The earliest and most detailed description of ancient Amaseia comes from Strabo, the geographer the city itself produced. In the twelfth book of his Geography, travelling through the region of Pontus, he reaches his own homeland and stops writing as a compiler of sources and begins to speak like an eyewitness: the passage that opens with "my city" sets out in a few lines the position of Amaseia in its valley, its walls, its palaces, its water installations and its bridges. The passage is short, yet the plan of the Hellenistic city can largely be reconstructed from it. Since the nineteenth century the travellers who came to Amasya, local historians such as Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, and the archaeologists who measured and drew the royal tombs have all read what they saw against these lines. Few monuments of the Kingdom of Pontus survive; according to Robert Fleischer, almost its only preserved remains are the five great rock tombs at Amasya and the fine Hellenistic walls of the palace quarter and of the acropolis on Mount Harşena.

Strabo says that the city lies in a wide, deep valley through which flows the Yeşilırmak, the ancient Iris. In his view Amaseia is "admirably devised", both by human foresight and by the help of nature, because it offers at the same time the advantages of a city and of a fortress. The basis of this claim is the rock on which the city rises: a high and precipitous mass that descends abruptly to the river. On one side is the wall along the riverbank, where the city is settled, and on the other the wall that climbs up on either side to the peaks. In an earlier book of the same work, describing the course of the Iris from its source to the Black Sea, Strabo also writes that the river flows past "the very wall" of Amaseia and that the city is very strongly fortified. At that point the river turns from its course towards the east and flows on towards the plain of Phanaroea; the same text records that Amaseia lies one hundred and fifty stadia west of Magnopolis on that plain.

City and Fortress in Strabo's Description

According to Strabo the two peaks of the rock are united with one another by nature and are magnificently towered. Within this circuit lie the palaces and monuments of the kings. The neck that connects the peaks is altogether narrow; the ascent to it from the riverbanks and the suburbs is five or six stadia on either side, and from the neck to the peaks there remains another ascent of one stadium, sharp and superior to any kind of force. A stadium is about 185 metres, and these figures look too large against the height of the rock as it can be measured today; Strabo may have meant the length of the path on the slope rather than the height. Such reservations belong to the reading of any ancient author's numbers, but the arrangement itself, with walls descending to the river, two peaks, a narrow neck and a palace at the foot of the summits, does not contradict the present topography.

Strabo's passage also reached Amasya by way of French travel literature. Hüsameddin quotes Strabo's words from the work of the French scholar Georges Perrot, who published his archaeological exploration of Galatia and Bithynia in 1872: directly above the rocks are the palaces and tombs of the kings, only one narrow path leads up to the heights, there are water wells in the fortress so that the garrison never suffers thirst in time of siege, and some of the bridges link the villages outside the city to it. This rendering is free compared with Strabo's original and has passed through two stages of translation, but it shows in what form an Amasya reader of the early twentieth century knew the ancient description of his own town. Perrot wrote that there could be no doubt that the tombs he saw were "exactly the tombs Strabo describes", while stating plainly that he had not found the palace.

The Harşena Rock and the Levels of the Fortress

Modern research supports Strabo's framework. The Amasya Fortress on Mount Harşena consists of three main sections and eight levels of defence; the wall circuit around the mountain is about two kilometres long and was built in different periods from antiquity to recent times. The Upper Fortress on the summit handles the defence of the top; below it on the southern slope lies the Middle Fortress, that is, the Maiden's Palace and rock-tomb area; and between the Middle Fortress and the roughly 1,200-metre wall line along the Yeşilırmak lies the Inner Fortress, set on eight terraces parallel to the mountain. Strabo's "wall that runs up on either side to the peaks" accords with this stepped and terraced layout.

Hüsameddin describes the rock in the early twentieth century through the eyes of a native. The face of the rock that carries the fortress is sheer, and its back rests against Kırklar Dağı; its base is broad and it narrows towards the summit. It runs for about two and a half kilometres from the middle of the Helkis Garden to the end of the Kamereddin quarter; its eastern end is low and its western end high, and because its two sides swell out like spread wings Hüsameddin likens it to a falcon taking flight towards the west. The Upper Fortress stretches from east to west, is enclosed by a stone wall about fifteen metres high, and its western end stands some twenty metres higher than the eastern. For a reader looking for Strabo's two peaks and the neck between them this description provides good ground; a ridge that sinks in the east and rises in the west suggests a rock in which two separate high points are joined by a narrow link. Hüsameddin himself does not make this connection; it is an inference.

The information Hüsameddin gives on the lower town by the river shows the later state of what Strabo calls "the wall along the riverbank, where the city is settled". The Inner Fortress, recorded in old writings as the Enderun Fortress or "Bâtın Amasya", that is, Inner Amasya, was bounded by the Helkis quarter on the east, the Sâbıkeddin quarter on the west, the Yeşilırmak on the south and the Harşena Fortress on the north, and was about twelve hundred metres long. It had four gates: the gate on the Helkis side, the gate in front of the Alçak Köprü known as the "Palace Gate", the Mağdinus Gate in front of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, and the Meydan Gate on the west. The foundation of a great wall could be seen along the riverbank, and compared with the wall of the Mağdinus Gate it appeared to have risen some twelve metres from the riverbed; successive earthquakes had levelled it. The present forms of the gates and walls belong largely to Seljuk and Ottoman repairs, but the line they trace runs in the same direction as the riverside defences of the Hellenistic city.

The views Hüsameddin reports on who built the fortress diverge. Arab geographers attribute it to a legendary founder named Harşena, and Hüsameddin discusses this tradition at length. Charles Texier, in his work on Asia Minor, writes that the Inner Fortress was built by the Pontic ruler Mithridates III two and a half centuries before Christ, destroyed and ravaged by Pompey when he took Amasya, and later repaired by the Roman government. Texier's dating rests on no inscription or excavation evidence and is of value today only for the history of scholarship; still, it shows that nineteenth-century researchers also assigned the riverside walls to the Pontic period.

Surviving Hellenistic Walls

Sections of Hellenistic wall can still be seen in the Maiden's Palace area and in the fortress. They are built of smooth, thick cut stones with embossed faces, laid in isodomic courses of equal height. The technique is common in Hellenistic public and defensive architecture. In Fleischer's lettering, Tombs A, B and C lie on the east side, close to the well-preserved Hellenistic walls of the palace quarter, while D and E lie on the west; walls and tomb terraces should therefore be thought of as lying along the same line. Some scholars note that the wall enclosing the palaces and tombs is remarkably well preserved, that a Persian-descended aristocracy and Iranian cults persisted in the first centuries of the kingdom, and that the five great royal tombs and the priestly tombs beside them would not have looked out of place in Persis. The origin of the dynasty supports this reading, since the founder Mithridates descended from a Persian satrap.

The Palace Terraces

The palaces of the kings that Strabo mentions are sought on the terraces of the southern slope of Harşena. Of these buildings only foundations and levelled terrace traces remain today. Having written that he could not see the palace, Perrot suggested that the masonry buildings visible above the place then called "Düldül Ayağı" were very probably its ruins. His reasoning was topographical: the spot was too narrow and high for a fortress but well suited to a palace, and a road had always led down from it to the city. He added that there was no indication at all of which kings had built the palace. Which present-day terrace or ruin Düldül Ayağı corresponds to cannot be established with certainty from the texts available.

The ruin popularly called the Maiden's Palace stands on the same slope as Strabo's palaces, but in the form Hüsameddin saw it, it was the remains of a later palace. According to him it had two gates, harem and selamlık sections, a garden, two baths and a kitchen; all of it lay buried, the harem stood in a high and airy spot, and the wall and gate of the selamlık were still standing. The front of its large west-facing gate was a slope, while its small east-facing gate opened onto the Helkis quarter by a tunnel-like passage. Kâtip Çelebi called the building the "İsfendiyar Palace" and connected the name with İsfendiyar Bey, lord of Kastamonu; Hüsameddin does not accept this explanation and thinks it more likely that the name came from Seydî Alizâde İsfendiyar Çelebi of Amasya, who lived for a long time as custodian in the palace after it was left empty in 1582.

The area was used as a military base under the Candaroğulları principality and then, for more than a hundred and fifty years, served Ottoman princes and sanjak governors. Between 2006 and 2008, with funds provided by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, excavations were carried out here and in the fortress, and since 2009 the Department of Art History of Istanbul University has continued the excavations in the fortress. The full plan of the Hellenistic palace area has not yet been published. Fleischer's monograph on the royal tombs, published in 2017, also treats the fortress, palace and underground passages listed by Strabo in a separate section; Laurent Tholbecq, reviewing the book, stresses that archaeological knowledge of Amaseia apart from the five rock tombs is still limited. Which parts of the terraces belonged to the Pontic kings will become clear only as the excavation data are published.

Sources do not agree entirely on the date at which the city became a capital. The founding of the kingdom by the Persian satrap Mithridates Ktistes is placed in some accounts around 302 or 301 BCE and in others in 281 BCE. Fleischer writes that Amaseia was the dynasty's capital for about a century, from roughly 281 BCE to the 180s, and that Mithridates I, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II and III and Pharnakes I all ruled here in that time. When Pharnakes I made Sinope, a harbour city with international connections that he had recently conquered, his capital, the court left Amaseia. In Fleischer's interpretation the abandonment of work on the westernmost tomb is linked with this move, and the tradition of rock tombs did not continue at Sinope; the later kings were most probably buried in tumuli or mausolea. The most important spatial clue in Strabo's description is that palaces and monuments lie within the same circuit of walls: the seat of power, the defence of the summit and the funerary cult of the dynasty are interlocked on the same mass of rock and protected against a single siege.

Water Channels Cut into the Rock

The most striking information Strabo gives about the interior of the rock concerns water. The rock has reservoirs inside it, and the city can never be deprived of this supply, because two tube-like channels have been hewn out, one towards the river and the other towards the neck. The text does not say how deep or long the channels were and does not call them stairs. The evident purpose of the arrangement was to secure, from within the rock and unseen from outside, the most vital need of a besieged fortress. What Strabo writes about the stronghold of Sagylion confirms the logic: the reservoir there had once been useful to the kings, and its wells were choked with huge rocks on Pompey's orders so that robbers and rebels could not use the stronghold. Cutting off a fortress's water was enough to end its function.

Among the rock-cut structures of the fortress are the 300-metre Cilanbolu Cistern, the 186-metre Dungeon Tunnel and the Ceylan Tunnel that descends to the river. They were opened into the bedrock with a vaulted section by rock-tunnelling technique and have stone steps inside; some accounts place their opening in the first century BCE. Which of these tunnels corresponds to the two channels Strabo mentions is not known with certainty. A stepped underground passage said to run from inside the fortress beneath the river and to connect with the royal tombs is sometimes dated to the third century BCE, but no verifiable document has been offered for that date.

The Cilanbolu Well

The most detailed account of Cilanbolu as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century is Hüsameddin's. The well lies in the middle of the fortress, on the high ground opposite the great gate, and descends from south to north. The bottom is reached by about a hundred and fifty steps. Its mouth is a round-topped opening some eight metres in diameter, and the same width continues down to the water. Because the upper part is earth it has been lined with masonry, but lower down it can be seen to be hewn from the solid rock. The place where the water lies has the form of a round chamber cut in stone; the water is clear, plentiful, light and sweet, and although it looks still, a very slow rotating movement can be made out on close watching. The southern side is at most an arşın deep, while the northern side, at the foot of the rock, is very deep. Because the governor Mehmed Kemal Bey preferred this water to all others, in his time the officials and notables of the town also drank from Cilanbolu.

The depth of the well was long a matter of curiosity. Hüsameddin relates from the Amasya historian Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi that the governor Caniklizâde Mikdad Ahmed Paşa hired a man to find out how deep the water was, paid his blood money in advance as the sharia required, and had him lowered into the water; the diver vanished at the foot of the rock and never came up again. Texier also writes that the English traveller Hamilton hired men and went down with torches, first taking the place for a fortress passage and then, on coming upon a spring, realising that it was a well. According to a popular tradition, water coming from the direction of Karaman Dağı had been brought to the well and its outflow carried down on the east side to the river and skilfully concealed, and this channel was said to end at Leğen Kaya above the Kuş Köprüsü. The tradition has not been verified, but it bears a natural resemblance to Strabo's channel cut towards the river. Hüsameddin found no reliable information on the origin of the name "Cilanbolu" and put forward only as a guess that someone named Cilan might once have repaired the fortress and called it "Cilanbolis".

Level with Cilanbolu on its south side, above the ravine over the Lower Palace, there is a second deep well. It is hewn from the solid rock running from east to west and is descended by ninety steps. At its bottom a passage cut in the form of a water channel, eight feet wide and fifteen feet deep, runs from south to north towards Cilanbolu; its southern end heads towards two large adjoining caves, but since both sides are filled with stones its nature could not be fully understood. Looking at the seepage on its northern side, Hüsameddin thought it probably a channel carrying water from Cilanbolu to the Lower Palace, and he noted that while the steps of the upper well had filled with earth and disappeared, those of this well looked as if they had been made a year before. The idea of a water system inside the rock reaching from the summit to the palace terraces is consistent with Strabo's account, but there is no evidence documenting when these passages were opened.

The Ferhad Kayası Water Channel

The city's water did not come only from inside the fortress. In the southwestern gorge, at the western foot of the Ferhad Kayası, a rock some three hundred metres high, an arched channel cut into the rock can be seen about three metres above the ground. People believed that this channel had been dug by Ferhad, the lover of Şirin. Hüsameddin rejects the tale and shows that, followed in both directions, the channel is a waterway one metre wide and two metres deep beginning in front of the Şahin Kayası some fifteen kilometres south of the town. The channel passes through Ferhad Arası and in front of Memi Dede, winds through a series of quarters from Gökmedrese to Sevâdiye, and ends in a square opening some four metres across cut into a rock south of the Kibrithane in the Bayezid quarter. Hüsameddin writes that these waterways existed seven hundred years before the Hijra and attributes them to Pharnakes, one of the Pontic kings. The attribution rests on no inscription and is the author's own conjecture; even so, it suggests that the water needs of the Hellenistic capital may also have been met from sources outside the fortress.

Rock-Cut Stairways and Tomb Paths

Movement between the palace quarter and the royal tombs depends on a network of stairways and tunnels cut into the rock. According to the survey carried out by Fleischer in September 2002 with the architect Falko Ahrendt-Flemming and the archaeologist Nicole Birkle, Tomb A is reached from the palace quarter by a staircase cut into the rock, and another staircase leads to the higher level of Tombs B and C. The way continues northwest through a tunnel. From the end of the tunnel one can climb up to the acropolis through a long, deep, stepped water tunnel, or walk west to the entrance of another tunnel with steps inside, and from there to the ample terrace in front of Tomb D. A staircase cut into the almost vertical rock in the form of a gallery leads up to Tomb E. This description shows structures that Strabo does not mention: the narrow neck leading to the summit, the water tunnels and the tomb stairways form a network of circulation that complements itself inside and on the face of the rock.

The tombs themselves show how the rock was shaped. During construction it was planned to cut corridors running round behind all of them so that they would look like free-standing buildings detached from the rock; Fleischer finds the prototypes in fourth-century BCE Caria, at places such as Kaunos and Telmessos. The corridors were completed only at Tombs B, C and D; at A the work was soon given up because of the very crumbly, fissured rock, and at E it was abandoned before completion. The entrances to the chambers are set high and can be entered only by ladder; Fleischer explains this by Iranian rules of purity and compares the high entrances of the Achaemenid royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Persepolis. The chambers are small, large enough for only one or a few burials. The five great tombs are 8 to 15 metres high; three of them are reached by two separate staircases and two by a stepped tunnel. Strabo, for his part, says only that there are "palaces and monuments of the kings" within the walls, and does not describe the tombs one by one.

Small arrangements on the rock face also give clues to the daily working of the palace city. Above Tomb E, attributed to Pharnakes, there is a well-known rock inscription: the commander of the fortress, the phrourarchos (Me)trodoros, dedicated an altar and a flower bed to the gods for King Pharnakes. The altar and flower bed evidently stood on the small level space in front of the inscription, which was reached by rock-cut steps still partly visible today. That the fortress was run by a garrison commander is the administrative counterpart of Strabo's definition of the place as "both a city and a fortress". Field Marshal Moltke, visiting these tombs in the nineteenth century, also wrote that five stone chambers adjoin one another, with corridors and stairways between them, all of them hewn from the solid rock down to their very parapets.

On the basis of the form of the corridors and details of workmanship, Fleischer argues that the three eastern tombs were cut in the order A, C, B, that B was squeezed in between the others with great effort, and that because no space was left in the rock above the palace quarter, D and E had to be placed at a distance. On this sequence he assigns Tomb A to Mithridates I, C to Ariobarzanes, B to Mithridates II, D to Mithridates III and E to Pharnakes I. The same research, reassessing traces already visible in the drawings published by Perrot, Guillaume and Delbet in 1872, established that Tomb A had a façade of six columns and B and D façades of four, made of separate blocks attached to the rock with dowels and clamps. These attributions are a proposal based on the position of the tombs in the rock and on relative chronology; the tombs carry no inscription naming the kings.

Stepped rock passages are known elsewhere in Anatolia and some are thought to have been opened for religious purposes, but for the Amaseia examples there is no definite evidence of their original purpose. The paths Fleischer describes link the tombs with the palace quarter and the acropolis; that the water tunnel is part of this network suggests a connection with the channel "towards the neck" mentioned by Strabo, but the connection has not been proved.

Bridges and the Riverbank

Strabo writes that two bridges span the river: one from the city to the suburbs and the other from the suburbs to the outlying territory. The place where the mountain on which the rock rises comes to an end is where the second bridge stands. This shows that the Hellenistic city was not merely a fortress squeezed onto a rock but a settlement spreading over both banks of the river. The suburb was the area of daily life that spilled beyond the walls.

Of the bridges in Amasya, the one considered ancient in origin is the Alçak Köprü opposite the Maiden's Palace. Hüsameddin writes that of the bridges Strabo describes only this one survives, but that it too lies buried in the riverbed with another built on top of it. According to him the old bridge forming the foundation of the present one was built of granite with small arches; as the bed gradually filled, its arches disappeared under the water and thick square masonry piers were set on top of them. Because it had sunk lower and lower, people called it the Alçak Köprü, the "Low Bridge". In 1864-65 the governor Ziya Paşa, guarding against the danger of floods, used the old bridge as a foundation and had a wooden bridge built on it; when this was carried away in the flood of 1880-81 it was rebuilt in 1881-82 with masonry piers and a wooden deck. Hüsameddin dates the bridge to the Pontic period, whereas the promotional publication of the Central Black Sea Development Agency regards it as built in the Roman period to connect the fortress with the quarters opposite, notes that the work of three separate periods can be traced on it, and adds that it is therefore also known locally as the Bridge of Three Civilisations. No excavation or inscription fixes the date of its first construction.

The gate at the head of the bridge also preserved a trace of the city's old layout. The gate of the Inner Fortress in front of the Alçak Köprü was called the "Palace Gate" and very probably took its name from standing at the start of the road leading up to the palace above; this last point is an inference. It is said to have been a gate of black marble with a very elegant arch, demolished in 1864-65 by Ziya Paşa as unnecessary. Thus the two ends of the axis running from the river to the palace terraces, bridge and gate, stood together until the nineteenth century.

The ground level of the Hellenistic city lies far below today's. Judging from finds made when wells were dug, Hüsameddin writes that in the Pontic period the ground level of Amasya was at least six metres lower than at present, that İçerişehir was paved throughout with marble and enclosed on the river side by a strong wall, and that most of its buildings were of red brick and some of marble. He reports similar remains on the south bank of the river, along the Upper and Lower Bazaar, beneath the Receb, Şamlıca and Sofuzâde quarters. These observations do not rest on systematic excavation, and the remains were not sorted by period; but they suggest that Strabo's suburb on the opposite bank should be sought beneath today's market quarters. That the Alçak Köprü reaches down to the riverbed and lies at the same level as these buried structures is, for Hüsameddin, a sign that the bridge belongs to that age.

The shape of the valley also says something about the city's economy. According to Strabo, the valley beginning at the river is at first not very wide, then widens to form the plain called Chiliocomum, a name meaning "land of a thousand villages". Then come the Diacopene and Pimolisene districts, all of them fertile and extending to the Halys, the modern Kızılırmak. This northern part of the territory of Amaseia is about five hundred stadia long. The rest of the country is much longer and extends to Babanomus and Ximene; in Ximene there are rock-salt beds from which, according to Strabo, the name Halys is supposed to derive. In breadth, from north to south, it reaches Zelitis and, in Greater Cappadocia, the land of the Trocmi. Enumerating the districts of Pontus between the territories of Amisos and Sinope, Strabo adds that the country of the Amaseians is by far the largest and best of them all.

Rock Tombs around the City

The royal tombs that Strabo calls "monuments" are only part of the rock tombs of Amasya. Hüsameddin counts twelve caves in the Amasya valley: five above the Maiden's Palace, two above the Saray quarter, one opposite the Meydan Bridge, two on the north face of Yassı Kaya, one at Ahur Önü, and one on the Ziyaret road known as the Aynalı Mağara, the "Mirrored Cave". That the caves outnumber the Pontic kings suggests that some were cut before the kings or for other people. According to local tradition the dead were removed from the caves before the Islamic conquest and the caves served for a time as retreats for Christian monks; in 1429-30 the sons of Kızıl Koca, captured by Yörgüç Paşa, were imprisoned in them, and in 1602-03, when Karayazıcı's men burned the town, its notables took refuge there with their wealth. This distribution shows that the city was surrounded by a ring of rock-cut tombs.

The Aynalı Mağara, some three kilometres northeast of the city, is the best-known example of this ring. Its façade bears two inscriptions in large letters; the upper one means "of Tes, the high priest", while the lower has been carefully erased and is largely illegible. The editors of Studia Pontica proposed that the lower inscription contained the name of the king whose high priest Tes was, Mithridates or Pharnakes, and that the name had been erased on the orders of the victorious Romans. George E. Bean rejected this view after his journey of 1950: none of these names can be read in the erased line, and the letter forms of the two inscriptions differ, the horizontal strokes of the sigma in the lower line setting it apart from the branching sigmas of the upper. In Bean's view the lower inscription is a name and patronymic belonging to a later reuse of the tomb, perhaps erased because it had been cut without authority. Fleischer dates the tomb to the second century BCE and notes that its form follows the arched façade of Tomb E.

Perrot linked the erasure of the lower line to a story he was told: a Turk passing on horseback saw his animal fall in front of the cave, and believing a devil lived inside, angrily erased the lower line but could not reach the upper one because it was too high. Hüsameddin regards the story as an invention of the local guides who took Perrot there; he says that the distance between the two lines is not so great that someone who erased one could not reach the other, that no such story was ever heard in Amasya, and that letters carved in stone cannot easily be erased. Bean's comparison of the letters gives the debate firmer ground, since whatever the reason for the erasure it shows that the lower inscription was cut at a different time from the upper.

Other Royal Residences of Pontus

The palace rock of Amaseia is not the only royal residence Strabo mentions in Pontic geography, and a comparison helps to see what was particular about the city. In the same book Gaziura appears on the course of the Iris as "an ancient royal residence", but deserted at the time of writing. At Cabeira stood the palace of Mithridates, the water-mill, the zoological gardens, the hunting grounds and the mines; the settlement lies at the foot of the Paryadres mountains. The fortress of Icizari on the shore of Lake Stephane, with a royal palace nearby, is described as ruined and deserted. A few of these places were no longer in use when Strabo wrote. Amaseia, by contrast, gathered palace, monuments and fortress on a single rock and was linked by river and valley road to the surrounding plains. In calling it both a city and a fortress, Strabo also shows how it differed from the other residences.

Amaseia, moreover, is not a city of the sea and the harbour in the way Amisos and Sinope are. Its strength is its land: Strabo speaks of wild fruits such as grapes, pears, apples and nuts and of well-watered pastures for the plain of Themiscyra, and for the neighbourhood of Amaseia he points to fertile country such as Phanaroea, full of olive trees and wine. The combination of a rock fortress and a broad arable hinterland was probably the main reason the city was chosen as a seat of government for centuries; this inference is drawn from Strabo's lines and is not stated by him directly. The dynasty's move to Sinope with its harbour shows the other side of the same balance: as Fleischer notes, with the kingdom's growing political and economic role a port with international connections had become better suited to it.

The Effects of War and Roman Order

In the same passage Strabo mentions the demolished strongholds and deserted land of his country and gives the Mithridatic War as the cause. He nevertheless adds that the country is well supplied with trees, that part of it affords pasturage for horses and for raising other animals, and that the whole of it is well suited to habitation. He also writes that Amaseia was at one time given to kings and in his own day was a province. The Roman capture of the city under Lucullus took place during the Third Mithridatic War, around 70 BCE.

Hüsameddin narrates these events in a chronology of his own and sets them in the topography of the town. According to him Lucullus entered the city through the northern gorge with a splendid train and camped in the Gülüs meadow north of the gardens now called Bahçeler İçi; the city escaped destruction but was badly plundered. In a later siege, he writes, Pompey had the lower fortress, that is, the walls of İçerişehir, and the upper fortress pulled down and the palace above laid waste. Texier's account of the Inner Fortress likewise speaks of Pompey's destruction. No such destruction is described in Strabo's section on Amaseia, and Hüsameddin's text does not make clear on which ancient source these details rest; they should therefore be read as a narrative of local historiography.

In the following years Pompey reorganised the region and Amaseia became one of the administrative centres of Bithynia-Pontus. Around 2 or 3 BCE the city was attached to the province of Galatia; Bean notes that the years on Roman-period tombstones found at Amasya are reckoned by the era of Amaseia, which began in 3 BCE. Around 112 CE, under Trajan, the city passed to the province of Cappadocia, and in the second century it received the titles of "metropolis" and "first city". Fleischer's monograph also examines the view of the city on the reverse of a coin of Amaseia struck under Severus Alexander and suggests that a stereotyped image of the royal tombs may be made out in this rare bird's-eye view. The monuments on the rock, in other words, remained among the symbols by which the city presented itself in the Roman age.

These developments show that the Hellenistic city Strabo describes continued to be used in the Roman and Byzantine periods. It is known that the wall circuit around the mountain was repaired and rebuilt in the periods after antiquity, and that a large part of the fortress was restored under survey and restoration projects prepared in 2007. Mount Harşena is protected as a first-degree natural site, and an area of about 350,000 square metres covering the fortress, the royal tombs and the Maiden's Palace area is protected as a first-degree archaeological site.

From Strabo to the Present

The fabric of Hellenistic Amaseia arises from the combination of three elements: a rock descending steeply to the river, a narrow neck uniting its two peaks, and a settlement spread over both banks in the floor of the valley. Strabo gathers these three elements into a single sentence and defines the city as both a town and a fortress. The observations of a local historian, the notes of travellers and recent research on the tombs have filled in the details of this short description: the stepped well of Cilanbolu, the stairways and tunnels running from the palace quarter to the tombs and the acropolis, the buried arches of the Alçak Köprü and the layer of the old city lying beneath today's ground. The real plan of the palace buildings, which of the rock-cut passages belongs to the Pontic period, whether the Alçak Köprü is Pontic or Roman, and the opening dates of some structures remain unanswered questions.

Chronology

302/301 BCE or 281 BCE: The years given in the sources for the founding of the Kingdom of Pontus by Mithridates Ktistes.

c. 281–180s BCE: The period in which, according to Fleischer, Amaseia was the dynastic capital; the five royal tombs were cut during this time.

After 183 BCE: Pharnakes I takes Sinope and moves the capital there; the abandonment of work on Tomb E is linked with this move.

2nd century BCE: The period in which the Aynalı Mağara, the tomb of the high priest Tes, was cut (Fleischer).

c. 70 BCE: The Roman army under Lucullus takes Amaseia.

3 BCE: First year of the era of Amaseia; the city is attached to the province of Galatia (2 or 3 BCE).

c. 112 CE: The city passes to the province of Cappadocia.

1864-65: The governor Ziya Paşa has the Palace Gate demolished and a wooden bridge built on top of the Alçak Köprü.

1872: Publication of the exploration of Galatia and Bithynia by Perrot, Guillaume and Delbet, with drawings of the royal tombs.

1881-82: The upper structure of the Alçak Köprü, destroyed in the flood of 1880-81, is rebuilt with masonry piers and a wooden deck.

1950: George E. Bean and P. M. Fraser examine the inscriptions of the Aynalı Mağara.

2002: Survey and drawing of the royal tombs by Fleischer, Ahrendt-Flemming and Birkle.

2006–2008: Excavations in the fortress and the Maiden's Palace funded by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

From 2009: The fortress excavations are continued by the Department of Art History of Istanbul University.

2017: Publication of Fleischer's monograph "Die Felsgräber der Könige von Pontos in Amasya".

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Robert Fleischer, "The Rock-tombs of the Pontic Kings in Amaseia (Amasya)", J. M. Højte (ed.), Mithridates VI and the Pontic Kingdom (Black Sea Studies 9), Aarhus 2009, pp. 109–119. amasya.bel.tr
  • G. E. Bean, "Inscriptions from Pontus", Belleten XVII. belleten.gov.tr

Official sources

  • Central Black Sea Development Agency (Orta Karadeniz Kalkınma Ajansı), cultural promotion publication on Amasya (Alçak Köprü, Kral Kaya Mezarları, Amasya Kalesi).
  • UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, application text for the Amasya Fortress and the Rock Tombs of the Pontic Kings. whc.unesco.org

Other sources

  • Laurent Tholbecq, review of R. Fleischer, Die Felsgräber der Könige von Pontos in Amasya (Tübingen 2017), L'Antiquité Classique 87 (2018), pp. 615–617.
  • Jona Lendering, "Amasia" entry, Livius.org.
  • "Amasya" entry (administrative history of the Roman and Byzantine periods).

Online sources