In the ancient world of Pontus, power was not gathered only in the palaces of kings. In the interior of the country, two great sanctuary centres founded in the name of goddesses worked as small states of their own, each with its own land, its own servants and a high priest whose standing came close to that of the king. The larger of the two was Comana Pontica, spread across both banks of the Yeşilırmak (the ancient Iris). Today it lies about nine kilometres northeast of Tokat, on the Niksar road, just south of the village of Gümenek, around a natural hill known as Hamamtepe. Comana was less an ordinary city than a society woven around a temple: its land belonged to the sanctuary, its labourers were dedicated to the goddess, and its priest was the person who ranked directly after the king at the ceremonies.

The backbone of what we know about the city is the account in Book 12 of the geographer Strabo, a native of Amaseia. Strabo describes this sacred city near his homeland both as an outside observer and as a citizen whose own family was tied to the priesthood. To this written source have been added the archaeological investigations conducted since 2004 by Middle East Technical University. The excavations have reached traces of the Hellenistic sanctuary that Strabo records, and they have also made visible the city's long life in the Roman, Byzantine, Danishmend-Seljuk and Ottoman periods.

Location and Setting

According to Strabo, Comana lay on the upper course of the Iris within Pontus, above the fertile plain of Dazimonitis (today's Kazova). He writes that the river flows through the middle of Comana onto this plain, then turns west and bends north past Gaziura, and finally curves east to run beneath the very walls of Amaseia. Comana and Amaseia were thus neighbouring centres standing at two different points of the same river. Strabo adds that the plain was always moist and covered in grass, that thanks to its abundant water famine was never known, and that wild grapes, pears, apples and nuts grew in plenty along the mountain slopes.

The remains of walls around the hill show that the city commanded the fertile plain below from this high ground. The walls, built of small, shapeless stones, may have formed the inner fill of the foundation of the wall enclosing the sacred precinct. The sanctuary is thought to have been linked to the opposite bank by a bridge that no longer exists; the pier of that bridge was found during the 2004 investigations inside the modern water regulator. The site has been damaged by modern irrigation channels and by a highway built later.

The Goddess Ma and Ma-Enyo

The sanctuary of Comana was dedicated to Ma, the native mother goddess of Anatolia. Her name means "mother", and she is also remembered as the invincible and the bringer of victory, that is, as a power with two faces, standing for fertility and for war alike. Some interpretations also see her as a moon goddess, while the Greeks identified her with the war goddess Enyo and with Athena. The name Ma-Enyo that came out of this identification supplies the conceptual frame behind the way ancient writers spoke of the temple at Comana as the place where the great nature goddess of western Asia was worshipped. Plutarch likewise compared the goddess with Semele and Athena. After the campaigns of Alexander, the worship of Ma reached as far as Macedonia.

Ma's name and function left traces in other sources as well. According to Stephanus of Byzantium, Ma was regarded as a companion of Rhea, the one to whom Zeus entrusted the infant Dionysus so that she might nurse and raise him. When Hera asked whose child it was, Ma said he was the son of Ares in order to hide him; the epithet "Masaris" that the Carians used for Dionysus is said to derive from this story. The same source notes that among the Lydians Rhea herself was called Ma and that a bull was sacrificed to her, and that the name of the city of Mastaura was interpreted as "Ma's bull". These reports give no exact description of a rite, but they show that Ma was understood in various parts of Anatolia by being merged with the Mother Goddess.

The Comana in Pontus was in fact founded as a copy of the city of the same name in Greater Cappadocia. Strabo writes that the sacrificial rites of the two centres, their states of divine possession and the reverence paid to the priests were nearly the same, and that the manner of giving oracles was similar too. Because the Pontic branch is regarded as a counterpart modelled on the Cappadocian centre, it is often treated as a local projection of it. Even so, in the age when the Mithridatic dynasty ruled, Comana in Pontus gained its own weight as the country's principal cult centre.

A Temple State

Inland Pontus had two settlements that had the character of temple states. The larger was Comana and the smaller was Zela, whose story is told in a separate article. At Comana the broad lands around the temple belonged to the goddess, and these lands were worked by people attached to the sanctuary. According to the figure Strabo gives, some six thousand sacred servants, the hierodouloi, were in the service of the temple. It is also recorded that some of them were of Iranian origin. The servants worked on the sanctuary's estate and kept the city's economic order going; the high priest was their overseer, but he had no authority to sell them.

The income from the land accumulated in the temple and was set aside for the needs of the priests and of the sacred order. Such an accumulation must have made the temple a place of security and deposit. In the assessment of the excavation team, Comana probably also served as a kind of bank for the Mithridatic kingdom. In Strabo's picture the city is populous and wealthy; its people live in abundance and all their land is planted with vines. In the period of the Pontic kingdom, Comana and Zela were independent centres that cultivated their own land and hosted many visitors at festival times, yet they still struck civic coinage of the same type as the other cities under the kings. Comana also had the status of a polis.

The High Priest

The most striking feature of Comana's political structure was the priesthood. In the Hellenistic age the holder of the office was chosen by the king and carried the highest honour after the king at ceremonies. According to Strabo, at the goddess's twice-yearly processions, the days of the exodos when the sacred image was carried through the city, the priest wore the goddess's diadem and received the respect due directly after the king. The temple's land, its servants and its revenues were under this person's supervision.

How important the office was to the kingdom, and how dangerous it could be, is clear from the story of Strabo's own family. The geographer mentions Dorylaus the tactician, his mother's grandfather. Dorylaus's nephew, the second Dorylaus, son of Philetaerus, had received the highest honours from Mithridates VI Eupator and in particular the priesthood of Comana, but when he was accused of trying to make the kingdom revolt to the Romans he was overthrown, and the family fell into disgrace with him. Strabo then reports that long afterwards, shortly before the kingdom dissolved, his mother's uncle Moaphernes came into prominence again, but he too suffered misfortune along with the king. This account shows that the priesthood was bound up with political loyalty and that the kings gave the office to people they trusted.

Festivals, Trade and City Life

What spread Comana's fame were the great festivals held at set times. According to Strabo, at the days of the goddess's exodos people gathered there from everywhere, from the cities and from the countryside, men together with women, to attend the festival. There were also people who, in fulfilment of a vow, lived there permanently and offered sacrifices to the goddess. The city was also an important trading centre for merchants from Armenia. That Comana was a sacred place of visit fed its commercial life as well: the festival crowds enlarged the market, and the merchants' lodging brought revenue to the city.

Strabo describes this side of the city by comparing it with Corinth. In his words Comana was "a lesser Corinth": at Corinth, because of the multitude of courtesans sacred to Aphrodite, outsiders resorted in great numbers and kept holiday, and at Comana too there was a multitude of women who made gain from their persons, most of them dedicated to the goddess. Merchants and soldiers squandered their money there, and so arose the saying "Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth." The nature and scale of this practice is a disputed matter in modern scholarship, since it rests on Strabo's interpretation; even so, the account shows how closely ceremony, trade and amusement were intertwined in the city's daily life.

The End of the Pontic Kingdom and the Roman Order

When the Pontic kingdom collapsed and Mithridates VI fled, the temple state of Comana became a principality and in the middle of the first century BC was given by Pompey to Archelaus. According to Strabo, Pompey appointed him priest, added to the sacred land a territory two schoeni, that is sixty stadia, in circuit, and ordered the inhabitants to obey his rule. Archelaus was thus both master of these lands and lord of the temple servants living in the city. Strabo notes that here too the servants were no fewer than six thousand. With this additional land the city's area is calculated to have reached a diameter of about four kilometres.

The story of Archelaus is also known from Strabo. This priest, son of the Archelaus honoured by Sulla and the Senate, was a friend of Gabinius. When Gabinius was sent to Syria he went there too, hoping to share in preparations for a Parthian war, and gave up that hope when the Senate would not allow it. At that time Ptolemy, the father of Cleopatra, had been driven out by the Egyptians, and his daughter, Cleopatra's elder sister, had taken the throne. While a husband of royal blood was being sought for her, Archelaus presented himself as the son of Mithridates Eupator, was accepted, but reigned only six months. Gabinius killed him in a pitched battle while restoring Ptolemy to his throne. The priesthood was taken over by his son.

This son was removed by Caesar in 47 BC. In his place Lycomedes, a Bithynian of Cappadocian descent, was appointed and given an additional territory; the figure in Strabo appears in one translation as four hundred schoeni and in other sources as four schoeni, the latter looking more plausible. After Lycomedes too was deposed, the priesthood went by the decision of Augustus to Dyteutus, son of Adiatorix. Some sources also mention priests named Medeius and Cleon, and they connect the annexation of Comana to the Roman province with the death of the last of these priests. The story of Dyteutus, as Strabo tells it, runs as follows. After leading Adiatorix in triumph with his wife and children, Octavian resolved to put him and his eldest son to death. The eldest son was Dyteutus, but as they were being led to execution the second of the brothers told the soldiers that he was the eldest, and a long contest arose between the two. In the end the parents persuaded Dyteutus, who was older, to yield the victory to the younger on the grounds that he would be a more suitable guardian for their mother and for the remaining brother. The younger brother was put to death with his father, and Dyteutus was saved. When Octavian learned the truth after the execution he was grieved, and he deemed the survivors worthy of his favour and gave them the honour of the priesthood.

Under Roman rule the power of the priests declined, though the temple continued. In the time of the Pontic kings and in the Roman period the city's lands grew, and under Augustus the area reached the size of the civitates of the region. The newly added lands are thought to have lain to the east, south and west, while the north remained limited because of the nearness of Magnopolis and Neocaesareia. These districts are known as Zelitis and Megalopolitis. When Comana was annexed in AD 34-35 to the province of Pontus Galaticus, Magnopolitis is believed to have been added to Comana as well. According to Munro, to the west of the city lay temple lands that the Pontic kings had taken in order to surround their royal castle at Gaziura; the area later became imperial land under the emperor Maurice (AD 582-602), and between the age of the kings and Maurice it stayed for a time in the status of ager publicus.

Comana in the Roman Age

The city was known by both the names Hierocaesareia and Comana until the time of Titus (AD 79-81), after which the name was Romanized into the form Comana Pontica. The appearance of Ma on coins from the time of the emperor Caligula shows that the goddess kept her place in the city's identity in the imperial age as well. The only evidence for the look of the temple is coins of Caracalla, Septimius Severus and a later Trajan; they depict a tetrastyle temple, that is, one with four columns. In the excavations the Roman phase is represented by a structure dated to the 2nd century AD and known as the Hierocaesareion Comaneon.

No building of the temple's architecture survives intact, but pieces that may have been reused live on in Tokat. The eight grey columns used in the Ali Paşa Mosque in the city centre are thought possibly to belong to the temple; the columns and capitals in the Ulu Mosque and the Garipler Mosque may also have been brought from Comana.

Christianity and Late Antiquity

The spread of Christianity hastened the collapse of the temple. The surrounding lands were attached to Daximon, a smaller but central settlement on the plain of Dazimonitis. Comana also became a known episcopal seat in the Christian tradition. Alexander, named in the sources as bishop of Comana in the third century, had taken up charcoal burning to escape worldly honours and so was known as "the Charcoal Burner". When Gregory Thaumaturgus was called to Comana to choose a new bishop, he rejected all the candidates proposed; when someone mockingly suggested Alexander the charcoal burner, he took it seriously and had him summoned. Alexander was made bishop, governed with wisdom, and died around AD 251 burned to death in the persecution of Decius. His memory has been preserved because it appears in a discourse by Gregory of Nyssa on the life of Gregory Thaumaturgus.

The name of Basiliscus, executed around 310 and remembered as bishop of Comana, marks the city's Christian identity in late antiquity. Saint John Chrysostom, sent into exile from Constantinople, reached Comana on the road and died there in 407, in the building where the clergy attached to the church of Saint Basiliscus gathered. So the city of the goddess Ma's temple came, some centuries later, to be remembered for a martyr's church and a saint's place of death. At this time the settlement was a walled town of rural character; the excavations describe the Early Byzantine phase as a fortified rural settlement dated to the 6th-8th centuries AD.

The Middle Ages, Gümenek and the Journey of a Name

Comana disappears from the historical record in the Byzantine period. Bryer and Winfield proposed that this could be explained by a move to neighbouring Tokat, which was better protected, or to Dazimon, which they identify with Hellenistic tombs. Paul Wittek objects to this view: Dazimon and Comana lie at opposite ends of the Kazova plain; in the 13th century Ibn Bibi mentions Dazimon and Tokat, while Comana is recorded separately in 1347 under the name Komada. This name corresponds to the Turkish form Qōmanāt, which appears in the 14th century in Hamdallah Mustawfi and other authors, and it is the source of the present name Gümenek. In this comparison attention is drawn to the fact that the name Tokat likewise derives from Dokeia, late antique Eudocia. The battle fought in 838 on the Kazova near Dazimon also shows that this region lay on the frontier line between Byzantium and the Abbasids.

The archaeological picture supports this naming discussion with evidence of continuity of settlement. The first ten years of the excavations were devoted to the Byzantine and later layers; the section that emerged includes a cemetery with two chapels in the 11th-12th centuries, a fortified rural settlement of the Danishmend and Seljuk period in the 12th-14th centuries, and an Ottoman village settlement in the 17th-18th centuries. The finds have also supplied important data on climate, agriculture, animal husbandry, food preparation and consumption, and the eating and drinking habits of the Middle Ages.

Archaeological Research

The location of Comana had already been identified by 19th-century travellers. In the summer of 1899 J. G. C. Anderson of Oxford, travelling through Pontus by oxcart, found at Comana, on the mound near a bridge crossing the Iris, an inscription naming the city. The study of his travelling companion J. A. R. Munro, "Roads in Pontus, Royal and Roman", showed that the old roads of Pontus were still in use two thousand years later. The party also recorded the abundance of stones from the dark marble quarry at Comana.

The Komana Archaeological Research Project (KARP), directed by Prof. Dr. D. Burcu Erciyas on behalf of Middle East Technical University and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, began in 2004 with intensive surveys and geophysical investigation. Excavations have continued since 2009 on and around Hamamtepe, which inscriptions identify as the centre of the city. The work on the walls northwest of the hill and on the hilltop has shown that the settlement is marked on the surface by pottery running from the Hellenistic to the Ottoman period. The volume "The Medieval Settlement at Komana" by Erciyas and Tatbul (2015) and the 2019 study by Erciyas and Acara Eser set out the record of this long life.

In the 2018 season a previously unknown context was reached, and in 2019 briefly and in 2020 more extensively this context was excavated. In this section of five layers and two architectural levels, alongside the pottery groups, came coins, female-shaped votive figurines of terracotta, a bronze fibula, and unexpected finds that had travelled from the Aegean and the Mediterranean. This material shows that the layers represent the Hellenistic settlement. In KARP's chronology the Hellenistic phase is placed in the 4th-2nd centuries BC and associated with a sanctuary, while the earliest phase falls in the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age (3500-2500 BC). So it has become clear that behind the temple state read from Strabo lies a much older history of habitation.

Amaseia and Neighbouring Centres

Comana Pontica was a centre of the same river, the same kingdom and the same cultural world as Amaseia. Amaseia was the political and administrative centre of the dynasty, while Comana was the sacred centre run by the priest chosen by the king. Strabo mentions the two in the same passage because both stand on the river; the Iris passes through Comana, turns at the old royal residence of Gaziura and flows beneath the walls of Amaseia. The ancient roads around the city linked it with Amaseia, Zela and Gaziura, and the Pontic roads studied by Munro carry traces of this network. While the rock-cut royal tombs of Amaseia express the worldly power of the kingdom, the temple of Comana formed that power's religious force and economic foundation.

Chronology

3500-2500 BC: Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age settlement at Comana.

4th-2nd centuries BC: Hellenistic phase, a sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Ma.

Mid-1st century BC: Collapse of the Pontic kingdom; Pompey makes Comana a principality and gives it to Archelaus.

47 BC: Caesar removes Archelaus's son; Lycomedes is appointed in his place.

AD 34-35: Comana is annexed to the province of Pontus Galaticus.

AD 79-81 (time of Titus): The city is known by the names Hierocaesareia and Comana.

2nd century AD: Roman phase in the excavations, the Hierocaesareion Comaneon.

About 251: Alexander the Charcoal Burner, bishop of Comana, is burned to death in the persecution of Decius.

407: John Chrysostom dies at Comana on the road to exile.

6th-8th centuries AD: Early Byzantine phase, a fortified rural settlement.

838: Byzantine-Abbasid battle on the Kazova.

1347: Comana is recorded under the name Komada.

1899: Anderson and Munro identify Comana by an inscription.

2004: The Komana Archaeological Research Project begins; excavations continue from 2009.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geographika, Book XII, chapter 3 (Comana in Pontus, paragraphs 32-36).

Academic studies

  • Munro, J. A. R., "Roads in Pontus, Royal and Roman", The Journal of Hellenic Studies 21, 1901.

Books

  • Erciyas, D. Burcu; Tatbul, Mustafa N. (eds.), Komana'da Ortaçağ Yerleşimi / The Medieval Settlement at Komana, Istanbul: Ege Yayınları, 2015. komana.org
  • Wilson, D. R., "Comana Pontica", The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, 1976.
  • Bryer, Anthony; Winfield, David, The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos, Dumbarton Oaks, 1985.
  • Wittek, Paul, "Von der byzantinischen zur türkischen Toponymie", Byzantion 10, 1935.

Other sources

  • Komana Archaeological Research Project (KARP), Middle East Technical University: history, excavation and chronology pages, https://komana.org/
  • Wikipedia, the articles "Comana Pontica", "Komana Pontiki", "Ma (goddess)" and "Alexander of Comana" (auxiliary sources). en.wikipedia.org

Online sources