Franz Cumont was a Belgian philologist, archaeologist and epigraphist, known as the historian of the Oriental religions of the Roman Empire and above all of the cult of Mithras. His link with Amasya goes back to the spring of 1900. That year, together with his brother Eugène, he set out on a research journey of some two and a half months that began at Samsun and ended at Trabzon, and on 22 April 1900 he arrived in Amasya. The brothers spent a week in the city; they examined the citadel, the royal tombs, the Aynalı Mağara and the ancient stones scattered all over the town, copied inscriptions, and identified, near the village of Ebimi beyond the Lokman Dağı, the mountain-top sanctuary of Zeus Stratios, the war god of the kings of Pontus.

The results of the journey were published in two volumes of the Studia Pontica series. Volume II, which appeared in 1906 (Voyage d'exploration archéologique dans le Pont et la Petite Arménie), is the narrative of the journey and contains a long chapter on Amasya. Volume III, published in 1910 with J. G. C. Anderson and Henri Grégoire, collects the Greek and Latin inscriptions of Pontus and Armenia; the inscriptions of Amasya form one section of it. From the Pharnaces inscription beside the royal tombs to the altars of Zeus Stratios, the epigraphy of ancient Amasya was brought together largely in these volumes.

Family and Education

Franz-Valéry-Marie Cumont was born on 3 January 1868 at Aalst (French Alost) in East Flanders. He came from a large, prosperous, liberal bourgeois family; his father, Florent Cumont (1830-1912), owned a textile factory, and his mother was Augustine Faider (1837-1890). He completed his secondary education with distinction at the Royal Athenaeum in Brussels in 1878-1884 and then read classical philology at the University of Ghent, where his teachers included Charles Michel. In 1887, at the age of nineteen, he took his doctorate in philosophy and letters with a thesis on Alexander of Abonuteichos (modern İnebolu), the false prophet. Published the same year by the Royal Academy of Belgium as Alexandre d'Abonotichos, this first book of the young Cumont already turned to Roman paganism and to Asia Minor, the subjects that would occupy his whole life.

A study of the spread of the Mithraic mysteries won him a travelling scholarship, and in 1888-1889 he attended courses in philology and classical archaeology at the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Vienna. He studied under Hermann Usener and Theodor Mommsen and came to know Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Erwin Rohde. He spent the winter of 1890 in Athens and 1891 in Rome, and completed his years of training at the École des Hautes Études in Paris in 1891-1892. On 10 January 1892, just twenty-four, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Ghent; he became extraordinary professor in August of the same year and full professor in 1896. In 1899 he took on the unpaid curatorship of the classical antiquities at the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels, becoming deputy curator in 1901.

Mithras and the Oriental Religions

Cumont's scholarly fame was established early by his great two-volume collection on the cult of Mithras, Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra. The work gathered the written sources and monuments of the cult and studied its Iranian origins together with its spread through the Roman world. Its summary, Les Mystères de Mithra, appeared in 1900, went through three French editions and was translated into German and English. Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (1906), born of his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and his lectures at the Collège de France, became his most famous book and was soon translated into German, English and Italian. In it Cumont treated the spread of the Oriental cults through the Roman Empire, together with the development of Neoplatonism, as the central fact in the moral history of the pagan empire.

In a letter of 22 May 1901 to Paul Fredericq, Mommsen wrote of him that "he masters history, letters and art, and he knows how to combine the results of these elements." This power of combination was what set Cumont apart among the scholars of his generation: in his work philology, epigraphy, archaeology and history were never separated. From 1898 he was the founder and most active contributor of a great international project to catalogue Greek astrological manuscripts, the Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum.

The Pontus Journey of 1900

Cumont's interest in Pontus arose both from his Mithraic studies and from how little was still known of the ancient geography of eastern Anatolia. In 1899 the British historian J. G. C. Anderson had travelled in Galatia and Galatian Pontus with J. A. R. Munro and Welsh, publishing the results in the first volume of Studia Pontica in 1903. The Cumont brothers went to the same region the following spring. The Belgian Ministry of Public Instruction gave Cumont a mission to Asia Minor, and the Belgian legation in Constantinople provided official support. In Vienna Otto Benndorf opened to them the documents collected by the Austrian Archaeological Institute. Osman Hamdi Bey, director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum, took a close interest in the undertaking and recommended the brothers to the officials of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in Anatolia; through the good offices of Constantine Karatheodori letters were obtained from the Patriarchate to the Orthodox metropolitans. The authorities of the provinces of Trabzon, Sivas and Erzurum also took measures for the safety of the journey.

The journey lasted from 4 April to 21 June 1900. The brothers landed at Samsun at dawn on Wednesday, 4 April. Achille Kypriottis, the Belgian vice-consul at Samsun, helped them hire men and buy horses for their caravan, and Whittall, director of the Tobacco Régie, wrote to his agents in the interior on their behalf, smoothing their way considerably. After examining the remains of ancient Amisos they crossed into Phazemonitis, the country around Vezirköprü and Havza. At Vezirköprü they saw remains of Roman stonework upstream from the wooden bridge. From there the road led to Merzifon, Amasya, Zile, Sulusaray, Sivas, Tokat, Comana, Niksar, Şebinkarahisar and Erzincan, and, after the remains of the Roman legionary base at Sadak (Satala), ended at Trabzon.

In the introduction to the book Franz Cumont writes that the two brothers shared the work according to their aptitudes: Eugène surveyed the route and noted the geographical observations, while Franz was responsible for epigraphy and archaeology. The same division held in preparing the book: Eugène drew new maps to complete and correct the existing maps of the region, which Franz calls "very defective," and Franz wrote the text and published the inscriptions. Cumont adds that, distracted by other work, he had to set the book aside and take it up again several times and feared that it bore the marks of these interruptions, but hoped it would be a useful contribution to the knowledge of eastern Asia Minor.

Merzifon and Suluova

On Wednesday, 18 April, the brothers left Havza (Kavsa) and took the highway from Samsun into central Anatolia. For a stretch the road ran through the narrow valley of the Tersakan Çayı; eight kilometres beyond Havza the Amasya road crossed the stream by a stone bridge and turned east, while the Merzifon road climbed over the hills and came down into Suluova. At the village of Zugo they saw a crude relief hidden behind the village washing trough: a bearded figure brandishing a thunderbolt in his raised right hand and carrying a round shield on his left arm. Cumont took it for an Anatolian god carved by a local sculptor, perhaps a forerunner of Zeus Stratios.

He describes Merzifon as a green oasis in the barren plain, set on the last spur of the Tavşan Dağı among gardens shaded by walnut trees. The town had some twenty thousand Turkish and Armenian inhabitants; it was the seat of the main establishment of the American missionaries in the region, and the Jesuits had opened French schools there a few years earlier. Because the name Merzifon resembled Strabo's Phazemon, it had been argued that the town was ancient Phazemon; Cumont rejected this, placed Phazemon at Vezirköprü and pointed out that Merzifon had almost no ancient remains and that the few inscriptions there had been brought from elsewhere. He nevertheless wrote that the town had been founded before the Turkish conquest, that Evliya Çelebi in the mid-seventeenth century called Merzifon an ancient town, and that its growth went back to the Byzantine period. He also noted that a thick-walled, vaulted building near the bazaar was shown as the tower in which St Barbara had been shut up by her father, and that a rope-maker was twisting twine in this medieval building at the time.

One of Cumont's most important contributions to the historical geography of the region was his identification of Suluova. To him this broad plain south of Merzifon was a dried-up lake and the "Plain of the Thousand Villages" (Chiliokomon) that Strabo places at the exit of the Amasya gorge. He recalls that Mithridates assembled his army of a hundred and fifty thousand men on this plain when he went to war with Rome in 88 BC, and that the emperor Theophilus took refuge here after his defeat by the Arabs in 838. At the time the plain was largely uncultivated and empty. The brothers found gravestones and inscriptions at Hayreddin, Yakup, Turnuk and Deliköy; two of the inscriptions at Turnuk were dated to AD 135 and 202. The richest site was Gelgiraz: beside the village mosque stood a fine marble altar dedicated to Zeus Stratios, two capitals lay upside down beneath the wooden posts that held up the mosque roof, a shaft of red marble stood nearby, and a piece of cornice served as a bench in the bathhouse. Cumont thought these pieces came from a second temple of Zeus Stratios on a height overlooking the plain.

A Week in Amasya

On 22 April 1900 the brothers crossed from Merzifon to Amasya. The road ran straight across the uncultivated, marshy flats of Suluova and then entered the narrow valley of the Tersakan, full of fruit trees. At the end of two hours of winding road a huge cone crowned with ruins suddenly appeared at a bend: the citadel of Amasya. They crossed the Yeşilırmak by an old bridge whose foundations Cumont believed to be more than two thousand years old; Strabo too mentions this bridge at the end of the gorge. The lower courses of the bridge over the Tersakan were of regular masonry and belonged to an old structure; its two arches, one round and one pointed, had been repaired with every kind of material. The mutasarrıf of Amasya, a former Ottoman diplomat and a cultivated man, told the brothers that when the foundations of a new bridge over the Yeşilırmak were dug opposite the government house, the remains of ancient piers had been found two or three metres below the present bed, together with coins. Cumont connected them with the second bridge mentioned by Strabo, which joined the fortress to the suburb on the opposite bank.

Even if it held fewer memories, Cumont says, Amasya would be famous for its setting. He writes that the Turks called it the "Baghdad of Rûm," and that every European who had seen the city since Busbecq, who came in 1555 as envoy to Süleyman the Magnificent, had admired it; Busbecq had compared Amasya to a theatre in which, from whatever tier one sat, a marvellous spectacle was to be seen. From the heights to the east one sees, some three hundred metres above the river, the bare twin-peaked rock with the citadel on top, on its flank the terrace with an ancient wall marking the site of the palace of the kings of Pontus, and higher up the gaping mouths of the tombs cut into the rock. At the foot of the rock the city stretches in a crescent; on the opposite bank mosques, bazaars and houses rise in tiers among the gardens on the barren slope of the Çakallar mountain. The Yeşilırmak is crossed by four bridges and by mill weirs; upstream lie orchards from which the famous Amasya apples were sent as far as Istanbul. Cumont recalls that in the seventeenth century Tavernier wrote that the soil of Amasya gave the best wine and fruit in Anatolia, but that there were only two wretched caravanserais in the city. The brothers had no need of khans: they spent "a charming week" in the house of Krug, who was born in Amasya and was, in Cumont's words, a precious guide for all archaeologists.

The Citadel

Cumont writes that no city of Pontus could compare with Amasya in the importance of its ancient monuments and, saying that a detailed description would need a volume of its own, limits himself to supplementing the information of earlier travellers. The citadel was then reached by a long detour around the mountain and entered through a low, wretched gate beside a crenellated tower. The lintel of the first gate was a fragment of a second-century AD architrave that had been carried up the mountain. Cumont thought it impossible to date walls rebuilt twenty times over without a long study, but considered that some of the lower courses were ancient and certain foundations perhaps went back to the time of Mithridates. In the remains of the keep on the highest point he recognised a section of the tower mentioned by Strabo, built of large blocks laid alternately lengthwise and crosswise. He also reread Strabo's description of the fortress: in his view the ancient walls ran along the left bank of the Yeşilırmak and climbed on both sides to the twin summits of the mountain, which carried strong towers, while the saddle between them was closed only by a wall.

Near the western summit opened the mouth of a tunnel cut in the rock and descending at an angle of forty-five degrees. The tunnel was three metres wide and three to four metres high to the crown of the vault; the brothers counted two hundred and seventy steps down to the basin, still full of cool, clear water. Cumont identified it as one of the two "impregnable cisterns" Strabo mentions, reached by narrow passages, and thought that the other, on the river side, had long since been filled in. This was the most impressive tunnel of its kind they saw on the whole journey. Listing similar ones at Turhal, Zile, Tokat, Niksar and Şebinkarahisar, Cumont wrote that a study of the distribution of these rock-cut stepped shafts would yield important results for the earliest archaeology of Anatolia.

The Royal Tombs and the Aynalı Mağara

Cumont writes that cutting tombs into the rock was a widespread custom in Asia Minor, but that the tombs of Amasya surpassed all others in beauty and size. Five tombs are ranged along a narrow rock ledge, once closed by a grille, between the citadel and the city above the terrace that carried the royal palace; here the ancestors of Mithridates Eupator were buried. In the rock mass a vaulted passage wide enough for a man to walk through surrounds a great block, so that the block remains joined to the mountain only at its base; a window is opened in its front and the block is hollowed out into a spacious burial chamber. Cumont notes that the tombs had already been studied in detail by Perrot and Guillaume and reproduces Struck's photographs in his book.

In his view these costly monuments were made for others besides kings. The finest of the tombs, half an hour downstream from the city and called the Aynalı Mağara ("Mirror Cave") for its polished surface, bore the epitaph of a high priest (archiereus). Part of the inscription had been chiselled away, perhaps in the Middle Ages when the chamber became a hermitage for monks who decorated its interior with frescoes; Cumont thought the inscription could not be later than the beginning of the first century AD. Another tomb below the citadel rock belonged to a prominent Amasya family, one of whose members had been an assessor to the governor of Bithynia. Cumont records a strange detail about this chamber: at the beginning of the nineteenth century soldiers of Napoleon taken prisoner in Egypt had been shut up in it and had carved their names on the wall before they died. The brothers read on the wall "Brou, français prisonnier, 1800," "Peyre, français, 1801," "Milita, prisonnier de guerre, l'an 1801" and "Copin, français volontaire, 1801."

Ancient Stones in the Town

Cumont writes that because the life of the city had never been interrupted, its old buildings had become material for new ones: the fine columns carrying the domes and porticoes of the mosques had very likely once held up the pediment of a temple and later the nave of a church. Gregory of Nyssa mentions a temple of the Mother of the Gods on the bank of the Yeşilırmak; Cumont thought it might have stood where the Sultan Bayezid Mosque now stands. He noted that the library attached to the mosque was rich in Turkish, Arabic and Persian manuscripts and that he was told it also held Greek books, but that he had no chance to verify this. He wrote that the city's coins showed gods such as Sarapis, Ares, Aphrodite and Tyche, as well as the four-columned Sebasteion where the delegates of Galatian Pontus gathered to sacrifice to the deified emperors, that Amasya had a stadium and very probably a theatre, but that none of these was visible above ground. The basilica of St Theodore, patron of the city, and the old cathedral holding the relics of Bishop Basil had also vanished.

The most interesting piece the brothers saw in the city was a white marble funerary stele found around 1886 in Krug's garden on the bank of the Yeşilırmak. On it a beast-fighter, naked, his torso and arms bound with leather bands, aims a broken weapon, most likely a hunting spear, with both hands at a bear rearing in front of him. According to the inscription, Troilos, having defeated all the bears in the stadium, was himself defeated by fever and went down to the dead. Cumont thought that the great fights with wild beasts of the Roman amphitheatres were very rare at Amasya, where boars, wolves and bears were more often used, and added that bears were still to be found in the forests of Pontus, as was fever in its valleys.

At the end of the city on the Tokat road, great blocks of white marble taken from a Roman building supported the crumbling walls of an old madrasa. The jambs and lintel of the door were formed of three architrave fragments bearing a dedication to Marcus Aurelius; a fourth fragment had been carried up to the citadel, where it served as the lintel of the first gate. In an octagonal room adjoining the school was preserved an ancient sarcophagus in which the body of the conqueror Halifet Gazi had been placed. Its lid had acroteria at the corners, its chest rams' heads at the corners, and on its sides winged Erotes holding garlands alternated with heads of Medusa; Cumont dated it to the beginning of the first century AD from its workmanship and ornament. Another, later sarcophagus served as the basin of the public washing place at the village of Ziyaret below Amasya and had been cut down to two-thirds of its length to fit its new use.

About an hour upstream from the city, on the left bank of the Yeşilırmak, a real stream flowed out of a small cave in the limestone. The inscription at the mouth of the cave was dedicated "To the great goddesses, the Nymphs" and enjoined those who approached the place to approach it reverently. The water cooled an orchard full of ripening cherries before losing itself in the river. Cumont wrote that the Greeks consecrated caves to the Nymphs, but that the peasants of Pontus, though they had learned the names of these goddesses from the Greeks, had not taken the worship of water from them; its sanctity went back much further.

The Mountain-Top Temple of Zeus Stratios

The most important discovery of the week in Amasya came on an excursion on Friday, 27 April. The brothers had been told there were antiquities at the village of Ebimi. A narrow path climbing a stream bed on the eastern side of the Amasya gorge led in two hours to the summit of the Lokman Dağı, some nine hundred metres above the Yeşilırmak. From there one could see, on one side, the deep gorge of the river flowing north and, on the other, beyond the heights of Amasya, the whole of Suluova as far as Merzifon. In an old graveyard near the summer pasture of Yeniköy they found a child's gravestone dated AD 237. After another hour across bare, juniper-covered hills where red marble broke the surface here and there, they came down to Ebimi on a well-watered south-facing slope. The village had a hundred and twenty houses built of large stones laid without mortar and roofed with flat earth; the villagers, whose hospitality Cumont especially remembered, were Kızılbaş.

They were told that the inscriptions in the village came from a hill half a league to the west. On this hill, its summit crowned with tall pines in a bare landscape, the villagers called the place Büyük Evliya, believed that a saint was buried there and were careful not to put an axe to the trees. Every year in May they gathered on the hill, slaughtered chickens and sheep and held a feast in honour of the Prophet Elijah. Around the flattened conical summit, 1,350 metres high, a wall some two hundred and fifty metres in diameter could be traced; in the middle rose a square mound about forty metres on a side, with pieces of cornice and fragments of worked marble lying around it. Cumont interpreted the circular wall as the boundary of the sacred precinct and the square mound not as a temple but as the site of a monumental altar like that of Zeus Soter at Pergamon.

The written proof that an organised cult had existed here came from a large pedestal dug out of the precinct before the brothers' eyes. It had once stood in place, but when it attracted a traveller's attention the villagers had buried it, fearing that their saint's tomb would be profaned. The heavy marble block was found and raised with great difficulty using poles and ropes; it bore a dedication by Gnaeus Claudius Philon, priest for life. The name of the god was supplied by two inscriptions at Ebimi, both dedicated to Zeus Stratios. According to the inscriptions the temple was administered in AD 100 by a board called the "synarchontes," and its clergy included neokoroi. A hillock west of the precinct was strewn with building debris, and the villagers dug coins and antiquities out of it. An epitaph found at Ebimi told how an old actor named Gemellos, after playing many parts on the stage and suffering on many roads, had left the stage of the world. Cumont thought he belonged to the guild of Dionysiac artists founded under Hadrian, whose troupes carried their plays from festival to festival, and that he had died while attending some festival and been buried in the shadow of the sanctuary.

Cumont linked the sanctuary to the famous sacrifice described by Appian. According to Appian, in 81 BC, after driving the Romans out of Cappadocia, Mithridates offered a sacrifice to Zeus Stratios on the summit of a high mountain in the manner of his ancestors: the kings themselves carried the wood to build a pile, around which a second, lower circular pile was laid; on top were placed milk, honey, wine, oil and all kinds of incense, and on the ground bread and food for those taking part. The fire, once lit, could be seen from the sea more than a thousand stadia away. Cumont recalled that some bronze coins of Amasya show a flaming altar with one or two trees beside it, sometimes surmounted by a spread eagle or a four-horse chariot, and matched the altar with the monumental altar at the centre of Büyük Evliya and the tree with the sacred grove. He saw the pines on the summit as the last descendants of the trees venerated by the ancients. Because Appian says the fire could be seen from the sea, however, he added that Ebimi, behind the coastal ranges, could not be the place of the sacrifice of 81 BC, which was more likely offered on a mountain nearer the sea, perhaps the Akdağ.

In Cumont's view Zeus Stratios was not originally a Greek god; Herodotus writes that he was worshipped in Caria. After Alexander his cult spread through northern Anatolia, and he became the protector of the state and its kings at Heraclea, at Nicomedia, capital of Bithynia, at Gangra, capital of Paphlagonia, and at Amasya, capital of Pontus. Cumont saw the god's identity at Amasya as threefold: he was perhaps the mountain god of a native tribe of the Yeşilırmak valley; the Greeks turned him into a warrior Zeus; and the Pontic dynasty, of Iranian origin, recognised in him its own Ahura Mazda. He closed the chapter by wishing that excavations would be carried out at the sanctuary of Ebimi so that the official religion of the dynasty might be better known. Cumont's wish was partly fulfilled a century later: forty-two coins found in the sanctuary during a rescue excavation in 2006 have shown that the site was in use from the second century BC to the fourth century AD and that its coins came from six regions of Anatolia and three beyond it.

The brothers spent the night in the village guest room at Ebimi and on 28 April returned to Amasya, rounding the Lokman Dağı on the south. At the village of Vermiş they found that a metrical epitaph copied earlier had been cut into four pieces used as bases for the posts holding up the mosque roof. They spent the following days in Amasya collecting inscriptions and checking earlier copies. Following the Tokat road towards Zile, they noted that the sheer rock on the opposite bank of the Yeşilırmak had been cut, almost at the level of the valley, into a horizontal channel nearly a league long. Cumont identified it as a watercourse, most likely ancient, that had supplied the southern quarters of the city, and recorded the popular story connecting it with a lover who sought the hand of the daughter of a "king of Amasya"; this is the watercourse that local tradition ascribes to Ferhad. One hour and forty minutes from Amasya, in the graveyard beside the Kapıkaya mosque, they found a white marble milestone bearing the names of the emperor Carus and his son Carinus. Cumont took it as proof that Carus had repaired the military road from Amasya to Comana in 283 on his way east for the Persian campaign. The brothers reached Zile in the last days of April and on 1 May left Zile for the road to Sulusaray.

Studia Pontica III and the Inscriptions of Amasya

In his book Cumont writes that at Amasya he revised the inscriptions collected by earlier travellers and added new ones. These inscriptions were published in 1910 in the first fascicle of the Recueil des inscriptions grecques et latines du Pont et de l'Arménie, issued with J. G. C. Anderson and Henri Grégoire as volume III of Studia Pontica. The fascicle brought together the epigraphic results of Anderson's journey of 1899, Cumont's of 1900 and Grégoire's of 1907, along with texts sent in by correspondents such as Father Girard, the missionary at Tokat. Of the three hundred and sixty-one inscriptions it contained, only forty-two had previously appeared in the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum.

The Amasya section opens with a short introduction tracing the city's history from its time as capital of the kings of Pontus through its role as metropolis of Galatian Pontus in the Roman period and as a metropolitan see in the Byzantine period, down to the Seljuk and Ottoman periods. The first inscription of the section, number 94, is a dedication cut into the rock in letters forty centimetres high, near the royal tombs just below the citadel and some two hundred metres above the river. The editors argue from the letter forms that the "King Pharnaces" for whom the fortress commander (phrourarchos) Metrodorus made this offering is Pharnaces I, grandfather of Mithridates Eupator, and not Pharnaces II. The high-priest inscription in the Aynalı Mağara appears as number 95, a text re-read by Cumont in 1900 and by Grégoire in 1907. The printing of the second half of the collection, which was to contain the inscriptions of Sebastopolis, Sebasteia, Comana, Neocaesarea and Trebizond, was announced as under way; that second half was never published.

Leaving Ghent: The Years in Rome and Paris

Cumont was elected a corresponding member of the Class of Letters of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1902 and a full member in 1909; in 1910 he received the five-yearly prize for the historical sciences for the period 1906-1910. That same year an episode changed the course of his life: the Catholic Minister of Sciences and Arts, Baron Descamps, refused to give him the chair of Roman history despite the unanimous proposal of the faculty. When it became clear that the reasons were purely political, a press campaign began and the students were stirred, but another candidate was appointed. Unwilling to accept the affront, Cumont resigned from the university, gave up his museum post in 1912 as well, and left Belgium to live between Paris and Rome without any official position. The independence his family fortune gave him made this possible.

The next thirty-five years were productive. In the spring of 1907 he had carried out an archaeological mission in Syria, whose results he published as Études syriennes (1917). In 1922, in a region whose safety was still doubtful, he excavated on the bank of the Euphrates at Salihiyeh the hitherto unknown site of Dura-Europos, and in 1926 he made the city known to scholarship with a two-volume report. He wrote books on Greek and Roman astrology, on beliefs about the afterlife and on Roman funerary symbolism; with his friend Joseph Bidez he published the letters of the emperor Julian and Les mages hellénisés (1938). From 1913 he was an associate member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris and from 1922 of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome; Aberdeen, Brussels, Louvain, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin gave him honorary doctorates. In 1935 he presided over the International Congress for the History of Religions in Brussels, and in 1936 he received the Francqui Prize, Belgium's highest scientific award. At his death his writings numbered close to a thousand.

Cumont did not want his books and papers to be dispersed. In 1946 he decided to give his library to the Academia Belgica, the institution founded to help Belgian scholars work in Rome, whose board he chaired. The library, of nine thousand volumes, six thousand offprints and several runs of periodicals, was inaugurated on 7 May 1947; illness kept Cumont from the ceremony, but in the message he sent he said that without the help of philology archaeology was only a "conjectural science." Since a double pneumonia that struck him in Paris in February 1947 he had felt his end approaching. In the summer he returned to Belgium and died during the night of 19 to 20 August 1947 in the Brussels district of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, at the home of his sister-in-law. He was buried in the family grave in the Ixelles cemetery. Most of his correspondence is kept at the Academia Belgica in Rome, and the Royal Academy of Belgium has a foundation and a prize bearing his name.

His Brother Eugène Cumont

Eugène Cumont was co-author of the Pontus journey and of the second volume of Studia Pontica, but far less is known about him than about his brother. On the title page of the book Franz is described as "professor at the University of Ghent" and Eugène as "professor at the War College (École de guerre)." His task on the journey suited his post at the War College: according to his brother, he surveyed the route and recorded the geographical observations. In preparing the book he drew new maps to complete and correct the existing maps of the region, which Franz called "very defective." The maps in Studia Pontica II are his work, and the text refers to them in places; Suluova villages such as Gelgiraz and Turnuk appear on map XII, and the road from Amasya to Zile on map XIII.

The brothers' collaboration did not end with the journey. While Franz wrote the text and published the inscriptions, Eugène's route notes formed the basis of the book's details on roads, passes and distances between villages. These details keep their value today: researchers such as Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen, who has studied the old roads around Vezirköprü, compare what the Cumont brothers saw in 1900 with their own observations. In the introduction to the Studia Pontica volume published in 2022 in the Bibliotheca Cumontiana series, in which the Academia Belgica is re-editing Cumont's works, a chapter by Annick Fenet devoted to Eugène bears the title "in the shadow of his brother" and records that he died in 1945. This introduction draws on the brothers' correspondence, Franz's travel diaries and the maps Eugène drew.

Significance for Amasya

Cumont's Amasya chapter is valuable for documenting the city's ancient remains as they stood at the end of the nineteenth century. The Roman architrave at the first gate of the citadel, the tunnel of two hundred and seventy steps, the names carved by Napoleon's soldiers in the tomb chamber, the bear-fighter's stele in Krug's garden, the Marcus Aurelius inscription built into the door of the Halifet Gazi Madrasa and the sarcophagus used as a washing basin at Ziyaret show how stones, some of them later moved or lost, looked in 1900. The identification of Suluova as Chiliokomon, the demonstration that Merzifon was not Phazemon and the discovery of the sanctuary of Zeus Stratios at Büyük Evliya are lasting contributions to the ancient geography and religious history of Amasya. The Amasya inscriptions in Studia Pontica III remain the basic collection of the city's Hellenistic and Roman epigraphy.

Chronology

3 January 1868: Born at Aalst.

1887: Took his doctorate at the University of Ghent; his study of Alexander of Abonuteichos was published.

1888-1892: Studied in Bonn, Berlin, Vienna, Athens, Rome and Paris.

10 January 1892: Appointed lecturer at the University of Ghent.

1896: Became full professor at Ghent.

4 April 1900: Landed at Samsun with his brother Eugène.

22 April 1900: Arrived in Amasya from Merzifon.

27-28 April 1900: Went to Ebimi and examined the sanctuary of Zeus Stratios.

21 June 1900: End of the journey through Pontus and Lesser Armenia.

1902: Elected corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

1906: Studia Pontica II published; Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain appeared.

1910: Studia Pontica III (inscriptions) published; resigned from Ghent after being refused the chair of Roman history.

1922: Excavated at Dura-Europos.

1936: Received the Francqui Prize.

1945: Death of his brother Eugène Cumont.

7 May 1947: The library he gave to the Academia Belgica in Rome was inaugurated.

20 August 1947: Died at Woluwe-Saint-Pierre.

Bibliography

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Online sources