Mithridates III is counted as the fourth king of Pontus, and he sits in the middle of the line of rulers who resided at Amaseia, present-day Amasya, in the valley of the Yeşilırmak. Before him stood Mithridates II, who made the realm known as a state of inland Anatolia; after him came his son Pharnaces I, who took Sinope and carried the kingdom to the Black Sea coast. Of the king who stands between these two stronger figures, the ancient sources say almost nothing. His dates of birth and death are unknown, the years of his reign shift by a decade or more depending on the source, and some scholars even question that he existed. What survives is a brief account of an attempt on Sinope, a few records about his family, a rock-cut tomb on the slope of Harşena that is assigned to him among the royal tombs and, above all, coins. His name is remembered today because he is regarded as the first Pontic king to strike coins with his own portrait.

His Place in the Dynasty and the Numbering

The Pontic dynasty begins with Mithridates Ktistes ("the Founder"), a member of the Persian nobility of Cius (near modern Gemlik), who proclaimed his kingdom around 281 BC. He was followed by his son Ariobarzanes and then by Ariobarzanes' son Mithridates II. Mithridates III is the son of Mithridates II and the fourth king in this sequence. One misunderstanding should be cleared up at the outset. The Founder was himself the third Mithridates of the house of Cius, and for that reason some works use the name "Mithridates III" for him, that is, for the king who fled from Cius to Paphlagonia. The Mithridates III discussed here is the third Mithridates in the count of the Pontic kings, and he lived two generations after the Founder.

The family tree does something to quiet the doubts about this king's existence. In his Mithridatica, Appian counts Mithridates VI Eupator as the eighth king of the dynasty and the sixth king to bear the name Mithridates, and Plutarch's life of Demetrius gives the same figure. When the Founder, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II, Mithridates III, Pharnaces, Mithridates IV, Mithridates V and Mithridates VI are set in a row, the count comes out exactly; if Mithridates III is left out, Appian's number does not add up. As Brian McGing points out in his article on the problems of identity and date among the Pontic kings, Ariobarzanes, Pharnaces and five kings named Mithridates are securely known, so a sixth Mithridates is usually assumed and placed between 220 and 185 BC as the father and predecessor of Pharnaces. Even so, the fact that this king is known only through a few coins and indirect records has led to the note that "his existence is disputed".

The best-known form of this doubt belongs to Mikhail Rostovtzeff. Rather than invent a new Mithridates, Rostovtzeff proposed that Mithridates II of Cius had in fact been the founder of Pontus. His argument rested on an inscription from Chersonesus in the Crimea, which dates a treaty between Pharnaces I and the Chersonesites to the 157th year of the era Pharnaces was using. If that era is counted from the accession of Mithridates II of Cius, the treaty falls just after Pharnaces' war with his neighbours, and the number of kings is complete without any need for Mithridates III. McGing rejects this solution. According to Plutarch, the founder of Pontus was a contemporary and friend of Demetrius Poliorcetes, who was born in 337/336 BC, and Diodorus writes that Mithridates II of Cius died near Cius. Since all the literary sources name the third Mithridates of Cius as the founder, McGing considers Rostovtzeff's proposal untenable and concludes that room must be made for Mithridates III in the Pontic king list. The Byzantine chronicler Syncellus, who says that the kingdom lasted two hundred and eighteen years under ten kings, does not fit this reckoning either, and McGing notes that his figure is not easy to explain.

"Mihridâd the Fifth" in Hüsameddin's Account

In the second volume of his Amasya Tarihi, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar lists the Pontic kings as rulers of Amasya under the heading "the Mihridâds". His count differs from the modern numbering. Because Hüsameddin also counts the two Mithridates of the Persian satrapal period, he calls the Founder "Mihridâd the Third", and he does not present Ariobarzanes and Mithridates II as separate kings. The ruler he calls "Mihridâd the Fifth" is therefore the father of Farnak, that is, of Pharnaces I. The details Hüsameddin gives suggest that this is the king known today as Mithridates III; the author does not make the identification himself, however, and it is a conclusion drawn from comparing the family relationships.

According to Hüsameddin, Mihridâd the Fifth came to the throne on his father's death 844 years before the Hijra, reigned for thirty-six years and was succeeded at his death by his son Farnak, whose accession is placed 808 years before the Hijra. Taken as solar years, these figures correspond roughly to 222 and 186 BC. The calculation is ours, but the resulting span is strikingly close to the range of 220 to 185 BC proposed by modern scholars. Hüsameddin draws this information largely from the European historian he calls Reynak, the author of a "History of Pontus", most probably Théodore Reinach, and from the Mir'âtü'l-İber.

The author also credits Mihridâd the Fifth with a building. In his account the king built a fortress west of the town of Barsevinç (Marınca), north of Amasya, and so brought the passes of Eflânus (Osmancık) and Amasya under his control. The name of this fortress, known as "Merzepon", means "the Pontic frontier, the Pontic homeland" and later turned into Merzifon. In the same passage Hüsameddin honestly reports a document that weakens his own view: Sa'deddîn Muhammed el-Merzifônî, who wrote a note on the spine of a copy of the Hulâsatü'l-Fetâvâ in the Hijri year 793, spelled the name of his town "Merzebân", and in Hüsameddin's opinion this record shows that the name Merzifon is a corruption of the word "Merzebân". No other source is known that shows the fortress of Merzifon to have been built by a Pontic king, let alone by this one; the account rests on Hüsameddin's interpretation of the name.

Hüsameddin writes that Mihridâd the Fifth was known in Greek and European histories by the epithet "Filadelfes", meaning "he who loves his brother", and that this epithet shows good relations with the Greeks. There is a confusion here. According to the legends on the coins, the king who bore the epithets "Philopator kai Philadelphos" was Mithridates IV, the brother and successor of Pharnaces; the coins of Mithridates III read only "King Mithradates". The epithet "Filapatur" that Hüsameddin gives to the previous king is the other half of the same pair. It appears that the sources the author used distributed the two epithets of Mithridates IV between two of his ancestors.

Family and the Seleucid Connection

His father, Mithridates II, was married to Laodice, a princess of the Seleucid house. Laodice is reported to have been the daughter of Antiochus Theos and the sister of Seleucus II Callinicus and Antiochus Hierax. The Pontic king's taking sides in the civil war between her brothers, and the passing of Phrygia to Pontus as her dowry, are seen as among the moves that made the kingdom a power to be taken seriously in the Hellenistic world. Mithridates III was a son of this marriage. Both of his sisters were also named Laodice. One married the great Seleucid king Antiochus III in 222 BC, and the other became the wife of Achaeus, a kinsman of Antiochus.

Polybius describes the betrothal of his sister Laodice in a short but vivid scene. While Antiochus was near Seleucia at the crossing of the Euphrates, the admiral Diognetus arrived from "Cappadocia Pontica", bringing with him the young girl who was the king's affianced bride. The king received her with great pomp, celebrated the wedding at once with royal magnificence and, after returning to Antioch, proclaimed Laodice queen. In the same passage Polybius writes that the bride's father, Mithridates, claimed descent from one of the seven Persian nobles who had killed the Magus, and that he had preserved in his family the dominion over Pontus that Darius had granted to his ancestors. This claim forms the core of the dynastic identity that Mithridates III inherited. In McGing's view, this marriage was the first occasion on which the ruler of one of the great Hellenistic monarchies took a princess from a small non-Macedonian ruling house, and it raised the young kingdom's prestige considerably. The other Laodice had been brought up by Logbasis of Selge in Pisidia, who treated her as his own daughter, and was later married to Achaeus.

The king's own marriage also came from the Seleucid circle. His wife is said to have been a Seleucid princess of uncertain identity, again named Laodice. Which branch of the Seleucid house she came from is not stated in the sources. Three children of the couple are known: Pharnaces I, who succeeded his father; Mithridates IV, who later ruled together with his sister Laodice; and that sister herself. Siblings succeeding one another on the throne began a practice that the Pontic dynasty would continue in later generations. The most famous name of the dynasty, Mithridates VI Eupator, was the son of this king's grandson Mithridates V, which makes Mithridates III his great-grandfather. Hüsameddin also records the common saying that the ancient name of Lâdik, "Leodikya", derives from its foundation by Queen Leodik, wife of "the great Mihridad", ruler of Amasya, but he regards with doubt the claim that other towns of the same name were also named after this queen. Since several queens of the dynasty bore the name Laodice, no connection can be drawn between this tradition and the wife of Mithridates III.

The Dates of His Reign

The years of the king's reign vary with the source and the scholar. One common reckoning places his reign roughly between 220 and 185 BC. Since it is certain that his son Pharnaces I took Sinope in 183 BC, the reign must have ended by those years at the latest. Another reckoning, in a dynastic table, shows the reign as running from about 210 to 190 BC. Yet another account says that he may have ruled during an uncertain period between 220 and 183 BC, and adds that after these years the kingdom vanishes from the historical record. What we have, then, is a span of some thirty years without a single securely dated event within it.

The numismatist François de Callataÿ, who studied the coins, makes the reign shorter, placing it around 220 to 200 BC and that of Pharnaces around 200 to 169 BC. Harold Mattingly, relying on an epigraphic study, wrote that the king was already dead by 196/195 BC. McGing takes a different route. The reign of Pharnaces brought Pontus a far more aggressive and expansionist foreign policy than that of his predecessors. The fact that Pontus took no part in the war between Antiochus III and Rome may, in McGing's view, be a sign that the aggressive Pharnaces had not yet come to the throne and that Mithridates III was still ruling. According to Cornelius Nepos, when Hannibal of Carthage fled from Crete to take refuge with King Prusias of Bithynia, Prusias was in Pontus; on this basis McGing suggests that Pharnaces may have become king around 188 BC. These proposals do not fully agree with one another, and the year of the king's death remains an open question today.

The haziness of the chronology has to do with the fact that Pontus scarcely entered the field of vision of Greek and Roman historical writing during these years. The kingdom reappears clearly on the historical stage only with his son Pharnaces I's capture of Sinope and his conflict with Pergamon. The generation in between therefore looks silent.

The Sinope Campaign and the Account of Polybius

The only event attached to the reign of Mithridates III is his march on Sinope. The episode as told in Polybius' Histories begins when a king, without specifying which Mithridates, makes war on Sinope. Polybius says that this was the first cause of the misfortunes the city would later suffer. The city's envoys go to Rhodes to ask for help. Rhodes appoints three commissioners and sets aside a grant of 140,000 drachmas. The Sinopeans are sent ten thousand jars of wine, three hundred talents of prepared hair, a hundred talents of prepared sinew, a thousand suits of armour, three thousand gold coins and four catapults together with their artillerymen. The nature of what was sent also shows how Sinope was preparing for a siege. Hair and sinew were the material needed for the torsion springs of ancient catapults, while the wine and armour were for soldiers who would bear the burden of a long defence.

Polybius also sketches the city's geography in detail. Sinope lies on the southern shore of the Black Sea, on a peninsula reaching out into the open sea. The neck joining the peninsula to the mainland is no more than two stades wide and is entirely closed off by the city walls. The seaward face of the city is steep, unsuitable for anchoring, with very few places that can be approached from the sea. The Sinopeans feared that while the king was entrenching on the landward side he might at the same time land troops on the level ground on the other side. They therefore fortified the shore facing the sea with stakes, palisades and missiles. What made the city so favourable a site, its position guarded on one side by land walls and on the other by cliffs, also explains why the Pontic kings coveted it so much. For an inland state seeking an outlet to the Black Sea coast, Sinope was the most valuable harbour.

This Rhodian aid may also be read as the moment when the relationship between the island and the Pontic dynasty first broke down. Polybius lists a Mithridates, together with Prusias of Bithynia, among the Asian rulers who sent gifts to Rhodes after the great earthquake that devastated the island. Here too he does not say which Mithridates is meant. Since Polybius places the earthquake a short time before the years he is describing, the king in question is most probably the father, Mithridates II; this is an inference. That within a few years the Rhodians became the party arming Sinope against the king of Pontus shows that, for Rhodes, the autonomy of the Greek cities on the coast weighed more heavily than Pontic friendship.

On whose behalf the campaign was waged is disputed. Because Polybius gives no number, the episode is placed on the one hand at the end of the reign of Mithridates II and on the other at the beginning of the reign of Mithridates III. Some scholars write that the reign of Mithridates III, or perhaps the end of his father's reign, began with an unsuccessful attempt to take Sinope. Another approach links the event to the year 220 BC and attributes it directly to Mithridates II. De Callataÿ, for his part, plainly assigns the attempt of around 220 BC to Mithridates III and connects the king's gold coins with this campaign; we return to this below. In either case the outcome is the same: Sinope did not fall, and the city was taken only around 183 BC by Pharnaces I. The campaign therefore produced no lasting result, and the goal of Sinope passed to his son as an inheritance.

The Palace at Amaseia

Amaseia was this king's residence. The city lies within the valley, at the point where the Yeşilırmak cuts through a mountain range. Strabo describes his native city as follows: the city is a high rock dropping sheer down to the river, combining the advantages of a city and a fortress. On one side are the walls along the river bank, on the other the walls climbing up to the peaks. The two peaks of the rock are naturally joined to each other and furnished with magnificent towers. Within this circuit lie "the palaces and monuments of the kings". The rock takes water from both the river and the neck through two pipe-like channels cut into it, so that it is never without water during a siege. There are two bridges over the river, one leading from the city to the suburb and the other from the suburb to the outlying country.

Of the palace area Strabo mentions, well-preserved Hellenistic walls survive today. Robert Fleischer describes these walls and the royal tombs as almost the only remains of the Kingdom of Pontus to have come down to us, and writes that Amaseia was the capital of the dynasty for about a century, between about 281 and 180 BC, and that the Founder, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II and III and Pharnaces I all ruled here. Hüsameddin, too, presents Amasya as the centre of the kingdom, quoting Ahmed Midhat Efendi's remark that the caves cut into the rocks around the city were made as the tombs of the Pontic kings. It is among the royal tombs, just above the palace Strabo describes, that the last resting place of Mithridates III is sought as well.

The Royal Tombs and Tomb D

The five large rock-cut tombs on the southern slope of Mount Harşena are arranged in two groups. In the documentation work Fleischer carried out in 2002 with the architect Falko Ahrendt-Flemming and the archaeologist Nicole Birkle, the tombs were labelled A to E from right to left. Tombs A, B and C lie to the east, close to the well-preserved palace walls; D and E lie to the west. Tomb A is reached from the palace by a staircase cut into the rock, and another staircase leads to the higher level of B and C. From there the way continues to the northwest through a tunnel; from its end one could either climb up to the acropolis, passing the long stepped tunnel cut for the water supply, or walk down westwards to the entrance of another tunnel with steps inside it and to a staircase leading up to the broad terrace in front of Tomb D. Tomb E is reached by a staircase cut in the form of a gallery into the almost vertical rock.

When the tombs were made, the plan was to surround each of them with corridors so as to give the impression of free-standing buildings within the rock. According to Fleischer, examples of this arrangement are found in fourth-century BC Caria, at Caunus and Telmessus. The corridors were completed only at Tombs B, C and D. Work on the corridor of A was begun but abandoned because of the crumbling rock, full of fissures, and the corridor of E was broken off halfway. Another feature common to the five tombs is that the entrances to the burial chambers are set high and could be reached only by ladder. Fleischer thinks this arrangement was most probably chosen in accordance with Iranian rules of purity, and cites for comparison the high entrances of the Achaemenid royal tombs from Darius I to Darius III at Naqsh-e Rostam and Persepolis. The chambers are small; with or without benches along their sides, they were made for a single body or for a very limited number of burials.

Fleischer's team rediscovered the traces of columns noted in the work of the French expedition of Perrot, Guillaume and Delbet, published in 1872. According to these traces, three of the five tombs had columned facades: Tomb A had six columns, and Tombs B and D four each. On the inner face of the right anta of Tomb B, the trace of an Attic column base survives; from this Fleischer concludes that the facades of Tombs A and D were most probably of the Ionic order as well. Parts of the steps, the antae and thresholds and the door lintels were made of separate stones and fixed to the rock with clamps and dowels, whose traces can still be seen. Tomb D thus had a facade inspired by Greek temple architecture, with a pedimented, four-columned portico.

As to which kings the tombs belonged to, Fleischer argues, on the basis of the shape of the corridors and certain technical details of the workmanship, that the three eastern tombs were built in the order A, C, B rather than A, B, C. Tomb B was the last, squeezed between A and C with considerable effort. Because no space was left in the rock above the walled palace area, the later Tombs D and E had to be cut at some distance to the west. From this sequence Fleischer arrives at the following attribution: Tomb A belongs to the Founder, Mithridates I; Tomb C to Ariobarzanes; Tomb B to Mithridates II; Tomb D to Mithridates III; and Tomb E to Pharnaces I. The dossier on Mount Harşena and the Rock-tombs of the Pontic Kings that Turkey submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2015 likewise assigns the five tombs to the same five kings and numbers them I to V. According to the dossier, the tombs range from 8 to 15 metres in height.

It must be stated plainly that this attribution is an inference. No contemporary inscription is known on any of the royal tombs stating which king lies in which tomb. Strabo does not say to whom the tombs belonged either. McGing accepts that the five tombs fit the five kings among whom Mithridates III is counted, but reminds us that we do not know whether all the Pontic kings from the Founder onwards were buried there. According to Hüsameddin, Texier had asked the same question, writing that like Strabo they called the tombs "the Tombs of the Kings", but that it was impossible to answer historically to which kings they belonged. Hüsameddin himself thinks that the caves at Amasya outnumber the Pontic kings and that some of them may have been cut before these kings. The account that Mithridates III was buried in Tomb D on Harşena is therefore an inference drawn from the order of construction and from the knowledge that the kings of the dynasty lay there. It seems very reasonable, but it does not rest on documentary evidence.

The Portrait Coins

Pontic coinage is thought to have begun most probably under Mithridates II, in the third century BC. Following the common practice of the age, these first coins imitated the coins bearing the image of Alexander the Great. For a newly founded kingdom, the easiest course was to take a recognised and respected coin, that is, the Alexander type, as its model. De Callataÿ takes a different view on this point: he assigns the gold and silver issues with Alexander types to Mithridates III as well, and accepts no coins of an earlier Pontic king. Whichever view is adopted, the Pontic king who set his own face into this tradition was Mithridates III. He is remembered as the first Pontic ruler to strike coins bearing his own portrait.

De Callataÿ's study, published in 2009 and the first to undertake a die study of these coins, lists one by one the coins known today in the name of Mithridates III. According to his catalogue there are two gold staters, nineteen silver tetradrachms and two drachms. The staters bear on the obverse a helmeted head of Athena and on the reverse a standing Nike holding a wreath, with the legend "King Mithradates". The tetradrachms show on the obverse the king's diademed head or his diademed, draped bust, and on the reverse a seated Zeus holding an eagle in his outstretched right hand and a sceptre in his left. Beside Zeus appear the eight-rayed star and crescent regarded as the badge of the Pontic dynasty. The drachms carry the same type. While the enthroned Zeus is closely copied from the tetradrachms of Alexander, the royal portrait has a realistic quality that captures the individual features of the face.

The faces on the coins are realistic. On one specimen the king is reported to be shown on the obverse as an unidealised, short-haired, bearded, rather elderly man. The numismatist Otto Mørkholm put a tetradrachm of this king on the cover of his posthumously published book Early Hellenistic Coinage and wrote that the portrait was probably made around 200 BC. According to Mørkholm, the Pontic kings were proud of their Iranian descent, and although they formed marriage ties with the Seleucid house, their attachment to their Eastern roots remained strong. This gave skilled Greek die engravers the chance to create a gallery of portraits with no real parallel in Hellenistic portrait art. Mørkholm writes that the head of Mithridates III is rendered with an extreme realism that brings out Eastern features very different from both Greek idealisation and Macedonian heaviness, and that the Pontic portraits equal the best Bactrian portraits in realism. The portrait is thus the product of an Eastern taste meeting Greek craftsmanship.

Earlier art historians were not always so measured in their comments on these portraits. De Callataÿ stresses that the old interpretations that drew conclusions about the kings' intelligence from their "Eastern features" reflect a racist strand of thought, and states plainly that there is no need to share them. Fleischer, too, notes that these coin portraits recall figures of the Roman republic more than contemporary rulers, so that an anti-Greek attitude might be looked for behind them; but he then adds that it has been shown that the Pontic kings, like other rulers, presented themselves as friends of the Greeks.

The Gold Staters and the Mint of Amisos

The gold staters of Mithridates III carry one of the most concrete clues to the king's history. The specimen in Paris was found at Ordu, the ancient Cotyora. The four control marks in the lower fields of this coin appear in the same places and in the same form on the silver coins that Amisos (Samsun) struck in its own name. De Callataÿ argues that this cannot be a coincidence, and that the royal issue was therefore struck at the mint of Amisos, not at the capital Amaseia. This shows that even if the Pontic kings did not fully control the issues struck in the name of Amisos, they were able to requisition the city's mint for their own needs.

De Callataÿ looks for the historical context of this issue in Mithridates III's attempt to seize Sinope around 220 BC. If the Alexander-type staters of Sinope, which Martin Price had earlier connected with the same event, are also taken into account, the two issues may have served the same purpose: paying the mercenaries hired by each side. If this interpretation is correct, the siege preparations described by Polybius and the first gold coins of Pontus are two faces of the same war. De Callataÿ presents this link as a possibility.

The Dating Debate

The king's coins have been misread many times over the centuries. A tetradrachm of Mithridates III first appeared in the hoard found in 1759 at Latakia in Syria, the first hoard of Greek coins ever to be published, and Pellerin read the letters on it as an abbreviation pointing to Cius. Domenico Sestini interpreted two letters on some tetradrachms as a date and read them as year 29, while Ennio Quirino Visconti restored to Mithridates III the tetradrachms that Joseph Eckhel had given to Mithridates II. The sequence of the kings was settled only at the end of the nineteenth century, through the work of Théodore Reinach.

More recently Harold Mattingly proposed that Mithridates III never struck coins at all, and that the tetradrachms attributed to him in fact belong to the first phase of Mithridates IV. His argument was that three of these coins had been found in very good condition in two Seleucid hoards dated to around 160 to 156 BC. De Callataÿ rejects this view on several grounds. The coins in question are not in good condition: one is worn and corroded, and another, found at Babylon, is broken into six pieces. The portrait of Mithridates III cannot be reconciled with that of Mithridates IV, and on his coins the king looks noticeably older. The weights also support the traditional sequence: at a median of 16.97 grams, the tetradrachms of Mithridates III are slightly heavier than those of Pharnaces (16.85 grams) and of Mithridates IV, which fits the slow decline in tetradrachm weights over the third and second centuries BC. The control marks shared with the coins of Amisos point the same way. De Callataÿ's conclusion is firm, and Mattingly's proposal has not found acceptance.

The Volume and Purpose of the Coinage

The sources disagree about how much coinage was struck. Some numismatic studies hold that by the end of his reign the king had struck a considerable quantity of silver coins. De Callataÿ's die study paints a different picture. The tetradrachms of Mithridates III come from only five obverse dies, and statistical methods estimate the total number of obverse dies the king used at about seven. According to de Callataÿ, the tetradrachms struck by all the Pontic kings from Mithridates III to Mithridates IV over some seventy years do not exceed thirty dies; this is one sixth of what Mithridates VI Eupator struck in thirty years. Pontic coins before Mithridates VI are very rare, which has made the study of the royal coinage difficult. For this reason the coins of Mithridates III are among the few documents that shed light on the kingdom's early period.

A hoard found near Amasya completes this picture. The Kirazlı hoard, found in the territory of the village of Kürtler near Amasya, was buried around 230 to 220 BC, that is, just before Mithridates III came to the throne. It contains not a single Pontic coin, and 636 of its 822 silver coins, or 77.5 per cent, had been cut with a chisel. The numismatist G. Le Rider concluded from this that money was not yet in very wide use in some corners of Pontic territory. According to de Callataÿ, the fact that the Pontic kings struck no bronze coins is consistent with this: the royal coins were most probably struck for military purposes, to pay mercenaries, and played little part in everyday trade. For this reason the propaganda value of the images on the coins should not be overstated. That tetradrachms of Mithridates III have turned up in Syria and Babylon likewise suggests that these coins were not kept within the kingdom but circulated in payments made abroad.

The Later Development of the Coinage

The coins of Mithridates III should be read as the beginning of the dynasty's visual language, but what followed did not run in a straight line. The realistic, unidealised conception of the portrait continued in later generations, and Mithridates V became the first Pontic king to have himself portrayed in a somewhat idealised manner. The new style is thought to have arisen from a wish to bring the king's Greek side forward more than his Eastern origins. His son Mithridates VI, for his part, moved closer to contemporary Hellenistic portraiture by having himself depicted in the likeness of Alexander the Great. The reverse types also changed from generation to generation: the coins of his son Pharnaces show a god of disputed identity holding a cornucopia and a herald's staff (caduceus), those of Mithridates IV show Perseus, and the joint issues of Mithridates IV with his sister Laodice show Hera and Zeus. The coins of Mithridates III are therefore regarded as examples of a more Eastern portrait style that preceded the dynasty's later Hellenistic appearance, and with their figure of Zeus they stand closest to the coins of Alexander.

Royal coins and city coins were struck separately. The royal coins were of gold and silver and bore the king's portrait and name. The coins struck by the cities were of bronze, with the city's name written on the reverse. De Callataÿ notes that, apart from a few minor exceptions, Amisos and Sinope did not strike bronze before Mithridates VI; the spread of civic bronzes therefore falls long after Mithridates III. The autonomous coinage of Sinope and the other coastal cities came to a halt for a time under Pharnaces I, when the cities lost their autonomy. Mithridates VI restored this right but kept control in his own hands. In his time Amaseia was, for a short while, the only city in the kingdom permitted to strike its own silver and gold coins. This privilege shows that Amaseia stood out in the kingdom's monetary affairs as well as being the seat of the palace and the royal tombs.

His Successors and Legacy

His son Pharnaces I, who succeeded Mithridates III, accomplished what his father had failed to do and took Sinope in 183 BC (182 in some records). The Rhodians complained of this to Rome, but to no effect. Pharnaces then seized coastal cities such as Cotyora, Pharnacia and Trapezus as well, so that the Kingdom of Pontus came to dominate a long strip of the southern Black Sea coast. In the war he fought against King Eumenes II of Pergamon and King Ariarathes IV of Cappadocia, he was forced in 179 BC to give up his conquests in Galatia and Paphlagonia, but Sinope remained in his hands. Polybius writes that he was of an arrogant and harsh character. After Pharnaces, his brother Mithridates IV and his sister Laodice came to the throne.

Pharnaces' choice of Sinope as his capital also brought the tradition of the royal tombs at Amaseia to an end. According to Fleischer, the corridor of Tomb E was left unfinished when Pharnaces decided to move his capital to the harbour city he had recently taken. The rock inscription above Tomb E records that the commander of the fortress, (Me)trodoros, dedicated an altar and a flower bed to the gods on behalf of King Pharnaces. Hüsameddin, for his part, looks for Pharnaces' name in Amasya itself: in his view "Fernak", the old name of the Çakallar and Karakaya area, derives from this king, and a deed of sale for a vineyard dated to the Hijri year 691 and Tâcîzâde Sa'dî Çelebi's phrase "the gardens of Fernak" preserve this old name. Linking the name to the king is Hüsameddin's own interpretation.

Measuring the share of Mithridates III among these generations is difficult. What we have is a failed campaign, a palace city, a rock tomb assigned to him and a small series of coins. Falling between his father's marriage policy and his son's conquests, this reign may, despite the silence of the sources, be regarded as the period in which the kingdom created its own coinage and its own image of the ruler. Pontus' staying out of the war between Antiochus III and Rome may also, if these years did fall within his reign as McGing suggests, be read as the choice of a cautious ruler.

Chronology

c. 281 BC: Mithridates Ktistes proclaims the Kingdom of Pontus.

222 BC: Laodice, sister of Mithridates III, marries the Seleucid king Antiochus III.

c. 230-220 BC: The Kirazlı hoard near Amasya is buried. It contains no Pontic coins.

c. 220 BC: An attack on Sinope by a "Mithridates" fails. Some accounts attribute it to Mithridates II, others to Mithridates III.

220-185 BC (or 210-190, or 220-200): Proposed spans for the reign of Mithridates III. The exact dates are unknown. The years given by Hüsameddin correspond roughly to 222-186 BC.

c. 200 BC: According to Mørkholm, the period in which the king's portrait tetradrachms were made.

196/195 BC: According to Mattingly, the king is already dead by this date.

c. 188 BC: Accession of Pharnaces I, as proposed by McGing.

183 BC: His son Pharnaces I takes Sinope.

179 BC: Pharnaces is defeated by Pergamon and Cappadocia and gives up his conquests apart from Sinope.

1759: The first known tetradrachm of Mithridates III enters the scholarly record with the Latakia hoard.

2002: Robert Fleischer's team documents the royal tombs at Amasya; Tomb D is attributed to Mithridates III.

Bibliography

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