Ancyra

(Ankara, now the capital of Turkey)

A city in central Asia Minor, lying around a steep crag that formed its acropolis. In accordance with the tradition (preserved by Pausanias) that Ancyra was founded by the mythical Phrygian king Midas, archaeological evidence confirms occupation by the Phrygians, who conquered and settled in the central and western parts of the peninsula toward the end of the second millennium BC. Situated at the junction of east-west and north-south trade routes, Ancyra became the second metropolis of Phrygia (after Gordium), and its museums today contain rich material from that epoch.

Following a period under Persian control, the place was occupied and visited by Alexander the Great in 333 BC, and subsequently belonged to the empires of Antigonus I Monophthalmos and the Seleucids; its commercial importance increased as that of Gordium waned. The Gauls who invaded the peninsula from 278 onward seem to have built in a new town on the same site, which later in the same century became the capital of one of their three (Galatian) tribal groups, the Tectosages. In 189 Ancyra was temporarily occupied by the Roman general Cnaeus Manlius Vulso, and early in the following century became part of the territories of Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus, until he was defeated by the Romans under Pompey. In 64/63, Pompey, in the course of his reorganization of the country, confirmed Ancyra's position as the center of an enlarged Tectosagan dominion. Antony gave Galatia and adjoining territories to the client king Amyntas, and when Augustus, on the death of Amyntas, annexed the country in 25 the city became the capital of the new Roman province, and prospered. Under the provincial reorganization of Diocletian, it remained the capital of Galatia Prima.

Of the various surviving remains from the Roman period—including baths and a late `Column of Julian’—the most important is the Temple of Rome and Augustus, erected in the emperor's honor during his lifetime by the Council of the three Galatian tribes. On its walls is a bilingual (Latin and Greek) inscription known as the Monumentum Ancyranum, which comprises by far the best preserved text of Augustus' famous political testament the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, offering an official interpretation of his actions throughout his career, together with a list of the honors that the senate and Roman people had conferred on him. The temple also contains a second inscription, containing a list of the high priests of the koinon (provincial organization) of Galatia in the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37).

Ancyra was visited by St. Paul, whose Epistle to the Galatians was written to strengthen the faith of its Christian inhabitants. He may have founded a church there (though its first attestation dates from 192). An inscription records a visit to the city by Hadrian, probably in 117. About 269 it passed into the hands of the secessionist Palmyrene empire of Zenobia, but three years later Aurelian entered its gates without opposition. In 324 it figured prominently in an attempt to suppress the Arian heresy, when a meeting of bishops held at Antioch arranged for a church council to be held at Ancyra—whose bishop Marcellus was strongly anti-Arian. But Constantine the Great, who did not want either of the extreme factions to triumph completely, transferred the meeting to Nicaea (İznik). In 362 the powerful non-Christian community of Ancyra gave a triumphal welcome to Julian the Apostate when he visited the place. (This city is to be distinguished from another of the same name, the chief center of Abbaitis in Mysia or western Phrygia.)