The towns and villages of Phrygia, a predominantly rural region of inner Asia Minor, provide richer documentation of their early Christian communities than any other part of the Roman empire. This includes the earliest lengthy Christian funerary text, coin types depicting Noah and the Flood introduced by Christians at the Phrygian emporium of Apamea, the famous ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions, and more than a hundred other pre-Constantinian grave monuments, The abundant evidence for the Christian presence up the Turkish invasions throws new light on continuity between Late Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period, and on the warfare between the Byzantines and Turks in the 11th century. This is the first exhaustive regional study since 1897.
Stephen Mitchell is emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter, senior research associate Berlin TOPOI, a former chairman of the British Institute at Ankara, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written a History of the Later Roman Empire (2nd 3d. 2015) and widely on the history, culture and religions of Asia Minor in antiquity, including Anatolia. Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (1993), Pisidian Antioch. The Site and its Monuments (1998), The Greek and Latin inscriptions of Ankara (2 vols. 2012, 2019), and Roman Archaeology in an Anatolian Landscape (2021).
Readers with academic interests in the archaeology and history of Asia Minor in antiquity, the social and historical world of early Christianity, in Christian epigraphy.