DOI: 10.37095/gephyra.2054334 ISSN: 1309-3924

A New Milestone of the First Tetrarchy from Kabaağaç on the Antiocheia-Laodikeia Road

Emine Bilgiç Kavak, Bilge Yılmaz Kolancı
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This paper publishes a Greek milestone recorded during the Attouda Survey Project in the modern cemetery of Kabaağaç (Sarayköy, Denizli), in the middle Maeander valley. The cylindrical stone names the four rulers of the First Tetrarchy (Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius and Galerius) in a dedicatory dative and records a distance of 17 miles from Antiocheia on the Maeander; it therefore dates to AD 293-305. The naming of Antiocheia as caput viae places the stone on the Antiocheia-Laodikeia section of route D3 in D. French’s reconstruction of the road network of Asia. It is, as far as we know, the only milestone on D3 between Nysa and the vicinity of Apameia that names its caput viae. Measured along a road running roughly straight down the valley, the 17 miles (c. 25.2 km) would end c. 2-4 km east of the findspot, in the vicinity of the hot springs that Anderson identified with Karoura; the stone, which stands upside down in the cemetery, may have been carried west from there. The milestone documents that the section of road on which Strabo and the Tabula Peutingeriana place Karoura was measured from Antiocheia, but it does not in itself fix the location of Karoura. The milestone itself does not show in whose territory the findspot lay: the measurement from Antiocheia may reflect that city’s responsibility for this stretch of road, or simply that Attouda, which lay off the main road, did not count miles of its own. The unfluted column drums, a Corinthian capital of the 2nd century AD and an incised cross recorded at the findspot point to a building in long use that may have acquired a religious function in the Early Byzantine period.

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