From the Classical Period to the Early Byzantine time the city of Myra and its territory

This thesis concerns the history of the city of Myra and its territory and is divided into two main parts. The first part investigates the political history of the city from the classical fortress until the late Roman Period when the city became the capital of Lycia; with its administrative, social, religious and economic structures recorded in ancient literary works, in epigraphic documents and in the archaeological remains providing the sources employed in this investigation. The aim of the second part of this study was to determine the extent of the territory and those settlements belonging to the city and so to contribute to the study of the ancient geography of central Lycia through proposing some localisations. In the first part of this thesis the historical development of the city Myra, the main city of central Lycia, is investigated through comparing Myra with the large eastern and western cities of Lycia such as: Xanthos, Patara and Limyra, within the context of western and eastern Lycia. During the Classical and Early Hellenistic periods the leading administrative centres of Lycia were Xanthos to the west and Limyra to the east. Although Myra has the second largest classical necropolis in Lycia, with 100 rock-cut tombs (after the city of Limyra), and also possesses a large fortress, it seems that Myra did not play any noteworthy role in the history of Lycia during the Classical and Early Hellenistic Periods. The epichoric name of the settlement of Myra remains uncertain, and it is also unknown if it minted any coins during the Classical Period. The city of Myra and its port of Andriake increased in importance under Ptolemaic rule during the third century B.C. and from this time Myra became one of the six largest Lycian cities, possessing three votes in the Lycian League, and it also obtained the most important position in eastern Lycia as the centre minting the coins of Masikytos, surpassing the mint in city of Limyra. During the Roman Imperial Period Myra and Patara, which had surpassed Xanthos in western Lycia, became the two leading cities of the province of Lycia. This, to the extent that the awarding of honorary citizenships of Myra and Patara might have been particularly employed as a political message, in representing both eastern and western Lycia, by some famous Lyciarchs such as Opramoas etc. Finally, in the late Roman Period Myra became the administrative and religious centre of all of Lycia after it was declared the capital of Lycia by Emperor Theodosius. In the first part, in addition to the political history of Myra, its political and economic relations with the other cities of Lycia and the administrative and social structure of the city are investigated, employing the surviving epigraphic documentation. During the Hellenistic Period, during the second half of the second century B.C., Myra made a treaty of equal citizenship