Chingyuan Wu, Peking University
This paper considers the connectedness of the two ports-of-call of Amastris and Heraclea Pontica in the eparcheia of Pontus during the Roman principate. Stanford's ORBIS platform offers a heuristic model of connectedness. We find the two ports-of-call the most popular segments along the south for maritime traffic coming from eastern Pontus and the Bosporus. Where the two is most different concerns their connections with the interior. Heraclea Pontica connected Ancyra to the Pontic coast, while Amastris had none. ORBIS is understandably non-granular in the sense that it "restrict[s] coverage to the more important elements of the Roman communication system," but if this is the case, it means that Heraclea Pontica and Amastris were connected in other ways as well, and the Amastrian mountainous interior, which could be described as the "previously unconjoined, or at least the previously less well-connected" segment of Anatolia (Horden 2020: 204), could have also been connected with the wider ancient Mediterranean world. Low visibility of settlements beyond known the one known urbanized area in modern Amasra makes discussions of broader connectedness difficult, but at least from recent field survey results suggest that the number and vibrancy of settlements likely increased in the Roman period (Bes 2015: 288-289; Çam et al. 2019; Çam 2021). The question then is whether recent studies contribute to a new assessment of Amastrian connectedness, and how it compares with existing impressions of both Amastris and its peer poleis, with Heraclea Pontica serving as the primary example.
Building upon Alexandru Avram's assumption that the aggregate of attestations of persons who have spent time in a city other than their homeland can serve as proxy for gauging their mobility (Avram 2013: 7-8), this paper uses the Prosopographia Ponti Euxini externa to test whether Amastrian connectedness reached currently unknown areas, particularly the interior. Comparison between Amastrian data (n=136) and Heracleote specimens (n=1101) may seem disproportionate, but this paper focuses on persons from the first to the third centuries CE and privileges locations instead of volumes so to visualize connectedness in the Roman world. The same concept is applied to persons of locales beyond the two subjects in question – foreigners who left records in Heracleote (n=5) and Amastrian territory (n=11) – and visualized together. In addition, though coins are a poor proxy as they may be transmitted in a variety of ways that do not reflect direct connections between Amastris and the cities that issued them, this paper considers coins from the Amasra Museum as published by Stanley Ireland and Soner Atesogullari (1996) to complement Amastris relatively poor prosopographical record and increase the potential to capture connections. The overall impression gleaned from this exercise is that Amastris could have played a comparable (though potentially less pronounced) role as that of Heraclea Pontica in terms of a hub-like node that connected interior land routes with maritime traffic, particularly for Hadrianopolis and Pompeiopolis (Corsten 2007; Ruscu 2017), but also potentially for centers such as Caesarea in Cappadocia.