Cultural identities in Ancient Greece

It is a really interesting part of the ancient world in particular, because it was a crossroads of cultures and civilizations. It is located at the point where overland routes coming down north through Anatolia, but also through the Caucasus, will meet the overland routes coming up through Mesopotamia and from the Near East. That is where they also join with the sea routes, which connect the Mediterranean as well. Throughout history, Cilicia has been very much a melting pot. In the medieval period, we know that this was the location of Arab groups, Armenian groups, as well as Greek groups — Byzantine Greeks as well.

Cilicia is the point of the Anatolian peninsula where you drop down from the highlands of the Anatolian plateau into the lowlands that border the Mediterranean Sea.

Cilicia is really a region where we can see a fantastic patchwork of different cultural traditions: Greek traditions, certainly, but also Anatolian vernacular traditions, Persian traditions, Near Eastern traditions, Cypriot traditions and Phoenician traditions.

In terms of trying to understand Greekness in antiquity, Cilicia really helps us to push at the boundaries of what was considered Greek, what was considered not Greek, how Greekness could coexist alongside and be interconnected with other types of identities and other kinds of cultural traits.

Archaeological research in Cilicia is particularly exciting because of this cultural diversity. When you are excavating, you can find artifacts which are typically Aegean Greek in style and manufacture, but these will be coexisting in the same assemblages as artifacts which have been imported from the Persian Empire or artifacts having come from an indigenous Anatolian tradition.

One of the things we can see in Cilicia, for example, is parallel traditions growing up alongside and developing alongside each other.

The local ceramic traditions draw very heavily from Aegean Greek styles and techniques, but they also draw from a long tradition of Anatolian ceramics as well. We can see different elements in the manufacture of these local ceramics intertwining and being used alongside each other in Cilicia.

For a period of several centuries, there seemed to be several different local kings who were operating within the region. They are intermarrying with each other; they are fighting with each other. They are drawing from various different cultural traditions from around the Near East and the Mediterranean. Into this comes the Persian Empire in the 6th century.

There are some communities which align themselves more and more closely with the Persian occupiers, and there are some communities which seem to try and be the polar opposite of the Persians.

They start to import more pottery and ceramics from the Greek Aegean, and they start to emulate more Greek styles when it comes to aesthetic preferences and the monumental arts and sculpture.

We also start to find increasing evidence for the use of the Greek language, in particular when it comes to civic life and public life. Taken all together, what we seem to have is evidence in the second half of the 5th century for a process of self Hellenization by some of the cities of Cilicia. Now, this is very internally driven. It is something that local communities are seeking themselves, and it is really driven by this local play of power, trying to articulate a cultural identity that is distinct from that of the Persian imperial authorities. However, while this is very internally driven, it is also partly a response to what is going on in the wider Mediterranean world at the time.

Around this time, there is a developing rhetoric of Greekness as an opposition to Persianness, Greeks being the freedom fighters or the resistance against Persian imperialism, especially against its spread in western Anatolia and into continental Europe. For the Cilician cities, Greekness then has a powerful political force. Greekness may not have been something that they necessarily felt. They did not necessarily feel a deep-seated sense of Greek identity and roots, but Greekness is almost a political stance. It is something that they can embrace as a way of expressing their opposition to Persian imperialism.

Almost in response to that, the Persian Empire rethinks the way it administers the Cilician region, and it replaces the local system of governance with a top down Persian governor. Then we have an increasing engagement with Greek cultural identity, Greek religion, Greek language, Greek customs on the part of the Cilician cities, and then on top of that, the Persians impose a much more military regime. They create a number of garrisoned fortresses around Cilicia through which they can control the local population in a much more direct and oppressive way. Then again, in response, that is when we see a real flowering of Greekness in terms of Greek styles of culture, Greek aesthetic styles and Greek art.

Chronologically, we can really trace heightened engagement with Greek culture on the part of the Cilician cities with increasing Persian oppression from the imperial authorities, and the two seem to be in direct counterpoint to each other.

The end of all of this process comes about with the conquest of Alexander of Macedon at the end of the 4th century, when Alexander conquers the Persian Empire and transforms it into a kind of Perso-Greek Macedonian empire. All of these debates become reimagined in this Hellenistic Greek world.

From that point onwards, after the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, the Greekness of the Cilician cities ceases to have any real political meaning. The Cilician cities just become part of this wider Hellenistic world, one which is a fundamentally hybridized world which incorporates Greek and Near Eastern elements. For the Cilician cities, of course, this is nothing new.

If there is one misconception this should help us address, it is the misconception that identity is always necessarily primordial and underlying, and that it has always been there. The case of Cilicia really helps us to understand that identities can change, and they can change quite rapidly in response to specific historical contexts.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025