Karia, a region in southwest Asia Minor, was inhabited by a people native to Anatolia and probably of Luwian origin. Documents in the Karian language, only recently deciphered, remain scarce and usually unforthcoming. In the past, various scholarly attempts at extricating indigenously Karian cultural or religious elements from Greek sources have met with mixed results, and what constitutes Karian ethnicity remains difficult to define. This dissertation is a contribution to the now growing understanding of that question. It offers an edition, with extended commentary, of a series of stone inscriptions from Karia written in Greek, and dating from the 6th to the 1st centuries BC. These texts, all of which are cui tic regulations, some published more than fifty ago, others newly discovered during the last decade, are analysed thoroughly with the aim of illuminating distinctive aspects of religious life in Karia. While avoiding the theoretical pitfalls of earlier scholarship, notably the question of indigeneity, this study demonstrates that it is possible to use Greek sources, including the inscriptions presented herein, to attempt at least a partial elucidation of the particular and defining characteristics of religious phenomena in ancient Karia.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:568391 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Carbon, Jan-Mathieu |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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