The Farthest Cities of Phrygia: Iron Age Interactions in the Southern Anatolian Plateau

“The farthest city of Phrygia”... this is how Xenophon tersely describes the city of Iconion/Konya in the Anabasis (1.2.19). Although inspired by Greek geographical conceptions of Xenophon’s own time – the 4th century BCE – these words are very apt to capture the crucial notion that, in antiquity, Konya and the Anatolian Southern Plateau represented a persistent interface between several competing political, social and cultural networks. This paper aims to offer a historical perspective to this understanding by focusing the Early and Middle Iron Ages (ca. 1200-700 BCE). I will show that during this period, the area was subject to competing cultural and political influences from Phrygia, in the northwest, and the Syro-Anatolian polities of Tabal to the east. A multifaceted frontier thus emerged, arguable from distribution patterns of material cultural features and from the politico-geographical map reflected in extant epigraphic sources, namely Assyrian and Luwian Hieroglyphic inscriptions. On this basis, I will also explore the case of possible linguistic interactions in the target area.