An Imperial Estate in Galatia

Abstract

Tentative suggestions which conform to the conditions of a scientific hypothesis may play a useful part in furthering the slow and unending process of rediscovering antiquity. Proof or disproof of them must naturally await the discovery of fresh evidence, and such evidence may never come; but if it does, its appearance is doubly welcome when it furnishes proof. It is nearly forty years since my travels in Anatolia took me into the angle of north-western Galatia, lying between north-eastern Phrygia and the southern boundary of Bithynia, which ran along the watershed between the middle Sangarius and its chief tributary the Tembrogius or Tembris. The southern side of this watershed, immediately to the west of the junction of the two rivers, is an infertile and thinly populated district, but farther west, towards the Phrygian border, the mountain slopes open out into a broad plain which runs down to the Tembrogius; near its head are the two villages of Upper (or Great) and Lower Igde-agatch. Westward of this plain and separated from it only by a low ridge is a pleasant valley, watered by an affluent of the Tembrogius.