Termessos Epigrafi Projesi (TEP)

Located within the boundaries of Güllük Dağı National Park in the modern province of Antalya, at an altitude of approximately 1,050 metres, Termessos is one of the best-preserved urban sites of the ancient world. This rugged mountain city of Pisidia resisted the siege of Alexander the Great in 333 BC and was never taken — one of the rare retreats Alexander made during his Anatolian campaign.

The city secured wide-ranging autonomy through a treaty of alliance with Rome in 70 BC and remained politically and economically active until the third century AD. Its urban fabric — theatre, agora, temples, and necropolis zones — survives almost intact.

The history of epigraphic research at Termessos begins with the Termessos section of Lanckoroński's Städte Pamphyliens und Pisidiens (1892), complemented by G. Cousin's 1899 article Inscriptions de Termessos. The fundamental reference work for the site remains Rudolf Heberdey's Tituli Asiae Minoris (TAM) III (1941). This corpus — comprising honorary decrees, public correspondence, cult dedications and funerary inscriptions — contains 944 inscription records. TAM III was followed by Bülent İplikçioğlu and his team's four-volume Epigraphische Forschungen in Termessos series (1991–2007). New inscription publications continue to appear today through the contributions of Prof. Dr. A. Vedat Çelgin, Prof. Dr. Murat Arslan, Prof. Dr. Ferit Baz, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emre Erten, Prof. Dr. Nihal Tüner Önen and Prof. Dr. Hüseyin Sami Öztürk. With these publications, the total number of published inscriptions has reached approximately 1,300. Termessos has thus become one of the best-documented epigraphic centres in Anatolia. Nevertheless, the spatial distribution and original contexts of this rich material within the city have never been systematically documented. TEP aims to evaluate the inscriptions — for the first time — together with their textual content and spatial contexts, thereby establishing the epigraphic topography of Termessos.

The greatest methodological challenge for a project that places the inscription–space relationship at the heart of research is obvious: an inscription that has been moved, reused as spolia, or removed to a storeroom can no longer offer reliable information about its original location. Locational epigraphic work only acquires genuine scholarly value at sites where the great majority of inscriptions preserve their original or near-original contexts.

Termessos offers an exceptional opportunity in this respect.

The city was abandoned in antiquity and never reoccupied. Traces of the Christian period are very rare; there was no large-scale rebuilding programme that would have necessitated the reuse of earlier material. In Late Antiquity only limited repairs and adaptations of certain spaces are attested — there is, for instance, not a single church in the city. The urban fabric of this mountain city, whose walls even Alexander could not breach, has survived to the present day with extraordinary integrity.

The methodological implications of this are decisive: at Termessos, the findspot of an inscription is highly likely to represent its original context. The city is therefore one of the rare ancient settlements where it is possible to analyse not only the textual content of inscriptions but also their spatial distribution, visibility, and urban function in a reliable manner. This capacity for systematic investigation of the relationship between inscription and space makes Termessos an ideal field for the research in question.