Creating a royal landscape: Hekatomnid use of urban and rural sacred sites in fourth-century Karia

Rolf Strootmann et Christina G. Williamson

p. 105-124

Résumé

In the mid-fourth century BC, the Hekatomnid Dynasty of Karia, Achaemenid satrap-kings of local descent, established a powerful ‘empire-within-the-empire’ in the Aegean. Various aspects of Hekatomnid kingship and imperialism seem to prefigure later Hellenistic practices, including dynastic cult. In trying to find the origins of Hellenistic kingship, however, modern scholarship has (apart from Macedonian traditions) mainly stressed alleged Persian and/or Greek influences. But Philip II and Alexander III, as well as the first Diadochs, may themselves have seen the local rulers of western Asia Minor as more important models for their own development of royal style and systems of control. In this paper we investigate the built environment as an aspect of Hekatomnid royal ritual. How did (religious) architecture contribute to the development of dynastic identity? How were royal rituals and spectacles that were performed in specific places instrumental in the creation of royal authority and social memory? We consider the original royal seat at Mylasa and the nearby dynastic sanctuary at Labraunda, as well as coastal Halikarnassos, to where the center was shifted by Maussollos, showing how the Hekatomnids used and transformed the built environment to imprint their monarchy on the landscape and create venues for the ritualized negotiation of power in their new empire.


Extrait

Introduction

1This article focuses on a fundamental material aspect of rulership, one that especially concerns its ceremonial side. This is the built environment in which rituals of royalty take place, and more generally the landscape as it was transformed through ritual into a sacred and royal space.

2In the Hellenistic world, kingship often expressed itself through religious architecture. Hellenistic architects moreover borrowed building forms from sacral architecture for the construction of palaces. The use of platforms, surrounding walls or monumental propylaea, enabled royal space to be set apart from civic space in much the same way that sanctuaries in the Aegean world were demarcated as sacred spaces.1 Distinctions between royal and religious architecture were thereby blurred. This practice of constructing royal space first developed, as we argue, in the pre-Hellenistic, late Achaemenid Aegean.

3In trying to identify the origins of Hellenistic kingship, modern scholarshi

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