A Roman bridge at Oinoanda

Abstract

An ancient limestone block was brought to our attention in the garden of Mehmet Atçı, the then bekçi of Oinoanda, at his house in the village of İncealiler, below the ancient site, during the site-survey of Oinoanda and its territory led by Professor Stephen Mitchell in 1994. It had been rescued from the nearby small antique site at Kemerarası, which lies at the foot of the Oinoanda hill (Urluca), immediately on the north bank of the upper Xanthos river, at the point where routes ancient and modern from the lower Xanthos valley debouch from the pass of Karabel into the Seki plain. Kemerarası is known to tourists for its Ottoman bridge which still spans the Xanthos (fig 1), and which is now superseded by a modern highway bridge, and to ancient historians chiefly as the findspot of the Demostheneia festival inscription published by Wörrle (1988). The old theory that the site at Kemerarası was a separate city of ‘Termessus Minor” has been scotched by Coulton (1982), who showed that Termessus Minor was the name of Oinoanda itself, viewed as a colony of Termessus Major.