This study reassesses an inscribed victory catalogue from Sinope (IK Sinope 105) that is often discussed in scholarship concerning agonistic culture in the Roman world. One particularly curious element of this inscription is the empty nature of the penultimate line, which bears only the numerals rho-nu. In the existing scholarship, this is usually interpreted as the sum of all the athlete’s victories. This paper challenges the orthodox interpretation, using a combination of David French’s squeezes housed at the British Institute at Ankara, supported by autopsy and recent photographs of the stone itself. It goes on to reconsider the practice of summing athletic victories in honorific inscriptions more generally, examining a specially compiled dossier of 207 inscriptions of comparable date to IK Sinope 105, and concluding that the practice was relatively rare. Finally, this paper considers other possible interpretations of the rho-nu in IK Sinope 105, among which is the suggestion that rho-nu could be a chronographic feature. While the interpretation of the rho-nu in IK Sinope 105 remains open, the combination of a close analysis of the stone with a wider contextual consideration of the genre demonstrates how much more remains to be said about even a well-known and often cited inscription. Özet Bu çalışma, Roma dünyasındaki agonistik kültürle ilgili araştırmalarda sıklıkla tartışılan, Sinop’dan ele geçen bir zafer kataloğu yazıtını (IK Sinope 105) yeniden değerlendirmektedir. Bu yazıtın özellikle merak uyandıran unsurlarından biri, sadece rho-nu rakamlarını taşıyan, sondan bir önceki satırın boş olmasıdır. Mevcut akademik çalışmalarda bu rakamlar genellikle atletin tüm zaferlerinin toplam sayısı olarak yorumlanmaktadır. Bu makale, taşın yakından incelenmesi ile son zamanda çekilmiş fotoğraflarıyla desteklenen, British Institute at Ankara’da bulunan French’in yazıt mülajlarını birlikte değerlendirerek bu geleneksel yorumu sorgulamaktadır. Daha genel olarak, onurlandırma yazıtlarında atletik zafer sayılarının toplanması uygulamasını yeniden gözden geçirerek, IK Sinope 105 ile karşılaştırılabilir tarihe sahip 207 yazıttan oluşan özel olarak derlenmiş bir dosyayı incelemekte ve uygulamanın nispeten nadir olduğu sonucuna varmaktadır. Son olarak, bu makale IK Sinope 105’teki rho-nu hakkındaki diğer olası yorumları da ele almaktadır; bunların arasında rho-nu’nun kronografik bir özellik olabileceği önerisi de bulunmaktadır. IK Sinope 105’teki rho-nu’nun yorumu açık kalmaya devam ederken, taşın yakından bir analizi ile bu çeşit yazıtların daha geniş bir bağlamsal değer- lendirmesinin birleşimi, iyi bilinen ve sıklıkla atıfta bulunulan bir yazıt hakkında bile söylenecek daha ne kadar çok şey olduğunu göstermektedir.

During the 1960 campaign of the Corinth Excavations, a Tang Dynasty coin was found in an ash and charcoal layer with deposits from the mid- to late 13th century ce and earlier. Considering similar coin finds from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, and the Chui Region, Kyrgyzstan, this article argues that the Corinth Tang coin is likely an Anxi Protectorate issue, though a Chui valley origin cannot be ruled out. This article discusses the origins, survival, and mobility of this minimal-value cash coin in a web of Eurasian connections, with particular focus on the connectivity of the Church of the East and the Jewish merchant network from the 8th to the 13th century ce.

2015年夏于劳迪凯亚（Laodikeia） 古城区中心出土了公元114/115年行省总督斯卡普拉政令铭刻，此政令为研究罗马元首制时期行省治理提供了新资料。在该政令中，总督制定了标准和惩罚措施，以确保水质及水利设施，并要求地方行政系统设立新职位，调整现有的水资源分配、保护和使用的职权和责任。市政自治是罗马元首制的一个主要机制。总督这种介入地方事务的行为，对地方政府而言是一次重大的干预。总督虽然有理论上不受限的权力，但总督任期长度、总督幕僚和附随人员规模、历任元首和总督的治理先例以及地方上掌有政治社会权力或影响力的人士和群体等动态因素，都会影响总督行使权力的方式。劳迪凯亚《政令》为今人提供了衡量罗马帝国中央与地方关系的尺度，揭示了包括中央与地方当局之间的权力平衡、权力动态和共识建设等方面的宝贵信息。 In the summer of 2015, an inscription dating to AD 114/115 was found during the excavation of the ancient city of L aodikeia. This paper discusses how the inscription, which was likely issued by the provincial governor Marcus (Osto rius?) Scapula, can be useful in the study on the provincial governance during the Roman Principate. The governor established standards and punitive measures to ensure water quality and hydraulic facilities, created new municipal of fices, and adjusted existing duties and responsibilities for the allocation, protection, and use of water resources. Municipal autonomy was one of the major mechanisms of the Roman Principate. The governor's intervention in local affairs was expected in local governance, but much depended upon local elites and institutions to materialise his intervention. Although the governor had unrestricted power theoretically, other factors, such as the length of the governor's term, the size of the governor's staff and entourage, the precedents set by former emperors and governors, and local individuals and groups with political and social power or influence, created dynamic pretexts that required careful navigation when exercising power. The Laodikeia edict offered an opportunity to assess how power balance, power dynamics, and consensus-building between the central and local authorities may have been like from the lens of the provincial governor.

This paper discusses the so-called Bakers’ Strike Edict from Ephesus  (Ephesos 231 = IK 12.215 p. 27) in light of recent studies on  the Roman imperial toolkit to build empire-wide communities. Clifford Ando and Myles Lavan argued that Roman emperors in the first two centuries CE were consciously blurring distinctions between Roman and non-Roman populations, so that there could be a shared sense of an empire-wide community among people in the provinces.  This paper argues that, in addition to Lavan’s observations, gubernatorial edicts also show concerns and measures that sought to communicate a sense of the communal at the local level. While the focus of discussion is on the edict responding to a bakers’ strike at Ephesus, several other examples from a corpus of gubernatorial edicts are also used in connection with this example. This paper hopes to contribute to Ando’s and Lavan’s arguments by pointing to a lower register of community building visible in gubernatorial edicts. The governors’ concerns for and efforts to creating communal cohesion and their need to balance parallel and at times competing “common goods” not only adds another nuance to the grander community building project at the imperial level, but demonstrates further complications on how praesidial governors – and in particular proconsuls – can and would react to difficult issues at the local level.

This paper considers the connectedness of the two ports-of-call of Amastris and Heraclea Pontica in the eparcheia of Pontus during the Roman principate. Stanford's ORBIS platform offers a heuristic model of connectedness. We find the two ports-of-call the most popular segments along the south for maritime traffic coming from eastern Pontus and the Bosporus.Where the two is most different concerns their connections with the interior. Heraclea Pontica connected Ancyra to the Pontic coast, while Amastris had none. ORBIS is understandably non- granular in the sense that it "restrict[s] coverage to the more important elements of the Roman communication system," but if this is the case, it means that Heraclea Pontica and Amastris were connected in other ways as well, and the Amastrian mountainous interior, which couldbe described as the "previously unconjoined, or at least the previously less well-connected" segment of Anatolia (Horden 2020: 204), could have also been connected with the wider ancient Mediterranean world. Low visibility of settlements beyond known the one known urbanized area in modern Amasra makes discussions of broader connectedness difficult, but at least from recent field survey results suggest that the number and vibrancy of settlements likely increased in the Roman period (Bes 2015: 288-289; Çam et al. 2019; Çam 2021). The question then is whether recent studies contribute to a new assessment of Amastrian connectedness, and how it compares with existing impressions of both Amastris and its peer poleis, with Heraclea Pontica serving as the primary example.Building upon Alexandru Avram's assumption that the aggregate of attestations of persons who have spent time in a city other than their homeland can serve as proxy for gauging their mobility (Avram 2013: 7-8), this paper uses the Prosopographia Ponti Euxini externa to test whether Amastrian connectedness reached currently unknown areas, particularly theinterior. Comparison between Amastrian data (n=136) and Heracleote specimens (n=1101)  may seem disproportionate, but this paper focuses on persons from the first to the third centuries CE and privileges locations instead of volumes so to visualize connectedness in the Roman world. The same concept is applied to persons of locales beyond the two subjects in question – foreigners who left records in Heracleote (n=5) and Amastrian territory (n=11) – and visualized together. In addition, though coins are a poor proxy as they may be transmitted in a variety of ways that do not reflect direct connections between Amastris and the cities that issued them, this paper considers coins from the Amasra Museum as published by Stanley Ireland and Soner Atesogullari (1996) to complement Amastris relatively poor prosopographical record and increase the potential to capture connections. The overall impression gleaned from this exercise is that Amastris could have played a comparable (though potentially less pronounced) role as that of Heraclea Pontica in terms of a hub-like node that connected interior land routes with maritime traffic, particularly for Hadrianopolis and Pompeiopolis (Corsten 2007; Ruscu 2017), but also potentially for centers such as Caesarea in Cappadocia.Bibliography:Avram, A. 2013. Prosopographia Ponti Euxini externa. Leuven.Bes, P. 2015. "The Cide-Şenpazar Region in the Roman Period," in Kinetic Landscapes. The Cide Archaeological Project: Surveying the Turkish Western Black Sea Region, Bleda Düring and Claudia Glatz, eds., Warsaw/Berlin, pp. 260-293.Çam, F. et al. 2019. "New Archaeological Expeditions in the Ancient City of Amastris,"Settlements and Necropoleis of the Black Sea and its Hinterland in Antiquity, Select Papers from the Third International Conference 'The Black Sea in Antiquity and Tekkeköy: An Ancient Settlement on the Southern Black Sea Coast', 27-29 October 2017, Tekkeköy, Samsun, Gocha Tsetskhladze and Sümer Atasoy, eds., Oxford, pp. 190-207.Çam, F. 2022. "Ancient Settlements in Bartin Province: 2017-2019 Research Results," in Bartın İli ve İlçeleri Yüzey Araştırması (Biya) İlk Tespitler ve Belgeler - Paphlagonia'dan Parthenios'a - I, Fatima Çam, ed., Istanbul, pp. 13-112.Corsten, T. 2007. "Prosoporaphische und Onomastische Notizen III," Gephyra 4, pp. 133-144. Horden, P. 2020. "Knitting Together the Unconjoined," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 145.2 (2020)197-218.Irland, S. and Soner Atesogul. 1996. "The Ancient Coins in the Amasra Museum," in Studies in Ancient Coinage from Turkey, Richard Ashton, ed., London, pp. 115-137.Ruscu, L. 2017. "Über Sex. Vibius Gallus aus Amastris," Journal of Historical Researches 28, pp. 52-68.