Cilicia as a multicultural region. Indigenous and foreign people in Roman and Byzantine inscriptions

Ancient Cilicia – both the Eastern fertile plain (Cilicia Piana or Pedias) and the Western rough area (Cilicia Aspera or Tracheia) – was a key crossroads of people and cultures, in a crucial point between East and West. Due to its strategic geographic position connecting Anatolia and Syria and to the presence the Mediterranean coast to the South, the region was characterised by manifold processes of mobility, migrations and interchanges between people and cultures throughout its history. This paper is focused on the analysis of the various ethnic groups attested in Cilicia through epigraphic sources, from the Roman to the Early Byzantine period. As far as we can argue, mainly (but not only) from funerary texts, coastal cities were, logically, the main centres were the presence of foreign people coming from different areas of the Mediterranean is attested, whereas the inland centres were more conservative and the persistence of local onomastics of Luwian derivation until the Roman period is a clear indicator of indigenous origins. The situation, anyhow, is not always clear and reveals to be even more complicated if we compare the Eastern and Western sectors of the province.