Tymion

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Coordinates: 38 ° 29 '  N , 29 ° 26'  E

Relief Map: Turkey
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Tymion​
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Turkey

Tymion was an ancient settlement in Phrygia , Asia Minor (in today's Uşak district in the Uşak province , Turkey ), near and under today's Turkish village of Şükraniye.

From the middle of the 2nd century AD until the middle of the 6th century, Tymion was an important place for the late antique Christian church of the Montanists : The Montanists, whose church spread over the entire Roman Empire, expected that the in the Book of Revelation (ch. 21), the heavenly Jerusalem prophesied would descend to earth at Tymion and the nearby city of Pepouza . Pepouza was the headquarters of montanism in the empire and seat of the montanist patriarch. One of the founders of Montanism, Montanus, appropriately named both places "Jerusalem". In late antiquity, both places drew crowds of pilgrims from various regions of the Roman Empire. Women played an emancipated role in Montanism: They could become priestesses and bishops. In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian, in association with Orthodox Christian forces, extinguished this church.

Since 2001, Peter Lampe from the University of Heidelberg has been leading annual archaeological campaigns in Phrygia . During these interdisciplinary campaigns, he and his team (including the church historian William Tabbernee from Tulsa, USA) discovered numerous previously unknown ancient settlements that were archaeologically documented. Two of these settlements are the most promising candidates for the identification of Pepouza and Tymion, the two holy places of ancient Montanism , based on a variety of indications . Research had searched in vain for these lost settlements since the 19th century.

The archaeological settlement at Şükraniye, which Peter Lampe identified as Tymion, was settled as early as the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. It flourished in Roman and then Byzantine times as a rural town in which mainly land tenants, so-called colonies , lived. The tenant farmers worked on an imperial domain, but were often harassed by passing city officials or imperial slaves and illegally forced to serve and pay taxes. In a petition to the emperor, the tenant farmers from Tymion and Simoe, a neighboring town, asked for help. Emperor Septimius Severus wrote back that his procurator would support the farmers on site. The imperial answer is received on an inscription.

literature

  • William Tabbernee / Peter Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion: The Discovery and Archaeological Exploration of a Lost Ancient City and an Imperial Estate (deGruyter: Berlin / New York, 2008) ISBN 978-3-11-019455-5 and ISBN 978-3- 11-020859-7
  • Peter Lampe, The montanist Tymion and Pepouza in the light of the new Tymion inscription, in: Zeitschrift für Antikes Christianentum 8 (2004) 498-512

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