Anatolian Tribes in 218 B.C.

Anatolian Tribes — Spring 218 BC · The Free Peoples of the Pontic Alps.

The free mountain peoples of the Pontic Alps — the broken, forested highland that walls off the south-east corner of the Black Sea. Here, in the crags and woods above the sea between Pontus, Lesser Armenia, Colchis and the Greek coastal colony of Trapezus, dwell a scatter of warlike tribes who bow to no king: the Chalybes or Chaldoi, the iron-workers reputed the first smiths of steel; the Mossynoeci, the "dwellers in wooden towers"; the Tibareni and the Macrones, who mark their bodies; the Drilai and their kindred. Never mastered by Persian, Macedonian or Pontic king, they keep their highland freedom, their strange customs and their raiding ways in the forests and ravines, living by herding, hunting, the forge and the spear, and trading the iron of their hills down to the Greek ports of the shore.

While Hellenistic kings carve the lowlands of Anatolia into realms and provinces, the ridge of the Pontic Alps remains a world apart — a no-king country of forest, gorge and iron. The tribes who hold it have outlasted every conqueror: the Persian satraps never truly held them, Alexander’s successors left them be, and the Mithridatid kings of Pontus press at the river-valleys below without ever swallowing the heights. Wedged between Pontus to the west, Lesser Armenia inland, Colchis to the east and the Greek colonies strung along the shore, the highlanders keep their own laws and their own gods. Their wealth is the iron of the Paryadres and the ore-veins of the Chalybes; their strength is a stubborn freedom and the difficulty of the ground. They raid the coast roads, exact toll of passers-through, and fade back into woods no army cares to follow.