Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ADALYA, cilt.19, ss.51-74, 2016 (AHCI)
The Milian Tumuli represent a course of premeditated, conscious actions of a society with a certain degree of experience and knowledge. This manifests itself in the selection of a site as well as in the labor and construction techniques. In this regard, the places selected and created for tumulus graves are situated within a landscape that was perceived, experienced, and contextualized by different peoples in different periods. These might reveal the cognitive relationships directly or indirectly established by the persons building these tombs with the historical geography in which they were living. In any case, with regard to the finds and/or wall paintings inside the tombs, we can assume that the people inhabiting the high plateaus of the Teke Peninsula were, in fact, too refined to be merely defined as provincial. They enjoyed a dynamic and multicultural social structure that allowed them to keep up with the developments occurring in other Anatolian centers of contemporary culture and art. These 'three-dimensional monuments' engraved in the geographical memory of Milyas can be regarded, like their counterparts in Phrygia and Lydia, as symbolic memorials intended to strengthen true or perceived kinship relations for territorial rights and political purposes. Thus they might have been the focus of a series of cultic activities related to the worship of family or ancestors.