IDEBESSOS
Lycia, Turkey.
Near Kozağaci,
900 m up in the mountain country 21 km N-NW of Kumluca and not easy to reach. The city is not mentioned
before the Imperial age, at which time it was a member
of a sympolity headed by Akalissos and belonging, as the
inscriptions show, to the Lycian League. As a junior
member of the sympolity Idebessos issued no coins in
its own name. In the Byzantine bishop lists the name appears in the corrupted forms Lebissos and Lemissos.
The extant ruins and inscriptions are all of the Roman
period. They include some remains of a city wall, a small
theater, poorly preserved, a bath building, a church, but
above all a great number of sarcophagi, many of them
very rich and handsome.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T.A.B. Spratt & E. Forbes,
Travels in
Lycia (1847) 168-69; E. Petersen & F. von Luschan,
Reisen in Lykien (1889) II 146-47;
TAM 11.3 (1940)
301-2
MI.
G. E. BEAN
