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The epigraphic habit, or the use of inscriptions in public and private contexts, was a fundamental feature of participation in the Graeco-Roman cultural sphere. Judged by this parameter, northern Asia Minor, apart from the coastal cities, was by no means Hellenized under the Pontic kings, as hardly any inscriptions exist from the Hellenistic period. The epigraphic habit was closely associated with the Greek language, and the use of Greek seems very restricted and a rather late phenomenon outside the old Greek colonies – with the exception of coin legends. Several literary sources remark on the linguistic talents of Mithridates VI and relate that the king spoke all the tongues and dialects of his domain: twenty languages or more.²⁶

Since a surprisingly large proportion of inscriptions in northern Asia Minor can be dated accurately, we can determine with some degree of certainty when the epigraphic habit was introduced. Naturally, caution should be taken when drawing conclusions from epigraphic sources. The preserved epigraphic monuments are by no means an unbiased selection of what once existed. Most importantly, we essentially only possess inscriptions written on stone. In northern Asia Minor, hard limestone was in scarce supply; on the other hand, metal was abundant, and inscriptions on bronze may have been more common than we can perceive today. Painted inscriptions on wooden panels may also have existed in an area rich in wood and Sinopean red dye.²⁷ This leads to the question of survival rates. In Herakleia Pontike, for example, only about seventy or eighty inscriptions have been preserved, and the earliest may well be a base for a statue of Claudius. By this time the city had been among the major cities in the Black Sea for nearly 600 years, and no one would hesitate to place it within the Greek cultural sphere. The destruction of the city by Cotta in 70 BC, the extensive reuse of inscribed stones as building material, and the destructive forces of modern town planning are the standard explanations given for the small number of preserved inscriptions.²⁸ At the sites chosen for investigation here, however, the inscriptions do not seem to have been subject to such radical selection during the Roman period and probably represent a fairly random sample.

Table 1. Chronological distribution of the dated inscriptions from Amaseia (based on French 1996).

Decade	Number of inscriptions
AD 50-59	0
60-69	0
70-79	0
80-89	0
90-99	3
100-109	1
110-119	0
120-129	3
130-139	5
140-149	6
150-159	5
160-169	13
170-179	13
180-189	3
190-199	9
200-209	6
210-219	4
220-229	0
230-239	3
240-249	2
250-259	4
260-269	0
270-279	0
280-289	0
–
370-379	1
Total	81