Kibyra

Kibyra or Cibyra (Κιβύρα), also referred to as Cibyra Magna, is an ancient city and an archaeological site in south-west Turkey, near the modern town of Gölhisar, in Burdur Province. It was the chief city of a district Cibyratis. Strabo says, that the Cibyratae are called descendants of the Lydians, of those who once occupied the Cabalis, but afterwards of the neighbouring Pisidians, who settled here, and removed the town to another position in a strong place, which was about 100 stadia in circuit.

It grew powerful under a good constitution, and the villages extended from Pisidia and the adjoining Milyas into Lycia, and to the Peraea of the Rhodians. When the three neighbouring towns of Bubon, Balubura, and Oenoanda were joined to it, this confederation was called Tetrapolis. Each town had one vote, but Cibyra had two votes; for Cibyra alone could muster 30,000 infantry and 2000 cavalry. It was always under tyrants, but the government was moderate. The tetrapolis formed under the leadership of Kibyra during the 2nd century BC, was dissolved by the Roman general Lucius Licinius Murena in 83 BC, at the time of the First Mithridatic War. Balbura and Bubon were assigned to the Lycians. The conventus of Cibyra, however, still remained one of the greatest in Asia. The Cibyratae had four languages, the Pisidian, the Hellenic, the language of the Solymi and of the Lydians. It is also the place where, according to Strabo, the Lydian language was still being spoken among a multicultural population around his time (1st century BC), thus making Kibyra the last locality where the culture, by then extinct in Lydia proper according to extant accounts, is attested. It was a peculiarity of Cibyra that the iron was easily cut with a chisel, or other sharp tool.