Review of Coşkun, A. (ed.): Galatian Victories and Other Studies into the Agency and Identity of the Galatians in the Hellenistic and Early Roman Period

This eagerly awaited volume, edited by one of the greatest authorities on ancient Anatolian Galatae, brings together a well-thought-through and thematically varied selection of chapters originally stemming from workshops and collaborations taking place in the 2010s.It is difficult to envision anybody better qualified to edit such a collection than Altay Cokun, who in addition to his meticulous and tremendously valuable Introduction contributes to the book two chapters on different aspects of Galatian studies.This just underlines the breadth and quality of Cokun's own research record: complementing his narrower specialisation in Galatian matters is his position as one of the leading scholars on Seleucid history.The need to cast new light into the study of Galatia has been fairly pressing for some time.The studies of Karl Strobel in the 1990s and the early 2000s, as well as Stephen Mitchell's numerous contributions over much of the same time period, laid a very solid basis for the better understanding of this still rather understudied Anatolian region and its history. 1 Mitchell's Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (1993; see pp. 8-9 in Cokun's introductory chapter in this volume) remained for many decades the definitive work on Anatolian history from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine period.Generally, Mitchell -who sadly died in January 2024 -sought to foreground local agency in the processes of Romanization and cultural integration in the Galatian area; in so doing, he paid close attention to local inscriptions and settlements, though he may have occasionally overstated the 'Celtic' character of some local artefact assemblages and material evidence.Strobel's work, on the other hand, leaned rather heavily in terms of the identity and ethnicity of the Galatians on the 'ethnogenesis' framework (especially in Strobel 1991, 1994 and 1996), preferring to see an overarching ethnic identity coalescing around a combined nucleus of Celtic elements and local Anatolian traditions from rather early on in the Hellenistic era.Strobel also very valuably drew the attention to the preconceived, rhetorical and stereotype-laden way in which the ancient sources wrote about Galatians, and the influence that the broader Hellenistic polities had on the Galatian groups.To a degree, neither of these great scholars put much emphasis on the agency of the Galatians themselves.