A New Astragalos Oracle Text from Kibyra: A Comparative Study with Southern Asia Minor Parallels

The astragalomancy practices, which are widely encountered in the geography of southern Asia Minor during the Roman Imperial Period (120-210 AD), particularly across the complex of Pisidia, Pamphylia, Southern Phrygia, Kabalia, and Lycia, are based on a divination tradition aimed at receiving divine messages through combinations of numerical values assigned to the different faces of a knucklebone (astragalus). The texts in question were compiled and subjected to a comprehensive analysis by J. Nollé in 2007. This article examines a new astragalos oracle monument with inscriptions on four sides, which was unearthed in 2024 within a chapel building on the 3rd Terrace of the Kibyra Agora. Focusing on Nollé’s corpus and recent finds, this study evaluates the aforementioned divination tradition specifically in the context of Kibyra from epigraphic, philological, and theological perspectives. Furthermore, the article analyses the praescriptum at the top of the inscription and discusses that the monument was erected along with a statue of Hermes and surrounding architectural elements by a benefactor who covered the expenses through his/her own means. In the final section of the study, a comparative apparatus criticus of the Kibyran copy with epigraphic copies from other cities is presented; grammatical errors stemming from stonemasons, corrupted lines, and metrical irregularities are identified, and the aspects of the Kibyran copy that diverge from the original text reconstructed by Nollé are analysed in detail.