A Carian shrine in a Hellenizing world. The sanctuary of Sinuri, near Mylasa

Sanctuaries were typically the locus where social identities at different levels were negotiated by the communities to which they were common. The sanctuary of the local Karian god Sinuri, some 15 km southeast of Mylasa, is an excellent example of this. The sanctuary dates from the Archaic period and by the late Classical period was the center of the local Pelekos syngeneia (kinship group); syngeneiai were frequent in Karia and were the base unit of communal identity. This particular community must have had strong ties to the Hekatomnids, the satraps of Karia, since this was one of only three sanctuaries in Karia which was monumentalized by the dynasty. At some time between the Late Classical and Hellenistic periods an unusual transition took place at this sanctuary when the Pelekos syngeneia was supplanted by the Pormounou syngeneia, which was clearly subordinate to the polis of Mylasa. The sanctuary of Sinuri was discovered in the 1930’s by Louis Robert and was excavated shortly thereafter. The nearly 80-plus inscriptions that came to light during the excavations show how strongly this local community had embraced the ‘epigraphic habit’, lacing the walls of their sanctuary with their decrees and especially with the lease contracts of land, scattered across the territory of Mylasa, which they acquired for the god. They also made architectural modifications of their own to the shrine, which had already been transformed by the Hekatomnids. Although the sanctuary was later destroyed by the construction of a basilica, inscriptions and the traces that are left nonetheless allow for a provisional reconstruction of what the sanctuary meant to the Pormounou, both economically and socially as they used it to come to terms with their own communal identity under the aegis of the Hellenistic polis