ICONIUM ī kō’ nĭ əm (̓Ικόνιον, G2658). A city of Asia Minor, modern Konya. According to Xenophon (Anab. 1. 2. 19), Iconium was the last city of Phrygia for one traveling E. In Gr. and Rom. times, it was considered the chief town of Lycaonia. It is mentioned three times in Acts (chs. 13, 14, 16) and in 2 Timothy 3:11. Paul and Barnabas reached Iconium from Pisidian Antioch, a journey of perhaps eighty m. if they followed the route that took them up the Sultan Range, and across fifty or sixty m. of the central plateau by the great eastern road from Ephesus to the Euphrates. The Galatian plateau is high and healthy, more like the great Asian steppes than any other portion of the peninsula. The city’s beginnings are lost in history. Iconium is prob. a Phrygian word, but a myth was invented to give it a Gr. meaning. King Nannakos, the legend said, the Phrygian Methusaleh, had a prophecy that said the Deluge would come when he passed away. The king called his people to repentance and supplication, and certain it is, from the evidence of Herondas, the 3rd cent. b.c. writer of comic pieces, that “the weeping of Nannakos’ day” was a proverb. It was of no avail. The flood came as predicted, and with the subsiding of the waters Prometheus and Athena remade man by means of images of mud into which life was breathed. The Gr. for “image” is “eikon,” or “ikon” in its modern form; hence Iconium. The story is a typical “aetiological myth,” a story that is invented to account for an existing fact. Another similar legend was attached to the name of Perseus and an “image” of the Gorgon presented to him. The flood story is not a sign of Jewish influence. The district was subject to flooding. Turning from myth to history, it may be said with certainty that an ancient Phrygian town was transformed into a Gr. city by colonization. Rome chose Lystra and Antioch as its bastions, but Iconium, in spite of becoming a Rom. colony under Hadrian, remained predominantly Gr. in tone and somewhat resistant toward Rom. influence. Claudius, for example, gave some attention to the organization of the rich and fertile area, and granted Iconium the honor of incorporating his name. Claudiconium, however, like Londonderry, similarly prefixed, rapidly shed its honorific syllables. The compounded name was a curiosity of coinage, a sphere in which such formalities of nomenclature most commonly find place and perpetuation. As a city of the Galatian “heartland” of Asia Minor, Iconium shared the fortunes of the area. In the 3rd cent. b.c. it fell within the domains of the Seleucid monarchs of Antioch of Syria, and in the middle of the 2nd cent. was prob. dominated by the intruding Gauls who were later confined to the northern uplands of the region. After approximately a generation under such subservience, Iconium was taken over by the Pontic kings, to be set free as a political gesture during the Mithridatic wars with Rome. In 39 b.c., Mark Antony handed the city to Polemon, king of Cilica Tracheia, and three years later to Amyntas, who became king of Galatia at that time of flux and change. Upon Amyntas’ death, with the organizing of the province of Galatia, Iconium became an independent unit once more within the provincial structure. As a Gr. city, Iconium was governed by its assembly of citizens. Greek was the language of its public documents. Even where the Rom. name Claudiconium is used on coinage it appears in its Gr. form “Klaudiconium.” It was a beautiful place, a natural center of human activity as its survival into modern times indicates. Two hundred square miles of fertile plain surrounded it, cool, well-watered, and tree-filled. Ramsay calls Iconium the Damascus of Asia Minor, blessed like the great Syrian city with wat er, genial climate, and the prosperity that goes with both.

The first impact of Christianity on Iconium provoked bitter opposition. The 2nd cent. story of Paul and Thekla, fiction though it is, contains as its core of truth the tribulations of the apostle and his first converts. Writing from Rome to Timothy, during his last imprisonment twenty years later, Paul still remembered his ordeal in the Phrygian city. Paul’s foundation, however, stood firm, and the church in Iconium, whose continued presence and activity is signified by numerous Christian inscrs. from the 3rd cent. onward, appears to have triumphed over the attempts of its Judaistic wing to corrupt the simplicity of its doctrine, the assault that occasioned the epistle to the Galatians.