(Κιλικία)
Cilicia was a country in the S.E. of Asia Minor, bounded on the west by Pamphylia, on the north by Lycaonia and Cappadocia, and on the east by the Amanus range. It was drained by four rivers, the Calycadnus, the Cydnus, the Serus, and the Pyramus, which descend from Taurus to the Cyprian Sea. It fell into two well-marked divisions. Cilicia Tracheia (Aspera), a rugged mountainous region with a narrow seaboard, was the immemorial haunt of brigands and pirates, whose subjugation was a difficult task for the Roman Republic and Empire; Cilicia Pedeia (Campestris), the wide and fertile plain lying between the Taurus and Amanus chains and the sea, was civilized and Hellenized. Its rulers in the Hellenistic period were partly the Egyptians, whose royal house gave its name to different townships, and partly the Seleucids, after whom the most considerable town of West Cilicia was named Seleucia on the Calycadnus.
In the NT ‘Cilicia’ invariably means Cilicia Pedeia. Though this country formed a part of the peninsula of Asia Minor, its political, social, and religious affinities were rather with Syria than with the lands to the north and west. The reason was geographical. It was comparatively easy to cross the Amanus range, either by the Syrian Gates (Beilan Pass) to Antioch and Syria, or by the Amanan Gates (Baghche Pass) to North Syria and the Euphrates. Hence it was natural that, at the redistribution of the provinces by Augustus in 27 b.c., Cilicia Pedeia, which had been Roman territory since 103 b.c., should be merged in the great Imperial province of Syria-Cilicia-Phœnice. It was equally natural that St. Paul, who boasted of being ‘a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia’ (Acts 21:39; Acts 22:3), should regard ‘the regions of Syria and Cilicia’ as forming a unity (Galatians 1:21). The writer of Acts does the same (Acts 15:23; Acts 15:41), and the author of 1 Peter, who enumerates in his superscription the Roman provinces of Asia Minor, omits Cilicia, which lay beyond the barrier of Taurus and belonged to a different order of things.
The presence of Jews in Cilicia probably dated from the time of the early Seleucids, who settled many Jewish families in their Hellenistic cities, giving them equal rights with Macedonians and Greeks. St. Paul enjoyed the citizenship of Tarsus not as an individual, but as a unit in a Jewish colony which had been incorporated in the State. Jews of Cilicia are mentioned by Philo in his Leg. ad Gaium (§ 36). Among the Jews of Jerusalem who rose against Stephen there was a synagogue of Cilicians (Acts 6:9). After his conversion St. Paul spent seven years in his Cilician homeland, engaged in a preparatory missionary work of which there are no recorded details. Probably he was founding the churches to which allusion is made in Acts 15:23; Acts 15:41. He began his second missionary journey by passing through Cilicia to confirm these churches, after which he must have crossed the Cilician Gates to Lycaonia (Acts 16:1); and probably he took the same road on his third journey (Acts 18:23). Syria and Cilicia were the first centres of Gentile Christianity, from which the light radiated over Asia Minor into Europe.
Literature.-C. Ritter, Kleinasien, 1859, ii. 56ff.; J. R. S. Sterrett, The Wolfe Expedition to Asia Minor, 1888; W. M. Ramsay, Hist. Geog. of Asia Minor, 1890, p. 361ff.; Smith’s Dict. of Gr. and Rom. Geog., i. [1856] 617; see also article ‘Cilicia’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) and Literature there cited.
James Strahan.