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Aspects of "Colonization"

John Boardman

Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 322. (May, 2001), pp. 33-42.

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Aspects of ÿ colonization"^

Ashmolean Museum

Oxford, OX1 2PH, Great Britain ashm0053 @ermine.ox.ac.uk

This paper surveys b rie jy the rationale and progress of colonizing around the

shores of the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. Attention is paid to the evidence for the

generally good relations betwe en the Gre eks and Phoenicians and the presence of

each in the other's settlements. Their spheres of injuence mirror closely that of Cyp-

riots and Greeks in the west at the end of the Bronze Age, and some degree of low-

level continuity is probable, until demands for land and materials prompted more

decisive re-e xplora tion. It was in the second q uarter of the eighth centu ry that moves

involving serious settlement are most apparent: Euboeans east of A1 Mina in Syria

(fo r trade), Euboeans and Phoenicians west to Ischia and C arthage (fo r land, even-tually trade). The phenomena are near-contemporary.

T ere are various reasons why problems of

ancient colonization in the Mediterranean

have been attracting more scholarly atten-

tion in recent years. O ne is that it represents a reac-

tion against overspecialized studies in archaeology

which are too restricted in subject or time and

place. Another is the fashionable angst over Euro-pean colonization over the last 500 years, and the

more recent American, both physical and commer-

cial, and their effects. This has und erstandably gen-

erated sympathy for the colonized rather than the

colonizers, and, with a degree of political correct-

ness, encouraged studies that favor the colonized.

Then, with much the same motivation, there is the

feeling that the Greeks have been overvalued, mainly

because our evidence for the relevant periods of

antiquity is largely derived from what they wrote

about themselves and others.When, nearly forty years ago, I rapidly summa-

rized my book, The Greeks Overseas, as being a

story of Greeks learning in the East and South,

* Th is article is the revised version of a lecture delivered

at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in

Jerusalem in March 2000, w hen the author was the second

Trude Dothan Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

This series, which also includes lectures at Al-Quds and

Hebrew Universities, was sponsored by the Albright Insti-

tute and endowe d by the Dorot Foundation.

teaching in the West and North, it seemed a harm-

less generalization, and as such it remains valid. But

it can be made to seem slighting of the colonized,

or even unappreciative of Greek genius. Such ap-

proaches, of course, simply replace old prejudices

with modern ones. There is too a new preoccupa-

tion with subjects and constructs that may have hadno validity in antiquity. I think of the concept of the

polis, the Greek city-state, which in Greece itself

was as varied as it could be, and which at any rate

in antiquity was a commonplace wherever political

power w as localized, and not in the hands of a some-

times distant imperial center or superpower.' The

Phoenician cities were in their way prototypes for

the Greek polis. Much the same is true of studies of

what are called the "elite" and of "class" in antiq-

uity. There is no such thing as a classless society in

the animal kingdom, including homo sapiens, an dwe are overoptimistic in thinking we can always

distinguish the so-called elite by their burials or

jewelry. Many of them had more money spent on

ceremonial or memorials, which we know little or

nothing about, than on what went into their graves.

Power is not always determined by or indicated by

l ~ h e r ere useful essays on the subject in Murray and

Price 1990. On eastern city states, essays in Hansen 2000:

35-140, especially H. G. Niemeyer, "The Early Phoeni-

cian City States" (89-1 15).

mailto:@ermine.ox.ac.uk

mailto:@ermine.ox.ac.uk



34 JOHN BOARDMAN BASOR 322

possessions. And then there is "the colony," our sub-

ject, and agony over what turns out to be simply the

problems of defining a modern w ord, or translation,

rather than what happened in antiquity. The Greek

word apoikia simply means 'a home away from

home', while the word "colony," from Latin colonia,

carries too many other both Roman and modern

connotations, which should not be allowed to com-

plicate ou r study of antiquity on its own terms.2

In such circumstances the only thing to do is to

return to the primary evidence and help it to speak

for itself. We know a lot more about antiquity now

than we did fifty years ago, without necessarily un-

derstanding it any better. What I shall try to do in

this paper is to sketch the way I see what happened

in the Mediterranean from abou t 1000 to 600 B.c.,

especially apropos of traveling, settling, and trad-

ing overseas, away from hom e. I focus inevitably o n

Greeks and Phoenicians, looking both at what hap-

pened and at what the incentive might have been

for it to happen. It is a matter of geography, history,

suste nan ce, greed-that is, of the ideologies of an-

tiquity, and not the ideolog ies of today, which are far

more complicated and ~i n is te r . ~

Seafaring is an important element in the study.

Th e great land powe rs of antiquity-in Anato lia,Me sopotam ia, Persia, and Egypt-kept to them-

selves except when it was a matter of purely impe-

rialist expansion, which was managed by armies,

not trade, and by massive removals of populations,

ethnic cleansing in modem terms. Greece was not

enough of a unity geograp hically ever to be an im-

perial power. It was totally divided by its geography

of mo untains and valleys and islands, and by its rel-

ative poverty in natural resou rces. But, including its

islands, it had the longest coastline for land area of

any part of the Mediterranean world. The Greekswere bound to be seafarers. The Phoenician coastal

strip was in various ways more isolated geographi-

cally from its hinterland by the mountains of Leba-

2 ~ h e r eas been much published about colonia li sm in

scholarship in recent years. I have some remarks on the

matter, more personal (Boardman 2001).

3 ~ h eiterature for the subject is enormous and since

this paper is intended to be a summary, especially for ori-

entalists, I give references only to some specific topics.

Mu ch of the relevant bibliography c an be found in Board-man 1999a, and there have been important recent essays in

Tsetskhladze 1999 and in Tsetskhladze and De Angelis

1994, with full bibliographies.

non than were the coasts to north and south, and so

naturally looked to the sea both for safety and for

resources. Cyprus is more like a piece of Anatolia

and Syria than of Greece, and well provided for in

natural resources. It was also a mu ch-traveled route.

The incentive for Cypriots to travel overseas may

have been relatively slighter, or has been underesti-

mated, but they were inevitably much visited.

The M editerranean is easy to navigate: no tides to

speak of, a capacity for some stormy weather but

nothing like the open ocean, and hardly any real

need ever to be out of sight of land or out of reach

of fresh water. There is hardly any need at all for

open-sea voyages, and there are convenient currents

and winds for some desirable passages, as from

Greece to north Africa and up along the Levant

coast.4The Aegean G reek peoples had the longest record

of exploration in the Mediterranean. Even in the

Middle Bronze Age, the sailors of Minoan Crete

and of the Cyclades were exploring west, perhaps

attracted by the obsidian resources of the Lipari

Islands. At the end of the Bronze Age, which is

not my main subject here, Greeks were taking an

interest in Cypru s and parts of the Levant, and they

were truly colonizing the west coast of Anatolia inmovem ents that culminated, in the minds of h istori-

ans, in the so-called Ionian Migration. They were

also attracted to the west, to Sardinia, Sicily, and

south Italy, the areas closest to them. In the west

the incentive may have been material, for metals

or other resources, rather than land, although there

migh t have been som e population problems at hom e.

The real problem cam e at the end of the Bronze Age

with whatever broke up the Mycenaean world, and

then the incentive may have been security and per-

haps greed, and operated more in moves e ast. I mak eno comment here on problems of Greeks in Cyprus

and the Levant, beyond observing that the Cypriot

Classical Syllabary was invented by about 1 000 B.C.

to write Greek, and I am not one of those who thinks

that masses of Greek pottery in the east can mean

no direct G reek interest there. The recent fashion of

divorcing pottery from the people who made, used,

and carried it is self-defeating (Boardman 2001).

For the easterners: in the later Bronze Age there

is exploration to the west, notably to Sardinia, and

4 ~ o rmajor sources on Mediterranean sea travel, see

Casson (1959; 1994).



2001 ASPECTS OF "COLONIZATION" 35

Fig. 1. The principal movements for trade and settlement toman 1999a: 269; 1999c: 50).

presumably for the same reasons as the Greeks:

metal resources. They arrive there after the Greeks;

how ever, they have no foothold in the areas of southItaly closest to Greece, and they are Cypriots, not

Canaan ites. They h ave a lasting effect on metallurgy

in Sardinia, far longer than their presumed pres-

en ce there. Th e pattern can be shown in a simplified

manner (fig. I).'

We are able to observe all this because the

archaeological evidence is plentiful and clear. In the

early Iron Age, how ever, it dries up in the west, and

we have been used to speaking about a Dark Age in

which everyone kept to his own lands, blighted by

invaders or disease or climate changes or all three.This is a very unlikely picture. Sailors do not give

up easily. I have little doubt that the shores of the

Mediterranean were still being visited by Greeks

and easterners, without break. It was just that there

was no incentive to settle, and no incentive to de-

velop regular trade at a scale that required regular

trade establishments, either for the visitors or the

natives. It would have been much more a matter of

the Matthew Arnold scene of untying corded bales

on the beach watched warily by dark Iberians, and

5 ~ e esetskhladze andDe Angelis 1994, for essays and

bibliographies of movements west; Aubet 1993, for the

Phoenicians.

the west Mediterranean before ca. 1000 B.C. (after Board-

then moving on. Archaeological evidence for such

activity is likely to be slight but might account for

the occasional exotic, but not necessarily valuable,obje ct found far away-generally also und atable . It

might, for instance, account for some objects that

are fortunately distinctive enough to be recogniz-

able-the Atlantic spits-that are foun d in Sard inia

and Cyprus (Karageorghis and Lo Schiavo 1989).

There was no question of trade competition. These

are not national merchant navies, and the seafaring

community was, as it still often is, a strong unity.

Piracy was always a tempting profession but proba-

bly was exercised more often in raids on coastal

settlements than against other shipping. Languagewas no barrier in an tiquity: it is only the literate who

find difficulty with foreign languages. Among sail-

ors, down to recent times, there was a lingua franca

that ran from Arabia to Spain, used alike also by

Greeks, French, and Italians. It is unw ise to overes-

timate the intricacy of early trade, justly criticized

by the Sherratts (1993).

Having already settled parts of the west coast of

Anatolia ignored by the inland powers, who were

the Phrygian successors to the Hittites, Greeks be-

gan to explore the north coasts of their own sea, theAegean, and settled there in Chalkidike and the

shores of Macedonia and Thrace. The local peoples

were related and the passage easy, especially for




the Euboeans, along the coast north of the Euboean

straits. The incentive was no doubt resources and

land as well as curiosity (Snodgrass 1994).

In the ninth century the Greeks are also looking

east, to a partly Greek-speaking Cyprus, and be-

yond, especially to Syria (Boardman 1999b ). That

the evidence for this is pottery, which is almost ex-

clusively of Eubo ean manufacture, suggests that the

initiative was Greek, not eastern, since eastern sail-

ors would have been broader in their choice of what

to bring back home. For instance, there is nothing in

the east from Crete, yet we know that there were

clear eastern, including Cypriot, links with Crete

from the ninth century on. Most of the oriental in-

novations in Crete were from Syria rather than

Phoenicia, but some Phoenicians visited the port of

Kommos on the south coast and seem to have en-

couraged a short-lived local cult of eastern flavor

(Boardman 1999a: 274, with refs.). But to call it a

Phoenician port of trade is not supported by the

evidence. The Phoenicians were busy in Cyprus

too, notably at Kition and Amathus.

What were the incentives? For Greeks, certainly

resources-perhaps not so much raw material as the

exotica which were to have such an effect on their

physical culture in their Orientalizing Revolution,and which may have helped define status, whatever

that may m ean at this period. For Phoenicians, so far

as Crete is concerned, the attraction was probably

resources, although it is not clear what. But for both

Greeks and Phoenicians, curiosity led by a profit

motive no doubt played its part, and Crete was on

one of the routes farther west. The coasts were not

unfamiliar, but the growing prosperity of the Greek

Early Geometric world of the ninth century would

have made it much more interesting, and eastern

curiosity m ay have been in no small part engaged bythe potential offered by the more outward-looking

citizens of the Greek homeland. This is probably

why we suspect that some eastern craftsmen may

have moved west to practice their trades closer to

their potential market, and incidentally teach Greece

new c rafts, or to relearn old o nes. There is, however,

little hard e vidence for this.

In days before passports and port taxes (familiar

enough in the eastern empires), and before any real

concern about national identity, many sailors must

have traveled as much in hope as in positive expec-tation, but the Mediterranean had reached a state in

which the expectations were beginning again to look

promising. The Greeks would have learned enough

about the east since the Bronze Age to recognize it

as a source of material wealth and probably much

more. Their culture was more akin to that of the

Near East than many have been prepared to admit,

although this is more apparent in details than in

overall attitudes to religion or way of life. The finds

in Syria can only be explained by a settled Greek

presen ce from before the middle of the eighth cen-

tury (Boardman 1999b). Eastern texts have also

much about Ionian Greek involvement in the area,

usually not peaceful (Boardman 2000). Piratic land

raids are mentioned, and long remained a common

practice, but many Greeks came to trade, and to

stay, to assem ble trade g oods, and to provide a safe

harbor for their ships.

I turn now to what happened in the western

Mediterranean, having argued for uninterrupted

knowledge of western shores. Many have agreed

that the incentive for more determined exploi-

tation of the west was sometimes land hunger,

sometimes the search for material resources. Thus,

Greece had no material resources of note and would

have needed to turn both east and west; while it is

thought that Phoenicians had to satisfy the demand s

of their Assyrian masters in the later eighth and

seventh centuries. The desire to find new homes canhave more than one motive. Greece was relatively

poor, and the Phoenician cities restricted in their

use of the hinterland where dependent towns were

too vulnerable. They were also at the mercy of pass-

ing imperial armies from north and south. Pressure

from neighbors might have been a strong incentive

to look for a new home. For Phoenicians in the east

this would have been the threat of the superpowers.

This may yet earlier have persuaded some Syrians

to look west and may explain the Phoenician pres-

ence in Cyprus from the ninth century on. Cypruswould be thought relatively safe from non-seafarers

like Assyrians, although this did not prove to be

the case indefinitely. If movement farther west by

Phoenicians was provoked by the needs of trade,

whether for themselves or Assyrians, it certainly

gave the oppo rtunity also to observe other possibili-

ties of life.

Th e Greeks of the eighth century were threatened

by no superpowers, only by each other, and this

perhaps was enough for an ambitious and growing

population to look farther afield than the territoryof their perhaps equally expansive but belligerent

neighbo rs. Th e Greek characteristic immortalized in

the saying "When Greek meets Greek, then comes



3700 1 ASPECTS OF "COLONIZATION"

Fig. 2. The principal movements for trade and settlement to the west Mediterranean ca. 1000-700 B.C. (after Boardman1999a: 269; 1999c: 50).

the tug of war" was a major factor in the course

of Greek history and no doubt a stimulus, as wellas a reflection on ethnic character determined by

geography, a Toynbeean exam ple of challenge and

response.

Whatever the reasons, in the eighth century both

Greeks and Phoenicians were taking their explora-

tion to the west more seriously. They were in touch

with each other, largely through Euboean involve-

ment east, which was more with Syria than Phoeni-

cia, and in Cy prus, and from the fact that routes west

went through Greek waters. More important than

whatever effects there might have been on the cul-tural life of the homelands through intercourse with

the foreigner were the relationships of the seafar-

ing community, which may have been but was not

necessarily the same as the landowning com munity.

It was in the ports and watering places of the Medi-

terranean that Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians met,

and it was on this circuit that a Greek realized and

learned the value of an alphabet-but not in Cy prus

where Greek was already written, for local con-

sumption, in the syllabary devised for it centuries

before. Cyprus was, at any rate, a mini-oriental con-sortium of polyglot kingd oms, yet the earliest appar-

ent merchant marks in Cypriot script appear on

Greek vases of around 700 B.C. from as far afield

as north Greece and south Italy-both on Eubo ean

rather than Phoenician routes (Vokotopoulou andChristidis 1995).

Greeks and Phoenicians may not have moved

west hand in hand, but the cam araderie of seafarers

has always overridden national differences, even in

times of war. The Greeks took interest first in south

Italy, because this was the nearest to them and well

familiar since the Late Bronze Age. The principle

of establishing yourself as close as possible to the

folk you wish to deal with led them first up as far

as the island of Ischia, on the doorstep of Etruria,

for any sort of settlement. They soon settled otherplaces en route along the coast and were in eastern

Sicily too. These were waters the Phoenicians may

well have sailed but in which they were never the

principal visitors. If the Bronze Age associations,

which were mainly with Cypriots, still had any

force, they turned inevitably to beyond the Greek

sphere of influence, to Sardinia on the back doo rstep

to Etruria, to west Sicily, and far beyond, to Spain

and north Africa.

The pattern of movement west in the Iron Age

(fig. 2) very closely mirrors that of the Late BronzeAge (fig. I), with slight changes in the personnel

involved, both Greek and eastern, starting now, for

Greeks, mainly from Euboea and Corinth, and for




,\\y Phoenician

Fig. 3. Distribution of goods of Syrian and Phoenician origin ca. 900-750 B.C. (after Boardman 1999a: 275; 1999c: 50).

eas te rn ers , from P hoenicia r ath er than ~ y ~ r u s . ~his

is another reason for su specting that there was never

any profound break in relations; it also makes non-

sense of any suggestion that either group needed

the guidance of the other to find their way. There

was no Iron Curtain between them, no signs of ani-

mosity, and the symbiosis of the two peoples is more

remarkable than their competition. There were east-

erners on Greek Ischia-Syrian and Phoenician, we

cannot easily tell which because our evidence, the

pottery, was common to both areas in the east-but

the Euboean con nection was at that time exclusively

with Syria, and most of the eastern inscriptions on

Ischia are Aramaic. This guaranteed an influx of

eastern goods, mainly brought by Greeks, but east-

ern pottery shapes began to be made locally too, and

even adapted for Greek use by being decorated in

the Greek Geometric style (Boardman in press).

In Sardinia the record is reversed. The pottery is

eastern, although there are Greek pieces as early as

any of Ischia and I imagine not carried there nec-

essarily by other than Greeks. But this was not an

area they wished to settle, and Ischia served them

well enough for trade with the Italian mainland . The

Greek-Syrian connection is rather confusing, but it

is very real. It can be demonstrated with a simple

map (fig. 3), which charts Syrian and Phoenician

6~ discuss this with m ore references (1999c),where the

three figures given here are also pub lished.

objects and influences: the Syrian are exactly co-

terminous w ith the Greek, the Phoenician go far be-

yond and e xclude the Syrian. Looking at it in terms

of local neighbors in the west, it means that in Etru-

ria the Phoenicians w ere more obv ious in the north,

the metalbearing areas, than in the south, although

there was soon a good mix of both eastern and

Greek. In cul tura l te rms, i t came to mean tha t

Etruscan luxury arts became dominantly Phoenician

in aspect, while the humbler but eventually more

pervasive arts, as of pottery, were more Greek , and

the Greek eventually prevailed even in major arts, as

of tomb painting.

We need to reflect on our evidence. We know

only about the settlements that succeeded and sur-

vived. How many, Greek or Ph oenician, did not take

root, but disappeared in a few years through dis-ease, incompetence, the hostility of natives, or the

decision to move on and find a better place? Our

maps of colonization almost certainly conceal a very

great deal more activity than the proved colonies

and settlements demonstrate. History and archaeol-

ogy are hard on failures.

In the west, the Greeks soon spread over the

whole island of Ischia and established a self-sup-

porting economy like any Greek polis (Coldstream

1994).This seem s true also of other early colonies

placed in the south and in Sicily. By contrast, in

Spain, the first Phoenician presence is in trading

stations near but not in native towns, and we have

to assume that they lived more through trading with



ASPECTS OF "COLONIZATION"

the local population than by developing agriculture

in the area. The settlements were at any rate very

small in early years, and they must have kept in reg-

ular touch with home. Carthage was another matter

(Niemeyer in Hansen 2000).I have remarked on the probab le presence of east-

erners, whether Syrian or Phoenician, in the early

Greek colon ies; the evidence is clearest in Ischia, far

less in Sicily. What of Greeks in the Phoenician

area? In the Phoenician stations on the Spanish

coast, Greek pottery is found beside the Phoenician

but, more significantly, there is a long record also

of the use of imitations of Greek cups (Boardman

in press). These may have been made locally or in

some other Phoenician town, but certainly not a

Greek one. Easterners had no use for Greek-style

drinking cups; they used more open bowls, or small

hem ispherical cups like the Syrians, without handles

and without feet (Boardman 2001). So there could

hardly have been a Phoenician demand for them,

and we have to assume that they were made for

Greek use locally, just as we have assumed that cop-

ies of eastern shapes in Ischia were for an eastern

element in the population. I see nothing strange

about this, and it can only be denied by those who

also deny the evidence of pottery for the identity ofpeople using it. But on that score they would also

have to deny the evidence we have that the Phoeni-

cian stations are Phoenician at all!

These copies of Greek cups are to be found in

other Phoenician sites in the west, including Carth-

age. In Carthage, too, there is a significant amount

of Greek pottery am ong the very earliest finds, much

or all of which cam e not from Greece but from

Ischia, which suggests very close relations between

the earliest foundations in the west by both peoples

(Docter and Niemeyer 1994). It was also long agoobserved, but not much repeated, that there are

Greek place names in the Carthage area: an island

called Euboea, the Naxian islands (Naxos was the

name of a Euboean colony in Sicily), and Pithe-

koussai, which was also the name of the Euboean

town on Isch ia (Treidler 195 9). These are names that

could hardly have been applied in any period later

than that of the earliest exploration, since thereafter

they remained determinedly out of the Greek sphere

of influence; so they seem to suggest early explora-

tion here too, and by Euboean sailors. We shouldnotice, however, that although Carthage grew rap-

idly, there is no eviden ce for development of control

of the hinterland as there is in Greek areas of Sicily

and south Italy; in other words, links with home

remained all-important at least until the mid-sixth

century. We should remember, too, that the routes

from Phoenicia passed through Greek waters rather

than along the north African coast, where currentsand winds were not favorable for west-east move-

ment (except from Cyrenaica), so there was here

another opportunity en route for sharing between

the peoples.

There seems nothing strange or improbable in

all this ev idence for collaboration and possibly ev en

joint e nterprise by Greeks and Ph oenicians. National

differences meant little enough at this level of oper-

ations in antiquity, and it is clear that with time they

cam e to respect each other's sphere of influence. The

idea of antagonism between them is the creation of

modern scholarship, for which even Homer is re-

cruited. Here the technique is to look up all refer-

ences to Phoenicians, usually Sidonians, in Homer,

and to find that they all treat them in a rather dis-

dainful manner-all but one, that is, where a Phoe-

nician's honesty is praised, but this is glossed over.

More to the point is to realize that Homer reflects a

landowning nobility to whom all merchants are sus-

pect and inferior, and to see that throughout Homer

all merchants, Greek or Phoenician, are treated inthis manner. The usual question to any visitor was,

Are you a serious merchant or just a pirate? I sus-

pect that more Greeks of our period admired the

easterners, while they also exploited each other.7

The word "colony," like polis, has acquired an

almost mystic meaning in m odern scholarship, effec-

tively categorizing what was in fact a very diverse

phenomenon and excluding other enterprises in

which peoples traveled and settled far from home.

It is debatable, for instance, whether any of the

Phoenician settlements in the west qualify as "colo-nies," rather than trading posts, until a generation or

so had passed. Some might also dispute whether

Ischia is a "colony," although there is more evidence

there for Greek concern with settling down and

farming over the whole, quite large island.

Whatever sailing activity there may have been

east or west, it is clear that only with the eighth cen-

tury did anythin g very serious in the way of settle-

men t overs eas begin. It is interesting to reflect on the

' see Winter (1995)for the "hard" view on Phoenicians

in Homer. Maier (1985) discusses a comparable misread-

ing of fifth-century relations between the peoples.




probability that Ischia and Carthage were about as

old as each other; and that it was at just this time,

after earlier exploration, that Greeks made them-

selves a port of trade, or the like, at A1 Mina in

Syria, accompanied, it seems, by a Cypriote pres-ence in Syria. Movement to new settlement was not

all east to west. These are near-contemporary phe-

nomena which illuminate and explain the future

history of much of the Mediterranean world.

In Cypru s of the seventh century, the ethnic mix

went on as before. An orientalist has detected as

many as eight Greek names among ten kings in

the island named by Esarhaddon (Lipinski 1991).

In Syria A1 Mina had gone on busily in contact

with Greeks, perhaps still in occupation, through

the seventh century, the Assyrian period; but nowthe Greeks were East Greek Ionians, not Euboeans.

It was the same people who, later in the century,

founded Naukratis in Egypt. We know much more

about Naukratis, and although it is hardly a model

that we can use for understanding early settlements

in the west Mediterranean, it is suggestive. Naukratis

is a merchants' town, set up perhaps by one state,

Miletus, but soon shared with several others on terms

negotiated with the ruling power in Egypt. The op-

portunity seem s to have arisen from Greek mercena ry

involvement in Egypt, and they continued to be

involved in Egyptian political and military affairs

in the sixth century,8 just a s G reek pira tes had been

involved on the coasts of Syria and Cilicia, and

even probably down at Ashdod, years b e f ~ r e . ~

With the sixth century the colonization story be-

comes a matter of expansion and consolidation in

the west, while expansion to the north had brought

about Greek settlement on the shores of the Black

Sea. This too must have been in part a search for

new resources, which explains the phenomenon of

the earliest settlements being the most remote and

closest to the areas of interest, in the extreme north;

but also for land, since prime movers in this area

were again Ionian, under pressure in these years first

from Lydians and later from Persians. Again, the

or Naukratis. see Boardman (1999a: 118-33, 280):

Mijller 2001.

he "Yamani" who stirred up revolt at Ashdod in 712

B.C. has been dismissed as not Greek because of the form

of the name, but he is also called Yadna, which recallsC v ~ r u s Yadnana). and it seem s to me verv Drobable that

d L ~ ,. . .he was a Cypriot Greek, and that other Yamanis of thisA

period in the east may not be unrelated to Greek activity

in the area (Saporetti 19 90; Rollinger 19 97).

motives for colonizing can be seen to be even more

complex than just land or trade (Tsetskhladze 1999).

This paper has done no more than summarize

the progress of new settlement around the Mediter-

ranean and only dealt with problems en route. Butthe problems have been real enough, and they con-

cern motivation as well as the relationship between

the colonizing peoples. There is another subject,

though, that has excited much comment in recent

years, allud ed to at the start of this paper, and this is

the effect of colonizing on the colonized . W hat, in

fact, were the cultural results of all this activity?

The Greeks generally moved into, or close be-

side, a local settlement whose population they pro-

ceeded to exploit. The Phoenicians generally kept

their distance. I think that this was not becausethe Phoenicians were basically nicer people, but be-

cause they were primarily interested in trade, which

is to mutual benefit, while the Greeks soon showed

a positive interest in land, and that generally meant

that it had to be taken away from others and fought

for. The "acculturation"-awful word-took many

different form s, all of it affecting the colon ized, not

the colonizers, who behaved almost as though they

had never left home in terms of their way of life, art,

religion, language, and beliefs. In south Italy the

local peoples accepted Greeks and Greek goods,

even to som e degree Greek art, and if there are

occasional examples of Greeks making objects of

native forms, especially pottery, the motivation was

purely commercial. The Etruscans were wealthier

and could afford to pick and choose, but their way of

life was transformed, at least in terms of arts and

crafts, in terms of what I would call the visual expe-

rience of the average Etruscan. Their luxury arts

developed in a thoroughly oriental manner, their

common arts in a Greek manner; and, largely be-

cause there were Greeks on the mainland south of

Etruria and Latium, in Campania, the Greek eventu-

ally won, although politically and commercially the

Etruscans were in time to prove to be more at home

with the Phoenicians and Carthage.

Much the same was to prove true in the south

of France, where some Etruscans were busy beside

the ~ ~ k ~ .sp ain the phoenicians met a strange

and sophisticated Iberian culture, which they influ-

enced in various ways, although the Phoenician ele-

ments are define than th e Greekand Phoenician are in Etruria. The Greeks, too, in-

e v it a b l~ntruded and seem also to have some degree

of presence, e ven if no regular se ttlem ent in south

Spain, but already the Phoenician arts of the west



2001 ASPECTS OF "COLON IZATION 4 1

were themselves beginning to feel the influence of

the Greeks, which we see happening m ost clearly in

Carthage . But in north A frica, in Ca rthage and in the

later Greek colonies of Cyrenaica, the newcomers

had it mainly their own way. In the Black Sea theculture and arts of Scythians, settled or nomad, were

too foreign for Greek art and culture to make any

serious impression on them, and the Greeks satis-

fied themselves with making mainly Scythian luxury

objects decorated in a purely Greek style.10

1°IJor the effects of Greek art in colonizing areas, in-

cluding Spain, see Boardman 1994.

In other respects, in terms of the effects of "ac-

culturation" as the result of colonizing, the last word

may be left with a Greek, born on the Black Sea

coast, Strabo (301): "[Olur way of life has spread its

change for the worse to almost all peoples, introduc-ing amongst them luxury and sensual pleasures and,

to satisfy these vices, base artifices that lead to in-

numerable acts of greed. So then, much w ickedness

of this sort has fallen on barbarian peoples also, on

the nomads as well as the rest." T his is a problem of

colonization that neither antiquity nor the modern

world has managed to resolve.

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