An Approach to the Historical Geography of the Southern Black Sea Littoral (First Millennium BC)

This book examines the historical geography of the southern Black Sea littoral in the 1st millennium BC. Notwithstanding the remarkable development of research on the Black Sea in antiquity over the last few decades, the southern littoral remains an area several aspects of which have still not been thoroughly studied, while the archaeological investigation has only very recently started to be held in numerous parts of the coast and in a more systematic way. This monograph aims to examine the most significant aspects of the historical geography of this region, in the light of all the written and archaeological evidence that is available so far: First of all, the littoral’s natural environment, namely the geographic stage on which the numerous peoples that inhabited it developed their civilisations and economies. Furthermore, the indigenous peoples of the littoral, most of which have never been given as detailed an examination as, for example, the Greek colonists there, and our knowledge of them is scanty. Of course, the Greek presence and colonisation in the southern Black Sea is also studied, as is the existence of other peoples, who were neither indigenous nor colonists but still had a presence in the littoral, whether as invaders (e.g. the Cimmerians), or as political overlords (e.g. the Persians). Finally, stress is laid on the urban development along the littoral: what kinds of settlements and installations were created, in which places, and with what frequency. Thus, the book offers for the first time in modern scholarship a detailed examination of the historical geography of the ca. 1000 km-long southern Black Sea littoral over the thousand years before Christ.