Ionia
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Ionia
Settlement and Growth
The region was of considerable importance in ancient times, for it was there that Greek settlers established colonies before 1000 B.C. These colonists were called Ionians, and tradition says that they fled to Asia Minor from the mainland of Greece to escape the invading Dorians. Athens claimed to be the mother city of all the Ionian colonists, but modern scholars believe that the Ionians were actually a mixed group (mainly from Attica and Boeotia) and that after migrating they were further mixed by intermarriage with native groups such as the Carians. Nevertheless, they spoke the same distinctive form of Greek that was spoken in Attica and Euboea, and their culture was always distinguished from that of the Dorians and Aeolians.
There came to be 12 major cities—Miletus, Myus, Priene, Sámos, Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedos, Teos, Erythrae, Khíos, Clazomenae, and Phocaea. A religious league (which reached its full power in the 8th cent. B.C.) was formed, with its center at the temple of Poseidon near Mycale. Smyrna, originally an Aeolian colony, later joined the league. The fertility of the region and its excellent harbors brought prosperity to the cities. Traders and colonists traveled the Mediterranean as far west as Spain and up to the shores of the Black Sea.
Conquest and Reconquest
Bibliography
See D. G. Hogarth, Ionia and the East (1909); C. Roebuck, Ionian Trade and Colonization (1959); G. L. Huxley, The Early Ionians (1966, repr. 1972); J. Balcer, Sparda by the Bitter Sea: Imperial Interaction in Western Anatolia (1985).
Ionia
a region in the central part of the west coast of Asia Minor (and adjacent islands) between the cities of Miletus and Phocaea, colonized by the Ionians in the 11th to ninth centuries B.C. Ionia was an important cultural and trade center, linking the East and West, a fact that promoted the region’s prosperity. The advanced culture of the Ionian cities exerted an important influence on the cultural development of Greece as a whole. It was Ionia that produced the first Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) and historians (the logographers, Herodotus). In the sixth century B.C., Iona was conquered by Lydia and in 546 B.C., by the Persians. In the fourth century B.C. the region came under Macedonian rule and in the second century B.C. under Roman rule.