Of the twelve Greek settlements that comprised the Asiatic branch of the Ionians, Miletus at the extreme south emerged as the most prominent, with a powerful myth-history. Indeed it was they—both those resident along the Anatolian coast and their congeners back in the Greek mainland (for example, the Euboean islanders)—who most fully exploited and developed their oriental inheritances: in the shape, for example, of the alphabet (borrowed and adapted from the Phoenicians of Lebanon), of mathematics (borrowed ultimately from the Babylonians of—in today’s terms—southern Iraq), and of coinage (borrowed from their Lydian neighbours some time in the first half of the sixth century).The site of Miletus itself had been settled long before the eighth century. Monuments. The origin of Greek orthogonal planning tradition was based on the established civilizations of the Near East, for example, Kahun in ancient Egypt and Babylon in Mesopotamia. Although not many details of his life are known, he is recognized as a Greek philosopher and mathematician. Following the general cataclysm that affected that part of the Mediterranean in the decades on either side of 1200, it next appears centrally in a movement of Greek people from mainland Greece eastwards across the Aegean to Asia Minor during the twelfth and eleventh centuries. The rebuilding of cities also presented another opportunity for orthogonal town planning: Miletus, on the coast of Asia minor, was razed by the Persians in 494 BC before it was rebuilt on a grid. The revolt is usually referred to as the ‘Ionian Revolt’, but actually it was Aeolian and Dorian Greeks of Asia who revolted too, along with Greeks and non-Greek Phoenicians resident on Cyprus.

(It is probably through this commercial colony that the Western world first heard the pyramids and obelisks so named: to a Greek a ‘pyramid’ was a kind of bun, an ‘obelisk’ a little roasting-spit—soldiers’ slang!) ), is what the historical Greeks knew as Miletus. To buy good will or take out insurance cover, Alyattes had married a daughter to a high-ranking Mede from northern Iran at a time when the Medes were in the ascendancy over their southern Iranian kinsmen the Persians. Now Didyma was over 20 kilometres south of Miletus, but it was linked to its metropolis by a Sacred Way, much as Eleusis was linked to Athens by the most famous of such dedicated trunk-routes. The only statement about Aspasia of Miletus which can be maintained as objectively true is that she was a foreign-born woman living in Athens c. 445 BCE who was the lover of Pericles and operated a salon of some sort.

However, the latter fact was in itself an indirect testimony to Miletus’s supreme power, since it was a constant of Greek intercity religious politics that the most important common sanctuaries were located in relatively insignificant political space—Delphi’s ‘amphictyony’ or religious league of mainly central Greek peoples is the obvious mainland analogy, but the same principle applies too to the siting of the most Panhellenic of Panhellenic sanctuaries, Olympia, within the territory of Elis (see Appendix, below).Miletus, like another of our selected cities (Thebes, Actually, ‘Ionian’ has a third dimension and implication. But excavations by Turkish and German archaeologists over the years have recovered and to some extent uncovered an enormous amount, even if most of it is Hellenistic (third centuryBCE) or—much—later, funded, for example, by the two rival Hellenistic period dynasties of the Ptolemies and Seleucids (see One Neleus ‘son of Codrus’ was credited with being the Milesians’ oecist (Founding Father), and credited too—ancient Greeks saw these things rather differently from us—with presiding over the murder of the already resident Carian males (in Homer, ‘barbarian-speaking’ Carians from Miletus had fought on the Trojan side) in order to seize, marry, and breed with their widows. The first sanctuary on this site dates as far back as the eighth century, but in the 550s the Branchidae could afford to construct a temple in the Ionic order, mostly hypaethral (open to the sky), measuring some 85 × 38 metres, including its double surrounding colonnade of over 100 columns, each carved with thirty-six flutes. A few of the authentically certain ones were placed strategically on and around the Hellespont (Dardanelles), such as Abydus, and within the Propontis (Sea of Marmara), such as Cyzicus.