It was the birthplace of the Hellenic civilization. The original Greek settlements in the region were numerous and small, but by the 8th century BCE they had consolidated themselves into 12 major cities—Phocaea, Erythrae, Clazomenae, Teos, Lebedus, Colophon, Ephesus, Priene, Myus, and Miletus on the mainland, with the islands Chios and Samos.
By the end of the 7th century the Ionian cities had achieved great prosperity through their trading enterprises, their colonization efforts, and their manufacture of ceramics, textiles, and metalware. The Turkish army drove the Greeks out soon after, killing many Greek people.
They did not challenge the Greeks on the Aegean Islands, though. One of the earliest electrum coins struck in Ephesus , — BC. About years ago, the Persian Empire was expanding through Asia and into Asia Minor the area between the Black and Mediterranean Seas and taking control of the eastern world. A Persian ruler was installed over every city-state that they conquered.
It was this action that eventually provoked the Ionian revolt which marked the beginning of the long confrontation between the Greek and Persian empires. For all of their advances in science and mathematics, these well-established city-states seemed the most prominent in Greece. The people of Ionia, were discontent with their new, dictatorial rulers.
The Persian rulers knew the feelings of the populace, but did little to alleviate the hostilities. Seeing that many of them were anxious for gains in power and land, he made them agree not to attack each other. Artaphrenes knew that internal conflict could result in disintegration of the empire. He tried to gain help from surrounding cities but failed.
Aristagoras encouraged the Ionians to remove their leaders. In response, many cities in the area rebelled and ousted their Persian rulers. Knowing that it would not be long until Darius retaliated, Aristagoras traveled to Sparta and appealed to King Cleomenes for aid. When the Spartan leader learned of the distance his army would travel to reinforce the Ionians, he declined the request for aid. Aristagoras, now desperate for support, went to Athens for help. The Athenians, fearing an inevitable attack by the Persians, decided to support Aristagoras and sent twenty triremes along with five from Eretria.
The ships were moored at the port of Coressus and the soldiers followed the river Cayster to Sardis. The Allied Greek force marched into the city where they met little resistance. As they marched deeper into the city, they finally engaged Artaphrenes ruler of Sardis who was defending the citadel.
Not able to capture the citadel, the Ionians set the city ablaze and retreated to Ephesus. Persians troops in the area met the Greeks at Ephesus and massacred most of them. Geography is central to the story. Consisting of small cities in islands on the Anatolian coast, Ionia at the end of the 7th century BCE was a seafaring merchant society.
The people spoke Greek, having ancestry in Greece proper, but they were living within the sway of the Kingdom of Lydia. Fishing and trade activities brought Ionians into contact with people from diverse areas, from the Black Sea to the North, Egyptians, and especially the Babylonian Empire. Babylon, although new on the scene in terms of its ruling dynasty and the fact that it had risen up over a matter of decades, had been the center of an earlier empire and was an ancient civilization.
In BCE, Babylonians were the most technologically advanced people of the era, their mathematical capability was far in advance of literally everybody else.
They were excellent at taking measurements and recording their data, particularly when it came to astronomy. They had nothing that we could call science, as everything was about measurement and prediction based on patterns that were interpreted from their data. They did not formulate physical models of nature, nor, as far as we know, did they propose that the things that they were observing, measuring, and analyzing with mathematics might be explained, rather than simply being accepted as the result of the activity of the gods.
This is where the Ionians came into the picture, possibly as one of several developments in human thinking that were popping up within the areas under Babylonian sway, and regions to its west and east. Jewish monotheism, for instance, was emerging on the scene among Jews that had been exiled from the land of Judah to the Babylonian heartland. A similar world view was Zoroastrianism, that started up a little more eastward, in Iran, but certainly was related to the monotheism of the Jewish exiles.
Still further east, in Nepal, Buddhism may have been emerging at this time or possibly slightly later , and China was just decades away from the time of Confucius.
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