Ionia
The Ionia is a region of the world ancient Greek west of Asia Minor , between Phocis and Miletus. It corresponds to the area within a radius of 170 km around the current city of Izmir. It takes its name from Ion , legendary ancestor of the peoples of this region. It was in Ionia that have developed the first forms of science of philosophy in the West, thinkers called Presocratics.
Ionian coasts have many economic benefits: good natural shelter facilitating the establishment of ports to trade with easy communication to the hinterland, a pleasant climate, open valleys for the cultivation of cereals and livestock horses, trays for rearing sheep , hills for fruit trees and olive trees.
Summary |
Origins
Its settlement from the second wave of migration Achaean , on the eleventh century BC. BC , was built as a result of many mixed marriages, the Dorians and populations pre-Hellenic. This population was united by a common dialect and a common religious shrine, the Panionion located on the territory of Priene.
In the ancient times , it federated twelve Greek cities of the mainland and islands: Chios , Ephesus , Eritrea , Clazomenae , Colophon , Lbdos , Miletus , Myonte , Phocea , Priene , Samos and Teos. Halicarnassus joined them later. Brilliant home of Hellenic civilization to seventh and sixth century BC. AD , it belongs to a larger set called "Greece of Asia" or "eastern Greece.
Each city was independent and had its own government and its own social organization, but they had the same political evolution toward the tyranny that other Greek cities, with which they were united by a common culture, even if there were many border conflicts.
Civilization
Ionia is the first region of Greece, where philosophy, art (especially architecture with the Ionic order) and the sciences have developed, benefiting from the intellectual riches of the Middle East and of Egypt. The Ionian cities have given many great thinkers Presocratics , great artists and great architects , like Thales of Miletus , Anaximander , Anaximenes , Leucippus at Priene , Heraclitus, to Ephesus , Anaxagoras to Clazomenae and Pythagoras in the island of Samos.
Ionia was coveted for its rich economic and intellectual development, by powerful neighbors, ambitious and enterprising. The Ionians had developed products of luxury and quality, banquets and elegant courtesans and grown fascinated. They were representative of the high point of sophistication achieved by the Greek civilization. But the Ionians were bad fighters, poorly trained History
After successful spread of settlements to the north ( Euxine ) and west ( Ionian Sea ; country Massaliotes ), Ionia passed first a protectorate of the Lydians , then after the victory of Cyrus over Croesus , under the domination of Persian , which she had to pay heavy tribute and maintain garrisons in return for a degree of autonomy and freedom given to local tyrants.
This situation worsened with the King of Persia Darius I and results in 499 BC. AD a revolt of Ionia, favored by the military setbacks of the Persians in the steppe Danube , and military support of Athens and Eretria. But the revolt turned into a disaster despite some victories, and people paid heavily this episode: the destruction and burning of Ephesus and Miletus , deportation of the people as slaves in Mesopotamia in 494 BC. BC , until their total allegiance.
Many people (merchants, craftsmen, poets, thinkers), emigrated, taking with them the refinements of their culture. It was a blow to the intellectual development of Ionia.
Only after the victories of the cities of mainland Greece at Marathon , then at the Battle of Salamis in -480 , the Battle of Plataea and the Battle of Cape Mycale in -479 , the Ionians regained their freedom, the expansion of the Persian Empire to the west was finally adopted.
Athens, which had played a role in the victory, took glory and profit, and -478 , for the creation of the Delian League , she began to form around it a maritime empire ensuring its hegemony over the Aegean, now prohibited Persian vessels, and its dominance over the Greek world. The war ended in 449 BC. AD and the defeat of the Persians was confirmed by the Peace of Callias.
Ionia then followed the fate of the world Hellenistic from the Seleucids in the Kingdom of Pergamon , then the Roman Empire which, by Christianizing became Byzantine : it passed in the fourteenth-century Genoa and eventually falls definitively into the hands of the Turks in the fifteenth century, but without ever losing its prosperity or its Hellenic character.
But, following the Ottoman defeat in 1918, Greece , governed by Eleftherios Venizelos , asked the annexation of Ionia, it occupied militarily, in a context where the declining Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of being broken up between the power Colonial victorious ( Treaty of Sevres ).
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1919 raised a national army and began to chase the Greek armies of Anatolia : the war ended in September 1922 by the resumption of Smyrna / Izmir. Half of the city (districts of Europeans) burned and was not rebuilt slowly. The population exchange that was agreed between Greece and the new Republic of Turkey after the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) led to the exodus of Greeks from Asia Minor (with the exception of Istanbul), replaced by Turks - fewer - from Greece.
Following the exchange of populations, we can no longer speak of Ionian civilization, and the word has disappeared from the Turkish administrative vocabulary. But not prosper: Ionia remains one of the most dynamic regions of Turkey , European investments are very numerous.
See also
- In Aramaic , the name " " means the whole Greek territory. It is the same for the name "" in Arabic and the name "" in Hebrew.
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