Colonies in antiquity

• 1. Introduction

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  Colonies in antiquity could stay loyal to a distant mother-city for generations, or break free the moment they were founded. In 814 or 813 BC, settlers from Tyre raised a city on the coast of North Africa and named it Kart-Hadasht, meaning New Town. History remembers it as Carthage, and it kept ties to Tyre long after its founding. Greek colonies of the Archaic and Classical eras took the opposite path. They stood as sovereign, self-governing city-states from their very first day. What made one colonizing power keep its offshoots on a short leash, while another let them go free at once? The answer differs across Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, the Horn of Africa, Rome and Han China. It starts in the region of southern Canaan, where Egyptian settlement is attested as early as 3200 BC.

• 2. From Colonizer To Host

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  Narmer had Egyptian pottery produced in Canaan and shipped back to Egypt, made at sites such as Arad, En Besor, Rafiah and Tel Erani. Fortifications, embankments, pottery, tools, weapons and seals all mark an Egyptian presence spread across the region. An area of permanent settlement may have been administered from Tell es-Sakan, the largest Egyptian settlement found there. Archaeologists have even uncovered an Early Bronze Age brewery in Tel Aviv that belonged to an Egyptian settlement.

  Egyptian shipbuilding reaches back at least to 3000 BC, and perhaps earlier. The Archaeological Institute of America reports that the earliest dated ship, from around 3000 BC, may have belonged to the Pharaoh Aha.

  Centuries later, between 301 and 198 BC, Ptolemaic rule over Judea sent large numbers of Jewish settlers into Egypt rather than out of it. The Ptolemies brought in Jewish soldiers along with their families, while other Jews left Judea for Egypt seeking economic opportunity. The Ptolemies also planted Jewish colonies in the cities of Cyrenaica, in what is now Libya.

  Those Cyrenaican communities took root inside a Mediterranean trading world that other seafaring peoples had been mapping for centuries.

• 3. Phoenician And Carthaginian Networks

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  The Phoenicians dominated Mediterranean trade through the early first millennium BC, holding contacts in Egypt and Greece. They pushed colonies as far west as Gadir, modern Cádiz, in Spain, and Tingis and Mogador in modern Morocco. Those Atlantic-facing footholds gave Phoenician traders control of routes reaching toward Britain and Senegal.

  The Carthaginians later founded their own colony at Carthago Nova in southeastern Spain, a city Rome eventually conquered.

  María Eugenia Aubet, a professor of archaeology at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, points to Huelva as the earliest documented Phoenician presence in the west. In 1997, new finds turned up in the Plaza de las Monjas at Huelva. Aubet said they pointed to "a regular presence of Phoenician people from the start of the ninth century BC."

  Radiocarbon dating from Carthage's earliest layers points to a founding between 835 and 800 cal BC. That range matches the dates handed down by the ancient historians Flavius Josephus and Timaeus.

  Far to the east, stone temples on the Horn of Africa would soon raise a different question about who counts as a colonizer.

• 4. The Sabaean Debate

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  Dʿmt took shape around 800 BCE near Ethiopia's Tigray region, and historians still argue over how much credit belongs to Sabaeans from Sheba in South Arabia. Evidence of Sabaean influence includes Sabaic inscriptions and Sabaean-style temples found across the area. As of 2017, specialists in South Arabian archaeology tended to favor migration or colonization, while Africanist archaeologists leaned toward an indigenous origin. But a 2025 account held that the "idea of colonisation as such has been discarded."

  In 2019, researchers found Sabaean inscriptions in Somaliland and Puntland, along with a Sabaean temple whose inscriptions credit its construction to the admiral of Sheba's fleet. The archaeologist González-Ruibal described a colonialist pattern along the northern Somali seaboard, driven by the state and aimed at extracting resources. Elsewhere in the northern Horn, he pointed to "a diasporic model, led by élites who soon mixed with local people, while maintaining ties with their ancestral homeland."

  Far to the north, in the Aegean, city-states were about to turn colonization into one of the most common forms of movement in the ancient world.

• 5. Greek Colonization Waves

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  Colonies appeared in Ionia and Thrace as early as the 8th century BC, and more than thirty Greek city-states eventually held multiple colonies scattered across the Mediterranean. Miletus of the Ionian League proved the most prolific of them, founding more than 60 colonies from the late 9th to the 5th century BC. Those settlements reached the shores of the Black Sea, the Iberian Peninsula, Magna Graecia in southern Italy, and the Libyan coast of northern Africa.

  A defeated faction in a Greek city sometimes left to escape subjugation by a foreign enemy. Civil disorder could push the losing side of internal battles to found a new city elsewhere. Population pressure and ostracism drove other departures, though most founders aimed above all to open trade relations and grow the mother-city's wealth.

  Greek city-states began founding colonies between 900 and 800 BC. The first two were Al Mina on the Syrian coast and the trading post Pithecusae at Ischia, both raised by Euboean settlers around 800 BC.

  Two further waves of colonists left Greece in what's known as the Great Greek Colonization. The first sailed out in the early 8th century BC, the second in the 6th century BC. Population growth alone seems too small an explanation for these migrations. Competition between the Greek city-states, newly emerging and eager to expand their economic reach, offers a better fit as the real incentive. Coined money spread throughout the Mediterranean Basin as this Greek expansion unfolded.

  Before sending out a colony, a Greek city almost always consulted an oracle, such as the one at Delphi. Certain classes of citizens were sometimes called to join, or a single son was drawn by lot from a household with several sons. Interested strangers could be admitted as well. A person of distinction was chosen to lead the emigrants, and such founders were honored as heroes after death. Sacred fire carried from the metropolis's public hearth kindled the hearth of the new city. For centuries afterward, the colony sent embassies and votive gifts to the mother-city's chief festivals.

  Notable Greek colonies in the western Mediterranean included Syracuse, founded from Corinth and Tenea around 734 BC, and Naxos, founded from Chalcis the same year. Massalia, known today as Marseille, was founded from Phocaea around 598 BC. Cyrene, in what is now Libya, traced its founding to Thera, with dates recorded as 762 or 761 BC and again as 632 or 631 BC. Cicero later remarked that it seemed "as if the lands of the barbarians had been bordered round with a Greek sea-coast."

  After Alexander's conquests in the 4th century BC, a further wave of Hellenistic colonies stretched from Egypt all the way to India.

• 6. Greek Cities In Anatolia

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  By the 15th century BC, Mycenaean Greeks had already reached Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus and the shores of Anatolia. According to legend, the hero Teucer founded the first Greek colony on Cyprus.

  Miletus sat on Anatolia's west coast near the mouth of the Meander River. By the 13th century BC, in the late Bronze Age, Carians, Luwian-speakers from south-central Anatolia, had arrived there, followed later by other Greeks. The city rebelled against the Hittite Empire, and after that empire fell, Miletus was destroyed in the 12th century BC. Ionians resettled it extensively starting around 1000 BC. Before Persia invaded in the mid-6th century BC, Miletus ranked among the greatest and wealthiest Greek city-states.

  Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Diogenes of Apollonia all belonged to the Milesian school of early Greek philosophy. Heraclitus lived in Ephesus, another Ionian city, while Anaxagoras came from Clazomenae, a member of the Ionian League. The list of ancient Greek theatres in Anatolia ranks among the longest anywhere Greeks ever settled.

  Greeks also settled along the south shore of the Black Sea, in the region called Pontus, and in the Pontic Alps of northeastern Anatolia. Those from southern Russia, Ukraine and Crimea became known as Northern Pontic Greeks, distinct from the Eastern Pontic Greeks of Georgia and Armenia. Milesian traders founded Sinope and Trabzon in 756 BC, along with Samsun, Rize and Amasra. Greek remained Anatolia's common language from Alexander's conquests until the Seljuk Turks invaded in the eleventh century AD.

  None of these Anatolian cities answered to Miletus forever. Every Greek colony was bound to its mother-city by customs that could last for centuries.

• 7. Bonds With The Metropolis

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  The Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC broke out partly from a dispute between Corinth and its colony Corcyra. Even so, war was treated as a last resort between a colony and its metropolis, with disputes resolved peacefully whenever possible. A colony usually adopted its mother-city's constitution, yet remained politically independent. A special holy fire from the metropolis was kept burning to remind both cities of their shared origin. If a colony sent out a colony of its own, the mother-city was generally consulted, or at least asked to supply a leader. Colonies frequently paid tribute at shared religious centers such as Delphi, Olympia, or Delos.

  Cleruchs formed a distinct class of Greek colonists, each granted an individual plot of land called a klêros. Trade posts such as Naucratis in Egypt worked differently from ordinary colonies. Their members kept the right to live back home, staying confined to their own quarter in the foreign city.

  Rome, once it began founding colonies of its own, would set aside this model of loose kinship and lean on garrisons instead.

• 8. Garrisons For The Empire

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  Rome had no standing army in its early days, so it planted citizen garrisons in conquered towns instead. These garrisons combined roughly three hundred Roman citizens with a larger number of Latin League members, and took one third of the conquered territory for the settlers. Coastal colonies of Roman citizens, called coloniae maritimae, secured both shores of Italy. The more populous coloniae Latinae, home to Latins as well as Romans, covered the mainland instead.

  A commission of three men led the colonists and founded each settlement, then stayed on as its patrons afterward. Colonists entered a conquered town in military array, marching behind banners as the founding was celebrated with special ceremony. Each colonia was free from taxes and elected its own Senate under a constitution copied from Rome's. Citizens of the coloniae civium Romanorum kept Roman citizenship and exemption from military service. Colonists of the coloniae Latinae instead held the ius Latinum, gaining property rights and, eventually, a path to Roman citizenship.

  From the time of the Gracchi, Roman colonies lost their military character and became a way to provide land for the poorest of the Plebs. After Sulla, colonization became a method for granting land to veteran soldiers. Emperors of the Principate took over the right to found colonies, using it mainly to plant military settlements in the provinces. Provincial colonies rarely received the tax exemption granted to those founded in Italy itself.

  Imperial China's Han dynasty, from 202 BC to 220 AD, extended its rule across the Hexi Corridor of Gansu and the Tarim Basin region of Xinjiang. After the general Huo Qubing defeated the Xiongnu ruler Hunye in 121 BC, settlers under Emperor Wu of Han colonized the Hexi Corridor and Ordos Plateau. Tuntian, self-sustaining agricultural military garrisons, secured these frontier outposts along with the Silk Road trade routes into Central Asia. Emperor Wu's conquest of Nanyue in 111 BC brought Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan Island and northern Vietnam under Han rule. By 108 BC, the Han conquest of Gojoseon extended control into what is now North Korea. Han colonists in the Xuantu and Lelang commanderies faced occasional raids from the Goguryeo and Buyeo kingdoms. They mostly traded peacefully with neighboring Koreans, who in turn absorbed Chinese cultural influence.

  In 37 AD, the Eastern Han general Ma Yuan sent settlers to the northeastern frontier and resettled defeated Qiang tribes within the Tianshui and Longxi commanderies. Ma pursued a similar policy in the south after defeating the Trưng Sisters of Jiaozhi, in what is now northern Vietnam. In 43 AD he resettled hundreds of Vietnamese into China's Jing Province and seized their sacred bronze drums as symbols of royal power. He then restored Han authority and law over Jiaozhi. The historian Rafe de Crespigny called it "a brief but effective campaign of colonisation and control" before Ma returned north in 44 AD.

  In 119 AD, the Eastern Han administrator Cao Song established military colonies near Hami, in what is now Yiwu County. Empress Deng Sui, regent for the young Emperor Shang of Han, instead favored a slow, cautious settlement policy on the advice of Ban Yong. Conflict was building with the Jushi Kingdom, the Shanshan, and their Xiongnu allies around the Taklamakan Desert. In 127 AD, Ban Yong defeated the Karasahr in battle, and colonies extended all the way to Turfan. By the 150s AD, though, the Han presence in the Western Regions had begun to fade. Near the dynasty's end, the chancellor Cao Cao founded agricultural military colonies to settle refugees displaced by war.

  In 209 AD, Cao Cao planted similar colonies in Anhui province to mark a clear border with his rival Sun Quan. It stood as one of the last times a Han ruler leaned on settlement, rather than armies, to hold a line.