Ionians

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ionians left their name on the world in a way few ancient peoples have managed. Somewhere in the Ferghana Valley of Central Asia, a Chinese historian writing the Records of the Grand Historian recorded a country called Dayuan, meaning "Great Ionians." A Persian inscription carved into the south wall of the palace at Persepolis listed them among the provinces of the Achaemenid Empire. The Book of Genesis names Javan, their Hebrew counterpart, as a son of Japheth. And in Neo-Assyrian letters from the 730s BC, a raid on the Phoenician coast was reported to Tiglath-Pileser III as the work of a people called the ia-u-na-a-a. The questions the Ionians raise are not small ones. Who were these people that so many distant civilizations felt the need to name? What drove them from their original homeland, and what did they build once they arrived on the shores of Asia Minor? And why does the school of thought they produced in a small coastal city called Miletus still shape the way the modern world asks questions about the natural world?

• 2. A Name Across Civilizations

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  A fragmentary Linear B tablet from Knossos, catalogued as tablet Xd 146, bears the name i-ja-wo-ne. Ventris and Chadwick interpreted it as possibly a dative or nominative plural case of the ethnic name Iawones. The Knossos tablets are dated to either 1400 or 1200 BC, placing this inscription before Dorian dominance in Crete. It is the earliest known trace of the Ionian name in writing, and it already appears far from where one might expect to find it.

  Homer used the form Iāones on a single occasion in his epics, describing long-robed Greeks attacked by Hector and apparently identified with Athenians. The poet Hesiod, writing in the same early period, used the singular form Iāōn in a fragment that survives from his work.

  The name's reach extended well beyond Greek literature. Neo-Assyrian letters from the 8th century BC report seaborne raids on Phoenician cities by a people rendered in cuneiform as ia-u-na-a-a. Sargon II described taking people he called Iamānu from the sea "like fish," and his Annals for 709 BC refer to seven kings of a district of Yadnana situated a seven-days' journey into "the sea of the setting sun" - a reference confirmed by a stele found at Citium in Cyprus.

  In Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid Empire, Ionians appear as Yaunā. In Indic literature inspired by Achaemenid usage, they became Yavana and Yona. The Thirteenth Edict of Ashoka, dated to 260-258 BC, directly mentions the Yonas. And in modern Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Persian, and Turkish, variants of the Ionian name remain the standard word for Greece and Greeks to this day.

• 3. Migration and Foundation Myth

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  Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the first historian to examine the Ionians systematically, declared that all those of Athenian descent who kept the feast Apaturia were Ionians. He also noted the remarkable smallness of the Ionian branch at the time it began to spread: "The whole Hellenic stock was then small, and the last of all its branches and the least regarded was the Ionian; for it had no considerable city except Athens."

  The foundation myth current in the Classical period traced the name to a figure called Ion, son of Xuthus, who lived in the north Peloponnesian region called Aigialeia. The Dorians, when they invaded the Peloponnese, expelled the Achaeans from Argolid and Lacedaemonia. Those displaced Achaeans moved into Aigialeia, pushing the Ionians out in turn. The Ionians then moved to Attica, mingled with the local population, and after many years emigrated to the coast of Asia Minor, founding the historical region of Ionia.

  Strabo's version of the same story added further texture. In his account, Hellen, son of Deucalion and ancestor of the Hellenes, arranged a marriage between his son Xuthus and the daughter of king Erechtheus of Athens. Xuthus founded the Tetrapolis of Attica. His son Ion conquered Thrace, after which the Athenians made Ion their king. Attica itself came to be called Ionia after Ion's death. Under leaders called the Codridae, later generations set out for Anatolia and founded twelve cities in Caria and Lydia, deliberately modeling their settlement pattern on the twelve original cities of Achaea, which had formerly been Ionian.

  Among the twelve communities Herodotus listed as originally Ionian were Pellene, Aegira, Bura, Helice, Aegion, Patrae, Dyme, and Tritaeae. He also noted a telling anomaly: the Cynurians, whom he described as the most aboriginal Ionians, had by his day been so thoroughly Dorianized by time and by Argive rule that they appeared to be the only Ionians left on the Peloponnese.

• 4. Language and Dialect

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  Ionic Greek belonged to the Attic-Ionic or Eastern dialect group of Ancient Greek. Scholars traditionally divide it into three regional varieties: West Ionic, spoken on Euboea; Central Ionic, spoken in the northern Cyclades; and East Ionic, spoken from around 1000 BC onward in Asiatic Ionia, where colonists from Athens had founded their cities.

  The reach of the Ionic dialect in literary culture was considerable. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns, and the works of Hesiod were all composed in a literary form of Ionic called Homeric Greek or Epic Greek. This meant that the foundational texts of Greek civilization were written not in the dialect of Athens or Sparta but in the idiom of the Ionians.

  In a broader linguistic sense, "Ionian" could describe all speakers of the Ionic dialect, a group that included not just the inhabitants of Ionia proper but also the populations of Euboea, the Cyclades, and the many cities founded by Ionian colonists. Even more expansively, the term could be applied to all speakers of the East Greek group, which included Attic itself.

  Ionic was eventually displaced by the Attic dialect, which had become dominant across the Greek world by the 5th century BC. The etymology of the name Iōnes remains uncertain. The scholar Frisk identified an unknown root, Ia-, pronounced ya-. Proposed derivations include a Proto-Indo-European onomatopoeic root expressing a shout of assistance, a connection to the Egyptian name ḥꜣw-nbwt for eastern Mediterranean island peoples, and a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "power."

• 5. Philosophy Born on the Coast

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  During the 6th century BC, the coastal towns of Ionia, among them Miletus and Ephesus, became the site of a transformation in how educated people thought about the natural world. Rather than turning to myth or traditional religion to explain phenomena like earthquakes, floods, or the movements of celestial bodies, a new kind of thinker emerged who sought mechanical and physical explanations derived from observation and reflection.

  These thinkers, Thales and those who followed him, were called physiologoi, a Greek word meaning roughly "those who discourse on Nature." They were skeptical of supernatural accounts and searched instead for rational explanations of the universe.

  The physicist Carlo Rovelli has described the work of this Ionian school as producing "the first great scientific revolution" and the earliest example of critical thinking. That critical posture, the assumption that the natural world is intelligible and that its workings can be explained without invoking divine agency, passed from the Ionian coastal cities into the broader current of Greek thought and from there into the intellectual traditions of the modern world.

  The character attributed to the Ionians in antiquity sits in sharp contrast to that of the Dorians. Where the Dorians were characterized as austere and militaristic, the Ionians were associated with philosophy, art, democracy, and what ancient writers called a love of pleasure. Those traits found their most famous expression in Athens, a city that was, by Ionian reckoning, the mother city of the Ionian migration to Asia Minor.