Al Mina

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Al Mina, Tyre is a spectacular and more familiar Roman site near Tyre.

Al Mina, on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, in the estuary of the Orontes (near present-day Samandag) was one of the earliest Greek trading colonies, founded a little before 800 BCE, in direct competition with the Phoenicians to the south. Substantial amounts of Greek pottery at the site have established its early Euboean connections, though Syrian and Phoenician cooking pottery[1] reflect a cultural mix typical of an emporium.[2] It served as an entrepôt for cultural influences that accompanied trade with Urartu and the shortest caravan route to Assyrian cities of upper Mesopotamia. Through Al Mina and Greek traders in Cyprus[3] the Phoenician alphabet, and much technology besides, were transmitted to Euboea and mainland Greece in the eighth century BCE (Burkert 1992). Al Mina was destroyed about 700, perhaps by Sennacherib, who repressed a rebellion at Tarsos in 696, but it was immediately rebuilt. Pottery recovered from later levels of the site show that a Greek presence remained at Al Mina through the fourth century, with pottery imported from Miletus and deftly imitated locally, apparently by Greek potters.

The excavations at Al Mina were initiated in 1936 by Leonard Woolley, who was disappointed in not finding a Bronze Age port and soon moved his interests to the earlier, more urbane site of Alalakh. Al Mina has been largely overlooked in popular surveys.[4] Subsequent work, nevertheless, has established Al Mina as key to understanding the role of early Greeks in the east at the outset of the Orientalizing Period of Greek cultural history.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Woolley discarded coarse undecorated utilitarian wares, and relative numbers of Greek, Syrian and Phoenician populations have not been established. (Lehmann 2005).
  2. ^ The controversy whether Al Mina is to be regarded as a native Syrian site, with Syrian architecture and cooking pots and a Greek presence, or as an Iron Age Greek trading post, occupies specialists: R. Kearsley, "Greeks Overseas in the 8th Century B.C.: Euboeans, Al Mina and Assyrian Imperialism," and J. Boardman, "The Excavated History of Al Mina," in Ancient Greeks West and East, ed. G. Tsetskhladze (Leiden, Boston, 1999).
  3. ^ Greek traders are also present at Tarsos and somewhat later at Tell Sukas. (Burkert 1992:11)
  4. ^ Such as Eric M. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Archaeology in the Near East 1997, which barely makes passing reference.

[edit] References

  • Boardman, John, 1980. The Greeks Overseas. Revised, enlarged ed.
  • ——— 1990, "Al Mina and history" Oxford Journal of Archaeology 9 pp 169-90.
  • Braun, T.F.R.G., 1982 "The Greeks in the Near East" in Cambridge Ancient History III.3 (Cambridge University Press).
  • Burkert, Walter, 1992. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Harvard University Press).
  • Coldstream, J.N., 1982. "Greeks and Phoenicians in the Aegean" and P.J. Riis "Griechen in Phönizien" in H.G. Niemyer, Phönizier im Westen (Mainz), pp 261-72 and 237-55.
  • Lehmann, G., 2005. "Al Mina and the East: A Report on Research in Progress," in Alexandra Villing (ed.), The Greeks in the East (London: British Museum Research Publication 157) pp 61-92. ISBN 0-86159-157-7
  • Luke, Joanna, 2003: Ports of Trade: Al Mina and Geometric Greek Pottery in the Levant. ISBN 1-8417-147-8
  • Woolley, Leonard, 1948. "The Date of al Mina" Journal of Hellenic Studies 68
  • ——— 1953. A Forgotten Kingdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
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