Al Mina

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Al Mina was an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, in the estuary of the Orontes, near present-day Samandag.

Its excavator, Leonard Wooley, considered it to be an early Greek trading colony, founded a little before 800 BC, in direct competition with the Phoenicians to the south. He argued that substantial amounts of Greek pottery at the site established its early Euboean connections, while the Syrian and Phoenician cooking pottery reflected a cultural mix typical of an emporium.

Wooley's critics point out that he discarded coarse undecorated utilitarian wares, and that the relative numbers of Greek, Syrian and Phoenician populations have not been established.[1] 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.[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 BC.[4] 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.[5] Later work considered 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.

Wooley identified Al Mina with Herodotus' Posideion, but more recent scholarship places Posideion at Ras el-Bassit.[6]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Lehmann (2005).
  2. ^ R. Kearsley, "Greeks Overseas in the 8th Century B.C.: Euboeans, Al Mina and Assyrian Imperialism,"; J. Boardman, "The Excavated History of Al Mina," in Ancient Greeks West and East, ed. G. Tsetskhladze (Leiden, Boston, 1999); Waldbaum (1997).
  3. ^ Greek traders are also present at Tarsos and somewhat later at Tell Sukas, see Burkert (1992), p. 11.
  4. ^ Burkert (1992).
  5. ^ Such as Eric M. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Archaeology in the Near East 1997, which barely makes passing reference.
  6. ^ Waldbaum (1997).

[edit] References

  • Boardman, John (1980). The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-25069-3. 
  • ——— (1990). "Al Mina and history" Oxford Journal of Archaeology 9 pp 169-90. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0092.1990.tb00221.x
  • 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. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-64363-1. 
  • Coldstream, J.N. (1982). "Greeks and Phoenicians in the Aegean" and P.J. Riis "Griechen in Phönizien" in H.G. Niemeyer, Phönizier im Westen. Mainz, pp 261-72 and 237-55. ISBN 3-8053-0486-2
  • 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 vol. 157, pp. 61-92. ISBN 0-86159-157-7
  • Luke, Joanna (2003). Ports of Trade: Al Mina and Geometric Greek Pottery in the Levant. Oxford: Archaeopress. ISBN 1-84171-478-X. 
  • Waldbaum, Jane C. (1997). "Greeks in the East or Greeks and the East?: Problems in the Definition and Recognition of Presence". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 305: 1–17. doi:10.2307/1357743. 
  • Woolley, Leonard (1948). "The Date of al Mina". Journal of Hellenic Studies 68: 148. doi:10.2307/626304. 
  • ——— (1953). A Forgotten Kingdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
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