Author: by Vladimir KUZNETSOV, Dr. Sc. (Hist.), head of the Taman field expedition, Archeology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences Articles in this rubric reflect the opinion of the author.-Ed. A field party of archeologists has unearthed a block of houses in what used to be the city of Thanagoria founded by Greek settlers in the sixth century B.C. This discovery challenges the view uttered by some historians that archaic Greeks colonizing the northern coast of the Black Sea lived just in primitive mud-huts and dugouts rather than in well-appointed homes... page 62 But they did not. Wearied by a long war they had been waging against oriental tyrannies in the 7th-6th centuries B.C., Ionian Greeks had to leave their native land, the western coast of Asia Minor, and settle elsewhere, in various parts of the Mediterranean and on the coasts of the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus). Here and there the lonians founded Greek colonies on the fringe of the lands populated by Barbarians. The residents of the Greek cities of Phocaea and Teos-all of them, in a body! - pulled up stakes. A word from the Greek historian Herodotus (5th century B.C.), otherwise known as "the father of history": "The people of Teos acted in much the same wise as did the Phocaeans. After Harpagus [Persian warlord], on building up an embankment, had seized the walls [of the townl, all Teosians boarded ships and set out for Thracia. Once there, they settled in the town ofAbdera." We cannot tell why Herodotus made no mention of another Teosian colony, Thanagoria, founded in about the same time as Abdera. Yet other ancient historians did mention it. Thus, according to Flavius Arrhianus (2nd century B.C.), the founder of Thanagoria was Thanagoras, a Teosian who had fled from the Persians. page 63 Unlike the Mediterranean, the northern coast of the Black Sea was a terra incognita to Greeks. The Taman Peninsula (part of the present Krasnodar Territory), for one: the first Greek colonies appeared the ... Читать далее