akritas
03-05-2007, 12:21 PM
The below are quotes from the book of N.Coldstream; Routledge, 2003 and its title is
Geometric Greece: 900-700 BC
Part 1
The Passing of the Dark Ages C. 900-770 B.C.
page 40
Euboea, Thessaly, Skyros, the Northern Cyclades
At the same time, a number of forms are peculiar to Thessaly, where the pottery has a mixed ancestry. These forms are best seen at Marmariani, in the north. By the beginning of the tenth century, or perhaps earlier still, an intrusive handmade ware had been introduced there, probably by immigrants from Macedonia; the three leading shapes are the beaked jug (with sloping or cutaway neck), the high-handled kantharos, and the cup with trigger handle.
A little later, perhaps c. 950 B.C., these handmade shapes were joined by a full set of wheel made forms imitating Attic Protogeometric, including a fine series of kraters lasting throughout the ninth century. It was from these Attic-inspired shapes that the Sub-Protogeometric style was evolved, in collusion with Euboea. Under this strong southern influence the handmade shapes, too, were soon reproduced on the wheel, and decorated in a hybrid Protogeometric manner (fig. 8d, e).
pages 42-43-44
In another rich grave, Toumba no. 13, the gold (fig. 10) is more substantial: 34 a curious fibula derived from the Mycenaean violin-bow type, but with an ornamental loop at the centre of the bow; a pair of more elaborate earrings composed of two tightly-packed spirals of wire, recalling the northern spectacle fibulae, or the double-spiral finger-rings from Macedonia; a pair of massive finger-rings convex in section; and a more delicate pair with double carination.
In brief: during this otherwise rather bleak period, nowhere else in the Greek world has such an abundance of gold been found. Some of the ornaments-e.g., most of the twenty-odd finger-rings-may have been specially made for the grave, since they do not look solid enough to have been worn in real life; and no goldwork, as yet, shows any obvious sign of Near Eastern sophistication; but it seems likely that the metal, at least, was imported from that direction. 35
The burial customs of Lefkandi represent a curious compromise, unparalleled elsewhere. With few exceptions, cremation was the prevailing rite, from Sub-mycenaean times until the final burials in the later ninth century. The corpse was burnt on a pyre near by, on to which some vessels, jewellery, and dress ornaments were thrown. Afterwards the cremated remains were not placed in an urn, as in Athens ; 36 instead, only a token amount of burnt bones was placed in the open grave together with the unburnt pots and personal belongings, which were sometimes placed as though round an inhumed body. The graves themselves had at first been cists; but from the late tenth century onwards it was enough to dig a simple rectangular shaft in the rock, usually closed with cover slabs resting on ledges.
As one might expect, the main concentration of Early Iron Age sites in Euboea lies in the central plain, dominated at this time by Chalcis and Lefkandi. But a recent survey has shown that there was also a scatter of coastal sites at or near the north-western cape of the island. 37 These would have served as staging-posts on the busy sea route leading from central Euboea into the landlocked gulf of Pagasae and the port of Iolcos.
Thessaly is too large a region to show any uniformity of culture or burial practices. Indeed, two quite independent traditions can be distinguished during the Dark Ages, flourishing at first in different parts of the country. 38 In the south, and especially within the gulf of Pagasae, relations with Euboea had been established well back in the eleventh century. Euboean influence is seen in the entire sequence of wheelmade Protogeometric pottery at Iolcos; and probably also in the adoption there of cist graves with single burials, although the rite preferred in Thessaly was always inhumation, as opposed to cremation at Lefkandi.
In the extreme north, meanwhile, the tholos tomb was the rule, designed for multiple inhumations. The pottery, in the. first instance, was all handmade, in shapes of Macedonian origin; hence it is reasonable to assume that emigrants from Macedonia were among the first incumbents, although the actual form of the tombs must have been inherited from a local Mycenaean tradition. The most informative of these northern sites is Marmariani, where the architecture and contents of six small tholoi have been published in full. A local alternative to the tholos was the rock-cut chamber tomb; at Homolion, still further north, five such tombs have been found as against only one tholos, but all contained multiple inhumations as at Marmariani.
By the middle of the tenth century we have already learned from the pottery that these two traditions had begun to mingle with one another; first the southern wheelmade shapes were copied by the northern potters, who then proceeded to make their own handmade shapes on the wheel, and-in the early ninth century-decorate them in a hybrid manner (fig. 8); meanwhile the northern shapes appear in southern Thessaly, both in handmade and wheelmade form. We must now enquire how far the contemporary burial practices show a similar fusion between north and south.
(diameter 1.60m.) resembling a miniature northern tholos. 39 At Pherae, 15km. inland from the gulf, there are no signs of northern influence in the Geometric cemetery of some forty cists; but an early ninth-century skyphos combines the shape of the Euboean pendent-semicircle variety with the decoration of crosshatched squares characteristic of the northern handmade kantharos.
We have yet to consider Iolcos, the most important site of all, and the most puzzling. A series of forty Protogeometric cists, all with child inhumations, has been excavated within the settlement, coming to an end well before 900 B.C. The latest probably overlap by a few decades the first burials in a tholos tomb at Kapakli near by-a tomb which was to accumulate seventy adult incumbents within the next four centuries. The local custom, so it seems, was to bury children inside the walls, and adults outside. Yet it is hard to accept the tholos as belonging to the local tradition, seeing that two adult cist-burials, of early ninthcentury date, have been discovered at Nea Ionia, less than 2km away from Iolcos; furthermore, the Nea Ionia cists are lacking in the northern pottery shapes, of which there is an abundance in the Kapakli tholos. 40 In view of the other signs of intrusive northern practices in the Pagasae region, perhaps the Kapakli tholos belonged to an immigrant northern clan, who came peacefully to settle in Iolcos, attracted, perhaps, by the greater opportunities there for dealing with the outside world.
From the published evidence, then, one gets the impression of frequent exchanges between north and south Thessaly between 950 and 850 B.C. To begin with, a sophisticated repertoire of Protogeometric shapes was introduced to the north under southern influence. At a later stage some northern forms, handmade and wheelmade, spread to the south; perhaps in the wake of northern immigrants, if we are correct in thinking that the tholos tombs of the north are the oldest in Iron Age Thessaly. Unfortunately, many more of these tholoi cannot yet be precisely dated, since their allegedly 'Geometric' contents have never been published. 41
The rich and extensive tumulus cemetery of Vergina in Macedonia lies beyond the geographical frontiers of this book, except for its exchanges with the Aegean world to the south. In a land where handmade pottery was the rule, the sudden appearance of a local wheelmade fabric, Sub-Protogeometric in its shapes and decoration, must be a sign of southern cultural influence. For most of these wheelmade shapes-low-based skyphoi with pendent semicircles, trefoil-lipped oinochoai, amphoriskoi, and a krater-one need look no further than northern Thessaly for counterparts; and the potters of Vergina, like their southern neighbours, also did wheelmade decorated versions of their own handmade kantharoi and cutaway jugs. Two drinking-vessels, however, indicate direct contact with Euboea; a fine low-based skyphos with full circles, which looks like an import from that source of c. 900 B.C.; and a flat-based glazed cup with a scribble round the lip, a form otherwise known only at Lefkandi. 42 Another skyphos and another cup, both with low conical foot, may perhaps go back into the late tenth century; otherwise, the ceramic influence of the south is confined to the first half of the ninth, with no sign of any subsequent contact until well after the end of the Geometric period. 43
34 AR 1970, fig. 13.
35 On the sources of gold see GDA 313.
36 Except for three urn cremations in the late tenth century, when Athenian influence was strongest. See GDA 196.
37 See the map, BSA 61 (1966), 106 fig. 29.
38 GDA 214-15.
39 The tumulus of Halos, another northern feature, contains nothing obviously earlier than MG, and will be treated in ch. 3.
40 Here I leave out of account the intramural cists, all of which probably precede the diffusion of the northern shapes.
41 i.e., in the north, Chyretiai and Gonnos; in the Magnesian peninsula, Melea, Argalasti, and Lestiani; near the gulf of Pagasae, Sesklo and Dimini; and Ano Dranitsa, in the Pindus foothills. For bibliography see Desborough, PGP 131-2; Snodgrass, DAG 205-6. Reports of cremations in these tombs were considered untrustworthy by Heurtley and Skeat, BSA 31 (1930-31), 12.
42 See p. 40 n. 22.
43 However, remoter Macedonian centres-e.g., Chauchitsa in the Axios valley-went on imitating the pendent-semicircle skyphos with overhanging rim until well into the eighth century: see PGP 190-2 pl. 24b.
page 51
In comparison with the previous period, there is also some evidence of a decline in trade and communications within the Aegean. Around 950 B.C., Athenian Protogeometric pottery had been widely exported, and imitated in places as far distant as Marmariani, Smyrna, Miletus, and Knossos; and also in Cos and Rhodes, where the style was perhaps introduced at second hand through settlers from the Argolid. By contrast, the EG pottery of Athens was hardly exported at all, and found virtually no imitators except in the neighbouring lands-the Corinthia, the Argolid, and Boeotia. Meanwhile, Crete and the Dodecanese were left to develop their own local styles in their own ways; yet the style with the widest circulation was undoubtedly the Sub-Protogeometric of Euboea, spread abroad to Thessaly, Skyros, and the northern Cyclades, with offshoots in Macedonia and Boeotia. However little commerce there may have been elsewhere, the Euripus channel must have continued to be a busy thoroughfare for sea traffic.
pages 87-88
To judge from the only datable finds, i.e., the Atticizing wheelmade pottery (mainly skyphoi, kraters, and plates), the burials extend over about two generations, in the early and mid-eighth century. Some oinochoai are still painted in a lingering Sub-Protogeometric style, but most are undecorated and almost fully glazed. Alongside these southern Geometric forms, two northern shapes are introduced-kantharoi and cutaway jugs; both are wheelmade, undecorated, and covered with glaze. Like the pyres, cairns, and tumuli, they are new to Halos at this time. The squat form of the jugs, which usually have two warts on the shoulder, looks like a local rendering of a handmade Macedonian form. For the burial customs, no other site offers an exact parallel; but cairns with swords are found at Vitsa in the Epirus, cairns and tumuli at Chauchitsa in Macedonia while at Vergina there are tumuli with cremations-in this case in urns-and a similar range of iron weapons. So, from this accumulation of novelties at Halos it appears that a further band of northerners, men and women, made their way into the Pagasaean coastlands around 800 B.C. 29 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968190)
29 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968173)N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Macedonia i.403-4.
page 103
These exchanges may have had the effect of consolidating the unity of the Greek world; in communication with non-Greeks, however, there is not much sign of any corresponding progress. Here the most striking achievement is that of the Euboeans, who were making their first moves towards the west coast of Italy soon after 800 B.C. (p. 223 ff.); yet, nearer home, they seem to have lost interest in Macedonia. 66 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968191)And, in spite of the foundation of Al Mina, there is a curious stagnation in dealings with the Levant. Considerably fewer Levantine imports come to Greece than in the mid-ninth century, and the overt symptoms of wealth in this period are largely confined to four Attic graves, and one tholos tomb at Knossos. This recession may be partly due to reverses suffered by the most active trading powers. The merchants of Phoenicia were no doubt hampered by Assyrian depredations, followed by the hostility of the Aramaean states-although their colonial kinsmen at Kition would hardly have been affected. In Euboea there are hints of internal discord in the MG I destruction at Lefkandi, followed by the diminution of the settlement and the foundation of Eretria; and across the water, the migration of well-armed northerners to Halos may not have been propitious for Euboean trade with Thessaly. At all events, the few Greek sherds of this period from Al Mina seem to be Cycladic rather than Euboean, as are most of the other exports to the Near East. Attic pottery does not reappear there until well into MG II, and it is then that Levantine trinkets begin to reappear in Greece, probably conveyed as before in Phoenician boats. The impression that very few Greeks settled at Al Mina before 750 B.C. is confirmed by complete silence about the place in Greek tradition, which usually records the name of an oikistes, or at least the home of the founders, for any overseas settlement that could be claimed as a colony. 67 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968191)
66 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968188)A pendent-semicircle skyphos occurs in an eighth-century context at Chauchitsa in the Axios valley (BSA 26 (1925-26), 10 fig. 30); but its heavy overhanging lip suggests a local derivation from ninth-century Vergina, and not from the contemporary low-lipped form of Euboea.
67 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968188)Herodotus (iii.91) mentions a colony on the Syrian coast at Poseideion, founded by Amphilochos of Argos on this return from the Trojan War. Poseideion was once identified with Al Mina (Dunbabin, GEN 25-6); but is now more reasonably associated with Tell Basit, an emporium near by which preserves the ancient name, and where recent excavations have produced Greek pottery going back to the tenth century.
.............
Geometric Greece: 900-700 BC
Part 1
The Passing of the Dark Ages C. 900-770 B.C.
page 40
Euboea, Thessaly, Skyros, the Northern Cyclades
At the same time, a number of forms are peculiar to Thessaly, where the pottery has a mixed ancestry. These forms are best seen at Marmariani, in the north. By the beginning of the tenth century, or perhaps earlier still, an intrusive handmade ware had been introduced there, probably by immigrants from Macedonia; the three leading shapes are the beaked jug (with sloping or cutaway neck), the high-handled kantharos, and the cup with trigger handle.
A little later, perhaps c. 950 B.C., these handmade shapes were joined by a full set of wheel made forms imitating Attic Protogeometric, including a fine series of kraters lasting throughout the ninth century. It was from these Attic-inspired shapes that the Sub-Protogeometric style was evolved, in collusion with Euboea. Under this strong southern influence the handmade shapes, too, were soon reproduced on the wheel, and decorated in a hybrid Protogeometric manner (fig. 8d, e).
pages 42-43-44
In another rich grave, Toumba no. 13, the gold (fig. 10) is more substantial: 34 a curious fibula derived from the Mycenaean violin-bow type, but with an ornamental loop at the centre of the bow; a pair of more elaborate earrings composed of two tightly-packed spirals of wire, recalling the northern spectacle fibulae, or the double-spiral finger-rings from Macedonia; a pair of massive finger-rings convex in section; and a more delicate pair with double carination.
In brief: during this otherwise rather bleak period, nowhere else in the Greek world has such an abundance of gold been found. Some of the ornaments-e.g., most of the twenty-odd finger-rings-may have been specially made for the grave, since they do not look solid enough to have been worn in real life; and no goldwork, as yet, shows any obvious sign of Near Eastern sophistication; but it seems likely that the metal, at least, was imported from that direction. 35
The burial customs of Lefkandi represent a curious compromise, unparalleled elsewhere. With few exceptions, cremation was the prevailing rite, from Sub-mycenaean times until the final burials in the later ninth century. The corpse was burnt on a pyre near by, on to which some vessels, jewellery, and dress ornaments were thrown. Afterwards the cremated remains were not placed in an urn, as in Athens ; 36 instead, only a token amount of burnt bones was placed in the open grave together with the unburnt pots and personal belongings, which were sometimes placed as though round an inhumed body. The graves themselves had at first been cists; but from the late tenth century onwards it was enough to dig a simple rectangular shaft in the rock, usually closed with cover slabs resting on ledges.
As one might expect, the main concentration of Early Iron Age sites in Euboea lies in the central plain, dominated at this time by Chalcis and Lefkandi. But a recent survey has shown that there was also a scatter of coastal sites at or near the north-western cape of the island. 37 These would have served as staging-posts on the busy sea route leading from central Euboea into the landlocked gulf of Pagasae and the port of Iolcos.
Thessaly is too large a region to show any uniformity of culture or burial practices. Indeed, two quite independent traditions can be distinguished during the Dark Ages, flourishing at first in different parts of the country. 38 In the south, and especially within the gulf of Pagasae, relations with Euboea had been established well back in the eleventh century. Euboean influence is seen in the entire sequence of wheelmade Protogeometric pottery at Iolcos; and probably also in the adoption there of cist graves with single burials, although the rite preferred in Thessaly was always inhumation, as opposed to cremation at Lefkandi.
In the extreme north, meanwhile, the tholos tomb was the rule, designed for multiple inhumations. The pottery, in the. first instance, was all handmade, in shapes of Macedonian origin; hence it is reasonable to assume that emigrants from Macedonia were among the first incumbents, although the actual form of the tombs must have been inherited from a local Mycenaean tradition. The most informative of these northern sites is Marmariani, where the architecture and contents of six small tholoi have been published in full. A local alternative to the tholos was the rock-cut chamber tomb; at Homolion, still further north, five such tombs have been found as against only one tholos, but all contained multiple inhumations as at Marmariani.
By the middle of the tenth century we have already learned from the pottery that these two traditions had begun to mingle with one another; first the southern wheelmade shapes were copied by the northern potters, who then proceeded to make their own handmade shapes on the wheel, and-in the early ninth century-decorate them in a hybrid manner (fig. 8); meanwhile the northern shapes appear in southern Thessaly, both in handmade and wheelmade form. We must now enquire how far the contemporary burial practices show a similar fusion between north and south.
(diameter 1.60m.) resembling a miniature northern tholos. 39 At Pherae, 15km. inland from the gulf, there are no signs of northern influence in the Geometric cemetery of some forty cists; but an early ninth-century skyphos combines the shape of the Euboean pendent-semicircle variety with the decoration of crosshatched squares characteristic of the northern handmade kantharos.
We have yet to consider Iolcos, the most important site of all, and the most puzzling. A series of forty Protogeometric cists, all with child inhumations, has been excavated within the settlement, coming to an end well before 900 B.C. The latest probably overlap by a few decades the first burials in a tholos tomb at Kapakli near by-a tomb which was to accumulate seventy adult incumbents within the next four centuries. The local custom, so it seems, was to bury children inside the walls, and adults outside. Yet it is hard to accept the tholos as belonging to the local tradition, seeing that two adult cist-burials, of early ninthcentury date, have been discovered at Nea Ionia, less than 2km away from Iolcos; furthermore, the Nea Ionia cists are lacking in the northern pottery shapes, of which there is an abundance in the Kapakli tholos. 40 In view of the other signs of intrusive northern practices in the Pagasae region, perhaps the Kapakli tholos belonged to an immigrant northern clan, who came peacefully to settle in Iolcos, attracted, perhaps, by the greater opportunities there for dealing with the outside world.
From the published evidence, then, one gets the impression of frequent exchanges between north and south Thessaly between 950 and 850 B.C. To begin with, a sophisticated repertoire of Protogeometric shapes was introduced to the north under southern influence. At a later stage some northern forms, handmade and wheelmade, spread to the south; perhaps in the wake of northern immigrants, if we are correct in thinking that the tholos tombs of the north are the oldest in Iron Age Thessaly. Unfortunately, many more of these tholoi cannot yet be precisely dated, since their allegedly 'Geometric' contents have never been published. 41
The rich and extensive tumulus cemetery of Vergina in Macedonia lies beyond the geographical frontiers of this book, except for its exchanges with the Aegean world to the south. In a land where handmade pottery was the rule, the sudden appearance of a local wheelmade fabric, Sub-Protogeometric in its shapes and decoration, must be a sign of southern cultural influence. For most of these wheelmade shapes-low-based skyphoi with pendent semicircles, trefoil-lipped oinochoai, amphoriskoi, and a krater-one need look no further than northern Thessaly for counterparts; and the potters of Vergina, like their southern neighbours, also did wheelmade decorated versions of their own handmade kantharoi and cutaway jugs. Two drinking-vessels, however, indicate direct contact with Euboea; a fine low-based skyphos with full circles, which looks like an import from that source of c. 900 B.C.; and a flat-based glazed cup with a scribble round the lip, a form otherwise known only at Lefkandi. 42 Another skyphos and another cup, both with low conical foot, may perhaps go back into the late tenth century; otherwise, the ceramic influence of the south is confined to the first half of the ninth, with no sign of any subsequent contact until well after the end of the Geometric period. 43
34 AR 1970, fig. 13.
35 On the sources of gold see GDA 313.
36 Except for three urn cremations in the late tenth century, when Athenian influence was strongest. See GDA 196.
37 See the map, BSA 61 (1966), 106 fig. 29.
38 GDA 214-15.
39 The tumulus of Halos, another northern feature, contains nothing obviously earlier than MG, and will be treated in ch. 3.
40 Here I leave out of account the intramural cists, all of which probably precede the diffusion of the northern shapes.
41 i.e., in the north, Chyretiai and Gonnos; in the Magnesian peninsula, Melea, Argalasti, and Lestiani; near the gulf of Pagasae, Sesklo and Dimini; and Ano Dranitsa, in the Pindus foothills. For bibliography see Desborough, PGP 131-2; Snodgrass, DAG 205-6. Reports of cremations in these tombs were considered untrustworthy by Heurtley and Skeat, BSA 31 (1930-31), 12.
42 See p. 40 n. 22.
43 However, remoter Macedonian centres-e.g., Chauchitsa in the Axios valley-went on imitating the pendent-semicircle skyphos with overhanging rim until well into the eighth century: see PGP 190-2 pl. 24b.
page 51
In comparison with the previous period, there is also some evidence of a decline in trade and communications within the Aegean. Around 950 B.C., Athenian Protogeometric pottery had been widely exported, and imitated in places as far distant as Marmariani, Smyrna, Miletus, and Knossos; and also in Cos and Rhodes, where the style was perhaps introduced at second hand through settlers from the Argolid. By contrast, the EG pottery of Athens was hardly exported at all, and found virtually no imitators except in the neighbouring lands-the Corinthia, the Argolid, and Boeotia. Meanwhile, Crete and the Dodecanese were left to develop their own local styles in their own ways; yet the style with the widest circulation was undoubtedly the Sub-Protogeometric of Euboea, spread abroad to Thessaly, Skyros, and the northern Cyclades, with offshoots in Macedonia and Boeotia. However little commerce there may have been elsewhere, the Euripus channel must have continued to be a busy thoroughfare for sea traffic.
pages 87-88
To judge from the only datable finds, i.e., the Atticizing wheelmade pottery (mainly skyphoi, kraters, and plates), the burials extend over about two generations, in the early and mid-eighth century. Some oinochoai are still painted in a lingering Sub-Protogeometric style, but most are undecorated and almost fully glazed. Alongside these southern Geometric forms, two northern shapes are introduced-kantharoi and cutaway jugs; both are wheelmade, undecorated, and covered with glaze. Like the pyres, cairns, and tumuli, they are new to Halos at this time. The squat form of the jugs, which usually have two warts on the shoulder, looks like a local rendering of a handmade Macedonian form. For the burial customs, no other site offers an exact parallel; but cairns with swords are found at Vitsa in the Epirus, cairns and tumuli at Chauchitsa in Macedonia while at Vergina there are tumuli with cremations-in this case in urns-and a similar range of iron weapons. So, from this accumulation of novelties at Halos it appears that a further band of northerners, men and women, made their way into the Pagasaean coastlands around 800 B.C. 29 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968190)
29 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968173)N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Macedonia i.403-4.
page 103
These exchanges may have had the effect of consolidating the unity of the Greek world; in communication with non-Greeks, however, there is not much sign of any corresponding progress. Here the most striking achievement is that of the Euboeans, who were making their first moves towards the west coast of Italy soon after 800 B.C. (p. 223 ff.); yet, nearer home, they seem to have lost interest in Macedonia. 66 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968191)And, in spite of the foundation of Al Mina, there is a curious stagnation in dealings with the Levant. Considerably fewer Levantine imports come to Greece than in the mid-ninth century, and the overt symptoms of wealth in this period are largely confined to four Attic graves, and one tholos tomb at Knossos. This recession may be partly due to reverses suffered by the most active trading powers. The merchants of Phoenicia were no doubt hampered by Assyrian depredations, followed by the hostility of the Aramaean states-although their colonial kinsmen at Kition would hardly have been affected. In Euboea there are hints of internal discord in the MG I destruction at Lefkandi, followed by the diminution of the settlement and the foundation of Eretria; and across the water, the migration of well-armed northerners to Halos may not have been propitious for Euboean trade with Thessaly. At all events, the few Greek sherds of this period from Al Mina seem to be Cycladic rather than Euboean, as are most of the other exports to the Near East. Attic pottery does not reappear there until well into MG II, and it is then that Levantine trinkets begin to reappear in Greece, probably conveyed as before in Phoenician boats. The impression that very few Greeks settled at Al Mina before 750 B.C. is confirmed by complete silence about the place in Greek tradition, which usually records the name of an oikistes, or at least the home of the founders, for any overseas settlement that could be claimed as a colony. 67 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968191)
66 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968188)A pendent-semicircle skyphos occurs in an eighth-century context at Chauchitsa in the Axios valley (BSA 26 (1925-26), 10 fig. 30); but its heavy overhanging lip suggests a local derivation from ninth-century Vergina, and not from the contemporary low-lipped form of Euboea.
67 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107968188)Herodotus (iii.91) mentions a colony on the Syrian coast at Poseideion, founded by Amphilochos of Argos on this return from the Trojan War. Poseideion was once identified with Al Mina (Dunbabin, GEN 25-6); but is now more reasonably associated with Tell Basit, an emporium near by which preserves the ancient name, and where recent excavations have produced Greek pottery going back to the tenth century.
.............