Field Notes from the Aegean: Mountains, Sea and Sand

From the Field Journal of Dr. Nadia Haddad

1June 3. From the dig house I can see why the ancient Greeks lived in so many separate city-states. Ridges of rocky mountains cut the land into small valleys and coastal plains. Historians estimate that only about one-fifth of Greece's land could be farmed. Our site, a hill town from about 500 BCE, sits on a plain about 20 miles across, with mountains on three sides and the sea on the fourth.

2June 5. Today we found pieces of amphorae, tall clay jars used to ship oil and wine. Their shapes and stamps show they were made on at least three different islands. The Aegean Sea is crowded with islands, so a sailor was seldom out of sight of land for long. Most ships sailed between spring and early fall, when the weather was calmer.

3June 8. A grain puzzle. The soil here is thin and rocky, good for olive trees and grapevines but poor for wheat. Yet seeds from the town's storerooms show that people ate plenty of grain. Ancient writers tell us that Athens brought in much of its wheat by sea from lands around the Black Sea and from Egypt, paying with olive oil, wine, pottery and silver.

4June 11. Goods were not the only things the sea carried. Between about 750 and 550 BCE, many city-states sent groups of their people across the sea to found colonies along the coasts of southern Italy, Sicily, southern France and the Black Sea. The colonists spoke Greek and honored Greek gods, but most colonies governed themselves.

5June 14. Neighboring city-states often fought over the borderlands between their valleys. Yet the same landscape could help defenders. In 480 BCE, a small Greek force led by the Spartan king Leonidas held the narrow pass of Thermopylae for three days against a much larger Persian army. A few weeks later, a Greek fleet in which Athens supplied the largest share of ships beat the Persian navy in the narrow strait beside the island of Salamis.

6June 16. An email came from my colleague Dr. Wen, who is digging near Khotan, an oasis on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in western China: "Here the desert does what your mountains do. Caravans could not cross the open sand, so they traveled from oasis to oasis around its edges. Towns grew wherever there was water, and they grew rich from the traders who had to stop there."