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Greek city of Miletos in Ionia
ARCHAIC ISSUE
Electrum (Gold/Silver Alloy) 1/12 stater or hemihecte 7mm (1.11 grams) Milesian standard.
Struck circa 600-550 B.C.
Reference: SNG Kayhan 444-448. SNG von Aulock -. SNG Copenhagen -.
Certification: NGC Ancients
VF 5747281-007
Forepart of lion right with extended foreleg.
Quatrefoil incuse with stellate pattern.
A settlement of great antiquity, Miletos was the southernmost of the twelve cities of the Ionian confederacy. It was also one of the earliest mints, though its prosperity was greatly curtailed following the defeat of the Ionian revolt against Persia, early in the 5th century B.C. It was the mother-city of the many famous colonies, including Abydos, Kyzikos, Sinope and Pantikapaion.
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Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria and later Ionia. Its ruins are located near the modern village of Balat in Aydın Province, Turkey. Before the Persian invasion in the middle of the 6th century BC, Miletus was considered the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities. In other sources however it is mentioned that the city was much more modest up until the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), when, for example, the city state of Samos on the island of Samos opposite Miletus was considered a larger and more important city and harbor at the time. Miletus’ greatest wealth and splendor was reached during the Hellenistic era (323-30 BC) and later Roman times.
Evidence of first settlement at the site has been made inaccessible by the rise of sea level and deposition of sediments from the Maeander. The first available evidence is of the Neolithic. In the early and middle Bronze age the settlement came under Minoan influence. Legend has it that an influx of Cretans occurred displacing the indigenous Leleges. The site was renamed Miletus after a place in Crete.
The Late Bronze Age, 13th century BC, saw the arrival of Luwian language speakers from south central Anatolia calling themselves the Carians. Later in that century other Greeks arrived. The city at that time rebelled against the Hittite Empire. After the fall of that empire the city was destroyed in the 12th century BC and starting about 1000 BC was resettled extensively by the Ionian Greeks. Legend offers an Ionian foundation event sponsored by a founder named Neleus from the Peloponnesus.
The Greek Dark Ages were a time of Ionian settlement and consolidation in an alliance called the Ionian League. The Archaic Period of Greece began with a sudden and brilliant flash of art and philosophy on the coast of Anatolia. In the 6th century BC, Miletus was the site of origin of the Greek philosophical (and scientific) tradition, when Thales, followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes (known collectively, to modern scholars, as the Milesian School) began to speculate about the material constitution of the world, and to propose speculative naturalistic (as opposed to traditional, supernatural) explanations for various natural phenomena.
Miletus is the birthplace of the Hagia Sophia’s architect (and inventor of the flying buttress) Isidore of Miletus and Thales, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (and one of the Seven Sages of Greece) in c. 624 BC.
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