Who ruled Miletus?

Miletus was a Greek port city on Anatolia's west coast, close to where the Maeander River reaches the sea, in what is now Aydın province, Turkey. In the seventh and sixth centuries BC it was among the richest cities of the Greek world, mother city of dozens of colonies around the Black Sea and home to the first Greek philosophers. The river that made its fortune eventually destroyed it: silt filled the bay, and the ruins now stand some ten kilometres from the sea.

Neolithic people lived on the small islands that then lay off the coast. Minoan settlers or traders were present from around 2000 BC, which fits the ancient legend that colonists from Crete founded the city. From about 1450 BC Miletus was a Mycenaean stronghold, probably the town that Hittite texts call Millawanda. Around 1320 BC it backed a rebellion in nearby Arzawa, and the Hittite king Mursili sent troops who burned part of it. Later Hittite letters describe it under a governor answering to Ahhiyawa, a power usually linked with Mycenaean Greece, and then under the control of the Hittites. During the Bronze Age collapse the city was burned again, presumably by the Sea Peoples.

According to legend, Ionian settlers led by Neleus, a son of the last king of Athens, took the town during the Dark Ages, killing its men and marrying their Carian widows. Miletus became one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League. In the late seventh century BC its tyrant Thrasybulus held off the kingdom of Lydia through a twelve-year war. By the sixth century the city had built a maritime network of colonies, mostly around the Black Sea; Pliny the Elder credited it with more than 90, including Sinope and Olbia. In the same period Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, the so-called Milesian school, sought natural rather than mythical explanations of the world.

After Croesus of Lydia fell to Cyrus of Persia in the mid-sixth century, Miletus came under the Achaemenid Empire. In 499 BC its tyrant Aristagoras led the Ionian Revolt. The forces of Darius the Great crushed it at the naval Battle of Lade in 494 BC and took Miletus; according to ancient accounts the men were killed and the women and children enslaved. In Athens the playwright Phrynichus was fined for staging a tragedy on the city's fall.

The Greek victory of 479 BC freed Miletus. It was rebuilt on the regular street grid associated with the Milesian planner Hippodamus, which later served as a model for Hellenistic and Roman new towns. The Peace of Antalcidas returned the Ionian cities to Persia in 387 BC, and Miletus never recovered its naval supremacy. Alexander the Great took the city by siege in 334 BC, and in this period its walls enclosed some 90 hectares, the largest area in its history.

Alexander's successors fought over the city. It passed through the hands of Asander, Antigonus I and his son Demetrius, and Lysimachus, then to the Seleucids after 281 BC and to Ptolemy II of Egypt in 279 BC, remaining under Egyptian influence until the end of the third century.

Allied with Rome, Miletus became part of the province of Asia in 133 BC, and most of the monuments visible today date from the Roman period. Around 57 AD the apostle Paul met there with the elders of the Ephesian church. New walls were built in 262, but the harbour was silting up, and by the time Justinian rebuilt the walls in 538 it was a small town. In the Byzantine centuries it was a bishop's seat with a small castle, the Palation, on a hill beside the city.

Turks first took Miletus in the late thirteenth century; the Byzantines briefly won it back in 1294 or 1295, but by the fourteenth century it was in Turkish hands for good and traded with Venice through its port. The Ilyas Bey mosque complex was built in 1403. Under the Ottoman Empire the harbour finally silted up and the town was abandoned.

The French archaeologist Olivier Rayet dug at Miletus in 1873, and German excavations under Theodor Wiegand and others followed from 1899; the work is now run by the Ruhr University Bochum. The Market Gate of Miletus was moved to Berlin and rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum, while the main local collection is in the Miletus Museum at Didim.