1. introduction · one kind or the other attesting to fortiﬁcation in or before late classical...

1. INTRODUCTION

City walls are a prominent part of the archaeologicalrecord in the ancient Greek world and it is not anexaggeration to classify them as the most commonlyattested type of ancient Greek monumental architecture.1

Their ubiquitous presence reflects the importance ofwarfare in ancient Greece from Archaic to Hellenistictimes,2 since in these periods the situation as a rule wasone of war rather than of peace for many poleis.3 Citywalls belong to the category of public architecture4 andmust have constituted the most expensive and laboriousundertaking for the communities that built them. Theywere the most substantial monuments of the cities they

enclosed, as they occupied a considerable amount ofspace and were constructed of thousands of tons ofclay, soil, stone, or wood.5 City walls remained a prom-inent architectural feature of Greek cities far into Romantimes, wherever Greek cities retained a position of eco-nomic and military significance in the Empire.6

At Akragas, Athens, Corinth, Gela, Hipponion, Meta-pontion, Megalopolis, Olynthos, and Phigaleia (Fig. 1), aswell as literally hundreds of other poleis, remains of citywalls are still standing or have been detected by excav-ation or other archaeological methods.7 The majority ofthese walls date from the Classical and Hellenistic

1 Müller-Wiener, Bauwesen, 171; Winter, x; Morgan and Coulton, ‘Physical Polis’, 105; Camp, ‘Walls’, 41; Lawrence, Architecture5, 173–4.2 Y. Garlan, Guerre et économie en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1989), 12–15.3 J.-P. Vernant, Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1968), 10; P. Ducrey, Guerre et guerriers dans la Grèce antique (Paris 1985), 9;

V. D. Hanson, The Western Way of War, Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (London 1989), 219; V. D. Hanson,Warfare and Agriculture in ClassicalGreece2 (Berkeley 1998), 1; M. H. Hansen, ‘Introduction’, in M. H. Hansen (ed.), The Imaginary Polis (Copenhagen 2005), 20.

4 In a handful of cases, always in connection with gates, gods are known to have been protectors of a city wall. This does not, however, transfer citywalls to the category of religious architecture. See Catalogue entries on Stagiros and Thasos phase 2.

5 It is, accordingly, no surprise that Aristotle hints at the aesthetic potential in the architecture of city walls (Pol. 7.10.8): �N �c ��F�� å�Ø �e��æ��, �På ‹�Ø ��åÅ �� æØ�ºÅ��, Iººa ŒÆd ��ø� KØ��ºÅ�� ‹ø� ŒÆd æe� Œ�� åfi Å �fi B �º�Ø æ��ø� ŒÆd æe� �a� �º��ØŒa�åæ�Æ�, Œ�º ‘If then this is so, not only must walls be put round a city, but also attention must be paid to them in order that they may be suitableboth in regard to the adornment of the city and in respect of military requirements, etc.’ (tr. Racham, Loeb). The Iliad is full of examplesattesting to the fact that the aesthetic qualities of walls mattered already in ‘the old days’, see below, Chap. 3.

6 The takeover by the Romans from c.150 BC changed this picture dramatically on a regional level, as walls of resisting poleis were torn down,Camp, ‘Walls’, 50. See below pp. 45–6 for examples of Roman destruction of numerous Greek city walls in the period following the Romanconquest of the Greek mainland. The widely retained self-governance of Greek poleis in the Roman Empire did not include the right to erectfortification walls without the blessing of the Roman masters, and walls were to a great extent unnecessary because of the Pax Romana, Lawrence,Aims, 111.

7 Winter, xi; Morgan and Coulton, ‘Physical Polis’, 105: ‘We will begin with walls [i.e. city walls] as the feature most commonly observed even atsites where very little else is visible or investigated . . . ’ Cf. Morgan and Coulton, ‘Physical Polis’, 106, on C5l. On the entire period before Hellenistictimes see Hansen and Nielsen, 135–7, summing up the evidence from the inventory as follows: 261 of 459 securely identified poleis have evidence ofone kind or the other attesting to fortification in or before late Classical times. See also Hansen, ‘Introduction’, in Hansen and Nielsen, at 33–40,where city walls of Greek poleis are listed with basic information on chronology and topography. For a discussion of unwalled poleis see below,pp. 25–6, 30.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/3/2011, SPi

periods.8 In addition, numerous references in writtensources attest to their existence,9 either directly by theuse of technical architectural terms, of which the mostcommon is ��Eå��, or indirectly, by describing a siege of acity — in ancient Greek �ºØ�æŒÆ.10

Because of the mass of evidence from Classical andlater times, it is generally held that the towns andcities11 of the Greek world were not normally sur-rounded by defensive walls before the early fifth centuryBC.12 Fortification walls have indeed been noted among

8 e.g. Lawrence, Architecture5, 174. A high number of city walls is also listed in indices of Winter; Leriche and Tréziny, Fortification; Miller,Befestigungsanlagen.

9 From the histories of Herodotos, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Diodorus Siculus, it can be observed that more than 250 Greek poleis werefortified before 300 BC. For a treatment of some of the references in Thucydides, see Ducrey, ‘Fortifications’, 133–42, and Lawrence, Aims, 53–61. Fora selection from various authors see Ducrey, ‘Muraille’, 249, and below, Chap. 3. A complete list of urban fortification walls found at poleis from theArchaic and Classical periods is offered in a separate index in Hansen and Nielsen, 1368–75.

10 These two central terms are discussed in detail below, Chap. 3.11 No established distinction exists between ‘town’ and ‘city’ in scholarship on the ancient world. The two terms are used synonymously in this

book unless otherwise stated. For a brief general discussion mainly on the post-antique western world, see M. H. Hansen, ‘The Concepts of City-State and City-State Culture’, in M. H. Hansen (ed.), A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (Copenhagen 2000), 11–34, at 25.

12 Pessimistic views on the prevalence of city walls in the Archaic period: C. G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800–500B.C. (Oxford 1977), 99–100; Kolb, Stadt, 128–9; Snodgrass, ‘Archaeology’, 9; Ducrey, ‘Muraille’, 248, 254; Miller, Befestigungsanlagen, 185; Lang,Siedlungen, 54; F. Lang, ‘House-Community-Settlement: The New Concept of Living in Archaic Greece’, in Westgate et al. (eds.), BuildingCommunities; OCD3 s.v. Urbanism (R. Osborne); Morgan and Coulton, ‘Physical Polis’, 105–6; Schilardi, ‘Emergence Paros’, 244 (for the view thattowns on the Greek mainland with circuits occupying an extensive territory developed in C6); J. D. Tracy, ‘To Wall or Not to Wall: Evidence fromMedieval Germany’, in Tracy (ed.), City Walls, 71–87, at 72. See also R. Brock, ‘The Tribute of Karystos’, EchCl 40 n.s. 15 (1996), 357–70, at 364, forthe view that Karystos is one of the few cities attested in literary sources as having fortifications in the Archaic period. Hölscher, Öffentliche Räume,67, believes that the role of the wall in the concept of the early Greek city has yet to be clarified. Full discussion below, Chap. 8.

F IG . 1. Phigaleia, trace of Classical walls (city-side on right hand side of wall).

2 I N T R O D U C T I O N


the remains of Early Iron Age settlements,13 but they havenot been thought to form a significant amount of themonumental architectural output of that era. Even forthe late Archaic period, fortifications have not beenregarded as a normal element of the urban centre of thepolis, and the walls do not therefore feature as a constitu-ent element of the early polis in modern scholarly litera-ture.14 In recent years, however, archaeological researchhas uncovered so much new evidence that a new appraisalof the importance of Archaic city walls is called for. Asignificant number of walls have been dated by stratifiedpottery finds and the literary evidence is also impressive,suggesting that the pessimistic view that relatively fewcities were walled in pre-Classical times must now berevised. In other words, their prevalence in earlier periodsmay have been much underestimated.

AIMS

The marshalling of the evidence for Early Iron Agesettlement fortifications and Archaic city walls, and adiscussion of their importance, constitute the mainfocus of this book. The evidence is collected in a Cata-logue (pp. 121–200), 132 sites with walls arranged alpha-betically. It presents the evidence for fortifications before480/79 BC,15 and a capital letter (A, B, or C) following thetoponym indicates the nature of the evidence: A areremains of fortifications dated by external archaeologicalevidence, mainly stratified pottery found in relation tostructures; B are remains of fortification walls dated bymasonry style, or other less secure means; C are pre-Classical fortification walls mentioned in literary sources.The assembled data will serve first of all to substantiate

the claim that Archaic Greek poleis were normally forti-fied.16 Next the material will be used to describe andanalyse the architecture of fortification walls and itsdevelopment from the beginnings in the Early Iron Age

through the Archaic period to the PersianWars of 480/79BC. There are numerous difficulties in matters of inter-pretation of the sources, and these areas of research touchupon highly controversial topics. The remains of Archaiccities themselves, for example, are generally very poorand an inevitable question is what the attested wallsactually encircled. Some fortified sites are clearly toosmall to be classed as even small towns, and some ofthem were probably second-order settlements, and thusnot poleis. Indeed, to speak of city walls as a general andwidespread phenomenon in the Archaic period requires,in the first place, the positive identification of a highnumber of actual cities at this point in Greek history.This question is linked with an even more controversialissue, that is, the emergence and character of the earlypolis. A major aim of this book is to provide answers tothese questions, or at least contribute to the scholarlydebate, by investigating the role city walls may haveplayed in the development of the early polis.

RESEARCH HISTORY

To establish at what point in history cities as a rule werefortified, has been on the agenda ever since the firstgeneral studies on ancient Greek urbanization appeared.In his Griechische Städteanlagen,17 A. von Gerkan no-ticed that fortification of cities is more frequently men-tioned during the second half of the sixth century, but atthe same time he was sceptical about there being a highnumber of walled cities even after the Persian Wars of480/79.18 In the only previous monograph on Archaiccity walls, Griechische Stadtbefestigungen19 A. Wokalekmaintains that ‘walls begin to appear’ in Archaic times.She further notes that the earliest fortifications on theGreek mainland appeared in the seventh century, thatthe number increases strikingly in the course of thesixth century, and finally, that city walls became a typical

13 An early summing-up of the evidence in Nicholls, ‘Old Smyrna’, 114–20.14 Snodgrass, ‘Archaeology’, 9; Ducrey, ‘Muraille’, 254; Hansen, ‘Urban Centre’, 52. For the view that the wall is in fact a constituent of the

polis see Camp, ‘Walls’, 51.15 Sites not included in the Catalogue are footnoted; site names followed by ‘(Cat.)’ are included in the Catalogue.16 I use the definition of the Greek polis as proposed by the Copenhagen Polis Centre, which is basically a town which was the centre of a self-

governing political community. Any settlement called a polis by the ancient Greeks themselves would essentially meet these criteria, Hansen, ‘LexHafniensis’, 7–72, esp. 12–14, and references to localities and their status as poleis follow the registration of the 1034 poleis published in Hansen andNielsen.

17 (Berlin and Leipzig 1924). 18 Gerkan, Städteanlagen, 19–23. 19 (Bonn 1973).

I N T R O D U C T I O N 3


feature of Greek cities in the fifth century.20 According toF. Lang’sArchaische Siedlungen in Griechenland, the city wallwas not a standard feature of the pre-Classical city,21 andpessimistic views on the prevalence of city walls in the laterArchaic period22 are expressed by for example P. Ducrey,who is sceptical about the existence of walls in the seventhand sixth centuries in Greece proper, as well as in theWest inthe seventh century.23 A. M. Snodgrass is doubtful about thelargemainland sites,24 and seems to have had sites like Argos,Athens, and Corinth inmind.25 R. Osborne is sceptical aboutthe existence of fortified settlements in the Greek worldgenerally in the eighth and seventh centuries.26 M. H. Han-sen comments on the astonishing discrepancy between theseviews on the one hand, and on the other, the great role citywalls play in Greek literature of the same epoch.27 Thisobservation has been the primary inspiration for the investi-gation presented in this book. Hansen’s own opinion is thatmost poleis were not walled around 600 BC.28 This may havebeen the case, although the evidence that walls existed fromthe seventh century is impressive, as will be discussed below.A. W. Lawrence29 is generally sceptical about early fortifica-tions in Sicily, and he accepts an early date only for a handfulof the walls, which, as it happens, were probably not olderthan the sixth century.30 Lawrence, however, sees the westernwalls — the ones which he accepts — as evidence for adevelopment that also affected the Greek homeland but isnot so well attested here as in the West.

Interest in city wall architecture can be traced at leastas far back as the first half of the fifteenth century AD,

with Cyriacos of Ancona’s visit to Eretria in 1436 and hisrecords of the city walls.31 In the nineteenth century, theera of the philhellenes, an important example of interestin walls and masonry styles is W. Gell’s The Itinerary ofGreece.32 Like other scholars of the time, Gell used theterm ‘Cyclopian walls’ for Mycenaean masonry, a terminspired by the ancient legends surrounding their ori-gin.33 His work is remarkable for its interest in establish-ing a relative chronology based on type of constructionand its concern for the problems connected with thedescription of polygonal (not Mycenaean) masonry,problems that constitute a serious obstacle for the studyof city walls to this day. He accompanies the publicationof drawings of walls from the acropolis of Argos (Larissa)with the following comment: ‘The sketches are given,because it is impossible to describe the style of buildingso as to give any idea of its real effect; for the earlymasonry of Greece differs most materially from thedrystone walls of other countries, yet in a mannerwhich cannot be explained without a drawing’ (p. 148).

E.Dodwell34 is another authorwho took an early interest inmasonry styles and their possible chronological significance,35

but his book is important mainly as an illustrative documentof city wall masonry styles and the state of preservation of anumber of walls in early nineteenth-century Greece and Italy.

City walls remained of interest throughout thenineteenth century36 and into the twentieth, when thestudy of the ancient world became more systematizedand specialized. The establishing of typologies based on

20 Stadtbefestigungen, 23–5. Wokalek lists 51 fortified sites from the Archaic period. The observation that Archaic city walls are found morefrequently in Sicily than in south Italy has to be balanced against the higher number of Archaic poleis in Sicily compared to Italy, 22 against 17. Inthe investigation conducted by the Copenhagen Polis Centre, the numbers including later foundations are Italy 22 and Sicily 46, Hansen andNielsen, nos. 5–51 (Sicily) and 52–74 (Italy).

21 Lang, Siedlungen, 54. F. Lang, ‘House-Community-Settlement: The New Concept of Living in Archaic Greece’, in Westgate at al. (eds.),Building Communities, 183–93.

22 Above, n. 12.23 See ibid. See, however, P. Ducrey,Warfare in Ancient Greece (New York 1986), 146, for the view that the higher prevalence of Classical walls in

relation to Archaic ones could be influenced by different conditions of preservation.24 n. 12, above. 25 ‘Historical Significance’, 126. 26 n. 12, above. 27 Hansen, ‘Urban Centre’, 52.28 ‘Hellenic Polis’, 160. 29 Aims, 34 with n. 55.30 Akragas, Leontinoi, Metapontion, Naxos in Sicily phase 2 and Selinous. See Chap. 7 and entries for these cities in the Catalogue.31 Parts of the walls of Eretria were drawn on 5 Apr. 1436, see P. Auberson, ‘Note sur Cyriaque d’Ancone’, AK (1967.1), 57.32 (London 1810).33 Gell, Itinerary, 152–3, and ‘Argolid plates’ 7–17; Loader, Masonry, 1. For the tradition in the ancient literature, see Apollodoros 2.2.1, Strabo

8.6.2, 11, and Pausanias 2.16.5–6, 2.25.8.34 E. Dodwell, Views and Descriptions of Cyclopian or Pelasgic Remains in Greece and Italy (London 1835).35 Dodwell and Gell travelled in Greece in the years 1801–6, also together, but Gell’s book (1810) was published before Dodwell’s (1835).36 W. M. Leake, Travels in the Morea, vol. 2 (London 1830), pl. 6 (plan of Argos with indication of walls observed and estimate of the

remaining traces). In Italy the earliest studies of walls date from C17l, but the walls are from houses and temples, see Miller, Befestigungsanlagen,1 with refs.



masonry style, begun in the nineteenth century, culmin-ated around the middle of the twentieth with the mono-graph Greek Walls by R. L. Scranton37 a study onmasonry styles not restricted to ancient Greek fortifica-tion walls, but to walls as such. A synthetic study with adetailed presentation of all major aspects of city walls didnot appear until 1971 with the publication of F. Winter’sGreek Fortifications, a highly comprehensive and all-embracing study, which still remains the principal workin the field of ancient Greek fortification studies.Descriptions of fortifications in reference books on

Greek architecture tend to be minimal. The importanceof city walls is stressed, but even so the subject is treatedonly in passing.38 This tendency is in keeping with thetraditional perception of Greek architecture as the historyof the architectural orders and the ornamentation ofmainly religious architecture, above all temples. Thisagain goes back to the rediscovery of ancient architecturein the Renaissance, which concentrated on the aestheticqualities of (temple) architecture. The adoption of theorders as ornaments in European architecture since theRenaissance has only emphasized the focus on temples.39

Greek and Roman city walls did indeed play a role in thedebate on city fortification from the Renaissance on-wards,40 and it is perhaps the disappearance of city wallsfrommodern Europe in the nineteenth century which is toblame for the lack of interest in Greek walls in scholarshipof the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth.However, the coverage given in some recent referenceworks seems to be a sign of shifting interests, and futurestudies are likely to reassess the importance not only of

city walls, but also of the entire category of non-religiousarchitecture.41

From the very beginning of scholarly interest, the viewthat the walls belong to the category of military architec-ture has prevailed. That this aspect of city walls hasdominated almost entirely42 does seem strange, however,given the fact that city walls were highly significant formany other aspects of everyday life in ancient Greekcities. The study of the civic aspects of city walls in facthas much to offer social and economic studies of theancient Greek world.43

A number of studies devoted to pre-Classical fortifi-cation in general, or to aspects of the topic, have furth-ered our knowledge of city walls considerably.44

However, they fall short of expectations in two ways.(1) No study has as yet presented all the archaeologicalevidence from the entire Greek world.45 This is of par-ticular importance, since a comprehensive view of allsources is the only way to identify basic trends in thearchitecture and to understand the socio-political sig-nificance of the city wall in the period. Thus, a studymust include material from Greece, Asia Minor,Cyprus, Magna Graecia, Sicily, Kyrenaika, and theBlack Sea coast. (2) To date no study has made serioususe of the literary sources, either the Archaic or theClassical, which retrospectively illuminate aspects ofcity walls in Archaic times. In order to get as completea picture as possible of the character and significance ofthe city wall in the Archaic period, all relevant informa-tion, literary as well as archaeological, must be taken intoconsideration.

37 (Cambridge, Mass. 1941).38 In W. B. Dinsmoor, The Architecture of Ancient Greece3 (London and Sydney 1975), the lemma ‘Greek fortification’ (in the index of

subjects) will only take the reader to the bibliography. In the more recently updated work Lawrence, Architecture5, 173, this undeserved low prioritygiven to city walls is partly rectified by a brief general treatment. Müller-Wiener, Bauwesen, 170–2, acknowledges the enormous number ofwalls and their early significance, but still only offers a two-page account. Fortifications are mentioned briefly in the entry architecture inOCD3 (R. A. Tomlinson). In the CAH2 Archaic fortifications are grouped with the non-monumental material culture (Boardman, ‘MaterialCulture’, 442–61).

39 e.g. R. A. Tomlinson,Greek Sanctuaries (London 1976), 16; Scranton,Walls, 3. See Chap. 3 for further documentation of interest in walls in C18and C19 AD.

40 e.g. M. Dögen, L’Architecture militaire moderne ou Fortification: confirmée par diverses histoires tant anciennes que nouvelles, & enrichiedes Figures des principales Forteresses qui sont en l’Europe (Amsterdam 1648).

41 e.g. the following quote, G. R. H. Wright, Ancient Building Technology, vol. 1. Historical Background (Leiden 2000), 89: ‘From this it canbe seen that Classical Greek monumental building was not confined in expression to religious architecture (as might be said of Egyptianmonumental building). It was sufficiently versatile to express other functional plans (e.g. meeting places and, above all, fortifications).’

42 Marsden, Artillery; Garlan, Poliorcétique; Lawrence, Aims; J.-P. Adam, L’Architecture militaire grecque (Paris 1982); van de Maele andFossey (eds.), Fortificationes Antiquae.

43 J. J. Coulton, ‘General Introduction’, in Sakellaraki et al., Phylla, 6: ‘ . . . the visible remains of Greek fortifications are well known andoften discussed, there have been few systematic excavations, and their internal buildings have rarely been investigated.’

44 Wokalek, Stadtbefestigungen; Miller, Befestigungsanlagen; Lang, Siedlungen. Balandier, Fortifications et defence (unpubl. diss. Marseilles).45 P. Ducrey, Warfare in Ancient Greece (New York 1986), 146. Cobet, ‘Mauern’, 251.



SOURCES

The walls erected around Early Iron Age settlementsform the first chapter in urban fortification of theGreek world after the Bronze Age. They can be dividedinto two categories. The first consists of walls at settle-ments which were abandoned before or in the earlyArchaic period, for example Emporio on Chios,46 thehilltop fortification of Melie in Ionia and Zagora onAndros,47 and walls at settlements which later devel-oped into poleis, but where fortifications are not knownto have been constructed during the Archaic period,such as Minoa on Amorgos and Phaistos in Crete. Thebest documented and most securely dated settlements ofthis category are included in this investigation.48 Someor perhaps even all such settlements represent poleis in arudimentary and sometimes abortive state of develop-ment. They may have been called polis and understoodas such by their inhabitants, but, if so, the term wasprobably used in the sense of stronghold rather than inthe later senses of settlement or political community.49

Some may have been nucleated settlements within king-doms, while others may have been independent com-munities, but, as the evidence stands, we can onlyspeculate. These settlements remain crucial for ourunderstanding of the process of urbanization and ofthe development in urban fortification architectureprior to the Archaic period, and are therefore discussedin this book.

The second category consists of Early Iron Age forti-fication walls found at poleis with continuous occupa-tion and fortification phases into the Archaic period orlater, example Old Paphos and Old Smyrna.50 The con-tinuation of these settlements, and their later iden-tification as poleis, does not automatically allow for asimilar classification in the early period. But, again,

including these settlements enables us to analyse thephysical character of early fortification, and in a widersense urbanization, and the development of these phe-nomena into the Archaic period.

In the Archaic period, when written sources informabout settlements being poleis,51 and where we in gen-eral know so very much more, there are still problemssurrounding our knowledge of the status of most indi-vidual walled settlements. Quite a number of well-known ancient Greek cities do not yield informationon their polis status before Classical times, and it followsthat in many cases it is an open question whether anArchaic fortification found among the remains of asettlement, which is only later attested as a polis (city),was actually a city wall at that earlier stage. As arguedmore in depth in Chapter 2, however, there is only verylimited evidence to suggest that fortified settlementsthat were not cities (or first-order settlements) existedin any abundance before Classical times. Thus, when-ever a fortification wall dates to the period underscrutiny in this book, it will be assumed that it wasconnected to a first-order settlement as well. With thismethod of deduction we are of course still far from apositive definition of the nature of the settlements asso-ciated with the walls, and I wish to underline thatI present what I believe to be the most likely interpret-ation of the contexts of these many walls rather thanfacts, which we do not have. This central problem ofidentifying the character of settlements is treated furtherbelow (pp. 17–19).

Only a few Archaic fortification walls cannot belinked to sites attested as poleis, either in sources con-temporary with the walls, or in sources of the Classicalperiod. With the exception of western Greece and,perhaps, the northern Peloponnese,52 the polis hademerged everywhere in the Hellenic world by the

46 Sites that are not footnoted appear in the Catalogue, pp. 285–343.47 Vroulia on Rhodos is later and may have been a kome of an early polis (Lindos) on Rhodes.48 To these few examples should be added a number of sites on Crete C11–8 BC, Nowicki, Defensible Sites; Camp, ‘Walls’, 49; in the Aegean,

Morgan and Coulton, ‘Physical Polis’, 105; Ducrey, ‘Muraille’, 247; A. M. Snodgrass, ‘Les Premiers Fortifications grecques’, DossArch 192 (1992),20–7; Lawrence, Aims, 32–3; Wokalek, Stadtbefestigungen, 25.

49 M. H. Hansen, ‘Introduction: The Polis as a Citizen-State’, CPCActs 1, 7–29, at 9; Hansen, Polis, 44.50 Sites at which we cannot prove the construction of new structures but for which we can assume the reuse (or continuous use) of structures

from the Mycenaean Period, could be claimed as a third category, e.g. Haliartos (Fossey, Boiotia, 302–3), Agios Andreas on Siphnos (see below,pp. 105–6).

51 Hansen ‘Introduction’, 18, gives c.650 BC as the earliest date, to which the essential characteristics of the Classical polis as a city state can betraced (Dreros, Sparta, and Thasos). See also Hansen, ‘Hellenic Polis’, 145–8.

52 See discussion on Achaia in Hansen and Nielsen, 474–7 (Morgan and Hall).



sixth century BC.53 It is possible to distinguish poleisfrom others types of settlement, and accordingly, Ar-chaic settlements for which we do not have this type ofinformation, and settlements or cities lying outside theareas generally accepted as having been of Greek dom-inance, are excluded from the present study.54 To drawa line between Greek and non-Greek settlements is,however, bound to be a controversial undertaking, es-pecially in the Archaic period. An obvious example isCyprus, with eighth-century sites such as Paphos andSalamis. Were they Greek at this early point of theirhistory? Since there is no evidence for their having beenprimarily Phoenician,55 the other obvious possibility atthe time, they will be considered as Early Iron Age andArchaic Greek towns, mainly because they develop intoGreek poleis, a status clearly attested in the case of bothSalamis and Paphos in the fifth century.56 Ethnicity is adifficult and complex topic, especially in early phases ofsites in ethnically mixed regions, and merits a compre-hensive study in itself. An inclusive approach has beenfollowed here, so that, for example, Cyprus, an island ofparticular importance for early fortification, could beincluded.57 If a few sites have been erroneously includedor excluded in the source material, however, this will

not materially affect the main conclusions presented inthis book.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

This chapter and Chapter 2 discuss the significance of thefortification of primary settlements and urban centres ofpoleis, and offer a brief discussion of types of fortifiedsettlement in the Greek world before Classical times.Chapter 3 deals with the relevant literary sources for par-ticular city walls in the Archaic period, analyses referencesto the citywall as a general phenomenon inArchaic writtensources, and examines the information on early walls pro-vided by the visual arts. Chapters 4 to 6 put the statisticalsignificance of the preserved walls into perspective, discussthe archaeology and architectural features of fortificationwalls, and review the various methods for dating pre-Classical city walls. Chapters 7 and 8 contain a topograph-ical and architectural analysis of the archaeologicalevidence, a discussion of the prevalence and distributionof city walls in the pre-Classical Greek world, and a generalconclusion. The text is concluded by theCataloguewhich isexplained in greater detail on p. 121.

53 Hansen, ‘Hellenic Polis’, 148–9; Hansen, Polis, 46–7. Here are also listed the regions where urbanization happened later, e.g. Akarnania andAetolia. Here the Greek poleis were colonies lying along the coast whereas the rest of the population was apparently settled in villages. Seediscussion of Aetolia, P. Funke, ‘Polisgenese und Urbanisierung in Aetolien im 5. und 4. Jh. v. Chr.’, CPCActs 4, 145–88. It has to be remembered,however, that the archaeological investigation of settlements of inner Aetolia and Akarnania has gained progress only in very recent years, Funke,ibid. 169 (on Aetolia). Excavations of city walls and other urban bulding types might change this chronological picture, as e.g. the presentexcavations at Kalydon did with probable Archaic acropolis walls (Cat.).

54 The site Montagna di Marzo in Sicily, where a C6m city wall has been found, may have been the Greek polisHerbessos, but this identificationis not established firmly enough to allow for inclusion in this study. The settlement may just as well have been a Hellenized indigenous community,see A. Cutroni Tusa and D. Moreschini, ‘Montagna di Marzo’, BTCGI 10 (1992), 229–35.

55 On Paphos being Phoenician, see e.g. Drerup, Baukunst, 101.56 Paphos is possibly called polis in the political sense by Aeschylos (Persae 892), and must be one of the poleismentioned in the urban sense by

Herodotos (5.115 [inferred]). Salamis is called polis in the political sense by Aeschylos (Persae 893), and polis in the urban sense by Herodotos(5.104.3, 115.1).

57 The Cypriot poleis of Paphos and Salamis of C8 are well identified, but we cannot prove that they were actually poleis before C5. They wereclearly vassal states to the Assyrians, and it can even be questioned whether they were primarily Greek at that early point in their history. For a briefdiscussion of a similar problem of ethnicity, see below, p. 76.



1. INTRODUCTION

1. introduction · one kind or the other attesting to fortiﬁcation in or before late classical...

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