II. The history of Old Smyrna

Abstract

The occupational history of the site, like its name Smyrna, goes back beyond Hellenic times. The earliest observed prehistoric habitation, dating to the third millennium B.C., and contemporary and culturally akin to that of the First and Second Cities of Troy, has been encountered only on the rocky core of the peninsula where occupational strata of this era were revealed in a trench dug down the face of the rock (Square Nxiv). Deep soundings at other points (Squares Exii–xiii, Jxviii–xix) yielded no trace of third-millenium occupation, and it seems unlikely that the occupation in this period extended far to the east. The peninsula in fact seems to have been much smaller at that time. The lowest occupation in the trench in Square Jxviii–xix, in the third metre below modern sea-level, seems to be of about the beginning of the second millennium; and since it is unlikely, assuming a fairly steady rate of submergence of the coast (cf. n. 13), that prehistoric occupation could lie much deeper than this, it must have been about the end of the third millennium that the east shore of the peninsula advanced to this point. A considerable upwards slope to westward from this point in early times may be inferred from the fact that a stratum of early Geometric pottery was cut in works of field improvement in 1951 about the 8-metre contour in Squares L–Mxvi (i.e. about 2 metres higher than in Square Jxviii). A similar series of second-millennium levels in Square Exii, not explored to the bottom, attests the growth of the peninsula on the north-east. The gap in time between the second-millennium and the third-millennium levels revealed in these trenches has not been closed, though isolated fragments of pottery found in the course of field improvement north-west of the trench in Square Nxiv may belong to this intermediate phase. The second-millennium occupation, of which a number of successive levels were exposed in the deep soundings, seems perhaps to be more akin to Anatolian than to Aegean cultures. The expansion of the habitable peninsula, assisted by the action of streams flowing from the mountain-side into the embracing arm of the sea, was more rapid in the second millennium than at any other time, and the settlement here in the advanced Bronze Age may have been a not inconsiderable one by the standards of this coast.