“Ionian Migration” vs. “Great Colonization of the Greeks”: Categories and Consequences

Abstract

Periodization runs the risk of predetermining the understanding of the past. Every discontinuity, of course, seems to justify the drawing of temporal borders, yet continuities of historical phenomena are often conceptually outsourced, i. e. qualitatively differentiated by creating categories. A telling example is the differentiation between an „Ionian Migration“ (11th-10th century BCE) and the “Great Colonization of the Greeks” (8th-6th century BCE). These modern labels separate the complex, yet continuous processes of mobility and migration of early Greek history, marking a “beginning” and an “end” in the “Dark Ages” respectively in the “Archaic Age”, while also bridging the seeming temporal gap of the 9th century by speaking of a “precolonial world”. Because of their pointedness these terms even allow nolens volens for an “ethnogenesis” of the Greeks. This paper pursues the question of what consequences the modern categories have had and still have for the modelling of movements and pleads for an integrative conceptualization of the history of early Greek migration.