Greek Colonisation of the Mediterranean & Black Sea
Mother-city to colony foundations of the Archaic Greek diaspora, drawn as arcs.
The great wave of Archaic Greek colonisation, rendered as arcs from each metropolis to the apoikiai it founded around the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Arc colour marks the mother-city; the network exposes the distinct colonial spheres of Miletus, Corinth, Megara, Phocaea and Chalcis. The compilation is illustrative — a hand-built selection of well-attested foundations — not an exhaustive register.
| Theme | Historical — religious & historical geography |
|---|---|
| Region | Mediterranean |
| Temporal range | 8th–6th c. BCE |
| Geographic coverage | Transregional |
| Records | 19 geolocated entities |
| Data source | Representative compilation (manual) |
| Centroid | 38.83° N · 22.88° E |
| Last revised | Jun 2026 |
A hand-assembled, representative selection of well-attested Archaic Greek colonial foundations (mother-city, colony, approximate foundation date and a nominal settler figure), drawn from standard narrative accounts and simplified for cartographic illustration of source→target flows.
The published dataset is distributed as CSV with a derived GeoJSON edition; coordinates are decimal degrees on the WGS 84 datum. DOI 10.5281/ortelius.044.