Greek colonization in the Mediterranean basin and the Black Sea, especially through the eighth and seventh centuries BC marks a significant turning point both in the overall history of the Mediterranean world and the general picture of the metamorphoses of Greek culture, to which three chapters of this thesis are devoted.
By this time, a rich nexus of maritime connections had already shaped the Mediterranean cultural geography, mainly starting with the second millennium BC. Elaboration of this human geography, however, was only possible when the properly institutionalized settlements, namely the colonial poleis, demarcated the Mediterranean coastlands. These settlements provided mediation between the agrarian inland territories and the maritime space. The early Greeks, on the other hand, witnessed a radical transformation of their identity with a rising consciousness of the existence of a larger other world through their sequential confrontations with the other peoples and places.
Before elucidating further on the aspects of Greek colonization, which had a decisive role in the rise and the making of identity of the polis, it may be illuminating to display a wider view of the Mediterranean maritime space before the so-called Greek expansion. In the light of recent archaeological evidence, many historians of early Greece now tend to reject the generally supported small Greece argument, which assumed the Greeks of the dark age as .an introverted and isolated ethnic community, operating ...in a kind of vacuum in which horizons were narrow and everything small, limited, primitive.
Like many historical societies under the distress of a transformation of their self, the Greeks of the Archaic age were seized by a kind of mobilization, by the help of which they transgressed the limits of their native habitat. The multileveled crises of the Archaic age forced them to spread out in the Mediterranean basin and the resulting.......
