Rome’s first transalpine province still answers to “the Province”
Provence runs from the lower Rhône to the Italian border along France’s Mediterranean south. Romans called it Provincia Romana—the province beyond the Alps—and the shortened Provincia became Provençal Provence; counts ruled from Aix until 1481.
Grotte du Vallonnet near Roquebrune-Cap-Martin holds stone tools about 1 to 1.05 million years old. Early in the Paleolithic the sea off western Provence stood 150 metres above today’s level, and by its end had dropped as much as 150 metres below, flooding or stranding cave homes. Paleolithic seasaw swings left Cosquer Cave’s mouth 37 metres under today’s Calanque de Morgiou, found by diver Henri Cosquer in 1985 with Ice Age art inside.
As forests and deer vanished, people turned to rabbits, snails and wild sheep, and around 6000 BC the Castelnovians near Châteauneuf-les-Martigues domesticated sheep, settled down and fired France’s first pottery. Farming Chasséens arrived from the east about the same time, followed around 2500 BC by the seaborne Courronniens on the Bouches-du-Rhône coast. Iron-armed Celts from Central Europe moved in between the eighth and fifth centuries BC and overpowered bronze-armed locals.
Rhodian traders visited in the seventh century BC and lent their name to the Rhône, once the Rhodanos. Greeks from Phocaea founded Massalia, today’s Marseille, around 600 BC, and more came after Persia destroyed their home city about 540 BC. At its fourth-century peak Massalia held some 6,000 people within fifty walled hectares, ruled by an assembly of its 600 richest citizens, and its merchants carried wine, salt pork, coral and cork up the Rhône and Durance as far as the Baltic.
Aix-en-Provence (Aquae Sextiae) capped medieval county power before French incorporation.
Source: Provence
