Miletus gave the world its first philosophers and the city grid plan
On the Anatolian coast near the mouth of the Maeander, one Greek port produced Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, planted colonies around the Black Sea, and laid out streets in a tidy grid that later Hellenistic and Roman cities copied. Its story runs from Minoan traders to Hittite raids to Roman monuments.
Neolithic people lived on the islands around Miletus in 3500–3000 BC, and the earliest Minoan settlement there dates to 2000 BC. Legend said Cretan colonists founded the town, and the flood of Minoan goods found on site fits that tale without proving it. From c. 1450 to 1100 BC it was a Mycenaean stronghold, appearing in Hittite letters as Millawanda. In c. 1320 BC it backed a revolt against the Hittites, whose generals burned parts of it. A Linear B tablet from Pylos even lists enslaved women from Miletus.
The city's golden age came as a member of the Ionian League. In the late 7th century BC its tyrant Thrasybulus kept it independent through a 12-year war with Lydia, and by the 6th century BC it ruled a maritime network of colonies, many bound together by the worship of Aphrodite as a seafaring goddess. Here Thales asked what the universe is ultimately made of, and tried to explain nature without appealing to mythological beings.
Then Persia arrived. In 499 BC the Milesian tyrant Aristagoras led the Ionian Revolt, which collapsed at the Battle of Lade in 494 BC, and the Persians punished the city brutally. When the playwright Phrynicus staged The Capture of Miletus in Athens a year later, Athens fined him for making the audience relive the disaster. Freed after the Greek victory at Plataea in 479 BC, Miletus was rebuilt on the orderly street layout credited to Hippodamus, later famous as the Hippodamian plan.
Alexander the Great besieged and took the city in 334 BC, when its walls enclosed roughly 90 hectares, its largest extent. It passed between his quarrelling successors, with Seleucus I winning favour by returning a statue of Apollo stolen by the Persians. In 133 BC it became part of the Roman province of Asia, and most monuments visible today date from Roman times.
Source: Miletus
