CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN CIVILIZATIONS
Outside contacts markedly affected both the pace and the nature of change in the centers of the Villanovan and Latial cultures. In the late ninth century, as well as in the eighth, maritime contact with the eastern Mediterranean again became a prominent factor in the development of central Italian societies. The Phoenicians led the way. The coastal regions of the modern states of Syria and Lebanon on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean were their homeland, and the first traces of their civilization appear there around the beginning of the second millenium B.C. The Phoenicians’ world centered on a number of cities, each with its own king, priests, palace, and temples, and each ruling the surrounding countryside.
Long distance trade by land and by sea was important in the social and political order of a Phoenician city-state: Kings and temple priesthoods participated, as did asso-ciations of rich and powerful merchants. Around 1000, the leaders of some of these cities, especially Tyre and Sidon, the most powerful of the Phoenician states, began to send out settlers and trading expeditions, first to the nearby coast of Cyprus, but soon as far away as Spain. Eventually, Phoenician settlers would establish a series of new cities along the coasts of western Sicily, Sardinia, north¬ern Africa, and southern Spain. Carthage (Latin, Carthago), probably founded around 800 in the territory of modern Tunisia, would become the most powerful of these new settlements and Rome’s great rival.
Greeks followed shortly afterward. After the collapse of Mycenaean civilization during the twelfth century, contacts between Italy and the Greek world had declined rapidly. Trade and population revived during the ninth century, and, at the same time, larger, richer, and more complex communities started to form again, which over generations would develop into city-states. Around 800, con¬tacts between Greece and Italy began to increase. By 775, some Greeks established a settlement on the island of Pithecusa in the Bay of Naples, and a few Phoenicians may also have settled there. In this new community, and in others that would be founded later, trade and access to metals played an important role—Pithecusa shows signs of ironworking on a large scale—but the search for farmland was vital, too, and before long would become the most important factor.
Greek settlements on the mainland soon followed. Cumae, founded around 750, was the first, and others would follow in the seventh, sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries. Eventually the eastern, southeastern, and northern coasts of Sicily would be dotted with Greek city-states, as would the south and west coasts of Italy as far north as Campania. Later, Romans would call these mainland areas of Greek settlement “Great Greece” (Latin, Magna Graecia). In the seventh and sixth centuries, the Greek colonies here, like other communities in Greece and in the coastal regions of central Italy, would follow more or less parallel paths that led to the formation of city-states.