ABSTRACT
Opportunities for exploration are especially favourable at Old Smyrna, a polis cut off in its prime by a Lydian army around 600 B.C. The Geometric town was of moderate size, occupying a promontory about 350m. long and 250m. wide. To judge from the main area so far excavated (c. 90×40m.), habitation was already quite dense by the late eighth century; but there was a curious contrast between the squalor of the private houses and the magnificent walls which enclosed the whole city. To have any fortifications at all was unusual for a Geometric polis; the only other complete circuits of these times are at Melia and Emporio, hastily thrown up in rubble to protect the acropolis only. But there is nothing hasty about the walls of Smyrna (fig. 96a pp. 261 f.), which must have been the pride of the city. They have a monumental appearance, far in advance of their time. Even in their original form (c. 850 B.C.), the foundations of one bastion consist of sawn ashlar blocks almost a
metre long, laid in regular courses.2 When the circuit was repaired and thickened in the mid-eighth century, the inner foundations were faced with huge hammer-dressed blocks of approximately polygonal shape; although the crevices contain a few small stones, there is already some attempt to fit the blocks together.3 By c. 700 B.C. this style of walling had been adopted at Miletus (p. 261) and Antissa (p. 263) in a much-improved form; thus the invention of true polygonal masonry, where the joints are dressed to fit exactly, may fairly be ascribed to East Greek builders. They must also take the credit for being pioneers in other forms of monumental construction, if we bear in mind the sheer size and spacious planning of the first Hekatompedon on Samos, and the elegant ashlar work of its third and fourth altars (p. 254). Such precocity can hardly be explained by eastern influence, since Ionia had very little communication with Phrygia or the Levant before the end of the eighth century. It has been suggested4 that the first Ionian settlers might have brought with them some skill in monumental masonry inherited from Mycenaean tradition, which they would then have adapted and transformed throughout the Dark Ages; alternatively, a native Anatolian tradition of fine masonry, as seen in the final walls of Troy VI, may not have been entirely forgotten. Even so, we have no positive evidence of any such skill among the eastern Greeks before the ninth-century circuit of Old Smyrna.
