ABSTRACT
From the moment Marseille was founded in the sixth century BCE by Greek traders – under the name of Massilia – the city has been a harbour and has lived through centuries and millennia as such. Obviously at the beginning, Marseille had only local or rather regional relations, for instance with Italian coastal cities. Progressively, relations developed with more remote port cities in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. One interesting point of such development was the setting up of a ‘funduk’, that is ‘an overseas trading post with a warehouse managed by consuls’.1
