The centuries before the Greeks began to write history are of the greatest interest and significance, but they are also for the historian full of uncertainty, obscurity and dispute. The reason is mainly the simple inadequacy of the information with which the historian has to work, and it is partly because of that inadequacy that the colonising movement is uniquely valuable. Part of this value lies in the revealing nature of colonial activity in itself. Think what it tells us about geographical knowledge, seafaring, if not seapower, military achievements, state organisation, economic conditions—to mention only a few broad and obvious categories. But in a period so inadequately known the colonising movement is also extremely important to the historian as a source of a relatively large amount of clear and unequivocal facts. In the context of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the fact that such and such a city sent a colony to such and such a place constitutes a rare piece of definite and valuable knowledge. Since it is also possible to assign dates to large numbers of colonial expeditions, we can say that the colonising movement provides a large amount of extremely significant historical information, which is in general terms clear and definite and relatively well dated.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.