are thinking of ancient or more recent geographical or administrative
divisions). This is why I refer to the area as an economic‘super-region’.
In Chapter 1, I suggested some of the ways in which the term‘north
Aegean region’can be applied to the interlinked economies of two major
territorial powers (Macedon and Thrace) and their coastal neighbours,
who enjoyed a high degree of political independence from these king-
doms. The next chapter developed the theme of the Greco-Persian Wars
as a defining stage in the history of the region, a period that catalysed the
emergence of the two main territorial states. Macedon and Thrace
became socio-economic magnets that refocused patterns of exchange
between coastal and inland parts of the east Balkan peninsula. At the
same time, a significant economic distinction began to emerge at the turn
of the sixth andfifth centuries, with the development of new naval
technologies by those Aegean states that had a vested interest in compet-
ing with the leading naval power of the era, namely the Phoenician and
Egyptianfleets of the Persian Empire.^1 From an economic point of view,
the accessibility of key strategic resources for shipbuilding, not just
timber, but also hemp, iron, and copper, made it highly desirable for
states that needed to expand their supplies in these resources to establish
or develop effective connections with partners in appropriate areas who
could provide them, or to get resources by direct territorial acquisition.
The northern Aegean, particularly the mainland coast, provided one of
the principal areas explored for these possibilities from thefinal decade
of the sixth centurybconwards, if not earlier, as we will see in Chapter 6.
Geography still plays an important role in the ways that‘regions’are
conceptualized by historians and economic geographers. The physical
geography of localities, together with climate, soils, and precipitation, has
had a powerful effect on the parameters of local cultures. There is a close
identification between people and the landscapes they live in. The north
Aegean sea is ringed by mountains—the northern Pindhos (effectively
the western boundary of our region, in terms of local ecologies and
historical connections);^2 the outliers of Pindhos to the east of the main
range, Mounts Barnous and Bermion (Figs. 2.1 and 5.1), respectively
west and east of Lake Vegoritis; the Pierian range as far as Olympos;
(^1) Wallinga 1993, 130–44; Davies (forthcoming 2013a); on Mediterranean‘connectivity’:
Horden and Purcell 2000, 123–72.
(^2) As the contributions to the periodic colloquia on Illyrian history and archaeology
make clear, the western half of the Pindhos was mainly, though by no means exclusively,
orientated towards the Ionian Sea (see e.g. the contributions to Cabanes and Lamboley 2004
and Antonetti 2010); Hatzinikolaou 2009 provides a survey of upper Macedonian historical
geography up until the imperial reorganization: Livy 45.29.5–9, with Hatzopoulos 1996,
I, 231–60, on‘the Districts’of Macedonia, esp. 231–40.
194 Regionalism and regional economies