with the non-Greek inhabitants of Asia and North Africa. The Milesians were Ionian Greeks and
considered themselves to have migrated to the coast of Asia Minor from the mainland of Greece by way
of Athens. Linguistic, archaeological, and other evidence indicates that this tradition may reflect historical
reality and that Ionian Greeks indeed settled Miletus from the mainland in the eleventh century BC. At the
end of the Dark Age, as the Greek world began to prosper and expand, the Milesians began to engage
energetically in trade and overseas expansion, establishing numerous settlements on the coast of the Black
Sea and along the Hellespont, the waterway that connects the Aegean with the Black Sea. Miletus’
success and its overseas connections attracted the attention of the Lydians, whose territory lay just inland
of Miletus, and whose affluent empire extended over most of western Asia Minor in the first half of the
sixth century BC.
Map 9 Greece and the Persian Wars.
The Lydians had incorporated a number of the Ionian Greek cities into their empire by military conquest,
but Miletus successfully resisted Lydian aggression and maintained open and relatively friendly relations
with Lydia and its kings Alyattes and Croesus (ca. 610–546 BC). In fact, according to the historian
Herodotus, a Milesian citizen named Thales, serving as an engineer, accompanied the army of King
Croesus on his campaign against the Persians in eastern Asia Minor. What little we know about Thales
indicates that he lived in the first half of the sixth century BC and that he concerned himself with geometry
and with scientific inquiry. He is said, for example, to have devised a procedure for determining the
distance to a ship at sea visible from shore and to have predicted the occurrence of a solar eclipse