Miletus

A prosperous trading city on the Ionian coast. Miletus produced the first thinkers to seek natural explanations for the world, launching what we now call philosophy.

Miletus was the richest Greek city in Ionia, a commercial port where ships from Egypt, Pontus, and the Aegean docked within sight of each other. It founded over eighty colonies along the Black Sea coast. The city sat at the mouth of the Maeander River, and the silt that river carried eventually silted up the harbor entirely — today the ancient waterfront lies four miles inland. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes all lived here in the sixth century BCE. They asked what everything is made of — water, the indefinite, air — and gave answers that had nothing to do with gods. This shift, from myth to explanation, happened in a port city where merchants already thought in materials and quantities.