Colonies in antiquity were
city-states founded from a mother-
city, not from a territory-at-large. Bonds remained close, and took specific forms.
The Phoenicians were the major trading power in the Mediterranean in the early part of the first millennium BCE. They had trading contacts in Egypt and Greece, and established colonies as far west as modern Spain, at Gadir (moder Cádiz), and later at Barcino (Barcelona). From Gadir they controlled access to the Atlantic Ocean and the trade routes to Britain. The most famous and successful of Phoenician colonies was Kart-Hadasht, a colony founded from Tyre. It would eventually be known as Carthage.
In Ancient Greece, colonies were sometimes founded by vanquished peoples, who left their homes to escape subjection at the hand of a foreign enemy; sometimes as a sequel to civil disorders, when the losers in internecine battles left to form a new city elsewhere; sometimes to get rid of surplus population, and thereby to avoid internal convulsions. But in most cases the motivation was to establish and facilitate relations of trade with foreign countries and further the wealth of the mother-city (in Greek, metropolis).
Several city-states (more than thirty) of ancient Greece had multiple colonies of settlement throughout the Mediterranean world, with the most active being Miletus, with ninety colonies stretching throughout the Mediterranean Sea, from the shores of the Black Sea and Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the east, to the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula in the west, as well as several colonies on the northern coast of Africa with the overall sum[citation needed] being 1500 from the late ninth, up to the 5th century BC.
