The polis lay 17 km east-northeast of the mouth of the Nestos River, almost directly opposite the island of Thasos.

It was a colony placed in previously unsettled Thracian territory, not then a part of Hellas, during the age of Greek colonization.

[5][a] It was variously Hellenized as Ἄβδηρα (Ábdēra), Αὔδηρα (Aúdēra),[7] Ἄβδαρα (Ábdara),[8] Ἄβδηρον (Ábdēron),[7] and Ἄβδηρος (Ábdēros),[9] before being Latinized as Abdera.

[7] Greek legend attributed the name to an eponymous Abderus who fell nearby and was memorialized by Hercules's founding of a city at the location.

Plutarch and Aelian relate that Timesios grew insufferable to his colonists because of his desire to do everything by himself; when one of their children let him know how they all really felt, he quit the settlement in disgust; modern scholars have tried to split the difference between the two accounts of early Abdera's failure by giving the latter as the reason for Timesios's having left Klazomenai.

[13] Strabo describes Abdera as "a Thracian city"[14] at the time of Anacreon and the migration of people from Teos to that area.

The successful colonisation occurred in 544 BC, when the majority of the people of Teos (including the poet Anacreon) migrated to Abdera to escape the Persian invasion of their homeland.

On his flight after the Battle of Salamis, Xerxes stopped at Abdera and acknowledged the hospitality of its inhabitants by presenting them with a tiara and scimitar of gold.

[19] Thucydides[20] mentions Abdera as the westernmost limit of the Odrysian kingdom when at its height at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war.

[21] Abdera was a wealthy city, the third richest in the League, due to its status as a prime port for trade with the interior of Thrace and the Odrysian kingdom.

[25] Abdera had flourished especially in ancient times mainly for two reasons: because of the large area of their territory and their highly strategic position.