Colonies in antiquity
One of the oldest colonisation process in history occurred around 1000 BC, the Sabeans of southern Arabia, with a civilization based on agriculture, began to colonize the highlands of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
[6] Egyptian settlement and colonisation is attested from about 3200 BC onward, all over the area of southern Canaan, by almost every type of artifact: architecture (fortifications, embankments and buildings), pottery, vessels, tools, weapons, seals, etc.
[7][8] Narmer had Egyptian pottery produced in Canaan and exported back to Egypt,[9] from regions such as Arad, En Besor, Rafiah, and Tel Erani.
The most famous and successful of Phoenician colonies was founded by settlers from Tyre in 814–813 BC and called Kart-Hadasht (Qart-ḥadašt,[13] literally "New Town"[14]), known in English as Carthage.
According to María Eugenia Aubet, Professor of Archaeology at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona: The earliest presence of Phoenician material in the West is documented within the precinct of the ancient city of Huelva, Spain...
[15] In Ancient Greece, a defeated people would sometimes found a colony, leaving their homes to escape the subjugation of a foreign enemy.
[18] Greeks founded two similar types of colony, the apoikía (ἀποικία from ἀπό apó “away from” + οἶκος oîkos “home”, pl.
[22] Another area with significant Greek colonies was the coast of ancient Illyria on the Adriatic Sea (e.g. Aspalathos, modern Split, Croatia).
Just as each individual had his private shrines, so the new community maintained the worship of its chief domestic deities, the colony sending embassies and votive gifts to the mother-city's principal festivals for centuries afterwards.
By the 15th century BC, the Mycenaeans had reached Rhodes, Crete and Cyprus ( where Teucer is said to have founded the first colony) and the shores of Anatolia.
In the late Bronze Age (13th century BC), Miletus saw the arrival of the Carians, Luwian speakers from south central Anatolia.
Greeks traditionally lived in the region of Pontus, on the south shores of the Black Sea and in the Pontic Alps in northeastern Anatolia, the province of Kars in Caucasus, and also in Georgia.
Greek was the lingua franca of Anatolia from the conquests of Alexander the Great up to the invasion of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century AD.
[32] The cleruchs (κληροῦχοι, klêrouchoi) formed a special class of Greek colonists, each being assigned an individual plot of land (κλῆρος, klêros).
The coloniae civium Romanorum retained Roman citizenship, and were free from military service, their position as outposts being regarded as an equivalent.
The right of founding colonies passed into the hands of the Roman emperors during the Principate, who used it mainly in the provinces for the exclusive purpose of establishing military settlements, partly with the old idea of securing conquered territory.
After the nomadic Mongolic Xiongnu ruler Hunye (渾邪) was defeated by Huo Qubing in 121 BC, settlers from various regions of China under the rule of Emperor Wu of Han colonized the Hexi Corridor and Ordos Plateau.
[34] Tuntian, self-sustaining agricultural military garrisons, were established in frontier outposts to secure the massive territorial gains and Silk Road trade routes leading into Central Asia.
[38] Ma pursued a similar policy in the south when he defeated the Trưng Sisters of Jiaozhi, in what is now modern northern Vietnam, resettling hundreds of Vietnamese into China's Jing Province in 43 AD, seizing their sacred bronze drums as rival symbols of royal power, and reinstating Han authority and laws over Jiaozhi.
[39] Historian Rafe de Crespigny remarks that this was a "brief but effective campaign of colonisation and control", before the general returned north in 44 AD.
[39] Cao Song, an Eastern Han administrator of Dunhuang, had military colonies established in what is now Yiwu County near Hami in 119 AD.
However, Empress Deng Sui, regent for the young Emperor Shang of Han, pursued a slow, cautious policy of settlement on the advice of Ban Yong, son of Ban Chao, as the Eastern Han Empire came into conflict with the Jushi Kingdom, the Shanshan and their Xiongnu allies located around the Taklamakan Desert in the Western Regions.
