Phasis (town)

[5] It seems to have been a vital component of the presumed trade route from India to the Black Sea, attested by the Classical authors Strabo and Pliny.

[5] The search for the city has a long history, beginning with the French traveler Jean Chardin, who visited Georgia in the 1670s and unsuccessfully tried to find evidence of the ancient Greek polis at the mouth of the Phasis (Rioni) river.

The first attempt at a scientific identification, based on an analysis of the Classical and Byzantine authors and his own fieldwork, belongs to the Swiss scholar Frédéric Dubois de Montpéreux, who traveled to the area between 1831 and 1834.

However, by the time the Georgian scholars Otar Lordkipanidze and Teimuraz Mikeladze began full-scale archaeological studies of the area early in the 1960s, these ruins had already been demolished by the Soviet authorities during the construction of an airfield between 1959 and 1960.

[10] After many years of uncertainty and academic debate, the site of this settlement now seems to be established, through a combination of surface, systematic and underwater archaeological research.

Yet, a series of questions regarding the town's exact location and identification of its ruins remains open due largely to the centuries-long geomorphologic processes of the area as the lower reaches of the Rioni are prone to changes of course across the wetland.

The 18th-century Georgian scholar Prince Vakhushti accords with this evidence, reporting that "to the south of Poti, close to the sea, is the large lake Paliastomi.