Enrique Baquedano (series coordinator)

Trade routes, land and sea military power, strategic locations, and many other factors led to the emergence and importance of numerous cities, which spread their influences around the Mediterranean. This fourth series devoted to the cities that emerged in Antiquity will begin with what was the capital of Egypt during the IX and X dynasties (around 2000 BC), Heracleopolis Magna (formerly Nen-nesu), where Spanish archaeological missions have been uncovering their secrets for over half a century. Then, we will turn our attention to Tyre, a city that exercised land and sea political supremacy over the other Phoenician enclaves during the X-VII centuries BC.　In present-day Turkey, we will focus on Aphrodisias, inherited from the name of the Greek goddess and a city famous for its marble sculptures.

The Italian Peninsula will be presented by Ostia Antica, founded on the mouth of the Tiber River as a defensive enclave of Rome, which subsequently functioned as a trade port of the capital, and by Venice, whose geographic location–at the crossroads of great empires–led to it becoming a great trade and naval power.

In the Iberian Peninsula, the journey will take us to Cádiz, founded three thousand years ago and which was known as Gades, from the Phoenician Gadir, in Rome; and Emporion, present-day Ampurias (L’Escala), one of the only Greek colonies documented in the Peninsula and often visited by Phoenicians and Etruscans.