Romania · Where the sources disagree
Was Histria founded in 657 BC or 630?
Two ancient writers give two dates for the oldest town on the Romanian coast. They are twenty-seven years apart, and the archaeology cannot tell them apart either.
The short answer
Probably somewhere in the third quarter of the 600s BC. Both ancient dates are guesses made centuries later, and pottery cannot be dated finely enough to choose between them.
Around 650 BC, give or take, a few boatloads of Greeks from Miletus — a wealthy port on what is now the Turkish coast — sailed up the western shore of the Black Sea and founded a town. They called it Istros, after the river we call the Danube. Today it is a ruin on a lagoon in eastern Romania, and it is the oldest town on Romanian soil that anybody wrote down the name of.
The Romanian timeline on this site starts there, in 657 BC. That number is worth a moment of your attention, because it is not a fact. It is one of two guesses, and we cannot tell which is right.
Two writers, two dates
The trouble is that nobody recorded the founding at the time. The two figures we have both come from writers who lived centuries afterwards, working from lists and traditions that no longer exist.
Eusebius of Caesarea put it in the 33rd Olympiad, which is 657 or 656 BC. He was a Christian scholar in Palestine compiling a chronicle of world history — in the fourth century AD. That is roughly a thousand years after the event, and about as far from it as we are from the Norman conquest.
Pseudo-Scymnus — the name means "not really Scymnus", which tells you how much we know about him — put it around 630 BC. He wrote a geography in verse around 110 BC, so he is five hundred years closer. But instead of giving a year, he pegs the founding to something else that was happening at the time: a Scythian push into Asia Minor.
Twenty-seven years apart. One of them is wrong, or both are.
Why you might believe the earlier date
Eusebius was working inside a system. Olympiad dating is a count — the games happened every four years and somebody kept score — and counts survive being copied in a way that vaguer statements do not. He also gives a specific year rather than a rough decade, which is what you expect from a man reading a list rather than estimating.
There is also pottery. Excavators at Histria have found imported Greek tableware — from Rhodes, from Ionia, from Corinth, from Athens — in the lowest levels, and it has been dated to the second half of the 600s BC. Romanian scholarship has generally treated that as confirmation of Eusebius.
Why you might believe the later one
Pseudo-Scymnus is five hundred years nearer the event, and he is writing geography rather than assembling a chronicle of everything that ever happened. The second genre has more gaps to paper over.
His dating method is also harder to fake. If you invent a year, you invent it free-standing. If you say "this happened when the Scythians moved into Asia", you have tied yourself to a second event with its own evidence, and somebody can check you.
And the buildings tell against Eusebius. The standard reading of the site puts the earliest of the three Archaic layers at about 630 BC. If people were living there from 657, something has to account for the missing twenty-seven years — a phase nobody has found, or a settlement so slight it left no structures at all.
Why nobody can settle it
Here is the part that usually gets left out, and it is the most interesting thing about the whole argument.
Both dates are in the second half of the 600s BC, and Greek pottery of this period is not dated that precisely. The best resolution available is roughly a quarter-century. When an excavation report says the earliest imports are "second half of the seventh century", that sentence is equally compatible with 657 and with 630. It settles nothing.
Worse, there is a circularity problem underneath. The absolute dates attached to Archaic Greek pottery were themselves worked out partly from the recorded founding dates of colonies — dates like the ones under dispute here. Using the pottery to choose between Eusebius and Pseudo-Scymnus risks handing back the assumption you started with.
What would actually settle it
Something dated by a method that has nothing to do with pottery:
- Tree rings. A waterlogged timber from the earliest phase, matched against a dated sequence, would give a year rather than a quarter-century.
- A closed deposit tying the earliest Greek material to something datable from outside the ceramic system entirely.
Until one of those turns up, the honest answer is: somewhere in the third quarter of the 600s BC, and the two numbers in the sources are two guesses of unequal age rather than a right answer and a mistake.
The bigger thing the date is hiding
Focusing on the year rather misses what is unusual about these towns.
Histria, and later Tomis and Callatis, were not a Greek conquest of Romania. They were three ports. Their people came for grain, salt fish and slaves, not for territory, and they stayed tied to the cities that sent them — Miletus for Histria and Tomis, Dorian Heraclea Pontica for Callatis. Walk a few kilometres inland from any of them and you were among the Getae, who were not Greek, did not become Greek, and by the late 200s BC were in open war with Histria, as the town's own inscriptions record.
That is why the map records this as settlement rather than rule. Drawn as territorial control, three harbours would claim a province that nobody in them ever governed.
Sources
- Eusebius of Caesarea, Chronicon, on the 33rd Olympiad.
- Pseudo-Scymnus, Periegesis, on the western Black Sea foundations.
- Histria (ancient city) — the site, the excavation history and the Archaic stratigraphy.
- Vasile Pârvan began systematic excavation in 1914. The Archaic levels were the particular work of Petre Alexandrescu in the 1990s; Alexandru Avram and Mircea Angelescu have led work since 2010.