Abydus (Çanakkale)

The Abydus promontory

Abydus: city on the southeastern shore of the Hellespont, modern Çanakkale.

Abydus was an important Greek city on a promontory on the southeastern bank of the Hellespont. That it was easy to cross the straits on this place, can already be inferred from the poems of Homer. The town was founded in the seventh century BCE as a colony of Miletus, with permission of a Lydian king, either Gyges or his son Ardys. When Lydia became part of the Achaemenid Empire, Abydus must have been added to the new state as well, because Greeks from the city joined the Ionian revolution against the Achaemenid king Darius I the Great. The revolt was eventually surpressed.

The strait between Sestus and Abydus.

Between Abydus and Sestus (on the European shore of the Hellespont), the Persian king Xerxes bridged the strait in 480 and crossed from Asia to Europe (text). After his attempt to conquer Greece had failed, Abydus joined the Delian League, the Athenian coalition, but during the Ionian or Declean War, the city revolted and joined the alliance of the Spartans, who used Abydus as naval base. The divided Greeks were an easy target for Persia, and in 387/386, the town was again occupied by Achaemenid troops. In 334, Alexander the Great used the city as his bridgehead when he invaded Asia.

Coin of Abydus

In the confusion after the downfall of the Persian Empire, several Diadochs occupied the city, but in the end, it became part of the realm of the Seleucids; their king Antiochus III the Great refounded the city after it had been sacked by the Macedonian ruler Philip V (in 200). Abydus withstood a long Roman siege during the Syrian War (but the inhabitants were forced to mass suicide), and it became part of the Pergamene Empire in 188. When its last king died in 133, he left his realm to Rome. It remained a provincial town of some importance.

A satellite photo can be found here.