If you have never heard about Panticapaeum, you are probably not alone. This small but thriving Greek colony was founded in the 7th century BC in a fertile and sumptuous landscape on the eastern shore of Crimea. Commanding a key position for trade at the Cimmerian Bosporus, a maritime strangle point, it prospered by linking the Black Sea with the Azov and the Don river regions. By 480 BC, it had become the capital of its own kingdom, and managed for centuries to navigate independence between strong Persian and later Roman interests. Haunted by Ostrogothic and Hunnic raids, it still survived as a Byzantine citadel. It lived through a succession of Khazar and Slavic lordships to become the modern city of Kerch, now once more trying to persist through a precarious situation in the current war in Ukraine.
Panticapaeum was never a large settlement. At its greatest extent, the ancient site occupied about 100ha, a common size for cities in the Roman Mediterranean. Yet the combination of a fertile hinterland and strong networks kept its population enduring and often thriving for over 2,600 years of continuous settlement. This is quite a feat. As Aztec expert Michael E Smith and colleagues have recently shown in a thought-provoking paper on ‘The persistence of ancient settlements and urban sustainability’, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the lifespan of many substantial cities in the old and new world was less than 250 years. Panticapaeum has lived ten times as long, so far.
Are megacities efficient?
The small but tenacious city on the Cimmerian Bosporus has seen excavations for over 150 years. Nonetheless, few non-Black Sea specialists delve into the results. Research in urban archaeology tends to focus on the few iconic and very large sites – illustrious metropolises such as Yinxu or Chang’an, Babylon or Rome, Alexandria or Antioch, Tikal or Teotihuacan. Such ancient megacities were never typical of the urban past, but their spectacular physical remains easily capture our imagination. However, there is much to suggest that they were not only exceptionally big, but based on a different ecology to other cities.
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