Extract

Euboea (‘rich in cattle’), also (Call. h. Delos 20; Strabo 10. 1. 2) called Long Island, Μάκρις, because it stretched from the gulf of *Pagasae to *Andros, shared the culture of the *Cyclades in the bronze age. The chief cities in antiquity were *Chalcis and *Eretria; in between was *Lefkandi, where remarkable 10th-cent. bce finds have revised notions of the so-called Dark Age of Greece. Other cities (there were perhaps as many as thirteen in all) included Histiaea, Geraestus, and marble-rich Carystus; and ‘there was in Euboia an astonishing number of second-order settlements compared with poleis’ (IACP p. 644). In the 8th cent. Chalcis and Eretria were active mercantile centres which led the islanders to involvement in an *emporion at *Al Mina in Syria by 800. The Euboeans’ primacy and importance in early colonization have been doubted; wrongly. They established colonies on the north-west shores of the Aegean and in Italy and Sicily (see colonization, greek; pithecusae) and fought over the Lelantine plain, which lay between them, in the 8th cent.