Nine Ancient Cities from Tipasa to Ur, West to East

Begins on the coast of central Algeria, about twenty kilometers east of Caesarea. Tipasa was a Punic trading post that became a Roman colonia and then an early Christian center, with three major basilicas from the third and fourth centuries. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982.

A Phoenician colony on the Maghreb coast that became a Roman town in Mauretania Tingitana by AD 46. Its site is now Melilla, whose old quarter was built over it. The page traces the Vandals under Gaiseric around 430, Belisarius around 533, Islamic forces by 700 and Spain in 1497.

Crosses to Greece, where Callium was the chief town of the Callienses in ancient Aetolia, high on Mount Oeta along the road from the Spercheus valley. Gauls destroyed it in 279 BC, and its remains were later flooded by a modern dam after excavations in 1977 to 1979.

A colony of Andros in ancient Macedonia, founded in 655 BC to control the mouth of the Strymon river. In 424 BCE it joined the Spartan general Brasidas out of rivalry with neighboring Amphipolis, and its neutrality was recognized under the Peace of Nicias in 421 BCE.

Another colony of Andros, on the Chalkidiki peninsula, best known as the birthplace of Aristotle in 384 BC. Philip II of Macedon destroyed it, and it was reportedly rebuilt at Aristotle's own request as a condition of his tutoring of Alexander the Great.

On the European shore of the Hellespont opposite Abydos, home of Hero in the story of Hero and Leander. Xerxes I bridged the strait near it in 480 BC, Athens besieged it in 479 BC, and its fortress fell to the Ottomans in 1355, one of their earliest footholds in Europe.

In ancient Thrace and later Moesia, on the river Ziras, a Thracian settlement of the fifth century BC later colonized by Ionian Greeks and called Cruni, after nearby founts of water. It was renamed Dionysopolis after a statue of Dionysus was found in the sea.

In Caria in southwestern Anatolia, named for its sanctuary to Aphrodite. Nearby marble quarries made it one of the leading sculptural schools of the Roman world, and the site preserves a stadium, theater and temple complex, with excavated sculpture shown in an on-site museum.

Ends in southern Iraq at Ur, a Sumerian city-state with occupation from the Ubaid period, around 3800 BC, and a walled city from the twenty-sixth century BC. It once stood near the Persian Gulf, and silt has since pushed the shoreline far to the southeast, leaving the ruins well inland.