Transcription
Let's start with geography. We cannot understand the history or the archaeology of Corinth without first understanding its geography. And the three most important things about Corinth were location, location, and location.
This is the Mediterranean Sea, and it's broadly got two main areas. We talk about the Eastern Mediterranean, which is sort of from Greece to the east. And then the Western Mediterranean, which goes on, uh, towards Italy and Spain. Now, Greece is in the center, that peninsula. And on one side of Greece, you have the Adriatic Sea between Italy and Greece. And the other side, you have the Aegean Sea between Greece and what is now Turkey, used to be the Roman province of Asia Minor. That is going to be important too.
Let's zero in on the area in the red box. The area immediately in the south of Greece, that sort of lump sticking out, is the Peloponnese or Peloponnesi. And you can see that Athens is over here, and there is Corinth. You can see also there are two other gulfs coming in from the Aegean Sea. You have the Saronic Gulf coming right in here. And from the, um, the Adriatic Sea, you have the Gulf of Corinth coming right into here.
So, we have an isthmus. What is an isthmus? That is the word in Greek. Isthmus means the neck, and it means a narrow neck of land separating two larger bodies of land. You see it here. There, in the red ring, is the isthmus. And when we use in English the word isthmus, it comes from this place. This was the first isthmus. This is the isthmus. And from that, in Greek, we name every other isthmus the same.
So here we have the Peloponnese, and here we have the mainland of Greece, connected by the isthmus. And Corinth is right on there. This shows it more closely still because there's an even further extension coming in, uh, from the gulf here, the Saronic Gulf, and from the Gulf of Corinth, which is all this. It comes in tighter here. And Corinth is this area just to the south of the Gulf of Corinth. So this is going to be very important.
You see how Corinth, we're standing up on the Acrocorinth, the hill, looking down over the old city, looking out at the sea there in the isthmus. When they tried to sail ships in ancient times, they had a real problem going around the coast here. This was a very dangerous coast on the south of the Peloponnese. And in those days, ships across the Mediterranean, sailing ships like the one Paul used, hugged the coast. They did not like to get out of sight of land. They would stay fairly close to the, to the, the coastline, to the shore, keep it within, within view if possible, or just out of view, and get back in as soon as they could. That was a dangerous route.
So how do you get trade between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Mediterranean? Well, you could bring your ships all the way through to the, through the Gulf of Corinth. You could unload what was in them there. And then you could go on through the Saronic Gulf into the Eastern Mediterranean. Location, location. And you could do it, of course, going the other way around, west or east. The same would apply.
Only, and here is the Lechaion, which is the port of Corinth, which is on the Gulf of Corinth. And we are now looking back from the water from Lechaion. And you see Corinth there, and behind it, the Acrocorinth hill. The other side, where you get the Saronic Gulf, the old harbor of Cenchreae. And there, there are two old stone moles or jetties sticking out into the water, the north one and the south one. But the problem is, what do you do about that narrow neck of land that is in between? It's not very wide. It's only, as you can see, well, it's about, uh, it's about four miles across. Just about four miles. Not very far, but far enough.
Well, now we move to archaeology, and we find an answer. They built a causeway of stone. They called the Diolkos, meaning the haulage. And there are grooves in it where they had trolleys with wheels. And they would offload the cargo on one side, run it across, and load it onto another ship waiting on the other side. Thus, the people who owned the boats, the ships, were not risking losing both cargo and ship and crew. And they could even take small, and I mean small, you can see by the size of what you're looking at, they could only, they could take small boats and put them, small ships, onto these trolleys and pull them over, probably by manpower rather than oxen, as far as we know.
So here we have the Diolkos going across. And this made Corinth very rich because all of that trade between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean was being channeled through an area that was totally dominated by this one city, Corinth.