Phasis (town)

Phasis (Georgian: ფაზისი; Ancient Greek: Φάσις) was an ancient and early medieval city on the eastern Black Sea coast, founded in the 7th or 6th century BC as a colony of the Milesian Greeks at the mouth of the eponymous river in Colchis, near the modern-day port city of Poti, Georgia. Its ancient bishopric became a Latin Catholic titular see of Metropolitan rank.

The names of ancient Phasis and modern Poti are apparently linked to each other, but the etymology is a matter of a scholarly dispute. "Phasis" is first recorded in Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BC) as a name of the river, not a town. The first Greek settlement here must have been founded not earlier than the very end of the 7th, and probably at the beginning of the 6th century BC, and received its name from the river.

Since Erich Diehl, in 1938, first suggested a non-Hellenic origin of the name and asserted that Phasis might have been a derivative of a local hydronym, several explanations have been proposed, linking the name to the Georgian-Zan *Poti, Svan *Pasid, and even to a Semitic word, meaning "a gold river." The collective use of the ethnic Φασιανοί, Phasians, is attested in Xenophon and Heraclides Lembus.

Phasis appears in numerous Classical and early medieval sources as well as the Greek mythology, particularly an Argonautic cycle. Phasis is reported by Heraclides, Pomponius Mela and Stephanus of Byzantium to have been founded by Milesians. Phasis is referred to as a polis Hellenis in the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax and Hippocrates calls it an emporion, "a trading place". According to the classical sources, Phasis had its constitution, including the Aristotelian corpus of 158 politeiai.

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