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<   No. 4866   2022-11-28   >

Comic #4866

1 {map showing a blue dashed line going from from Alexandria to Çanakkale}
2 Prof. Jones: I say, isn’t the line on the map normally red?
3 Emily: I like defying stereotypes.

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It's tough finding maps of exactly the right era, so students of geohistory will notice a few anomalies. I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader.

But since it's also shown here, I was recently thinking how interesting it is that the city of Naples got its name from the Greek Neapolis, which means simply "new city". It got me wondering what the "old city" was.

Doing some research reveals that the original city in the area was founded by the Cumae, the first mainland Italian colony of the Ancient Greeks, around 700 BC. This Cumaean city was named Parthenope, after one of the sirens in Greek mythology.

In 507 BC, following the Battle of Aricia, the tyrant Aristodemus of Cumae decided to establish a new city a few kilometres to the north of Parthenope. This new settlement was named Neapolis ("new city"), while Parthenope also became known as Palaeopolis ("old city").

You can see the relation between the two cities in this map (Public domain from Wikimedia Commons):

Because of the way in which modern cities spread, Parthenope/Palaeopolis has now been subsumed into greater Naples.

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