Miletus is an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia (in what is now Aydin Province, Turkey), near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria.

Before the Persian invasion in the middle of the sixth century BCE, Miletus is considered the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities.Evidence of first settlement at the site has been made inaccessible by the rise of sea level and deposition of sediments from the Maeander.

The first available evidence is of the Neolithic.

In the early and middle Bronze age the settlement came under Minoan influence.

Legend has it that an influx of Cretans occurred displacing the indigenous Leleges.

The site is renamed Miletus after a place in Crete.The Late Bronze Age, thirteenth century BCE, sees the arrival of Luwian language speakers from south central Anatolia calling themselves the Carians.

Later in that century the first Greeks arrive.

The city at this time rebelled against the Hittite Empire.

After the fall of that empire the city is destroyed in the twelfth century BCE and starting about 1000 BCE was resettled extensively by the Ionian Greeks.

Legend offers an Ionian foundation event sponsored by a founder named Neleus from the Peloponnesus.The Greek Dark Ages are a time of Ionian settlement and consolidation in an alliance called the Ionian League.

The Archaic Period of Greece begins with a sudden and brilliant flash of art and philosophy on the coast of Anatolia.

Miletus In the sixth century BCE is the site of origin of the Greek philosophical (and scientific) tradition, when Thales, followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes (known collectively, to modern scholars, as the Milesian School) begin to speculate about the material constitution of the world, and to propose speculative naturalistic (as opposed to traditional, supernatural) explanations for various natural phenomena.A thousand years after birthing Western philosophy and science, Miletus serves as birthplace of Hagia Sophia's legendary architect (and inventor of the flying buttress) Isidore of Miletus.