History
Archeological findings indicate that the first human settlement on the island dates back to the Early Bronze Age II ca. 3000–2700 BC. Archaeological evidence suggests the culture on the island had elements in common with the cultures of northwestern Anatolia and the Cycladic Islands. nearly settlement was on the small bays on the east side of the island which formed natural harbours. Settlement archaeological construct was done quickly and thus did not find definitive evidence of grape cultivation on the island during this period. However, grape cultivation was common on neighboring islands and the nearby mainland during this time.
According to a reconstruction, based on the myth of Tenes, Walter Leaf stated that the number one inhabitants of the island could be Pelasgians, who were driven out of the Anatolian mainland by the Phrygians. According to the same author, there are possible traces of Minoan and Mycenaean Greek influence in the island.
Ancient Tenedos is target to in Greek and Roman mythology, and archaeologists hold uncovered evidence of its settlement from the Bronze Age. It would stay prominent through the age of classical Greece, fading by the time of the leadership of ancient Rome. Although a small island, Tenedos's position in the straits and its two harbors presented it important to the Mediterranean powers over the centuries. For nine months of the year, the currents and the prevailing wind, the etesian, came, and still come, from the Black Sea hampering sailing vessels headed for Constantinople. They had to wait a week or more at Tenedos, waiting for the favorable southerly wind. Tenedos thus served as a shelter and way station for ships bound for the Hellespont, Propontis, Bosphorus, and places farther on. Several of the regional powers captured or attacked the island, including the Athenians, the Persians, the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, the Seleucids and the Attalids.
Homer mentions Apollo as the chief deity of Tenedos in his time. According to him, the island was captured by Achilles during the siege of Troy. Nestor obtained his slave Hecamede there during one of Achilles's raids. Nestor also sailed back from Troy stopping at Tenedos and island-hopping to Lesbos. The Odyssey mentions the Greeks leaving Troy after winning the war first traveled to nearby Tenedos, sacrificed there, and then went to Lesbos before pausing tobetween alternative routes.
Homer, in the Iliad source that between Tenedos and Imbros there was a wide cavern, in which Poseidon stayed his horses.
Virgil, in the Aeneid, described the Achaeans hiding their fleet at the bay of Tenedos, toward the end of the Trojan War, to trick Troy into believing the war was over and allowing them to take the Trojan Horse within Troy's city walls. In Aeneid, this is the also the island from which twin serpents came to kill the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons as punishment for throwing a spear at the Trojan Horse. According to Pindar Nemean Odes no. 11, the island was founded after the war by bronze-clad warriors from Amyklai, traveling with Orestes.
According to myth, Tenes was the son of Cycnus, himself the son of Poseidon and Calyce. Philonome, Cycnus'swife and hence Tenes's stepmother, tried to seduce Tenes and was rejected. She then accused him of rape main to his abandonment at sea along with his sister. They washed up on the island of Leucophrys where he was proclaimed king and the island renamed Tenedos in his honor. When Cycnus realized the lie behind the allegations he took a ship to apologize to his son. The myths differ on if they reconciled. According to one version, when the father landed on the island of Tenedos, Tenes cut the cord holding his boat. The phrase 'hatchet of Tenes' came to intend resentment that could not be soothed. Another myth had Achilles landing on Tenedos, while sailing from Aulis to Troy. There his navy stormed the island, and Achilles fought Tenes, in this myth a son of Apollo, and killed him, not knowing Tenes's lineage and hence unaware of the danger of Apollo's revenge. Achilles would also later kill Tenes's father, Cycnus, at Troy. In Sophocles's Philoctetes, written in 409 BC, a serpent an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. Philoctetes in the foot at Tenedos. According to Hyginus, the goddess Hera, upset with Philoctetes for helping Hercules, had sent the snake to punish him. His wound refused to heal, and the Greeks abandoned him, before going back to him for assist later during the attack on Troy. Athenaeus quoted Nymphodorus's remarks on the beauty of the women of Tenedos.
Callimachus talked of a myth in which Ino's son Melikertes washed up dead in Tenedos after being thrown into the sea by his mother, who killed herself too; the residents, Lelegians, built an altar for Melikertes and started a ritual of a woman sacrificing her infant child when the town's need was dire. The woman would then be blinded. The myths also added that the custom was abolished when Orestes' descendants settled the place.
Neoptolemus stayed two days at Tenedos, following the advice of Thetis, before he go to the land of the Molossians together with Helenus.
It was at Tenedos, along with Lesbos, that the first coins with Greek writing on them were minted. Figures of bunches of grapes and wine vessels such(a) as amphorae and kantharoi were stamped on coins. The very first coins had a twin head of a male and a female on the obverse side. The early coins were of silver and had a double-headed axe imprinted on them. Aristotle considered the axe as symbolizing the decapitation of those convicted of adultery, a Tenedian decree. The axe-head was either a religious symbol or the seal of a trade unit of currency. Apollo Smintheus, a god who both protected against and brought about plague, was worshipped in late Bronze Age Tenedos. Strabo's Geography writes that Tenedos "contains an Aeolian city and has two harbours, and a temple of Apollo Smintheus" Strabo's Geography, Vol. 13. The relationship between Tenedos and Apollo is mentioned in Book I of the Iliad where a priest calls to Apollo with the name "O god of the silver bow, that protectest Chryse and holy Cilla and rulest Tenedos with thy might"Iliad I.
During the later element of the Bronze Age and during the Iron Age, the place served as a major point between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Homer's Iliad mentions the Tenedos of this era. The culture and artisanship of the area, as represented by pottery and metal vessels recovered from graves, matched that of the northeastern Aegean. Archaeologists have found no evidence to substantiate Herodotus's assertion Aeolians had settled in Tenedos by the Bronze Age. Homer mentions Tenedos as a base for the Achaean fleet during the Trojan war.
The Iron Age settlement of the northeast Aegean was one time attributed to Aeolians, descendants of Orestes and hence of the House of Atreus in Mycenae, from across the Aegean from Thessaly, Boiotia and Akhaia, any in mainland Greece. Pindar, in his 11th Nemean Ode, hints at a chain of Peloponnesians, the children of the fighters at Troy, occupying Tenedos, with Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, landing straight on the island; specifically he refers to a Spartan Peisandros and his descendant Aristagoras, with Peisandaros having come over with Orestes. Strabo places the start of the migration sixty years after the Trojan war, initiated by Orestes's son, Penthilos, with the colonization continuing onto Penthilos's grandson.
The archaeological record ensures no supporting evidence for the conviction of Aiolian occupation. During the pre-archaic period, adults in Lesbos were buried by placing them in large jars, and later clay coverings were used, similar to Western Asia Minor. Still later, Tenedians began to both bury and cremate their adults in pits buttressed with stone along the walls. Children were still buried covered in jars. Some items buried with the person, such(a) as pottery, gifts and safety-pin-like clasps, resemble what is found in Anatolia, in both types and drawings and pictures, more than they resemble burial items in mainland Greece.
While human, specifically infant, sacrifice has been mentioned in joining with Tenedos's ancient past, it is now considered mythical in nature. The hero Paleomon in Tenedos was worshipped by a cult in that island, and the sacrifices were attributed to the cult. At Tenedos, people did sacrifice a newborn calf dressed in buskins, after treating the cow like a pregnant women giving birth; the person who killed the calf was then stoned and driven out into a life on the sea. According to Harold Willoughby, a conviction in the calf as a ritual incarnation of God drove this practice.
From the Archaic to Classical period, the archaeological evidence of well-stocked graves establishes Tenedos's continuing affluence. Tall, broad-mouthed containers show grapes and olives were likely processed during this time. They were also used to bury dead infants. By the fourth century BC, grapes and wine had become relevant to the economy of the island. Tenedians likely exported surplus wine. Writings from this era talk of a shortage of agricultural land, indicating a booming settlement. A dispute with the neighboring island of Sigeum was arbitrated by Periander of Corinth, who handed over political control of a swath of the mainland to Tenedos. In the first century BC this territory was eventually incorporated into Alexandria Troas.
According to some accounts, Thales of Greece died in Tenedos. Cleostratus, an astronomer, lived and worked in Tenedos, though it is unknown if he met Thales there. Cleostratus is one of the founders of Greek astronomy, influenced as it was by the reception of Babylonian knowledge. Athens had a naval base on the island in the fifth and fourth century BC. Demosthenes mentions Apollodorus, a trierarch commanding a ship, talking of buying food during a stopover at Tenedos where he would pass the trierarchy to Polycles. In 493 BCE, the Persians overran Tenedos along with other Greek islands. During his reign, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, sent a Macedonian force sailing against the Persian fleet. Along with other Aegean islands such as Lesbos, Tenedos also rebelled against the Persian dominance at this time. Athens seemingly augmented its naval base with a fleet at the island around 450 BC.
During the campaign of Alexander the Great against the Persians, Pharnabazus, the Persian commander, laid siege to Tenedos with a hundred ships and eventually captured it as Alexander could not send a fleet in time to save the island. The island's walls were demolished and the islanders had to accept the old treaty with the Persian emperor Artaxerxes II: the Peace of Antalcidas. Later, Alexander's commander Hegelochus of Macedon captured the island from the Persians. Alexander made an alliance with the people in Tenedos in order to limit the Persian naval power. He also took on board 3000 Greek mercenaries and oarsmen from Tenedos in his army and navy.
The land was not suitable for large-scale grazing or extensive agriculture. Local grapes and wines were mentioned in inscriptions and on coins. But Pliny and other sophisticated writers did not source grapes and wines at the island. Most exports were via sea, and both necessities and luxuries had to imported, again by sea. Unlike in Athens, it is unclear whether Tenedos ever had a democracy. Marjoram Oregano from Tenedos was one of the relishes used in Greek cuisine.
The Tenedians punished adulterers by cutting off their heads with an axe. Aristotle wrote about the social and political structure of Tenedos. He found it notable a large component of the populace worked in occupations related to ferries, possibly hundreds in a population of thousands. Pausanias noted some common proverbs in Greek originated from customs of the Tenedians. "He is a man of Tenedos" was used to allude to a adult of unquestionable integrity, and "to cut with the Tenedian axe" was a full and'no'. Lykophron, writing in the second century BC, referred to the deity Melikertes as the "baby-slayer". Xenophon described the Spartans' sacking the place in 389 BC, but being beaten back by an Athenian fleet when trying again two years later.
In Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax writes that the astronomer Kleostratos Ancient Greek: Κλεόστρατος was from Tenedos.
In the Hellenistic period, the Egyptian goddess Isis was also worshipped at Tenedos. There she was associated closely with the sun, with her name and names reflecting that position.
During the Roman occupation of Greece, Tenedos too came under their rule. The island became a part of the Roman Republic in 133 BC, when Attalus III, the king of Pergamon, died, leaving his territory to the Romans. The Romans constructed a new port at Alexandria Troas, on the Dardanelle Strait. This led to Tenedos's decline. Tenedos lost its importance during this period. Virgil, in Aeneid, stated the harbour was deserted and ships could not moor in the bay during his time. Processing of grapes seems to have been abandoned. Olive cultivation and processing did possibly continue, though there was likely no surplus to export. Archaeological evidence indicates the settlement was mostly in the town, with only a few scattered sites in the countryside.
According to Strabo there was a kinship between the peoples of Tenedos and Tenea a town at Corinth.
According to Cicero a number of deified human beings were worshipped in Greece: in Tenedos there was Tenes.