The Greek colonizers of Phocaea (modern Foça), an Ionian city on the northern promontory of the Gulf of Smyrna, Anatolia (now the Gulf of Izmir, Turkey), arrive in Anatolia perhaps as late as the tenth century BCE.

The ancient Greek geographer Pausanias says that Phocaea was founded by Phocians under Athenian leadership, on land given to them by the Aeolian Cymaeans, and that they were admitted into the Ionian League after accepting as kings the line of Codrus.

Pottery remains indicate Aeolian presence as late as the ninth century BCE, and Ionian presence as early as the end of the ninth century BCE.

From this an approximate date of settlement for Phocaea can be inferred.

Ionia, a region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (in present-day Turkey, the region nearest Izmir, which was historically Smyrna), on the Aegean Sea, is eponymously named after the Greek Ionian tribe, who in earliest times occupied mainly the Aegean islands in between mainland Greece and the peninsula of Anatolia, but whose peoples migrated and founded settlements in both Attica (most significantly, Athens) and the region named after them in today's Turkey.

Comprising the central sector of the western coast of Anatolia, Ionia is bounded by the regions of Aeolis on the north and Caria on the south and includes the adjacent islands.

Ionia proper comprises a narrow coastal strip about twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) wide that extends from Phocaea in the north near the mouth of the river Hermus (now the Gediz), to …