Ancient Corinth

Neolithic pottery places people on the site from at least 6500 BC, but it was probably not heavily occupied again until around 900 BC, when the Dorians are believed to have settled there. Still a backwater in the 8th century BC, Corinth was held by the Bacchiadae, a tightly knit Doric kinship group who ruled through an annually elected prytanis and a polemarchos at the head of the army. Between 747 and 650 BC the city became a unified state, planted colonies at Corcyra and Syracuse in 733 BC and by 730 BC held at least 5,000 people.

In 657 BC the polemarch Cypselus read a Delphic oracle as instruction to rule, seized the city and exiled the Bacchiadae. He governed for three decades and built temples to Apollo and Poseidon in 650 BC. His son Periander (627–587 BC), counted among the Seven Wise Men of Greece, saw Corinth's first coins struck and, after giving up an attempt to cut a seaway across the Isthmus as too difficult, built the Diolkos, a stone ramp for hauling ships overland. The tyranny ended in 581 BC with the assassination of his nephew and successor, and the leading families established the Isthmian Games that same year.

In classical times Corinth rivalled Athens and Thebes in wealth, drawn from the traffic crossing the isthmus, and until the mid-6th century BC it exported black-figure pottery across the Greek world before losing that market to Athenian artisans. The Corinthian order took its name from the city, and its temple of Aphrodite is said to have employed some thousand hetairas. Corinth sent 400 men to Thermopylae, forty warships to Salamis under Adeimantos and 5,000 hoplites to Plataea. Its dispute with Athens over its colony Corcyra was among the factors behind the Peloponnesian War, and in 338 BC Philip II founded the League of Corinth in the city. When Rome declared war on the Achaean League in 146 BC, the army of Lucius Mummius besieged, captured and burned Corinth, killed all the men and sold the women and children into slavery; Mummius took the cognomen Achaicus for it.

The site kept only minimal habitation until Julius Caesar refounded it as Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis in 44 BC. Rebuilt as a major city of Achaia and later the provincial capital, it carried a mixed population of Romans, Greeks and Jews. Paul the Apostle first came in AD 49 or 50, while Gallio, brother of Seneca, was proconsul of Achaia, and stayed eighteen months, working as a tentmaker with Priscilla and Aquila. In AD 51/52 Gallio presided over Paul's trial in the city. Paul wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians from Ephesus and the Second from Macedonia.

Earthquakes in AD 365 and 375 and Alaric's invasion in 396 largely destroyed the city; it was rebuilt on a monumental scale but over a much smaller area. Justinian I (527–565) walled the isthmus from gulf to gulf with the Hexamilion, about ten kilometres long. The main settlement moved up to the Acrocorinth, and the city recovered only from the 9th century, peaking in the 11th and 12th centuries on a flourishing silk industry. An earthquake in November 856 was reckoned to have killed some 45,000.

Roger II of Sicily's Italo-Normans plundered Corinth in 1147 and carried off captives, silk weavers above all; it never fully recovered from the sack. Leo Sgouros held Acrocorinth against the knights of the Fourth Crusade from 1205 and rode off its summit to his death in 1208; the fortress fell in 1210. The Ottomans took the city in 1395, the Despotate of the Morea retook it in 1403, and from 1458 it was Ottoman Gördüs, a sanjak centre, held by Venice between 1687 and 1715 and a sanjak capital again until 1821. Greek accounts date its release from Ottoman rule to 1822; formal liberation came in 1832 under the Treaty of London.

An earthquake destroyed the village around the ruins in 1858, leading to the founding of New Corinth three kilometres to the north-east. A. Skias dug at the site in 1892 and 1906 for the Archaeological Society, and in 1896 the American School of Classical Studies at Athens began the Corinth Excavations, which have continued since, directed by Charles K. Williams II from 1965 and Guy D. R. Sanders from 1997. Work has centred on the mid-6th-century BC Temple of Apollo, one of the few features visible since antiquity, and has reached remains from the Early Neolithic onward. Finds are housed in the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth, and recent excavations by the Greek Ministry of Culture have brought further material to light.