These colonies were quite independent of the mother-city as far as government was concerned, but the colonists looked back to the home from which their race had sprung with great affection; wherever they went they were still Greeks, they spoke the Greek language and they worshipped the Greek gods. Colonies were founded not only in the islands of the Aegean, but along the coasts of the Black Sea, which the Greeks called the Euxine. These latter colonies, of which Byzantium (the ancient name for Constantinople) was the greatest, became very important to the Greeks, for they supplied them with grain which grew abundantly on the northern shores, and with iron from the Hittite land in the South-East. The greatest of all the colonies in the East were the Ionian colonies, those in the eastern part of the {111} Aegean and on the coast of Asia Minor. The Greeks who colonized them were descended from the Ionian tribes who had settled in Greece, and so this whole region became known as Ionia. Herodotus tells us that the "Ionians had the fortune to build their cities in the most favourable position for climate and seasons of any men whom we know." Miletus was the greatest of the Ionian cities, and it developed a very rich civilization some time before the great days of Athens. Great thinkers came out of Ionia. Thales, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, the philosopher and man of science, studied the heavens, and he foretold an eclipse of the sun in a certain year, which came to pass. The Babylonians before him had made similar studies, but he carried on their work and made greater advances. He questioned in his mind what his discoveries might mean, and for the first time in the world he declared that the movements of the sun and moon and stars were determined by laws, and that the eclipse of the sun was due to certain movements of the heavenly bodies, and had nothing to do with the anger of the Sun-God. This was the first step in the freeing of men's minds from superstition, and though man had a long way to go and many things to learn before he could take the second step, it was Thales of Miletus and other Ionian philosophers in the sixth century B.C. who first set men to thinking about the real meaning of the things they saw about them in the world of nature. What we to-day call science was born in Ionia more than two thousand years ago. Many {112} wise sayings of Thales have been preserved. It was he who said: "God is the most ancient of all things, for He has no birth: the world is the most beautiful of all things, for it is the work of God: ... time is the wisest of all things, for it finds out everything."[3]