The Maeander River is the classical Latin name for the Büyük Menderes River in southwestern Turkey. It rises in west central Turkey, near the ancient Phrygian city of Celaenae (now Dinar) flowing west into the Aegean Sea near the ancient Ionian city of Miletus. Its winding back and forth course gave rise to English word meander.
It was situated where the Marsyas leaves the hills to join the Maeander, and it became a seat of Seleucid power, and a centre of Graeco-Roman and Graeco-Hebrew civilization and commerce.
There Antiochus the Great collected the army with which he met the Romans at Magnesia, and there two years later the treaty between Rome and the Seleucid realm was signed.
For a long period it was one of the greatest cities of Asia Minor, commanding the Maeander road; but when the trade routes were diverted to Constantinople it rapidly declined, and its ruin was completed by an earthquake.
It comprised a narrow coastal strip from Phocaea in the north near the mouth of the river Hermus (now the Gediz), to Miletus in the south near the mouth of the river Maeander, and included the islands of Chios and Samos.
Notable works of the school still extant are the famous archaic female statues found on the Athenian Acropolis in 1885–1887, the seated statues of Branchidae, the Nike of Archermus found at Delos, and the objects in ivory and electrum found by D.G. Hogarth in the lower strata of the Artemision at Ephesus.
Ionia was of small extent, not exceeding 90 geographical miles in length from north to south, with a breadth varying from 20 to 30 miles, but to this must be added the peninsula of Mimas, together with the two large islands.
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