The Thracian Bosporus between Europe and Asia in fact and fiction (II/I millennium BC)

The Thracian Bosporus is an unavoidable case study if we are searching for spaces and reasons for the definition of boundaries and separators – natural or ethnic – between the Ancient Greek and Near East worlds. In this paper, the evidence of the real weight and role of the Bosporus in the relationships between Greeks and non-Greek people is scrutinized without prejudice, with a final focus on the ancient name(s) of this waterway. All the gathered sources point toward the conclusion that the channel has originally been perceived as a passage from a country to another, not as an actual boundary.