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that there had been absolutely no town planning anywhere up to this point, and anyway his urban oeuvre was well over two thousand years earlier than New York. It’s true that he is credited with more plans than he was possibly able to execute, in the sense that some, like Rhodes, happened after he had died. But there is no doubting that he was a major influence on the way new cities should be laid out, and more than a century after his birth, Knidos implemented Hippodamus’ basic idea for their new metropolis. But as we shall see, the Knidians set about the ‘Hippodamus thing’ with even more panache than their classical neighbours.

Looking at Cape Crio today, the chosen site for their new city, it is not difficult to see why they selected it sitting as it does on this corner of the Mediterranean. But in its day it was an audacious notion and required a considerable imagination and courage to design. The site consists of an island of unusual ruggedness. On its south side, the side facing away from the city, the island, called by some Triopium, is a succession of sheer, forbidding cliffs rising straight out of the sea, with the great volcano of Nisyros not ten nautical miles distant, and the long rocky island of Tilos a bit further to the south. The sea is deep just off the island and the contrary winds that gust around the point nearly always cause the surface of the sea to boil in a squally spindrift. To the landward side, the island slopes, steeply at first, then at a shallower angle towards what was once a deep race between the island and the promontory.

The mainland, meanwhile, is a continuation of the mountain range that begins west of present-day Datça, rising to over three thousand feet and then diminishing in a series of precipitous hills to the tip of the peninsula. Today, the site has largely returned to its former uninhabited state, and to some the place has assumed its original barren and forbidding appearance.

The concept in the mind of the engineers who opted for this location was to join the middle of the island to the mainland with a man-made isthmus across the centre of the intervening straits, a distance across the narrows of

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