Phasis

Phasis was an ancient and early medieval city on the eastern Black Sea coast, founded in the 7th or 6th century BC as a colony of the Milesian Greeks at the mouth of the eponymous river in Colchis. Its location today could be the port city of Poti, Georgia. Its ancient bishopric became a Latin Catholic titular see of Metropolitan rank. Etymology The names of ancient Phasis and modern Poti are apparently linked to each other, but the etymology is a matter of a scholarly dispute. "Phasis" is first recorded in Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BC) as a name of the river, not a town. The first Greek settlement here must have been founded not earlier than the very end of the 7th, and probably at the beginning of the 6th century BC, and received its name from the river. Since Erich Diehl, in 1938, first suggested a non-Hellenic origin of the name and asserted that Phasis might have been a derivative of a local hydronym, several explanations have been proposed, linking the name to the Proto-Georgian-Zan language *Poti, Svan, *Pasid, and even to a Semitic word, meaning "a gold river." The collective use of the ethnonym (Phasians) is attested in Xenophon and Heraclides Lembus. The name Phasis is the origin of the word pheasant.