This article is about the region of western Anatolia. For the group of islands west of Greece, see Ionian Islands.

Ionia (Greek Ιωνία; see also list of traditional Greek place names) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (now in İzmir, Turkey) on the Aegean Sea. 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. It was bounded by Aeolia to the north, Lydia to the east and Caria to the south.

According to the universal Greek tradition, the cities of Ionia were founded by migrants from the other side of the Aegean and their settlement was connected with the legendary history of the Ionic race in Attica, by the statement that the colonists were led by Neleus and Androclus, sons of Codrus, the last king of Athens. In accordance with this view the "Ionic migration", as it was called by later chronologers, was dated by them one hundred and forty years after the Trojan war, or sixty years after the return of the Heraclidae into the Peloponnese. Without assigning any definite date, we may say that recent research of 1910 has tended to support the popular Greek idea that Ionia received its main Greek element rather late - after the descent of the Dorians, and, therefore, after any part of the Aegean period. The only Aegean objects yet found (1910) in or near Ionia are some shards of the very late Minoan age at Miletus. It is improbable that all the Greek colonists were of the not numerous Ionian race. Herodotus tells us that the settlers were from many different tribes and cities of Greece (a fact indicated also by the local traditions of the cities), and that they intermarried with the native races. In Asia, Greeks were named with derivations of "Ionian", such as Yona in Pali and Yavana in Sanskrit. Josephus relates the Ionians to the biblical character Javan son of Japheth: "but from Javan, Ionia, and all the Grecians, are derived" (Antiquities of the Jews I:6). In Greek mythology, Ion, regarded as the founder of the Ionian tribe, was the son of Creusa (daughter of Erechtheus); his father was either Creusa's husband Xuthus (according to Hesiod's Eoiae) or Apollo (according to Euripides).

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