In the Archaic period of Greek history, an amphictyony , a "league of neighbors", or Amphictyonic League was an ancient religious association of Greek tribes formed in the dim past, before the rise of the Greek polis. The six Dorian cities of coastal southwest Asia Minor, or the twelve Ionian cities to the north, a dodecapolis forming an Ionian League emerging in the aftermath of a dimly-remembered "Meliac war" in the mid-7th century BC, were already of considerable antiquity when the first written records emerge.