To the archaic Greeks this was Pontos Axeinos, the inhospitable sea, and the name was changed to Euxeinos, hospitable, on the principle that a dangerous thing is best flattered. Colonies were planted around it from the seventh century BCE, and the mythology followed the ships: the Argonauts sailed to Colchis on its eastern shore for the golden fleece, Prometheus was chained in the Caucasus above it, and Iphigenia was carried to the land of the Tauri in the Crimea to serve a goddess whose rites, Greek writers said, consumed shipwrecked strangers.
One of its cults is archaeologically real. On the small island the Greeks called Leuke, off the Danube mouth, stood a shrine of Achilles as lord of the Black Sea, where sailors left dedications; the island is the modern Snake Island, and inscribed offerings have been recovered from it.
The sea has also been drawn into the study of flood traditions. In 1997 the marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposed that the Mediterranean broke through the Bosphorus around 5600 BCE and flooded a freshwater lake catastrophically, displacing the people around it, and suggested that memory of the event fed the Mesopotamian and biblical flood stories. The refill itself is generally accepted; the catastrophic speed and the connection to the flood narratives are not, and later coring work has argued for a gentler rise.