The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  The alternation between sedimentation and erosion is explained by changes in the sea level, by variations in the climate (more rainfall brings more erosion) and by human activity which may interfere with the composition of the layers of soil and modify the conditions of flow. This has been part of the equation since the paleolithic era, when humans first caused forest fires (there are 5000 cubic metres of ash on one Algerian site from the Caspian era); and since neolithic times, when the critical factors were slash-and-burn agriculture and grazing livestock.

  These considerations open up new perspectives and oblige us to revise previous hypotheses. If the Roman Campagna was depopulated and became wasteland in the fourth century ad, the reason may be sought not only in human negligence but in the increased waterflow which washed gravel and unhealthy waters down to the low-lying regions. Similarly, when malaria became virulent there in the sixteenth century, it was because water had flooded the flatlands and stayed there, obliging the residents either to wage war unremittingly against floodwaters, or to abandon the site.

  All this helps to explain too why hill farming persisted and came to be of exceptional value in the Mediterranean: up above the waterlogged valleys, on the mountain slopes, a combination of wheat, olives, vines and fig-trees was cultivated from earliest times.

  Limits on expansion

  Let me sum up. We are too inclined to think of Mediterranean life as la dolce vita, effortlessly easy. But we are allowing the charms of the landscape to deceive us. Arable land is scarce there, while arid and infertile mountains are everywhere present (‘plenty of bones, not enough meat’ as one geographer has put it). Rainfall is unevenly distributed: plentiful when the vegetation is hibernating in winter, it disappears just when plant growth needs it. Wheat, like other annual plants, has to ripen quickly. Human labour is not relieved by the climate: all the heavy work has always had to be done when the summer heat is at its fiercest, and the resulting harvest crop is all too often meagre. Hesiod’s advice in summer was to go ‘naked to sow, naked to plough, naked to reap’, and Virgil repeated the tag: nudus ara, sere nudus. If the grain is in short supply at the end of the year, he adds, ‘then shake the oak tree of the forests to satisfy your hunger’.

  To all this, it should be added that the water of the Mediterranean, always quite warm, near 13 degrees centigrade over most of its area (hence the warm winter climate), is biologically very poor. The naturalist who knows the Atlantic, and then witnesses the ‘hauling up of pots and nets’ in the Mediterranean, is astonished not to find there ‘that squirming variety of sea life that characterizes the rich ocean deeps’. There are few species of fish and shellfish and most of them are small. There are of course some famous fishing-grounds, the lagoon of Comacchio, the lake of Bizerte, the Riviera of the Bosphorus and in the Hellespont the ‘passes of Abydos, rich in oysters’. Shoals of tuna are hunted every year off the coast of Sicily, North Africa, Provence and Andalusia. But for all that, the overall harvest is lean. The fruttidi mare may be exquisite perhaps, but their stocks are limited. There are several reasons for the shortfall. The coasts plunge abruptly into the water without shelving – and coastal shelves are the habitat of sea creatures. The animal and vegetable plankton is very poor – almost as bad as in the Sargasso Sea, where the surface water for that very reason has the same blue transparency as the Mediterranean. And lastly there is the complicated marine history, which is responsible for frequent sudden shifts of salinity and temperature: the local species have been decimated one after another.

  It is its narrow opening into the Atlantic that has been the Mediterranean’s lifeline. Imagine if a dam were to seal up the Strait of Gibraltar: the Mediterranean would be transformed into a salt lake from which all life would disappear. If on the other hand it was more open to the Atlantic, the sea would be reinvigorated, revived by the traffic of the tides, invaded by oceanic fauna. The surface water would be disturbed, the exceptional warmth in winter would vanish. Which would we prefer? Perhaps we should be resigned to eating frozen fish from the Atlantic, which is brought regularly to the Mediterranean. Then when we visit Venice, it will be a great luxury to order an orata di ferri not from the lagoon but from the free waters of the Adriatic, landed from one of those beautiful fishing smacks from Chioggia with their painted sails.

  But what about the riches of the sea itself, the reader may wonder. We can all conjure up images of a Mediterranean jewelled with islands, its coastlines indented by harbours, those schools for mariners, an invitation to travel and trade. In fact the sea did not always in the past provide that ‘natural link’ between countries and peoples so often described. A very long apprenticeship had to be served. Almost as daunted by the sea as later generations would be by the sky, primitive peoples did not risk taking to the waves in the Mediterranean until the twelfth and eleventh millennia BC at the very earliest, more likely the sixth and fifth (dates of which we are much more certain) – and even then it was a brave venture. But starting an apprenticeship does not mean attaining mastery all at once. Only with the third millennium b c, if then, did fleets become of practical importance; in the second, effective trade became possible, and not until the first did ships sail out beyond the Pillars of Hercules on to the trackless waters of the Sea of Darkness.

  So although they were attempted very early, these ‘haphazard voyages’ did not become regular and civilized (though not always safe) shipping roads until very late in the day. While the network of maritime links was comparatively dense, it operated only on certain coasts, from certain ports. Crossings were mostly made across narrow stretches of the sea, or in one of the sea-basins into which the Mediterranean is divided and which acted as so many semi-insulated economies. ‘He who sails beyond Cape Malea’, said a Greek proverb, ‘must forget his native land.’

  The Sicilian bar

  As a result, the Mediterranean world was long divided into autonomous areas, only precariously linked. The entire globe is today far more united as between its constituent parts than the Mediterranean was in the age of Pericles. This is a truth one should never lose sight of even when contemplating the apparent tranquillity and unity of the Pax Romana. The plural always outweighs the singular. There are ten, twenty or a hundred Mediterraneans, each one sub-divided in turn. To spend even a moment alongside real fishermen, yesterday or today, is to realize that everything can change from one locality to another, one seabed to another, from sandbank to rocky reef. But the same is equally true on land. Yes, we can always tell that we are somewhere near the Mediterranean: the climate of Cadiz is quite like that of Beirut, the Provencal riviera looks not unlike the south coast of the Crimea, the vegetation on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem could equally well be in Sicily. But we would find that no two areas are actually farmed alike, no two regions bind and stake the vines the same way – in fact we would not find the same vines, the same olive-trees, fig-trees or bay-trees, the same houses or the same kind of costume. To understand the essentially dual character of Dalmatia, one would have to have seen the port of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in February during the Feast of Saint Blaise, when the city was transformed by music and dancing, and thronged by men and women from the mountains. These differences have often only been partly created by geography. It is the historical past, persistently creating differences and particularities, that has accentuated these variations, leaving colourful traces which still delight us.

  The unified image of the sea is in any case belied by some major contrasts. The north can never be taken for the south; a fortiori the eastern Mediterranean is not the same as the west. The Mediterranean stretches out so far along the parallels that the Sicilian bar bisects it rather than bringing the fragments together.

  Between the south coast of Sicily and the low-lying shores of Africa, the sea is not very deep. It seems to heave up its bed: one more effort and a barrier would run from north to south. These shallow waters are signalled by the string of islands stretching from Sicily to the Tunisian coast with its coral and sponges: Malta, Gozo
, Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Zembra, the Kerkennah islands, Jerba. I can remember flying from Tunisia to Sicily, or between Greece and Italy, in the days of flying-boats which took you low over the sea: you could make out even the white edge of the Trapani saltmarshes in western Sicily, the shadows of the boats on the seabed close in to shore, and the channels of deeper blue water marking the surface currents. You could even see Corfu and the Gulf of Taranto at the same time! I always imagine the dividing line between the two Mediterraneans on this imaginary aerial map, made up of memories laid end to end. It is a line marked by some of the stirring episodes in Mediterranean history. But that is hardly surprising. North against south meant Rome against Carthage; east against west meant the Orient against the Occident, Islam against Christendom. If all the battles of the past were to be plotted together on the map, they would describe a long combat zone stretching from Corfu through Actium, Lepanto, Malta and Zama to Jerba.

  History has demonstrated over and again that the two basins of the Mediterranean, the east and west, have been comparatively self-contained worlds, even if they have at times exchanged ships, commodities, people and even beliefs. In the end, the sea itself obliged them to co-exist, but they have always been quarrelling brothers, opposed to each other in everything. Even the sky and its colours look different either side of Sicily. The east is lighter: in a sea more purple than blue, or wine-dark as Homer called it, the Cyclades are patches of luminous orange, Rhodes a black mass, Cyprus a shape of intense blue. Or that is how I saw them, one afternoon, flying from Athens to Beirut. We may criticize progress, but if you want to see the Mediterranean, the best thing you could do as an introduction would be to fly over it on a clear day in a little plane which is not travelling too high or in too much of a hurry.

  The Mediterranean at the heart of the Ancient World

  Immense though the Mediterranean was if measured by the travelling speeds of the past, it has never been confined inside its own history. It rapidly outstripped its own borders, looking westward to the Atlantic, eastward to the Levant which was to fascinate it for centuries on end, south to the desert marches beyond the palm groves, north one way to the rolling Eurasian steppes that border the Black Sea, and north the other way to the slow-developing Europe of forests, beyond the traditionally sacrosanct northern limit of the olive tree. The life and history of the Mediterranean do not stop – as the geographer, the botanist or even the historian might have imagined – at the point where the last olive tree has been left behind.

  It is in fact the major feature of the sea’s destiny that it should be locked inside the largest group of landmasses on the globe, the ‘gigantic linked continent’ of Europe-Asia-Africa, a sort of planet in itself, where goods and people circulated from earliest times. Human beings found a theatre for their historical drama in these three conjoined continents. This was where the crucial exchanges took place.

  And since this human history was in perpetual motion, flowing down to the shores of the Mediterranean where it regularly came to a halt, is it any wonder that the sea should so soon have become one of the living centres of the universe, and that in turn it should have sent resonant echoes through these massive continents, which were a kind of sounding-board for it? The history of the Mediterranean lent an ear to the distant sounds of universal history, but its own music could be heard from far away too. This two-way flow was the essential feature of a past marked by a double movement: the Mediterranean both gave and received – and the ‘gifts’ exchanged might be calamities as well as benefits. Everything was in the mixture and, as we shall see, the brilliant arrival of the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean can already be explained as the coming together of different elements.

  2

  The Long March to Civilization

  Taking our bearings within the familiar spatial compass of the Mediterranean calls for little effort. We have only to close our eyes and memories flood in: we can picture Venice, Provence, Sicily, Malta or Istanbul. But taking our bearings across the total span of lived time in the same Mediterranean raises problems of a quite different order. Going in search of lost time is like unrolling an endless ribbon: the further back we go, the harder it is to keep hold of it.

  When we embark on this backward journey, should we stop at the turn of the third millennium BC ? For this was when truly established civilizations first appeared in the Middle East – with their fields, domestic animals and clustered villages, their towns, gods, princes, scribes, ships and trade. These are the classic civilizations, recognizable from our schoolbooks, and still the normal starting point for all teaching about history. Egypt and Mesopotamia seem almost familiar territory. But perhaps it is misleading to grant them this status as the take-off point in human history?

  Their era did indeed mark a sensational turning point. The great watershed in human history was not the fall of the Roman Empire, as leading historians of a former generation used to think (Fustel de Coulanges, Ferdinand Lot, Henri Pirenne) but the emergence of two key developments: agriculture and writing. This is where the waters of the world divide, with ‘prehistory’ on one side and ‘history’ in the traditional (and too narrow) meaning of the term, on the other. We can agree on this; but contrary to what was once thought, agriculture and writing did not appear at the same moment.

  From the most recent archaeological discoveries, we now know that the earliest forms of agriculture, the earliest domestication of wild animals, the first signs of awareness of the human condition, the first pottery and bronze artefacts, the first sea voyages, did not begin with the Sumerians, or with Menes-Harmer, the first legendary pharaoh of Egypt, but some two, three or four millennia earlier, in Asia Minor, Palestine and Iraq. We would probably no longer dare agree with the author of a (nevertheless rather good) book published in 1958 that History Begins at Sumer. Sumerian civilization did not spring from nowhere. And since we are beginning to find out more about what happened centuries or even millennia before that civilization, the urge to penetrate further into the earlier past becomes more pressing.

  I The lower paleolithic: the first artefacts, the first people

  I shall therefore follow the advice of Alfred Weber, a sociologist who cared passionately about history. As early as 1935, he was saying that if we really wanted to know what human beings are and where they come from, we would have to start from prehistory in its entirety. But we should recognize that that is easier said than done. In those timeless ages before writing was invented, there was no Herodotus to describe the Egypt of his day, no cuneiform or hieroglyphic script for scholars to decipher. Once human beings start to speak and write down their words, there is some chance that we might understand them. But without any written documents, how are we to imagine their life, their legends, their religions?

  Our only recourse is archaeology, of course, a special kind of science and even more complicated when applied to prehistory, since that compounds one uncertain science with another. The talented popularizer C. W. Ceram once described archaeologists as detectives, looking not for corpses and murderers but for skeletons, shards of pottery and fragments of tools. These detectives will never succeed in uncovering the whole truth, but may patiently piece together the fragments, devising overall explanations if they have a bent for gen-eralizations – and that is always dangerous. New excavations can at any moment demolish what might have seemed a very plausible version of the past.

  Every archaeological site uncovers a series of layers from different ages, each with its traces of human activity. Ideally, one would wish to dig down to virgin soil, to the earliest occupation of the site. In Crete for example, on the site of Knossos, fifteen metres represents the vertical distance between the present day and the seventh millennium BC (the beginning of the neolithic, when the island was apparently first occupied by humans). Every excavation therefore creates its own chronology: ‘this’ must have happened before ‘that’. The difficulty lies in matching one chronology with those from other sites and in charting that elusive ‘ab
solute’ chronology which is the dream of every archaeologist.

  There are several approaches to this task, the most sensational of which has been radio-carbon dating, devised by the American chemist William F. Libby in 1946. This enables us to date things as far back as 60,000 years ago. Plants, animals and humans all absorb during their lifetime a certain amount of radioactive carbon, which is progressively lost from their remains. This loss is measurable and becomes a sort of retrospective clock, with some margin of error, some exceptions, generally self-evident, and some astonishing results, which can be verified when they coincide with those obtained by other means. The problem is that carbon dating has not been applied to all sites, and the results of excavations still under way may not be published for some time. So archaeological knowledge is always in a state of flux. But even Sherlock Holmes sometimes had to abandon his first hypotheses and start again.