The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Changes in sea level also led invariably to further erosion of watercourses. The rivers dug down into their own alluvial plains, so ancient terraces mark the slopes of onetime river valleys. These frequent accidents played a part in the choice of site made by prehistoric peoples for their settlements. And since geologists are able to date these accidents, it becomes easier to propose a plausible chronology.

  A geological revolution?

  The term ‘geological revolution’ to describe the cataclysms of prehistory was coined by Alfred Weber. It is a controversial expression: while we certainly know that the geographical environment varied dramatically during the years of prehistory, were the humans who lived on earth during the Aurignac or Solutre periods ever really conscious of the instability of their physical surroundings, season by season, year by year? Climatic variations extend over many centuries and obey very long-term rhythms. Are they the result of local or general disturbances? Are they, for instance, caused by variations in solar activity as some experts think, or – as was once suggested, though I think no one would dare hazard it today, since it seemed too good to be true – because of a shift in the polar axis? According to this theory, the North Pole was originally located in what is now Greenland and gradually moved to its present position: this would have benefited Europe and North America but would have been bad news for Siberia. The disappearance of the Siberian mammoths, some of which are still to be found preserved in the permafrost, and which were the source of a flourishing trade in ivory as late as the twelfth century a d, might be evidence of such a shift.

  Nothing of the kind has ever been proved. But we can still wonder at these cosmic revolutions which are yet to be explained: awesome transformations which for once really did change the face of the world.

  II Fire, art and magic

  In a universe where living creatures were the playthings of the blind forces of nature for thousands of years, in which so many animal species drove one another into extinction, man gradually came to occupy a special place. He overcame the obstacle of a determinism which should in theory have defeated him; he safeguarded his achievements and ‘capitalized’ on them, committing them to memory and thus improving the tools he had developed. Biologically too, the human race evolved. The most impressive evidence is that the size of the human brain increased steadily. ‘Human progress’ had begun everywhere simultaneously, at a snail’s pace of course, but from now on it wasunstoppable. The upper paleolithic was to witness some extraordinary developments.

  Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens

  During the middle paleolithic, from about 100,000 BC,5 all of Europe and the Mediterranean basin was occupied by the people we know by the name ‘Neanderthal man’. Biologists no longer consider this species as primitive and brutish. Despite his heavy jaw, low and receding brow and ape-like posture, Neanderthal man was a fairly close relation of his conqueror, Homo sapiens, and possibly a sub-species of the same. In recent times, it has been thought that he might have been a cross between Pithecanthropos and Homo sapiens, although this would oblige us to rethink much of our data.6 Neanderthal man was at any rate responsible for perfecting the techniques of flint-knapping in the Levallois era, thanks to a method of obtaining splinters by calculating the angle of strike to obtain a desired shape. A few finishing touches and the tool was ready for use. Wood and stone were now combined to make implements and for the first time humans began to bury their dead, something which implies that rituals already existed, and that people had the capacity to reflect on death and the afterlife, a mental step which many prehistorians consider to mark the true birth of humanity. It is true that Neanderthal man had not yet taken the step, crucial for a hunting species, of developing weapons to be thrown; nor had he yet discovered any form of artistic expression or indeed language (or so it is thought, but how do we know?). At any rate it seems highly probable that he was the inventor of artificially created fire. Until then, naturally occurring blazes were the only source of flames for human use, and they had to be carefully preserved. But to be able to produce fire at will, to ‘manufacture’ it, was a formidable step forward, a ‘means of production’ and guarantee of security – the greatest revolution before the coming of agriculture.

  The Neanderthalers died out, however, in about 40,000 BC, during the upheavals which accompanied the last major cold strike, the so-called Wiirm ice age. Was the problem that they were in some sense a mistake, an ‘evolutionary dead end’, or was it simply that their low numbers made them unsustainable? One expert suggests that there were no more than about twenty thousand individuals scattered over the area that is present-day France (a number which cannot of course be confirmed, but is based on the number of authenticated sites, so is not blind guesswork). In their stead, mixing with them and eliminating them – perhaps by force although we do not really know that – a different human population became established and took over on a global scale. This was Homo sapiens, that is our own species, with the various racial differences which still distinguish us from each other today. This was a species already the result of cross-breeding, ‘like a mongrel dog’ as Marcelin Boule put it. Since inter-breeding between different races appears to have produced greater intelligence, it was obviously a good thing. Certain experts have claimed that in the area occupied by France alone, traces can be found of a white race, Cro-Magnon, in the Dordogne; an Inuit-type Lagerie man, at Chancelade, also in the Dordogne; and a Negro-type man at Grimaldi near Menton. ‘They are all still very close to us’, writes R.-L. Nougier. ‘The Guanches of the Canaries are living examples of Cro-Magnon, and many peasant families in the Dordogne and Charente, tall and dolichocephalic, still display some of the same features. The Inuit peoples are descended from the Magdalenian people of Chancelade, while the residual Bushmen and Hottentot people of distant South Africa have affinities with the people of the Grimaldi caves.’ This all sounds a bit too neat to be true. But S. Coon’s remarkable book on The Origin of Races firmly states that all the races present in the world today were already present before the final stage of evolution which produced Homo sapiens. As for this last-named, does he go back a very long way, 100,000 years BC, with much the same appearance as today – as a UNESCO symposium suggested in September 1969? Prehistorians make jokes like everyone else, and one of them, F. Bordes, tells us that if Homo sapiens from 100,000 years ago were to ‘be dressed in present-day clothes, no one would turn round in the street’. Well, perhaps we can believe him…

  To sum up, whether very ancient or not, Homo sapiens appeared at about the same time in Europe and the Mediterranean. With his emergence – though now showing substantial regional differences– the evidence points to an increase in the rate of progress, from the Aurignac to the Gravettian, Solutre and Magdalenian periods. Therange of everyday implements was extended by the production of fine stone blades and before long the emergence of more specialized tools: knives, chisels, scrapers and so on. The new technology involved placing between the hammer and the lump of flint a ‘chisel’ made of some material less hard than stone, usually wood. Flakes of flint were shaped into long, light sharp-edged blades. At the same time, the original two-sided axes, which had already become slimmer in the Neanderthal period, were fashioned in the shape of crescents or leaves, light and sharp. These finely honed tools made excellent spearheads; the invention of the haft, a wooden stick with a groove into which the spearhead fitted, would turn it into a valuable acquisition, a really long-distance weapon. This projectile can be dated to the Magdalenian period. By the end of the paleolithic, it was being replaced by the bow and arrow, a landmark invention which would be the standard equipment for hunters and warriors for thousands of years to come.

  In addition, other materials were now being worked on with flint chisels: horn, bone and ivory, substances which were easy to split, slice, carve and polish. They would be used to make arrowheads, harpoons, awls, bradawls, fishhooks, eyed needles – all objects found in abundance in deposits from the Solutre period onward.

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sp; Art first appears – but outside the Mediterranean

  All these objects also began to be decorated with patterns, carvings and engravings. Art now appeared for the first time in human history, and in many different forms: a fantastic development!

  This art of the paleolithic era seems to have been a feature of Europe as far as the Urals. It is found in the western Mediterranean, though very little in the eastern half, with one exception: the carvings and objects discovered in the caves and rock shelters of Belbasi in southern Anatolia. So the Middle East, where some millennia later the first forms of agriculture would develop, followed by the first cities and densely settled societies – the cradle of many original civilizations and cultures, all rich in art and technology – was not the site of the earliest forms of artistic expression in the paleolithic era. All the technical innovations of the upper paleolithic in the way of implements have been found in the eastern basin, as well as along the North African coast, sometimes (in Syria, Palestine and Cyrenaica) in more sophisticated form than in the French sites, as revealed by carbon dating. But it seems that apart from Belbasi, there are no surviving traces there of paleolithic art. The cave paintings of the Sahara and Libya date from much later, so are not relevant here.

  This early paleolithic art even seems to be altogether foreign to the Mediterranean in origin. The so-called Gravettian culture probably originated in central Europe and Russia, and from there spread to what are now France, Spain and Italy, at a time when the Adriatic was still partly dry land, providing overland access between Italy and the Balkans. It is from this period that we can date the amazing female figurines made of stone, clay or mammoth ivory which have been found in southern Russia and Siberia, at Modena and Ventimiglia, and in Austria, Moravia and the Dordogne. About sixty or so have been discovered, most of them unarguably of similar origin: the heavy breasts, massive thighs and rounded pregnant bellies of these so-called Venuses are unambiguously some kind of symbol of fertility and prosperity, foreshadowing the mother-goddesses who would be venerated by all the agricultural cultures of the neolithic, from the Middle East to Portugal, from Siberia to the Atlantic and elsewhere.

  Perhaps with these figures, we hold a piece of essential evidence. Can we say that this stage of human development, starting with the so-called Aurignac culture, represents the basic religious prototype of humanity? I am inclined to agree with Jean Przyluski’s synthesizing theory: what was beginning to take shape here, after an immensely long period when the instinct to survive was paramount, was the first stage – ritual magic – in a religious life which would take many long ages to move beyond this. Art itself had its source in magic. In the paleolithic, there is very little representation of the human form for its own sake, as distinct from symbolic rituals. There are a few exceptions: in Moravia, a tiny carving has been found, a mere five centimetres of carved stone, in which a miraculously powerful human torso is depicted. (To a French eye it is reminiscent of the sculptures of Maillol.) And a tiny ivory carving of a face, as moving as an unfinished portrait, has been found at Brassempouy in France. Both of these suggest that models of human beauty were the source of inspiration, as distinct from the steatopygic goddesses of fertility. But is there any reason whypaleolithic art should have to be related to magic? Do we have to exclude the possibility that the idea of pure beauty could have possessed some stone age sculptor?

  I should hasten to say that thoughts like these are prompted only by a few isolated exceptions. They certainly do not follow from the cave paintings, the glory of the paleolithic, however pleasing aesthetically we now find them. It was once thought that cave paintings were confined to France and Spain. But recent discoveries in mainland Italy and on the island of Levanzo (one of the Aegadian Islands) as well as in a cave at Kapovaya in the Urals, seem to indicate that they cover the same territory as the Venuses of the Gravettian era.

  France and Spain are nevertheless (but why?) the unchallenged centres of an art which is thought to date from the Aurignac to the Magdalenian eras (from about 30,000 to 8000 BC), although these dates are still a matter of debate. Cave paintings are almost entirely devoted to animals, which are depicted in realistic and fantastic mode, with such mastery of draughtsmanship and movement that when the first ones were discovered at Altamira, less than a hundred years ago, and attributed by a Spanish archaeologist to stone-age hunters, there was an outcry to the effect that they must be fakes. Since then a whole series of caves in the Franco-Cantabrian region, from Altamira to Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne, have revealed a host of engravings, reliefs and immense frescoes, all evidently related in some way. We can now date them with some confidence and classify them; we know what there is to know about their subject matter (which is rather monotonous) and the techniques used. Yet their message remains mysterious. Only the outer caverns or the entrances of these caves were inhabited, and then only for part of the year; so the context was almost certainly one reserved for ritual activities, ‘far inside the darkness, barely lit by an oil lamp made of stone, with lichen for a wick’, in deep caves once occupied or reoccupied by hyenas or bears. So why do we find there this profusion of animal drawings – rhino-ceros, bison, reindeer, horses, goats, saiga, bulls, deer, elephants and mammoths – depicted lying in wait, running or wounded, all with an extraordinary feel for movement? It seems virtually certain that these figures, which are almost never grouped in realistic fashion, and are sometimes superimposed on each other, on the same wall at different periods, must have their place in some kind of ancient ritual. The image itself is a form of possession. All primitive human society is marked by incantation, magic, an anguished dialogue with supernatural forces. Plentiful geometrical signs, which are also no doubt symbolic, decorate the same walls, and some analogies with the few hunter-gatherer peoples surviving in the twentieth century have suggested variousingenious and all-encompassing explanations. In fact we still do not know what the social, sexual and ritual context was for these images. Their extraordinary beauty does not correspond to aesthetic preoccupations among our prehistoric ancestors, at least in any sense that we would understand today. They do not represent a quest for beauty so much as obedience to the enchantment of an incantatory and inescapable magic.

  Decorated artefacts

  Yet sooner or later, from the Gravettian period onward, art began to impinge on everyday life. Ordinary implements made of horn, stone or bone start to be decorated with carvings or engravings, patterns made of lines or dots, more sophisticated arabesques and lifelike images of fauna: horses, ibex, bison, birds, fish, bears, rhinos, reindeer. When one looks at one of these ‘pierced rods’ or ‘wands’, with its painstaking deeply engraved carvings, or at the curved handle of a spear in the shape of a bounding gazelle or a horse’s head, one is irresistibly reminded of the many everyday wooden objects, also lovingly painted, polished, carved and sculpted, produced in the Middle Ages. Does that mean that some other aim, apart from the desire to make a satisfactory implement, has always guided the hand of certain kinds of craftsmen? We are entitled to wonder: Homo ludens may have been present in every era.

  We have no clear evidence, nor is it likely we ever shall, about what made up the cultural universe of these hunting peoples who decorated their caves: nothing is known about their beliefs, their ceremonies, songs and dances, about the painted skins and tattoos suggested by certain remains, or by the deposits of ochres and other dyestuffs found at Neanderthal sites.

  The art of eastern Spain

  A quite different kind of art, another language altogether, is found in the second great zone of prehistoric art, known as that of the Spanish Levante. It is actually divided into three basic groups: the Catalonian coastline; the coastal region of Valencia-Albacete; and the region of Cuenca-Teruel. In these areas, most of the paintings have been found in rock shelters open to the air, rather than deep inside caves. It has been suggested that this corresponds to some kind of liberation. The images may well have continued to hold some magical meaning or intention, b
ut their spirit and style appear very different. There is none of the majesty of the powerful heavy beasts of Lascaux in these little pictures showing men and animals in everyday situations: hunters chasing their quarry, a wounded animal charging, groups of warriors armed with bows and arrows, a peaceful flock of birds, a group of dancers, women gathering plants or collecting honey from a swarm of bees at the top of a cliff. What the style may have lost in vigour it makes up for in liveliness and movement. Its charm lies in the swift gestures so confidently suggested by these monochrome silhouettes, stylized to the point of being schematic. The latest in date are sometimes reduced to single strokes. The lifelike character of the gestures and scenes contrasts with the near-abstract style of draughtsmanship.

  The art of the Spanish Levante belongs unequivocally to the Mediterranean, but is later in date than that of Lascaux or Altamira – perhaps even as late as the mesolithic. And in any case, it concerns only a tiny sector of the enormous Mediterranean – which raises a problem in itself. Why, at the very moment when man-made art appears for the first time, does so little appear in the Mediterranean proper? Was life there lived differently, with other preoccupations? Was the truly miraculous aspect of the Mediterranean the development of language and speech in the eastern basin, as some have thought? But the origins of language are still mysterious: we are reduced to our imagination, or to later comparisons. The last tribe to be discovered in the Amazon basin, for example, not only does not practise the primitive farming of the other Indian tribes – it is a hunting culture like that of the early stone age – it also does not speak any known dialect. One observer who spent time among these people reported in 1969 that their onomatopoeic and grunting sounds, which had none of the features of an articulated language, seemed to express emotions and sensations, but not concepts. However that takes us into the realm of unverifiable hypotheses.