III
For startling evidence of massive building projects from Neolithic Europe it is necessary to turn westwards, to the temples and sanctuaries of Malta and Gozo, which predate even the pyramids. The Maltese temples were created by people who crossed the sea and created an isolated culture with their own hands. The eminent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has observed that ‘something really exceptional was taking place in Malta more than five thousand years ago, something quite unlike anything else in the Mediterranean world or indeed beyond’; this society was in full ascendancy around 3500 BC.11 The old diffusionist assumption that the temples were in some way imitations of the pyramids or ziggurats far to the east is patently false. But, although they were not imitations, neither did they become models followed by other cultures within the Mediterranean. Malta was settled by about 5700 BC, from Africa or more likely from Sicily, whose culture is reflected in the earliest Maltese rock-cut tombs. The early Maltese arrived quite well prepared: they brought with them emmer, barley and lentils, and they cleared parts of the island to create cultivable fields, for the archipelago had extensive tree cover, now completely lost. They acquired tools from the volcanic islands around Sicily, employing obsidian from Pantelleria and Lipari. The island culture began to develop in distinctive ways from 4100 BC. Then, very approximately in the millennium after 3600, great underground tombs or hypogea were carved out for collective burial, suggesting that the Maltese community had a strong sense of identity. Massive building works were already under way at Ġgantija on Gozo, and at Tarxien on Malta itself. With great concave decorated façades, and fronted by forecourts, these were enclosed structures, roofed buildings with hallways, passages and compartments, with a preference for a clover leaf arrangement of semi-circular rooms. The aim of the builders was to erect massive temples which could be seen from a great distance away, rising above the islands as one approached by sea, such as the temple at Ħaġar Qim in the south of Malta, where steep cliffs drop down to the Mediterranean.12
The buildings emerged slowly, over time, rather like medieval cathedrals, and with a less coordinated plan.13 Oddly, there were no windows, but there must have been extensive wooden fittings, and the stone fittings, which are all that survives, are often handsomely decorated with carved designs, including spirals. For the culture of prehistoric Malta encompassed more than monumental buildings. The temples contained massive statues of which fragments survive, assumed to represent a Mother Goddess associated with childbirth and fertility. At Tarxien a female statue nearly two metres high was the focus of the cult; there is quite simply nothing similar anywhere in the western Mediterranean at this time. The chambers at Tarxien have left clear evidence of sacrificial ceremonies. An altar at Tarxien was found to contain, in a hollowed space, a flint knife; around the altar were the bones of cattle and sheep. Shells were unearthed, confirming that seafood was an important part of the local diet; and among the carvings are graffiti of ships.14 All this building and carving was achieved without the use of metals, which reached Malta only around 2500 BC.
Culturally as well as physically this was an insular world. In the Neolithic period, the population of the islands has been estimated at less than 10,000. Yet the workforce was capable of building half a dozen large shrines and many smaller ones, suggesting the islands may have been divided into several little provinces. One might then expect evidence of warfare – spearheads, for instance. But virtually no such evidence survives: this was a community at peace.15 Malta and Gozo were perhaps sacred islands that commanded the respect of the peoples of the central Mediterranean, rather like Delos in the classical Greek world. A hole in a slab in the temple at Tarxien may be proof that this was the site of an oracle. Yet it is remarkable that so little evidence has been found of foreign visitors. If these were sacred islands, part of their sacredness must have consisted in a rule that they were unapproachable, inhabited only by native Maltese in the service of the Great Goddess, who was represented not just in the statues and figurines the Maltese carved, but in the very shape of the temples, with their billowing exterior and womb-like internal passages.
The end of this culture is as perplexing as its creation. The long peace came to an end by the middle of the sixteenth century BC. There is no sign of a decline in the temple culture; rather, there was a sharp break, as invaders arrived, lacking the skills that had created the great monuments, but possessing one advantage: bronze weapons. Judging from finds of clay whorls and of carbonized cloth, they were spinners and weavers, who arrived from Sicily and south-eastern Italy.16 By the fourteenth century they had been replaced by another wave of Sicilian settlers. But Malta had by now lost its distinctiveness: the migrants and their descendants squatted in the monuments left by people who had vanished from the face of the earth.
IV
Whereas on Malta nothing changed greatly over many hundreds of years, Sicily was more volatile, as one would expect of a large, accessible landmass with a great variety of resources. Settlers were drawn to the region by the availability of obsidian on the Lipari islands; they brought their culture with them ready-made, as can be seen at Stentinello, near Syracuse, which flourished at the start of the fourth millennium BC, while the Maltese temples were still being constructed. The site, filled with huts, had a perimeter of about 250 metres, and was surrounded by a ditch; within, pottery and simple animal-head figurines have been found. This was a busy village, with its own artisans and command of the surrounding countryside and shoreline, from which it could draw its food. The settlements of these people are very reminiscent of those found in south-eastern Italy, whence their ancestors clearly came.
As much as 3,000 years separate the very first Stentinello culture from the coming of copper and bronze; changes did not take place fast, and these migrations were spasmodic – as yet, there was no great wave of migrations that convulsed the Mediterranean. But it was precisely this slow, osmotic contact that created some elements of a common culture. The style of life of the Neolithic Sicilians from Stentinello shared many features with that of other Neolithic peoples in the Mediterranean; this does not mean they all spoke the same languages (lacking writing, they have left no traces of their language), nor that they shared a common ancestry. But they all participated in the great economic and cultural changes that resulted in the adoption of farming, the domestication of animals and the manufacture of pottery. A similar rough, incised pottery can be found on sites from Syria to Algeria, from Spain to Anatolia. In the same period, Lipari ceased to be simply a depot where obsidian could be collected at will, and was settled by people of similar tastes and habits to those of Stentinello. The open sea was no barrier: settlers headed southwards, and pottery similar to that from Stentinello has been found on sites in Tunisia, as has obsidian from Pantelleria, between Sicily and Africa.17
Lipari enjoyed an especially high standard of living as a result of its command of obsidian supplies. Whether the succession of different styles of pottery indicates changes in the composition of the settler population can be debated endlessly. Fashions change without populations changing, as any observer of modern Italy is well aware. Ceramics decorated with red flames characteristic of the sixth millennium BC were succeeded by others which were plain brown or black, remarkable for their smooth, polished surfaces, and carefully and precisely made. By the end of the fifth millennium BC these gave way to ceramics decorated with meandering patterns, zigzags or spirals, painted on the surface, very similar to items found in the interior of southern Italy and the Balkans. This too was succeeded by new fashions, as plain red pottery was introduced early in the fourth millennium BC, ushering in the long-lived ‘Diana culture’, as it has become known from the principal find-site. The important point is the slowness of change and the stability of these island societies.18
Mariners took advantage of their voyages across the Adriatic Sea, the Ionian Sea or the Sicilian Channel to carry and offer goods, most of them perishable – pottery and obsidian are simply what have tended to sur
vive. It is only possible to guess at what sort of boats these early mariners used. On the open sea skin coverings probably provided insulation; nor can the boats have been tiny, since they were used to carry not just men and women but animals and pots.19 Later evidence, crude drawings on ceramics from the Cyclades, suggests that the boats had a low draught, making them unstable in choppy seas, and that they were powered by oars. Practical experiments with a reed boat named the Papyrella have suggested that movement was slow – four knots at best – and that time was easily lost to bad weather. Reaching Melos in the Cyclades from the mainland of Attika, island-hopping along the way, may often have been a week’s work.20
There were still Mediterranean islands where settlement was very limited, including the Balearics and Sardinia. Majorca and Minorca were already inhabited in the early fifth millennium, though pottery was not introduced until the middle of the third, and it is quite possible that there was an occasional hiatus, as early settlers gave up the battle against the environment. The earliest inhabitants of Sardinia appear to have been stock-raisers, who must have brought their animals with them.21 Along the shores of North Africa, there were no monumental buildings, no efflorescence comparable to that on Malta. Most of those who inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean ventured no further than the fishing grounds within sight of their home. The emergence in the fifth millennium of farming communities in the Nile Delta and in the Fayyum to the west was a local rather than a Mediterranean phenomenon; that is to say, it marked a creative response by the inhabitants of well-watered, indeed waterlogged, lands to the environment in which they lived, and, for a few centuries at least, Lower Egypt was a closed world. Malta, Lipari, the Cyclades were still highly exceptional island communities that performed very specific roles, in two cases as the source of material for stone tools, and in one, very mysterious, case as the focus of an elaborate religious cult.
2
Copper and Bronze,
3000 BC–1500 BC
I
The development of prehistoric societies has always been viewed from one of two perspectives: a diffusionist approach, now largely out of fashion, which attributes the arrival of new styles and techniques to migration and trade; or an emphasis on the factors within a society that fostered change and growth. Alongside the tendency to look for internal explanations of change, interest in the ethnic identity of settlers has faded. Partly this reflects an awareness that easy identification of ‘race’ with language and culture bears no relation to circumstances on the ground: ethnic groups merge, languages are borrowed, important cultural traits such as burial practices mutate without the arrival of newcomers. Equally, it would be an error to see all social change as the result of internal developments merely enhanced by the effects of growing trade: the lightly populated shores and islands of the prehistoric Mediterranean provided broad spaces within which those in search of food, exiled warlords or pilgrims to pagan shrines could create new settlements far from home. If there were earlier settlers, the newcomers intermarried with them as often as they chased them away or exterminated them, and the language of one or the other group became dominant for reasons that are now beyond explanation.
The Cyclades became the home of a rich and lively culture, beginning in the early Bronze Age (roughly 3000 BC onwards). The main islands were by now all populated; villages such as Phylakopi on Melos were thriving; on several islands small villages developed out of an original core of a couple of small homesteads.1 The obsidian quarries were still visited, and copper was available in the western Cyclades, whence it reached Crete; Cycladic products continued to flow outwards, though in quite precise directions: to the southern Aegean, but not, for some reason, northwards, suggesting that the opening of the seas was still partial and dependent on what other regions could offer the Cycladic islanders. The islanders appear to have imported little into their villages; very few eastern products have been found on excavated sites on the Cyclades. But this is to make the classic error of assuming that the archaeological record is reasonably complete; textiles, foodstuffs, slaves, objects made of perishable materials such as wood, all no doubt arrived, though whether their arrival can be formally described as ‘trade’ is still, in the third millennium BC, a moot point.
The Cycladic culture ceased to be defined solely by the Cycladic islands; it began to spread southwards. In what archaeologists call ‘EB I’, that is, the first stage of the Early Bronze Age, a new settlement developed at Ayia Photia in north-eastern Crete; to judge from the style of burial, it seems more Cycladic than Cretan. To describe this as a formal Cycladic ‘colony’ is to be too specific; rather, Cycladic natives installed themselves on Cretan soil, and continued to live in the style to which they were accustomed. By ‘EB II’, around 2500 BC, Cycladic goods were penetrating past Ayia Photia and even being imitated by Cretan artisans; in addition they began to radiate north-eastwards to the emerging town of Troy, close by the Dardanelles, which, with its gradually expanding links to the Anatolian interior and the Black Sea, was probably the major source of tin.2
For one product was gaining prestige, literally strengthening the hand of those who exercised political power: bronze; and it was demand for this alloy that would create a network of connections across the Aegean, linking Troy to the islands. Shiny containers and pedestals made of bronze or copper proclaimed their owners’ wealth and prestige; but it was bronze weapons that assured safety from one’s enemies. Those who owned these articles were doubtless successful warlords. Copper was to be found on the island of Kythnos in the westernmost Cyclades, or in Attika on the Greek mainland. Early metallurgists had learned they could strengthen the relatively soft metal copper by alloying it with tin. Bringing together the ingredients of bronze and establishing a system of exchanges meant that the network of connections across the Aegean developed into what can at last be described as trade routes: links established regularly according to the seasons, from one year to the next, for the purpose of exchange, in which the intermediaries travelled by boat, though it would be going too far to assume that they were professional merchants who lived entirely from the proceeds of trade. In consequence the Mediterranean was coming alive, criss-crossed by people of varied origins, in search of or anxious to dispose of goods that were of equally varied origins.
The Cyclades lay astride these routes. Rather than drawing in influences from several directions, they developed a distinctive art form of their own; the term ‘art’ should, however, be used with some qualification since the objects they produced had precise functions, even if those functions are now hard to decipher. ‘Cycladic art’ has been a powerful influence on modern artists – ‘a simplicity of form that can be altogether breathtaking’, in Colin Renfrew’s words, for there was a growing concern with the proportions of the human body, a sense of ‘harmony’ that has no parallel in the other monumental sculptures of the period, in Malta, Old Kingdom Egypt or Mesopotamia.3 Objects range in size from miniature figures, so stylized that to modern eyes they resemble a violin more than a human, to near lifesize statues of musicians; the violin figurines count among the earlier works, dating from roughly 3000 BC. Female figures predominate, hinting at the cult of a Great Goddess. The ‘Fat Lady of Saliagos’ with her generous buttocks may, like the Maltese idols, have some link to fertility cults. White marble from Paros provided the raw material, but enough stains survive to prove that these objects were highly coloured.4
The statues are associated with burials, and one grave was accompanied by fourteen ‘idols’. Sometimes they are found broken, perhaps as part of an elaborate funeral ritual. Do they represent the deceased? They may have had several functions, especially as they were being produced over many hundreds of years (the Early Bronze Age on the Cyclades spans twelve centuries from 3000 BC onwards). Other explanations include the idea that they were psychopompoi, that is, guides to the souls of the dead in the Underworld, or substitutes for human sacrifices, or even companions who would offer sexual gratification or musical entertainme
nt in the next world. The sculptures testify to the existence of a caste of skilled craftsmen. The graves indicate a stratified and complex society, with leaders and subordinates; the male workforce must also have been employed as oarsmen on board the small ships that increasingly plied the Aegean, though it is highly unlikely that they ranged any further, and sailing ships appear to have been introduced only during the second millennium BC. Images of their oared ships can be found on the so-called ‘frying pans’, engraved clay plates which carry pictures of centipede-like objects with raised prows.5
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 4
