The Making of the Middle Sea

A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World

Cyprian Broodbank

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771853
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A masterpiece of archaeological and historical writing, 'The Making of the Middle Sea' is extensively illustrated and ranges across disciplines, subject matter and chronology from early humans to the rise of civilizations - Egyptian, Minoan, Mycenaean, Phoenician, Etruscan, early Greek and pan-Mediterranean. It is the only up-to-date, full, interpretive synthesis on the rise of the Mediterranean world from its beginnings to the threshold of Classical times. The author is Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. '... offers us a Mediterranean like nothing we have seen before, in vivid and commanding prose that sweeps majestically across time and space while providing a stunning granularity of detail' - Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University

CHAPTER ONE

A barbarian history

Prelude: a Mediterranean microcosm

Out here, the only sound is the clink of wind-sculpted splinters of limestone on others half buried in the red earth. The sun has been up just a few hours, but already heat pulses in the air, all shade to shelter anything larger than a mouse has vanished, and the huge sky is bleached an unbearably brilliant white on the retina. At eye-level (the highest angle of vision that I can manage without a wince), a strip of sea, solid blue yet faintly in motion like the colours in a Rothko, half-encircles the horizon. Beyond it hovers a pallid silhouette of other, much bigger land. And in the gap between, an old Russian container ship steams up the strait, surreptitiously emptying out its tanks as it goes.

This sketch may evoke innumerable patches of land and sea around the globe, but its further particulars anchor the scene in one definite place on the east coast of the Aegean island of Kythera, in August 2001.¹ I am out there looking for a team that has been in this wilderness since dawn collecting battered lumps of 3500-year-old pottery, the surface signature of an archaeological site found a year before by another team as it swept to and fro across the peninsula, combing it for traces of this island’s eventful past. Modern and medieval remains are meagre in this bleak sector, save around the old harbour at Avlemonas, twenty minutes’ walk behind me. The finds are equally few from the time when the Spartans, fearful of a takeover by the all-powerful Athenian fleet, wished this island neighbour of theirs would sink beneath the waves, though a few scatters of Roman sherds among the rocks that fringe tiny, sea-filled creeks reveal small-scale comings and goings by boat several centuries later. What intrigues us, however, and brings us back to this superficially unpromising place, is the fact that as soon as we venture further back in time, to the Bronze Age and even beyond, the signal strengthens, and the landscape erupts with activity.

By now I can just make out the team, the small dark figures stationary as they count and bag their finds, their leader taller and moving, all weirdly shimmering with the heat coming off the land and horizontally striated with silver lines of mirage. A little closer I can pick out slighter actions, and sense the progress. Fieldwork here is approaching completion, although we will need to study those eloquent hunks and crumbs of pottery for days back in the shade before we reach our best assessment of what was going on. Already it is clear that most finds date to that phase of the Bronze Age when the Minoan societies of Crete were at their most powerful and influential within the Aegean. Kythera formed a part of the Minoan web of connections, and this site is just one among many contemporaries on an island commonly held to have served as a Cretan outpost. Quite what it was doing out here, how people lived in this landscape, if they did, and, if they did not, what else they were up to, are questions for later, but already from the fragments glimpsed on this visit it is clear that they had cooked food and stored something, both quite intensively to judge by the density of remains. Soil and pollen, extracted from a core drilled into a usefully located wetland near Avlemonas, inform us that this place did not look very different 3500 years ago, or indeed for some 2000 years on either side of this date. But perhaps people managed to farm this barren land nonetheless, by building terraces across the shallow folds to retain earth and moisture, as we know they did elsewhere on Kythera. Or maybe their preoccupations were quite different. For on the craggy crest of the hill that rears up behind our site, a prominent place later made sacred for a second time by the white church of Agios Georgios, an open-air shrine of the same period has just been excavated by Greek archaeologists, who found offerings of figurines, vessels and other ritual paraphernalia in metal, stone and clay, some of which came from overseas.² And this shrine was itself visually tied to the real fulcrum of power on Kythera, the port-town of Kastri further to the south, a place where names such as ‘Knossos’, ‘Mycenae’ and perhaps more distant locations formed part of the cultural geography of its more outward-looking inhabitants.³

Nor are these the earliest remains from this little patch. Tiny sherds of pottery indicate several foci 6500–4000 years ago, probably hamlets each clinging to a small patch of land. With them are shiny black flakes of obsidian, a razor-sharp volcanic glass whose nearest source lies 130 km (80 miles) distant on the Cycladic island of Melos. Even these people therefore enjoyed modest connections that reached beyond the sea, though for what now obscure reasons did they bother to try to live out here? A still older find of Neolithic date makes slightly more sense to our time-fogged perceptions: roughly 7000 years ago a visitor out hunting or fishing left a tiny arrowhead on the offshore islet to my right that now exults in the name of Antidragonera.⁴ And from this vantage point in the past a speculative plunge launches off into deeper time. For the strait between Kythera and the hazy land beyond (Cape Maleas, the southeast tip of the Peloponnese) is just one segment of a corridor of sea and land that runs south towards Crete, itself occasionally (but not today, in high summer) visible beneath a long white cloud. Whatever lived on Crete in the remote past, whether elusive hunter-gatherers, as some believe, or just the bizarre creatures that we will encounter in later chapters, had to get there somehow, and Kythera lies athwart one of the most plausible routes of entry.

This scrap of Kythera, and the shifting webs of people that have tied it to other places across the sea, reflect many of the kinds of locations and activities that make up the early past of the Mediterranean, that basin of mingled sea and land whose plenitude of history and culture, both internal and world-impacting, is so vastly disproportionate to its tiny share of the planet’s oceanic and terrestrial space. This book’s subject is that early past, from its beginnings long before the emergence of our own species up until the formation of the Classical world, and the way in which an oecumene with the sea as its middle was forged from myriad fragments, creating a blueprint for a blue planet. In line with a number of recent broad-ranging histories it is written in the belief that if we do not understand the deeper past and its trajectories towards the present, we shall never grasp the conditions of our humanity, nor comprehend our present predicaments and impending futures.⁵ As we shall see, despite some valiant starts and older studies, no such up-to-date, holistic exploration of the early Mediterranean exists, and we are all, dwellers within it (in body or mind) and others alike, very much the poorer for it. But before looking at why this immense time span and remarkable theatre are of such enduring interest, let alone how they might be effectively approached, we can linger a little longer on Kythera for a few initial insights into a few other kinds of webs, whose influence we will need to combat relentlessly. These are the webs of the mind, full of sirens and decoys, in which we ensnare the Mediterranean’s past.

1.1 A panorama over the eastern coastlands of Kythera and the small harbour of Avlemonas, taken from the heights of Agios Giorgios. Several points around the great bay have served as anchorages from the Neolithic to the present.

Three unintended visits to the nearby coast illustrate in metaphorical terms the dangers to be faced. The first, in 1802, was by the Mentor, wrecked off Avlemonas carrying some of the marbles taken from the Athenian acropolis by Lord Elgin, whose illustrious cargo was fished up by sponge divers, buried on the beach and completed its journey a few years later. The second, in 1843, was by the poet Gérard de Nerval. Nerval anticipated a bed of roses, primed by the tale of Aphrodite’s birth off Kythera, and a flower-strewn painting by Watteau (that made no allusion to the love goddess’s less polite mythic origins in the genitalia flung into the sea after Cronos castrated his father). Instead he saw black rocks with a man hung from a scaffold on the headland, and vented his spleen to Baudelaire, who re-spun the scene in Les Fleurs du Mal. The third visit took place a few years ago and, symptomatically, I do not know the illicit passengers’ names or what became of them, but they arrived under escort on a turquoise fishing boat of Libyan lines, now impounded at a quayside further up the coast and blithely ignored by the tourists and locals pouring off the ferry from Piraeus. Each of these visits highlights desires in all too much Western thinking about the Mediterranean, the first to expropriate its antiquities and past for our own ends, the second to romance it in ways that falsify its meanings, and the third to forget the awkward bits that we do not understand or want to know about, especially if they relate to North Africa west of Egypt.

Before Corruption

Any new writing on Mediterranean history operates in the shadows of giants. Of these, the French historian Fernand Braudel is without doubt the most venerable, and was the first to recognize the Mediterranean’s unity and distinctiveness as a field of study [1.2]. His massive The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (first published in French in 1949) reconfigured space to fix the marine basin, rather than the surrounding continents, at centre stage.⁶ As a leading light of the annaliste movement, Braudel also advocated revolutionary ideas about the aims of historical enquiry, which he saw as the pursuit of geographical, cultural and economic dynamics more than politics. Last but not least, he plumbed temporality itself, conceiving time as refracted into multiple wavelengths: the sharp oscillations of events, medium-term conjonctures such as social and economic structures, and the term for which he is most famous, the longue durée of environmental rhythms. In passing, he also added to our knowledge of the 16th-century AD Spanish monarch whose name, by a deliberate inversion of expectation, brings up the title’s rear.

1.2 Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the founder and still doyen of long-term historical study of the Mediterranean.

Ironically, and largely due to its awesome scope and rapidly acknowledged iconic status, for many years Braudel’s masterpiece discouraged further comparable Mediterranean-wide studies. The last decade or so, however, has seen a resurgence of engagement with the Mediterranean as an entity, visible in a proliferation of specialist studies,⁷ several overall histories,⁸ a caustically recounted circuit by Paul Theroux and the rhapsodies of the Croatian writer Predrag Matvejević, whose Mediterranean Breviary offers the beguiling spectacle of ‘Braudel as rewritten by Walt Whitman’.⁹ In part this resurgence reflects post-Cold War changes in the Mediterranean’s status as a geopolitical arena. It is also connected to the troubling state of its environments and societies today. The time has clearly come, therefore, to reopen themes raised by Braudel over sixty years ago, and to explore the possibility of applying his synoptic vision to earlier parts of the Mediterranean’s past.

This challenge has recently been taken up at Braudelian length and depth by a partnership between medieval and ancient historians. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History marks a sea change in our understanding, something of a paradigm shift, to invoke an abused but in this case apposite term.¹⁰ Its themed investigation, via vignettes drawn mainly from the millennium or so before and after the birth of Christ, identifies, in a less romantic vein than Braudel, the common denominators that underl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Topographical Map
• Chronological Tables
• Chapter One: A barbarian history
• Chapter Two: Provocative places
• Chapter Three: The speciating sea
• Chapter Four: A cold coming we had of it
• Color Plates I
• Chapter Five: Brave new worlds
• Chapter Six: How it might have been
• Color Plates II
• Chapter Seven: The devil and the deep blue sea
• Chapter Eight: Pomp and circumstance
• Color Plates III
• Chapter Nine: From sea to shining sea
• Chapter Ten: The end of the beginning
• Color Plates IV
• Chapter Eleven: De profundis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Sources of illustrations
• Index
• Copyright