The Mediterranean in the Ancient World
Page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE MEDITERRANEAN IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Fernand Braudel was born in 1902 in Lumeville, north-western Lorraine, France. The son of a teacher, he took his degree in history at the Sorbonne in 1923. He spent much of the war as a prisoner in Germany, where he wrote most of his Mediterranean thesis. In 1949 it was published as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; it has become recognized as one of the twentieth century’s greatest books. Braudel’s other books include Civilization and Capitalism, The Identity of France and A History of Civilizations. The Mediterranean in the Ancient World will be his last major posthumous publication. In 1984 he was elected to the Academie Française. Fernand Braudel died in Paris in 1985.
Sian Reynolds has translated many of Braudel’s books into English. She is Professor of French at Stirling University.
Oswyn Murray is a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
in the Ancient World
Text edited by
ROSELYNE DE AYALA and PAULE BRAUDEL
Preface and Notes by
JEAN GUILAINE, Professor at the College de France
and PIERRE ROUILLARD, CNRS
Translated from the French by
SIN REYNOLDS
With an Introduction by
OSWYN MURRAY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3114, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B1
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 1196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in France as Les Memoires it la Miditerranie by Editions de Fallois 1998
This translation first published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2001
Published in Penguin Books 2001
8
Copyright © Editions de Fallois, 1998
Copyright © the Estate of Fernand Braudel, root
Translation copyright © Sian Reynolds, 2001
Introduction copyright © Oswyn Murray, 2001
‘Preamble’ copyright © Christopher Logue, 1999
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978-0-14-193722-9
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction by Oswyn Murray
‘Preamble’ by Christopher Logue
Translator’s Note
Editors’ Foreword to the French Edition
Preface to the French Edition
Author’s Preface
PART I
1 Seeing the Sea
2 The Long March to Civilization
The lower paleolithic: the first artefacts, the first people
Fire, art and magic
The Mediterranean strikes back: the first agrarian civilization
Conclusion
3 A Twofold Birth
Mesopotamia and Egypt: the beginnings
Boats on the rivers, ships on the sea
Can the spread of megaliths explain the early history of the Mediterranean?
4 Centuries of Unity: the Seas of the Levant 2500-1200 BC
Ever onward and upward?
Crete: a new player in the cosmopolitan civilization of the Mediterranean
Accidents, developments and disasters
5 All Change: the Twelfth to the Eighth Centuries BC
PART II
6 Colonization: the Discovery of the Mediterranean ‘Far West’ in the Tenth to Sixth Centuries BC
The first in the field: probably the Phoenicians
The Etruscans: an unsolved mystery
Colonization by the Greeks
7 The Miracle of Greece
Greece: a land of city-states
Alexander’s mistake
Greek science and thought (eighth to second centuries BC)
8 The Roman Takeover of the Greater Mediterranean
Roman imperialism
Rome beyond the Mediterranean
A Mediterranean civilization: Rome’s real achievement
Appendix I Table of Prehistoric Ages and Anthropoids
Appendix II Maps
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
FIGURES
Figure 1 Hunters from the caves of the Spanish Levante
Figure 2 Deerhunt, Cueva de los Cabalios
Figure 3 Catal Hdytik – inside a sanctuary
Figure 4 A district in Catal Höyük
Figure 5 The Narmer Palette
Figure 6 Phoenician warships and roundships
Appendix 1 Table of Prehistoric Ages and Anthropoids
MAPS
1. The Mediterranean (geographical overview)
2. The Fertile Crescent
3. Mesopotamia
4. Ancient Egypt
5. ‘Phoenicia’
6. The eastern basin of the Mediterranean (2500-1200), showing Hittite expansion and the rise of Crete
7. Phoenician colonization
8. Greek colonization
9. Etruscan settlements
10. The urn-field burial people
11. Celtic migrations
12. The Empire of Alexander the Great
13. Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul
14. The Roman Empire in the reign of Septimius Serverus
Introduction
Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was the greatest historian of the twentieth century. So universal has his influence been on the study of history since the publication of his first major work fifty years ago, that it is almost impossible for us to remember what history was like before Braudel; and for that reason we often tend to forget how important was this revolution in historical method: it takes a discovery like that presented here, of a lost work by the master on his favourite theme, to remind us of our debt to him. The purpose of my introduction is therefore to describe the life and work of Braudel, and to explain in what ways this book exemplifies his approach to history.
Braudel liked to think of himself as a typical Frenchman from the provinces: in his memory he belonged to a peasant family from Lorraine on the borders of France and Germany, where because of poor health he had indeed spent his early years in the village of Luméville-en-Ornois at his paternal grandmother’s smallholding, with its chickens, stone walls and espalier fruit trees, in a world which (as he described it) was still centred on the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the itinerant woodcutters and an ancient mill. The contemporary realities of industrial Lorraine and the ever-present threat from Germany were subsumed into this idyll, as was the fact that his later childhood and adolescence were spent in Pa
ris and its suburbs, where his father was a teacher of mathematics. On leaving school, Braudel did not compete for entry to the elite institution of the École Normale Superieure, but went to the Sorbonne, where he found himself attracted by the lectures of professors of history outside the mainstream, in economic and social history or the study of ancient Greece, which attracted audiences of between four and seven. In 1923, at the age of 21, he travelled to his first post as a teacher of history at the grammar school of Constantine in Algeria, and here he saw the Mediterranean for the first time. He had chosen resolutely to identify himself with the margins of French society and to escape from his Parisian bourgeois background to a career in the provinces.
His true intellectual formation began in Algeria, a world where a young man could take himself seriously. He turned from the study of Lorraine (which he came to think too full of national problems) to Spain, and began to contemplate a traditional historical thesis on the Mediterranean policy of Philip II between 1559 and 1574; by 1927 he was publishing reviews of books on Spanish history. But he was also fascinated by the new history of Lucien Febvre, based on the science of human geography and exemplified in a book written in 1913 but not published until 1922, La Terre et revolution hutnaine (translated as A Geographical Introduction to History (London, 1932)). Braudel read the book in 1924; but as usual his approach was cautious: it was three years before he began to write to Febvre, and their close personal friendship did not begin for another ten years. Meanwhile, in his first reply to Braudel, Febvre had planted a serious doubt about his subject of research:
Philip II and the Mediterranean, a good subject. But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II ? A much larger subject. For between these two protagonists, Philip and the middle sea, the division is not equal.
Braudel was a successful schoolteacher and was becoming known as an expert in his chosen area: in 1932 he returned to Paris, and was nominated to a series of more and more prestigious lycées; in 1933 he married one of his earliest pupils in Algiers. Then he made a decision which was to change his life: in 1935 he took the offer of a five-year secondment to the new university being established with French help at 530 Paolo in Brazil. It was a golden chance for him and for others of his generation who had not followed the easy road to break into French academic life; at least one of his contemporaries and friends in that enterprise is now equally famous – the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
‘It was in Brazil that I became intelligent.’ Braudel was always an eminently practical man. He managed to rent a large mansion complete with a Chevrolet and an Italian chauffeur, from someone who conveniently spent the period of the university terms in Europe. Each winter Braudel would return to Europe and work in the archives of the great Mediterranean trading cities, such as Venice and Dubrovnik (Ragusa). In his research he was an innovator in two respects, conceptual and practical. He made the move from government archives to commercial archives; and by chance he invented the microfilm, which he used in order to copy two or three thousand documents a day, to be read during the university year in Brazil:
I bought this machine in Algiers: it belonged to an American cameraman and was used to make rough images of scenes for films. On it you had a button that allowed you to take one photo at a time, or you held it down and took the whole shoot at once. When I was offered it, I said to the cameraman, ‘Photograph me that: if I can read it, I’ll buy it.’ He made me a magnificent photo. And that’s how I made kilometres of microfilms. It worked so well that when I was in Brazil I could spend whole days reading documents.
In 1936, on the long voyage back to Brazil in a cargo boat, he told his wife that he had decided to make the Mediterranean the centre of his research. A year later he was offered and accepted a post with a much lower salary at the main research centre in Paris, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, in one of the two non-scientific sections, the IVe Section (historical and philological sciences). By chance the boat on which he and his wife travelled home from Brazil in 1937 was carrying Lucien Febvre back from a lecture tour in Buenos Aires: in the two weeks of voyage they became close friends. Febvre, now aged sixty and a professor at the College de France, had been one of the two young professors at Strasbourg who founded in 1929 the polemical journal Annates, which sought to create in a provocatively colloquial style a new and more open approach to history, defined mostly by its search for ‘a larger and a more human history’ (Marc Bloch), by its denial of all historical barriers and by its rejection of the traditional history of politics and government in favour of a deeper analysis of social and economic forces. From this time on Febvre became Braudel’s friend, intellectual adviser and confidant.
When war began, Braudel was mobilized in the artillery and stationed on the frontier in Alsace; he saw no fighting, but he was forced to surrender after the encirclement of the French army by the Germans. Despite the armistice, he was imprisoned at Mainz in 1940, where he remained until 1942.; then he was denounced by fellow officers as being a supporter of De Gaulle rather than Petain, and sent to a special ‘discipline camp’ for ‘enemies of Germany’ at Ltibeck, where he remained until 1945. There he was reasonably happy amidst all sorts of ‘dissidents’ – partisans of De Gaulle, French Jewish officers, sixty-seven French priests of all descriptions, escapers, ‘all the best types in the French army’, together with English airmen and Dutch, Swedish and Polish officers. He missed only the German books that he could find in the municipal library of Mainz.
It was during these four years of captivity that Braudel wrote the first draft of his monumental work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Assisted by a few books, but mainly using his prodigious memory and the long period of his pre-war researches, he constructed a work which combined a vast chronological and historical sweep with a huge mass of minute details, covering the entire Mediterranean world from the renaissance to the sixteenth century. This immense intellectual achievement was written in exercise books on a small plank in a room shared with twenty prisoners. At intervals parcels of the manuscript would arrive in Paris for criticism by Febvre; by the end of the war the work was finished, only to be rewritten at the rate of thirty to fifty pages a day until it was finally presented in 1947 as a thesis of 1160 pages.
The transformation of Braudel’s thought in captivity remains obscure, although recent publications of writing from this period have offered some insights. In one sense it was, as he said, ‘a work of contemplation’, an escape into a world which he could control and whose detailed realities he could believe with greater ease than the artificial world of prison life. In 1941 he wrote a rare letter from Mainz to his wife (who was living in Algeria), ‘as always I am reading, writing, working. I have decided to expand my work to the period from 1450 to 1650: one must think big, otherwise what is the point of history?’ In the two camps he gave miniature university lectures to his fellow prisoners. Notebooks containing the text of some of these have been discovered, and they were published in 1997: it is clear from them that the reflective experience of prison was the turning point in his historical thought, for in these lectures he sets out virtually all the great themes which he presented after the war.
Shortly before the presentation of his thesis, Braudel had been passed over as Professor of History at the Sorbonne in favour of a more conventional historian. At his viva voce examination, his rival (who was on the jury of examiners) sought to justify the choice: ‘you are a geographer, allow me to be the historian.’ In retrospect it is clear that this moment marked a turning-point in the intellectual history of France: over the next thirty years the Sorbonne stagnated as a back-water of conservatism, while outside the university system Braudel proceeded to construct his great empire of ‘the human sciences’ and to open a series of vistas that could perhaps never have found their place within a more conventional university atmosphere, where orthodoxy in teaching was valued above originality of ideas.
Braudel had made his reputation with The Mediterranean, which wa
s published in 1949; a second revised and reorganized edition was published in 1966, in preparation for the American edition of 1973, in the magnificent translation of Sian Reynolds (who takes leave of Braudel with the present book); with the translation of this new edition Braudel became the best known historian in the world. My generation was brought up to believe in the words of its preface: the old history of events was indeed dead, ‘the action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and powerful march of history… these statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors.’ In their place Braudel offered, not ‘the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to so little purpose at the beginning of so many books, with its description of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the seasons’, but a whole new way of looking at the past, in which the historian re-created a lost reality through a feat of historical imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter and the weaver, the skills of the vintage and the olive press, the milling of corn, the keeping of records of bills of lading, tides and winds. It began to seem as important for a historian to be able to ride a horse or sail a ship as to sit in a library. Only the third section of Braudel’s book returned to the history of events, ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs’. Braudel taught us to see that historical time was divided into three forms of movement, geographical time, social time and individual time, but that beyond all this the past was a unity and a reality – all these movements belonged together: ‘history can do more than study walled gardens’.