The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  ‘And that, I shall call Greece. And those, Her Archipelago,’ said He. Then turned away To hear Apollo and the Nine perform Of Creation, from the stage at Table Bay.

  They enter. They attend. They bow. The Lord of Light and Mice gives them their note. And then they sing:

  ‘In the beginning there was no Beginning, And in the end, no End…’

  Christopher Logue

  Translator’s Note

  As this is the last of the full-length books by Fernand Braudel to be translated into English, I would like to put on record my thanks to the people who have regularly helped and advised me over the years, for those translations with which I have been associated. (Some of his books have been ably translated by other hands, notably Miriam Kochan, Sarah Matthews and Richard Mayne.) I would therefore particularly like to thank Madame Paule Braudel for all her kindness and expertise; Richard Ollard, whose encyclopedic knowledge and generosity have been available since the earliest days and who has read over the manuscript of the present work; Stuart Proffitt, who is an editor in a million; Douglas Matthews, who has expertly compiled several of the indexes; and Peter France, who has always been there, but has offered help well beyond the call of duty in this last volume. Most translations are to some extent team efforts, but for any mistakes and shortcomings in the final text, I am solely responsible.

  Siân Reynolds

  Editors’ Foreword to the French Edition

  This book has a history. Early in 1968, a representative of the Swiss publisher Albert Skira arrived from Geneva to see Fernand Braudel. Skira had planned a series of illustrated volumes in large format narrating the history of the Mediterranean. His agent had been asked to persuade Braudel to take on not only the volumes on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – as he was expecting since that was the period of his own research – but also the first volume in the series, on the Mediterranean in prehistory and antiquity. Initially surprised but immediately tempted, Braudel quickly became fascinated by prehistory, a field that was quite new to him and was going through revolutionary change at the time. He sat down and wrote his manuscript in a short time and with great enjoyment.

  But by 1970 Albert Skira was in very poor health. This may explain why in 1971-2 the project was held up, and there were uncertainties over the choice of illustrations. Then, after Skira’s death in 1973, the whole expensive series was cancelled almost before it had begun. By this time, Fernand Braudel was too absorbed in his work on the second volume of Civilization and Capitalism to consider revising for separate publication a text originally written as part of a larger project. It would also have meant the extra task of finding the necessary maps and illustrations. So he set aside the manuscript and thereafter more or less forgot about it.

  Still unpublished ten years or more after the author’s death, this text had become problematic. Those who knew of its existence were anxious that it should not be lost. But to publish it as it stood seemed inappropriate, since in the years since 1970 archaeology had made a great deal of progress; in particular, carbon dating had thrown intoquestion earlier attempts at chronology. On the other hand, finding a co-operative expert who could bring up to date a book written essentially for the general reader would also be difficult. What could be done? We appealed to Jean Guilaine, whose expert knowledge would enable him to make an informed judgement. He unhesitatingly declared that the tone of the book was so captivating that he favoured publishing the text as it stood. The important thing in his view was to avoid disrupting the book’s narrative and stylistic flow. The original problem could be solved by adding notes informing the reader wherever modern scholarship had revised certain dates or interpretations in the interval, and by providing references to recent publications. The task remained of finding a scholar prepared to take on this work. Jean Guilaine volunteered to cover his own field, prehistory, while Pierre Rouillard, assisted by two colleagues,1 agreed to cover the period from iooo BC. Publisher and editors wish to thank all those concerned for their generous assistance.

  The text of which a translation is published here is therefore the same manuscript which was sent to the Skira publishing house in 1969, and which the author received back a few years later. Notes by Jean Guilaine and Pierre Rouillard (recognizable by their initials) appear after the text, and these two scholars have also provided a preface. The maps in Appendix II identify place-names mentioned in the text. Since the maps do not need to be consulted in order to follow the argument, it was decided not to incorporate them into the body of the book, especially since they refer to more than one chapter. There is also a full index.

  Preface to the French Edition

  by Jean Guilaine and Pierre Rouillard

  The field of study covered by this book – prehistory and the world of antiquity – is not one where we would expect to find Fernand Braudel at work, even if the scene is set in his beloved Mediterranean. But the historian famous for drawing attention to the permanent realities of geography and their determining influence was certain to be tempted by the prospect of exploring the origins of a historical environment he had spent a lifetime studying, both in structural outline and exhaustive detail.

  ‘Never say that prehistory is not history’, writes Braudel in The Identity of France. Any archaeologist of the neolithic era and protohistory would agree whole-heartedly with this, and might even add: ‘Never say that the distinguishing feature between prehistory and history is the invention of writing’. Anyone who has excavated, analysed and investigated the earliest civilizations of the neolithic, chalcolithic and bronze ages – which had agriculture, metal-working and eventually towns, but which mostly existed without any form of writing – will have realized that it is perfectly possible to describe their history, to trace the emergence of various patterns of identity, social fabric, competition between elites, economic change and everyday life. What difference is there between the royal dynasties buried at Ur of the Chaldees and those buried at Alac.a Hoyttk in Anatolia in about 2500 BC ? Do the former come under ‘history’, the latter under ‘prehistory’? The distinction is pointless. Scholars have therefore constantly tried to explore as far back in time as they can, back to the era of beginnings and origins. That is why the historian cannot afford to neglect the first settled civilizations. For it was in those early days that the crucial turning-points occurred, as hierarchical societies becameestablished, early cities were founded, geo-cultural areas became defined, religious traditions grew up – in short that populations turned into peoples.

  Readers may be astonished to find Braudel taking on this new challenge. But it is not so surprising if we locate this book within his writings as a whole. By transporting the reader all over the Mediterranean, through all the historical strata from prehistory to the Roman conquest, he was not only enjoying the pleasure of the journey – which shines out from the text – but also sharing with us his conviction that ‘history cannot truly be understood unless it is viewed across the entire time span of human existence’, viewed, in other words, both in the long perspective (la longue duree) and also through geography: the latter is present from the start in Braudel’s account of every great cultural and political achievement, from the first stirrings in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the civilization of the Etruscans in what was probably Braudel’s own favourite region, Tuscany. This book on the Mediterranean in prehistory and antiquity, written just as he was beginning work on the second volume of Civilization and Capitalism, of which the first volume had appeared in 1967, marks an abrupt shift of scale. The author had to tear himself away from series of economic data to consider the successive fluctuations and connections of the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean which had shaped the history of the sea: his field of study had expanded now to cover not centuries but millennia, that final extension of la longue duree which was also to be found in his last book, The Identity of France.

  As specialists in early history, we regard his essay as a salutary exercise. One can even see it as an object lesson, as the histor
ian of great expanses and long time-spans brings his vision and professional skill to the aid of the protohistorian, who so often finds himself bogged down in a mass of details and specific questions. Braudel’s book may therefore be able to offer us some keys, open up new perspectives and elicit fresh responses. Some will no doubt be shocked by it: does Braudel not run the risk of projecting models from the mercantile and economy-driven sixteenth century on to an ancient world that was completely different? Braudel does indeed often hazard reflections of this kind: he compares the cosmopolitanism of the Levantine ports in the second millennium BC or the commercial development of an archaic Greek city to the effervescence of the cities of the Renaissance; or he likens the quarrels between Athens, Sparta and Thebes to competition between ‘modern’ Italian cities; he suggests that when the western basin of the Mediterranean was first colonized, it represented something like the New World to Aegean emigrants, with Carthage as an ‘American’ power. But he never does so naively. He knew the Mediterranean’s islands, plains, mountains, people and history far too well to hazard implausible hypotheses, and he usually presents his more speculative suggestions in the form of questions. We can be grateful to him for pointing out parallels, underlining analogies and asking pertinent questions which the experts take care to avoid, since they cannot answer them and prefer on that account to keep quiet. His analyses of great blocs and deep divides, of the perennial drawing power of the east, lasting until the conquests of Alexander and even Rome (though the latter had first looked westward) provide us with some thought-provoking landmarks. Among the key articulations in history, Braudel in some of his other writings put forward a particularly suggestive concept, that of the ‘world-economy’: he convinced us that it was relevant to the sixteenth century, though he never applied it to antiquity. We may be sure that he would have been agreeably surprised to see that this concept is being put to good use by one of our colleagues working on the iron age in a Europe-wide perspective.

  This is not a work of recent composition. It was written in 1969, then set aside. In the late 1960s, radio-carbon dating had not yet made an impact on chronologies based largely on guesswork. The scattered data on the Middle East in neolithic and chalcolithic times did not allow us to generalize as we can today. The western megaliths were still thought by many to have been a phenomenon spreading at the same time as metal-working. Migrations, whether by the so-called ‘Peoples of the Sea’, the Etruscans or the Cimbri and the Teutons, were at that time given exaggerated importance, or allowed to play a role in historical explanations which they never really warranted.

  Fernand Braudel also reflects the academic wisdom of his day when he locates the east as the point of departure for everything else, or when he describes the last millennium b c as the reign of three peoples, the Phoenicians, the Etruscans and the Greeks, leaving out others whoalso contributed to Mediterranean civilization: the Ligurians, Celts and Iberians. Those who were students in the 1960s will remember what one was taught in those days: nothing at all about the Phoenicians, except their invention of writing and the practice of tophet in ancient Carthage; a few lectures on the Etruscans and the ‘mystery’ surrounding them, a ‘mystery’ which perplexes Braudel too; while Greece was reduced to two major topics, colonization and the heyday of classical Athens. Fernand Braudel’s vision lies somewhere between – or perhaps beyond – this standard university syllabus and what could be (and still is not always) a discipline which would take into account all the facets of Mediterranean civilization. But if one goes beyond the ever-increasing volume of discoveries made by archaeology and looks again at the basic long-term problems, one quickly finds that these essential questions remain permanently in need of an answer, regularly surviving even the most important discoveries in the field. And it is these questions, going beyond exact dating or the occasional sensational find, that our author has sought to bring to our attention, sometimes suggesting answers to them prompted by his expertise in other periods.

  At the same time, the reader will meet a Braudel fascinated by the achievements of neolithic farmers, by the rich progress in science and arts made in the Middle East, by the indefatigable Phoenician mariners and merchants, by the extraordinary feats represented by the discovery of writing, Ionian philosophy or Roman law. As a historian of the modern period, he is forever on the lookout for new departures which he sees as so many revolutions: the trading revolution, for instance, which would last for all time; or the invention of the Phoenician alphabet, linked to trade and making it more practicable. Another change he considers revolutionary is the functioning of the state of Athens, as established after the archaic period; yet another, the emergence of the Roman republic. At the same time, in counterpoint to all this, he suggests another reading of history, demythifying somewhat those two giants, Greece and Rome, and seeing them as masterly beneficiaries of a process which had preceded them. What is more, one suspects he had a sneaking sympathy for the peoples crushed by the Roman bulldozer: the Etruscans and Carthaginians. In this respect a new reading is sometimes necessary to modify or challenge some claims to grandeur, since we know that the rich and powerful in history have generally managed to win the argument. In particular, has Greece been credited with a primacy in arts and technology for which the decisive breakthroughs had already been made further east?

  When it comes to events, one is delighted to find Braudel asking questions about their significance, about their real influence in the story of these great geopolitical changes, and about the importance attributed to certain defeats – often seen through the eyes of the defeated – which may have been over-estimated by historians. One warms to his idea that stable political units might very well have survived a series of shocks, despite the surface disturbance of constant harassment: this is the Braudelian philosophy of history, in which the weight of the masses corresponds to the trajectory of time, with as a counter-theme a strong intuition that even in prehistoric eras humanity was already a cross-bred population.

  With Braudel, the great teacher is never far behind the convinced scholar: we find him ticking off Alexander the Great for example, as if he were a Ph.D. student who has set off in the wrong direction, blaming him for being too preoccupied with the east (an unpardonable fault in the eyes of a man brought up in the western basin); or when he reproaches Rome for straying too far beyond the Mediterranean.

  Finally, and this is not the least of the pleasures in this book, we find Braudel the writer, the magical story-teller who knows how to make the most of a document, asking awkward questions, bringing a detail to life by giving it an unexpected twist, comparing situations apparently quite different, bringing together opposite aspects of a problem, or reacting against obvious anachronisms.

  In this sense the present book is a tonic. It is the work not of some visitor to the prehistoric and antique world, but of a long-time lover of the Mediterranean, revealing its beginnings to us with the added enrichment of his encyclopedic knowledge. In these pages, as we see the megaliths, the pyramids, the Greek temples and the basilicas outlined against the clear blue sky, we are being shown the image of a past which is ever present.

  j. r.

  P.R.

  7

  Author’s Preface

  As the reader may know, I am a specialist on the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Out of curiosity, and indeed necessity, I have explored the whole of the sea’s past, and have read almost all the serious works I could find on it in ancient and modern times. For all that, my personal research really covers only the period 1450-1650.

  Why then did I rashly accept Albert Skira’s request to write the first volume in a series on the past of the Mediterranean, since it indubitably lay outside the usual range of my competence?

  To move into new territory without really leaving home is a temptation, a delight comparable to a taste for travel. Perhaps I yielded to it once more out of that sin of curiosity, and also because I have always believed that history cannot be really understood unless it is ex
tended to cover the entire human past. Perhaps it is only right, as well, to measure one’s ideas and explanations against unfamiliar historical landscapes. The present work, which is intended for the educated general reader, offered me the chance to take my own fabulous journey through the long expanse of history, la tres longue duree. So I seized the chance.

  I must say that it has given me enormous pleasure to follow the discoveries, hypotheses and running debates in archaeology and ancient history, disciplines which have been completely revolutionized over the last half-century – while also, naturally, being reminded quite often of the historical periods and problems I knew well from devoting a lifetime to them. For in the long and dazzling past of the Mediterranean, history may not repeat itself, but it is all part of a single fabric.

  F.B.

  29 July 1969

  PART I

  1

  Seeing the Sea

  The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again. Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of calculation, caprice and misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life.

  An ancient scar on the terrestrial globe

  But if that is true, if the Mediterranean seems so alive, so eternally young in our eyes, ‘always ready and willing’, what point is there in recalling this sea’s great age? What does it matter, the traveller may think, what can it possibly matter, that the Mediterranean, an insignificant breach in the earth’s crust, narrow enough to be crossed at contemptuous speed in an aeroplane (an hour from Marseille to Algiers, fifteen minutes from Palermo to Tunis, and the rest to match) is an ancient feature of the geology of the globe? Should we care that the Inland Sea is immeasurably older than the oldest of the human histories it has cradled? Yes, we should: the sea can be only be fully understood if we view it in the long perspective of its geological history. To this it owes its shape, its architecture, the basic realities of its life, whether we are thinking of yesterday, today or tomorrow. So let us look at the record.