The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Weaving

  In the case of weaving, was it routine or progress that had the upper hand? Both, probably. Weaving cloth is a very ancient craft. We find it at Catal Hoyiik or Jarmo in the sixth millennium BC and it probably goes even further back. The technology is similar to that of basket-work, which was already in existence in the paleolithic. We may therefore suppose that from then on, whenever suitable raw materials were available, weaving will have been practised.

  So it is not surprising that in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent, woven woollen fabrics are found in tombs contemporary with the domestication of sheep and goats; or that in Egypt, linen weaving goes back at least as far as the sixth millennium, before the first dynasties. Cotton can be ruled out: it was first used by the ancient civilizations on the Indus, reaching Mesopotamia only in the first millennium, in the age of Sennacherib: it is found in Egypt only in the form of imported woven calico, in bright colours. Goat hair was used very little, except for making bags or bridles. Wool and linen had always been the two essential textiles. Egypt virtually confined itself to linen, Mesopotamia employed both and their respective merits were debated there.

  Spinning and weaving probably developed their maximum potential fairly early on. A fragment of Egyptian linen dating from about 3000 BC has 64 threads for the warp and 48 for the woof over a square centimetre: this could hardly be bettered. The technology does not seem to change at all, whatever the age of the iconographical documents that have survived. To spin either wool or linen basically meant starting from a mass of raw material, and pulling out of this bundle, which was placed on the ground or in a receptacle of some kind, the threads to be twisted by the spindle. About twenty centuries separate women of the Diyala valley with their distaffs, as depicted on a vase, and a woman of Susa, sitting on a stool, doing the same task: the gesture is identical in both cases. Egyptian women always did their spinning standing up, or sometimes perched on a wooden platform, so as to increase the distance separating the raw flax from the spinner’s fingers, thus giving more play to the distaff.

  The new feature, in these early days of Egypt and Mesopotamia, was the sudden increase in textile production. Even along the Nile, where few clothes were worn, cloth production increased as costume became a sign of social status. From the days-of the New Kingdom the simple male loin-cloth – traditional garb which gods and pharaohs were always depicted wearing in Egyptian art – was worn only by men of lower status. Richer men wore several such loin-cloths and tunics on top of each other, often pleated. Women were no longer merely clad in the long tunic of the past, but covered it with more flowing robes of fine transparent linen in many colours. (Until then, both sexes had worn only white linen.) Immense lengths of woven fabric were required for the preparation of mummies. And Egyptian linen was famous overseas, being widely exported. This foreign trade was a royal monopoly.

  In Mesopotamia too, textiles, especially woollens, were one of the staples of the export trade from the third millennium. At Ur of the Chaldees, workshops were set up in the temples which were also the power centres of the time. The royal palace would later become the centre for organizing this active craft. Nothing more clearly tells us the extent to which weaving, a modest activity almost always carried out by women or wretched prisoners of war, in fact implied the organization of the whole economy and society.

  Wood, a key material

  The essential role played by wood in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian economy is hardly surprising. Most obviously, it was simply used every day as an all-purpose material, as in the rest of the world, including Europe, until the nineteenth century and beyond. But the problem was that the alluvial soil of both areas, despite all its advantages, could not produce this essential material. One Assyriologist says that the useful tree species in Mesopotamia can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What use were willows, or the fibrous trunk of the palm-tree? In Egypt, only the sycamore and acacia yielded hard wood. Later on, new species were established under the New Kingdom: pine, yew, lemon, beech,but these could never fully compensate for the lack of indigenous trees. For rafters, doors, pillars, furniture, ships, craft tools, looms, sarcophagi and sculpture, the residents of Egypt and Mesopotamia had always had to rely on imported wood.

  Both civilizations knew and envied the forests of cedar and other resinous trees in the Amanus Mountains and Lebanon. Mesopotamian legend had already baptized ‘the cedar mountain’ the ‘home of the gods’. ‘There the shade was cool and refreshing’ for Gilgamesh, the fabulous hero, and the great treetrunks slid into the rivers ‘like giant serpents’ when Gudea, the priest-king of Lagash, felled them with his great axe to build the temples of his city. An Egyptian traveller fourteen centuries before Christ looked up in amazement at the sky above the forests of Lebanon, ‘all dark because there grew there so many cypresses, oaks and cedars’. These forests explain the flotillas of sailing boats between Byblos and the Nile Delta, or plying up the Syrian coast to northern ports, towing behind them rafts of timber which would then be transported overland, heedless of cost, to the cities of Mesopotamia.

  Wood was therefore the reason for the first proper links between Egypt and Syria, for the expeditions to Byblos sent by the Pharaoh Sahira and the ‘entrepreneurs’ of Elephantine. Sargon waged a war over timber from the Mediterranean. This may seem unusual prominence to give a material usually passed over in silence in historical narratives. But there was no choice when such an everyday necessity was in such short supply. Egypt, where we find so many images of craftsmen wielding adze, hammer and pegs before the days of copper nails, had to import all its wood. Timber forced a breach in Egypt’s economic isolation, and through this breach, many other things would flood in. A comparable example is northern China, another zone of muddy terrain, as barren as the moon, and obliged to look to the south or far south for timber. The same causes sometimes produce the same effects.

  Copper and bronze

  With the use of metals, a significant barrier was crossed. In theory the stone age was now left behind. In practice, however, nothing changed overnight.

  From earliest times, metals such as locally occurring copper and even iron from meteorites had been worked like stone, using hammer and chisel. But the birth of metallurgy meant the use of a furnace and successful smelting. This began in the fifth millennium BC with copper smelting, attested in Iran and Cilicia, and probably carried out in the Amuq plains and north towards Diyarbakir, ‘the land of copper’. Its success must have depended in part on the quality of the ores, which in these areas are often mixed with arsenic. Pure molten copper is not easy to cast in moulds. Copper smelting was transformed the day tin began to be systematically added to it – again by trial and error, by sprinking cassiterite (tin oxide) mixed with charcoal on the molten copper. The excellent alloy that resulted – bronze – appeared in Mesopotamia in about 2800, and in Egypt in about 2000 BC.

  Costly and rare, bronze, which has given its name to a whole era of human history, long remained a luxury. Only a few tools, ornaments, and the weapons of the powerful would be made of metal. Most ordinary mortals were still in the stone age. In Sumer, wool was still plucked from sheep’s backs rather than sheared. The Egyptians long used stone knives, as did the advanced cities on the Indus, where the blades which have been found are made of black flint.

  Specialized smiths very soon emerged for the different processes of metal-working, including gold and silver. Some handled ores, others the metal once it had been refined by hammering, crushing and repeated smelting. In Mesopotamia, pottery furnaces with blast pipes have been found: the bellows would be used to activate the combustion of charcoal mixed with the ore. Moulds for the molten metal, some made of limestone, have also been discovered.

  The earliest copper and bronze smiths were undoubtedly working in a luxury trade, with its own rules, methods and traditions, its independent or itinerant workers who, like those of sub-Saharan Africa today, went round selling their own wares, or made them to order. Wandering craftsmen of t
his kind are thought to be responsible forthe strange metal objects found on the shores of the Black Sea, in the Nahal Mishmar cave, dating from about 3000 BC:1 copper weapons, sceptres, crowns, copper clubs of complicated design but technically perfect and certainly in advance of anything to be found in Mesopotamia at the time. Here the copper had a strong admixture of arsenic. Gordon Childe described metallurgy as the ‘first international science’ of those far-off centuries. This would explain the curious resemblances found in some cases between copper and bronze objects enormous distances apart.

  Another ‘international’ aspect of metallurgy was that the raw materials, in the form of ore or crude metal, had to be fetched from distant sources. The Mesopotamians went in search of copper in Cappadocia or in the Taurus mountains, or procured it in the islands of Bahrain (dispatch points for metal and mineral ores from Oman). Tin came from Iran, silver from the Taurus. The pursuit of metal, like that of wood, thus obliged the cities of Mesopotamia to engage in the long-distance trade which was essential for the creation of a diversified society with its artisans and carriers and already equipped with a merchant class, complete with financial backers. The Egyptians had to go to Sinai for copper and to Nubia for gold. But being further away than Mesopotamia from both the creative centres and the travelling smiths of the early days of metallurgy, Egypt was slow to adopt their technology. Magnificent examples of goldsmithing existed under the Old Kingdom, it is true, as beautiful in their way as the cups and goblets of Ur with their fine pure lines. But bronze smelting did not become established in Egypt, if our dating is correct, until the end of the third millennium.

  Writing and numbers

  Writing is basically a technology, a way of committing things to memory and communicating them, enabling people to send orders and to carry out administration at a distance. Empires and organized societies extending over space are the children of writing, which appeared everywhere at the same time as these political units, and by a similar process.

  The early pictogram, a rather clumsy form of proto-writing, was a mere mnemonic device: an outline vaguely reminiscent of the object it referred to. Several meanings were possible. ‘When we find the head of an ox, does it refer to the animal itself, or to one of its products? Perhaps it signifies a horn, or something that could be made from horn?’ The meaning was clear only to those using it at the time. For the pictogram does not allude precisely to a single given word, distinguished once and for all from other words. Among certain peoples, even today, this kind of writing still exists. The second stage is the ideogram, a stylized shape which designates a single object but does so regularly. The final stage is the phonogram, which translates and expresses the sounds of a language, its phonemes.

  But this is too schematic a description. In practice, the ideogram was not completely eliminated by the phonogram, the appearance of which signified greater precision in writing, rather than a system replacing what had gone before. So in Egyptian, the word for hoe, mer, was represented by three stylized strokes, but they also designated the sound mere, which could mean both canal and the verb to love. ‘In the first case, when it is used to mean hoe, it is still an ideogram, in the second, it has become a phonogram’.

  In Sumer at the end of the third millennium, when there first appeared what we now call cuneiform script – produced by the impression made on soft clay tablets by the scribe’s stylus, a sharpened reed – this script combined ideograms and phonograms: it had become capable of transcribing all the sounds in Sumerian, and despite difficulties which would persist until the revolutionary invention of the alphabet towards the end of the second millennium BC, cuneiform script was used to transcribe the phonemes of many other languages (Akkadian, Elamite, Cassite and Hittite).

  By a somewhat similar process, Egypt moved from hieroglyphic to hieratic and then to demotic script, the last named being the most cursive and simplified. But at this point in our narrative, it is the oldest form of writing that interests us. The name hieroglyphics, sacred writing, was coined by the Greeks who, on first seeing these signs on temple walls, thought they must have religious significance. Sculpted in relief or by incision, encrusted in decorative glass, engraved on precious objects by a goldsmith, painted on the wall of a tomb or on a modest papyrus roll, hieroglyphics, althoughinstantly recognizable, have to be interpreted with some latitude.

  The palette of Narmer, the pharaoh who has been identified with the legendary Menes (c. 3 zoo) is the earliest written Egyptian document we possess. The reader may like to try reading in the top left-hand corner the pictogram of the victory of Horus (the falcon-headed god, but also the pharaoh himself) over a chained man who doubly represents northern Egypt: he is bearded, unlike the clean-shaven Egyptians of the Upper Nile, and the water plants around him signify the marshy north. It is a puzzle which can be translated as ‘The god Horus has conquered the northern enemy’ or ‘the god Horus has conquered five thousand enemies in the north’, since five lotus flowers could also represent the figure five thousand!

  An important technical point is that a flexible form of paper, made from the cortex of the papyrus reed, was in use in Egypt from the time of the first dynasties. This made it possible to use the calamus reed as a pen and to write quickly, using black or red ink. The ingenious invention has had rather annoying consequences for us though: whereas the heavy tablets of Mesopotamian clay stacked in the palace ‘archives’ have been found in large numbers, the fragile papyrus rolls have only rarely survived. For every few metres preserved in museums today, literally kilometres have disappeared – virtually all the public records.

  More important than these technical details is the crucial role played by writing in these developing societies. It became established as a means of controlling the society. In Sumer, most of the archaic tablets are simply inventories and accounts, lists of food rations distributed, with a note of the recipients. Linear B, the Mycenae-Cretan script which was finally deciphered in 1953, is equally disappointing, since it refers to similar subject matter: so far it has revealed hardly anything but palace accounts. But it was at this basic level that writing first became fixed and showed what it could do, having been invented by zealous servants of state or prince. Other functions and applications would come in due course.

  Numbers appear in the earliest written languages. The Egyptian system of numbering in hieroglyphics is a simple idea. It worked on a decimal basis, and the only figures used were for one, ten, a hundred and a thousand: thus ‘a lotus flower means a thousand, an index means

  Figure 5 The Narmer Palette. From Hierakonpolis, it describes the viaory of Horus. Schist, 64 cm high, Cairo Museum (drawings by Laure Nollet).

  10,000, a tadpole means 100,000, a god with raised arms a million’. Numbers to be added together were simply juxtaposed. So the figure for 10,000 needed only one sign – but 9999 would have required thirty-six: nine times the sign for 1000, nine times the sign for a hundred, nine times the sign for ten and nine times the sign for one. Hieratic numbering later simplified the system by avoiding repetition of numerals. But Egyptian arithmetic and the system used there for fractions remained primitive compared to that employed by those wizards at calculation, the Babylonians.

  At first sight, it is true, the Babylonian number system, inherited from the Sumerian, looks unduly complicated: being on the base of 60, it uses fifty-nine different symbols for the first fifty-nine figures. But for numbers higher than sixty, the position of the figure in the writing system changes value. Every figure thus has two values, its own and its positional value, as in the case of modern numerals. The Babylonian system for fractions moreover, already in use at the time of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), was extremely well devised and easy to use.

  These early writing and number systems took years of apprenticeship to master, so the art of writing and calculating was restricted to a privileged and talented elite. At Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, a city whose importance and activity will be described later, a scribe had to know Sumerian (more or less a de
ad language by then); Akkadian, which in the second millennium was the language for international relations and legal documents; and a third script, as soon as the alphabetical cuneiform script of Ugarit itself began to be used. This was a body of science which had to be transmitted from master to pupil. One of the classic exercises consisted of copying, and probably translating into several languages, the ‘scribes’ prayer’: ‘To the young pupil sitting before thee, be not indifferent in thy greatness. In the art of writing, all secrets reveal unto him. Numbering, counting, every solution reveal unto him. Secret writing, reveal to him therefore’. This prayer dates from quite late on (thirteenth century BC), but is nevertheless revealing. One could not become a ‘technocrat’, a scribe or a literate person, without rigorous training. It was the price to be paid for enormous privileges. Egypt and Mesopotamia had their own mandarin class.

  Towns and cities

  Cities played a crucial though ambiguous role in the new civilization. They were created by population increase, but they also generated it. They were created by trade, but they generated that too; they were tools in the hands of great political powers, but they also operated on their own account. The basic conditions of their existence seem always to have been the same: they all had a dependent hinterland, a temple, a palace, an artisan class (weavers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths), scribes, carriers, merchants. Once a wall had been built around the settlement, it was fixed perhaps for centuries, distinguishing the town from the surrounding countryside and making it in some sense superior. All these basic conditions accompanied the rise of a city but did not always determine its fortunes.