The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  If this indeed was the case, then the ‘cultural universe’ of the megaliths moved from east to west. But it certainly did not do so in any regular fashion or from any single source. We shall be able to charttheir spread, if spread there was, only when we have succeeded in dating all the megalithic monuments, region by region.8

  Malta: temples and dolmens

  The experts do not by any means agree for example on the date of the megalithic temples in Malta, or even on the date of the first human habitation of the island (which was probably reached via Sicily): the evidence consists only of a very few shards of cardial pottery. Some very ancient burial chambers have, however, been unearthed by excavation, containing a mixture of bones still coated in ochre and human blood. Later than these are the immense catacombs of Hal Saflieni, discovered iri 1901, in which over seven thousand skeletons were found, their bones scattered apparently at random.

  At some very early date – and this is peculiar to Malta, giving it a special place in megalithic history – genuine temples also appeared. About a dozen of them have been preserved, differing greatly from one another, and combining huge boulders with more ordinary building stones. Although their chronology is uncertain, excavations throughout the island have made it possible to classify these temples in relation to one another. The two oldest ones at Mgarr have a clover-leaf design, with three oval main chambers, a feature which is always found in later temples, despite the increasing architectural complexity which make them truly enormous monuments.

  This is true for instance of the temples at Gantija, Hagiar Kim, and Mnaidra, and of the fantastic complex at Hal Tarxien, made up of several successive temples, not far from the present-day capital, Valletta.

  The hypothesis advanced by J. D. Evans in 1959 seems quite plausible: that these temples were originally primitive tombs which later changed their usage, remaining dedicated to the cult of the dead, who had to be placated by propitiary rites and sacrifices. This would explain, among other things, the curious frieze in the Hal Tarxien temple, depicting rams, pigs and goats, potential victims. Here too we find the Earth Mother, represented by many carved images (not merely menhir-statues as elsewhere). The style varied greatly with the period, but in the final generation of temples (dating from the first half of the second millennium), the style of the sculpture and certain motifs such as the spiral make one think there may have been some direct Aegean influence.

  This temple civilization in Malta was suddenly and totally destroyed in about 1500 BC,9 by invaders who probably originated in southern Italy. The boat graffiti mentioned earlier cannot be later therefore than the middle of the second millennium. But the newcomers, who destroyed the island’s first civilization and used the ruins of the Hal Tarxien temples for their own ends, had one special feature: they brought with them copper weapons. This advantage no doubt made up for their inferior numbers compared to the builders of the megalithic temples. Of those builders, nothing else remained, neither their pottery – which was replaced by a much cruder variety – nor their art. Their successors appear themselves to have belonged to some form of megalithic culture, however, and they in turn covered the island with small dolmen tombs, of fairly crude design, in which pottery characteristic of the occupation has been found.

  Malta may perhaps have played a key role in the megalithic chain. I say ‘perhaps’ advisedly. This has often been suggested, but we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by the size and grandiose strangeness of the Maltese stones. After all, it is equally possible that southern Italy (Bari, Otranto, Tarentum) and Sicily, where huge mass tombs cut into the rock have left plentiful traces, associated with bronze-age artefacts, may have played just as influential a role in this primitive culture, if not more so. The small sea-girt island of Malta, producing a fantastic set of stone monuments, yet having no knowledge of metals, seems too special a case to have played the role of cultural transmitter in the spread of megaliths, as some people have hypothesized.

  The strange case of Sardinia

  Sardinia, equally strange and special, is also worth pausing to consider. This is a very curious island, long uninhabited, like its neighbour Corsica. Being larger and even more isolated from the mainland than the latter, it has been perhaps the most conservative region of the whole Mediterranean – at every stage in its history. As in Malta, there was both a deviation from and a development of the usual megalithic pattern.

  Collective tombs were present from the very first human occupation of the island, which was probably not before 2250 BC.10 They include the mysterious tombs of Li Muri, with their raised stones and their refined stone artefacts; somewhat later, it seems, came the tombs cut into the rock, which correspond to the first identifiable culture on the island, known as the Ozierian. Everything about these tombs seems to point to a link with eastern culture – the bulls’ heads carved on the rocky walls, the idols of Cycladic type, the spiral designs at Pimenteli, which are a symbol of fertility widespread in the eastern Mediterranean from Sumer to Troy, Mycenae and Syria. But there is some western influence too, particularly from southern France, and certain imported artefacts argue for contact with both Sicily and the British Isles, possibly Ireland.

  Of later date, but almost contemporary with each other,11 are the tombs with dolmens, which would later develop into the great mass burial chambers known as the ‘tombs of the giants’, and the first villages with nuraghi, towers, very characteristic of the island, and similar to the Corsican torri. About 6500 of these towers, more or less well-preserved, have been recorded on the island, and the list is probably not complete. Their name, which may come from a pre-Indo-European dialect, may mean a heap or a hollow. Originally they seem to have been watchtowers for defensive purposes, built on a platform and on the cairn principle, thus creating inside a kind of tholos, a vaulted chamber, on a more or less steep slope. They went on being built until Roman times (238 BC) and even later, The nuraghi thus spanned a thousand years of existence, during which time they were gradually embellished with various refinements, like the temples in Malta, a protective outside rampart for instance, or supplementary towers. With the Carthaginian invasion in the sixth century BC, they had to be defended against engines of war: numerous projectiles have been found at the foot of the nuraghi. The huge complex at Barumini, where recent excavations have identified at least two successive periods, was the result of these progressive improvements and refinements.

  These complexes, built of massive boulders, sheltered defenders, families, tribes and their chief, and sometimes armaments. As for their religious life, about which little is known, it centred first on the tombs of the giants, then on sanctuaries located near wells or fortified temples. These sites are reminiscent of those on Malta, but they are not identical, and we should note that they are in fact of much later date. Yet they come from the same stock of formal possibilities.

  Unlike Malta, Sardinia had early knowledge of metals. Artefacts, probably imported, including copper which analysis shows to have come from Spain, the south of France, and Ireland, have been found in the Ozieri tombs. After this, local workings rapidly came to occupy an important place in this mining island, as we shall see later. One would like to know the date at which the foundries connected to the fortified temples and the nuraghi were built.

  From the Spanish Levante to the Atlantic

  The Balearic islands, or at least Minorca and Majorca (Ibiza was uninhabited until the Carthaginians arrived in 636 BC), would give rise to observations comparable to those one might make concerning the whole Mediterranean ‘from Cyprus to Mycenae, by way of Crete and the Aegean islands’, Malta and above all Sardinia. The tombs and towers in these two islands have not yet been systematically excavated. There are about a thousand towers, both round and square, locally called talayots. Do they date only from the first millennium, as seems possible? At any rate, they had time to develop, culminating in groups of towers and houses, surrounded by thick walls. The village of Capocorp Veil for example, near Lluchmayor, is ab
out two hundred metres long and forty across; it has a wall three metres thick, and includes seven talayots, three round ones and four square. The cultural and historical meaning of this megalithic architecture has yet to be deciphered.

  In Spain itself, the spread of megaliths was even more curious. From Almeria to the Ebro and even to the Llobregat, the Mediterranean coast is absolutely free of any trace of this kind of construction. The region seems to have been penetrated from the south, through a narrow gap near the famous archaeological site of Los Millares (mid-second millennium).12 After having come in via this entrance, the newcomers moved westwards, towards the Atlantic coast and Portugal. If the archaeologists are right, these people were invaders, sincetheir skeletons, found in large numbers in the necropolises, seem to indicate a different racial group from that already established in Spain and North Africa.

  These invaders were newcomers then, and they were familiar with metallurgy. The objects in the tombs reveal the combined use of copper and stone, daggers made of metal or flint, pikes and some remarkable arrowheads. Above all, and this is particularly noteworthy, the newcomers headed for the mining areas of Almeria, Jaen, the Sierra Morena and the Lower Guadalquivir. These were the only inland regions they colonized, otherwise settling only in coastal zones. Was it mining or seafaring that made their fortune? Both, probably. Evidence of their prosperity at any rate lies in the existence of towns without any equivalent in the west at the time. On what is now the despoblado (uninhabited site) of Los Millares in Almeria province, we must imagine a genuine city with walls and flanking towers, an aqueduct bringing water from three kilometres away, and many rich necropolises. The practice of burying princes or chieftains surrounded by their entire families points to a ‘patriarchal and aristocratic society’.

  These collective burial sites help locate the invaders in the great megalithic movement: eastern influence seems clearer here than elsewhere.13 In the Los Millares tombs, a corridor leads into a round or oval chamber made of great slabs of upright stones, welded together with clay, and topped by a false dome, as in certain tholoi in the Aegean from the first half of the second millennium. Sometimes a group of baitlos (sacred stones) painted red is found at the mouth of the corridor, very like those of Byblos. Other tombs, enormous in size, as at Antequera or Lacara near Merida, use more of the heavy raised stones of the dolmen type. Some of the tombs are underground, cut into the rock (as in Sicily and very frequently in the Aegean) and they always follow the pattern of the corridor and the cairned chamber. Martin Almagro Basch has unhesitatingly related this architecture and its associated pottery, weapons or stylized idols, to the Cyclades culture dating from about zooo BC to the end of the Mycenaean period. Once more we find links between a megalithic culture and Aegean or Syrian influence, emanating therefore from areas already in close contact with each other in the seas of the cosmopolitan Levant of the second millennium.

  An open question

  The megalith problem, which we have not explored beyond the Mediterranean area, remains obscure, complex and controversial. Is the whole quest a wild goose chase, as one archaeologist maintains? All hypotheses remain possible, and the specialists often come up with contradictory ones, although they are almost always suggestive. What if we were one day to find firm evidence that the dolmens and menhirs of Brittany go back to the fourth millennium and are the oldest of all the groups in the west?14 One theory however does not seem convincing: in order to refute the idea of an eastern origin, and thus of any kind of unity in the whole megalithic culture, one school of thought points out that the chronology we currently use provides no clear evidence of an east-west progression. It has therefore chosen to conclude that ‘the very simple ideas and technology’ underlying the megalithic monuments must have sprung up spontaneously ‘in many regions’ in Europe and the Mediterranean, without any obvious connection between them. But was it such a simple and straightforward matter, in terms of technology, to transport the great boulders of Stonehenge from a quarry some hundred and fifty miles away? Was it ‘natural’ to build these huge collective tombs (which G. Bailloud has rightly identified as the essential feature of a culture including ‘the dolmens, the hypogees and the tholoi’), and is it really plausible to assume that it appeared everywhere more or less spontaneously?

  The spread of a cultural phenomenon which included but was not confined to the megaliths does not of course signify total coherence or absolute uniformity. This would hardly be likely, since the process was spread over one or two millennia, and in environments geographically and humanly very different. Nevertheless a certain world view of forms and rituals did manifest itself, probably spreading by sea, rather than by large-scale population movement, and that does pose the enigma of the origins of those who created these monuments. Were they missionaries of a kind, founding a religion? The expanding temples on Malta and the funerary cults seem to point unavoidably to religious life. But in those days, what people did not build its life around its religion? Were they adventurers, setting out from the east in search of new tin or copper mines? I would be inclined to favour this theory, inspite of the early Maltese civilization which had no metal. The fact that ambulant metal-workers and smiths are well known in the history of the Middle East tends to strengthen me in this belief. We know that they travelled large distances, from the early third millennium. In about 2500, in the great cities of the Middle East, metal craftworking was usually in the hands of guilds of foreigners, who guarded their secrets jealously and did not mingle with the urban community. A little before 2000, it seems that there was a serious crisis in the countries which had been longest in possession of bronze, from Asia Minor to Iran. Was it caused by social movements, natural disasters, or simply by the working-out of local mines? At any rate, it resulted in many groups of metal-workers moving south. They took with them identical technology and artefacts: large-headed pins (known as mace-shaped), torques (a kind of open necklet), bracelets of the same shape, bi-conic beads or beads in the shape of stoned olives, daggers with triangular blades. These ‘torque-wearers’ as C. Schaeffer called them, possibly because of two silver statues from Ugarit, each of which wears a golden torque, can thus be traced from Ugarit to Byblos, Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, and central Europe via the Adriatic.15 Was it contact between the Syrian or Cretan sailors and the ‘torque-wearers’ which explained the first voyages towards the western mines, those of Sardinia, Spain and central Europe?

  If the same people were also those who exported the megaliths, our problems would be solved. But that would perhaps be too good to be true. What is clear is that some kind of shipping route was established, and as always in these cases, a number of influences were at work. It also seems clear that this revival of the mines and western metallurgy was a sort of preface to the Phoenician voyages of the first millennium. These, far from being a blind leap into the unknown, seem to have become linked directly to the exploitation of mines in Spain and Sardinia, and no doubt also to the tradition left behind by the early invaders, who had sent out colonial expeditions long before the Phoenicians.

  4

  Centuries of Unity: the Seas of

  the Levant 2500-1200 BC

  In attempting an overview of the Middle East in the fifteen or so centuries between 2500 and 1200-1000 BC, the period roughly corresponding to the bronze age, we are obliged to take the long view and recognize that there will be large gaps in our knowledge. Our acquaintance with this age has progressed in leaps and bounds in the last few decades, but even so, when the time-span is so great, many black holes remain. It is a daunting task to sketch an overall picture, when so much still lies in shadow, and when any fresh evidence may set off a kind of chain reaction, undermining a series of explanations previously thought valid. What must it have felt like in 1915, when the scholar Bedrich Hrozny (1879-1922) first deciphered the cuneiform script of the Hittite archive of Bogazkoy? He was convinced (hence his success) that the Hittite language must have been Indo-European. A similar sensation was caused whe
n the press announced on 3 September 1969 that the language of the civilization of the Indus had been deciphered: it was said to be Dravidian, and thus related to present-day dialects in the Deccan.1

  Such events can destabilize an entire sequence of explanations: what we thought last year may no longer be valid today. We always have the exciting feeling that we are on the point of discovering what really did happen – then we may be sent back to square one. The fantastic images from the Cretan palaces still exist, but we no longer see them through the eyes of an Arthur Evans or a Gustave Glotz: we do not call these figures ‘the Parisienne’ or ‘the Prince with the fleur de lys’.

  I Ever onward and upward?

  The bronze age began in the Middle East in the middle of the third millennium and ended in the twelfth century BC, with the turmoil brought by the so-called ‘Peoples of the Sea’. The story of the bronze age could easily be written in dramatic form: it is replete with invasions, wars, pillage, political disasters and long-lasting economic collapses, ‘the first clashes between peoples’. But all these rival empires and aggressive cities, all the barbarians from mountains or desert who overcame by force or cunning peoples more advanced than themselves, were caught up in a general tide of creative progress which washed over everything, a civilization which spread regardless of frontiers. In this way a certain unity was created among the countries and seas of the Levant. The history of the bronze age can therefore be written not only as a saga of drama and violence, but as a story of more benign contacts: commercial, diplomatic (even at this time), and above all cultural.

  Might this expanding cultural universe have been capable of taking over the entire Mediterranean? It seemed to be heading that way shortly before the invasions of the Peoples of the Sea. These invasions proved a disaster for the whole area, not only for the destruction they wrought, but because Greece and the Aegean were now cut off and isolated from the Middle East, eventually becoming foreign to it. This schism, which was never to be healed, contained in embryo the future great cultural divide between East and West.2