The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  The new and exceptional character of the cultural awakening of the second millennium BC can best be grasped from the example of Egypt: here was the most structured religion, and the least open to the outside, of any in the Middle East. As a national religion, it excluded all non-Egyptians, and the exclusion was often formally set down. In the temples of Khnum, the ram-headed god who dispensed the waters of the Nile, an inscription reads: ‘Do not permit any Asian to enter the temple, be he old or young’. The Egyptians were the only legitimate believers, and indeed the only legitimate inhabitants of the world. It is true that in Nubia and certain cities in Syria which the Egyptians more or less controlled, Egyptian temples were built where some local divinities were admitted into the Egyptian pantheon, with the addition of symbols like the horns of Hathor or the winged disc. But that was just another way of dominating and controlling colonial subjects. Still, Baal and Astarte, who were introduced in this way into the ranks of Egyptian gods, did gather a certain following independently of anypolitical stratagems or calculations. Some borrowing did occur, and the secret door of religious exchange was at least partly opened.

  The process becomes clearer during the religious and cultural crisis which started to appear from about the eighteenth dynasty and came to a head under the reign of Amenophis IV, the strangest pharaoh in history, whom we met briefly earlier. The sun god had revealed himself to the pharaoh, who proceeded to proclaim the omnipotence of this single god, represented in simple and symbolic fashion by an image of the sun as a disc with rays ending in outstretched hands. This god’s name was Aten and the pharaoh took the name of Akhenaten, meaning ‘he who has been approved by Aten’. There followed a religious war between Akhenaten and the stifling powers of the priests of Amun, who had been enriched by gifts from previous conquering pharaohs. The pharaoh was forced to leave Thebes, the capital where the spurned god Amun still reigned, and to create a new capital city, built hastily in Aten’s honour – the city we now know by the name of the nearby village of Tell el-Amarna. Fragile and lively, it flourished for a mere twenty years.

  But for our purposes, the interesting thing is not this revealing episode in itself, nor the unsuccessful attempt to introduce the worship of a single deity, something that was already in the air before the reforming pharaoh and which, despite some immediate reaction against him, would continue to trouble the hearts of the faithful thereafter. The interesting point for us is that the Egyptian religion should have shown that it could open up to a certain universalism, that it was for once willing to take notice of the foreigners who had hitherto been so undesirable. Akhenaten’s ‘Hymn to the Sun’ actually credits the god with the creation of many different races: ‘The tongues of men are different when they speak, and their character is different too, as is their skin. Thus hast thou made thy people different’. But these foreigners, provided they are guided by the Book of the Dead, will be saved like the Egyptians, and will have access to the afterworld – although by their smell, the gods will know that they do not come from the holy land of Egypt.

  In other words, the sun shines on all mankind alike: all people can live in peace under Aten and his associate on earth. It is true that the problems Egypt faced at the time, treachery and military defeat in Syria and religious conflict at home, were too serious for these declarations not to correspond to some underlying political intentions. If the sun god was accepted by all, he might consolidate and save the empire. But these ideas were held within an undeniable spiritual context, and cosmopolitanism had already infiltrated the old house of Egypt for several generations before the mystical reign of Akhenaten brought it briefly into the centre of the Egyptian religion.

  Ill Accidents, developments and disasters

  If we were now to review the picture painted above and insert all the events that took place over the same period, they would cast a dark shadow over the whole scene. During the endless bronze age, the Middle East witnessed all kinds of hardships, upheavals, dangerous developments and catastrophes. Its history is extremely complicated, but can be reduced to a number of quite clear patterns, a kind of geography of human migration.

  Geography and human settlement

  Geography can be a marvellous explanatory tool, so long as we avoid loading it with elementary determinism. It clarifies questions and formulates them, but it cannot resolve them. Men and their history complicate the picture and confuse the issue.

  Let us simplify by saying that in the earliest times, the Middle East could be divided into five or six types of region, depending on whether they attracted and retained populations or, alternatively, dispatched emigrants elsewhere. These population shifts, which could easily lead to catastrophe, are at the heart of the dark picture we shall have to paint.

  In the first place there were the regions attractive to settlers, cyclonic zones so to speak, which drew in the different currents. These were areas which had a long history of sedentarization, and already possessed fairly settled towns and villages, and stable patterns of cultivation and grazing. The most populous of these – Mesopotamia and Egypt – were the most attractive, but they were also well able to defendthemselves. The less populous areas, which covered much wider areas than these privileged regions, were more open to migration or indeed invasion. They yielded to incomers, without necessarily noticing what was happening: Asia Minor in the broad sense and archaic Greece were both examples of such regions.

  As opposed to these sought-after regions were those where there was strong population pressure and a constant overflow of people. It was not that demographic density was greater there than elsewhere; on the contrary, it was inferior to what could be found on the banks of the Nile or the Euphrates. But these regions were over-populated in relation to their resources – hence the disequilibrium which gave them an unsettled history. They were situated in the mountains, deserts and steppes and on many sea-coasts. Seagoing people of the Mediterranean might be farmers and cultivators as well, but the narrow coastal zones, usually hemmed in by the nearby mountains, were not as a rule self-sufficient. They were also dependent on the sea.

  The dramatic events of the bronze age were thus the result of the different zones into which the Mediterranean was divided. Human populations were as much victims of the natural forces all round them as of their own customs, desires and rulers.

  Mountain-dwellers and seafarers

  For all that, the classic Mediterranean stereotypes – hill-dwellers coming down from the high valleys, or seafarers setting sail from their native land never to return – do not appear so frequently, or in such a straightforward way, in the Middle East, a continental landmass not very open to the sea and where the mountains are somewhat peripheral. Structurally the Middle East continues the great platform of ancient rocks making up the Sahara, interrupted briefly by the Red Sea then continuing on into Iran. Fragments of this platform had collapsed to form the Red Sea and the Dead Sea, while others had been raised: the mountain ridges of Libya and Arabia on either side of the Nile, and the mountains of Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon: But the real mountains are to the north, beyond the double line of the Taurus and Zagros. They form part of Asia Minor and part of Iran, linking up with the mountains of Armenia and, further north, with the mighty Caucasus.

  So the threat from the mountain-dwellers was confined to the north of our region. It did not therefore take on that immediate and familiar character it had in Italy and Greece, where mountain people simply had to travel downhill to find themselves in the cities and cultivated fields of the plains. Emigration from the mountains to the Middle East was often a long journey, punctuated by halts: the populations which came from the Caucasus stayed for years or centuries in Armenia, then settled down again in the Zagros or Iran before reaching their journey’s end in Mesopotamia, Syria, or Asia Minor, where the plateaux and the high and low plains were still desirable lands to take over. These emigrants from the mountains are known to us as a rule at their point of arrival, where recorded history illuminates their presence. But what
was their history before that?

  The Gutu, for example, seem to have originated in the Zagros, that is the mountain barrier to the east of the Mediterranean. But for all we know, they may have come from further east. Their rapid rise was favoured by the internal upheavals of the Akkadian Empire. They then occupied Babylon in 2160, setting up a government there which the troubled times rendered immediately ineffective. By 2116 or so they had been driven out again. So their triumph had been short-lived.

  The Hurrians, whose language bears no relation to any other known language apart from Urartian, may have come from Armenia towards the end of the second millennium BC. They were probably artisans, bringing with them metal-working techniques, as well as equestrian harness and the light war-chariot. Whoever they were, they scattered throughout the cities of Mesopotamia, Syria, Cappadocia and Cilicia. They settled in large numbers in Carchemish and Ugarit, cities where industry was implanted early, and they took part, but as foot-soldiers so to speak, in the construction of the state of Mittani under the leadership of Aryan chiefs, between the sixteenth and fourteenth centuries BC.

  If we take another famous example, the Kassites, their origins too are uncertain. They may have come from Iran, Armenia or the far-off Caucasus, or perhaps from all three. They are first detectable in the Zagros, the launchpad for their final emigration. Their language, another non-Indo-European one, might have provided some clues, if these immigrants had not so quickly abandoned it: they adoptedAkkadian as soon as they arrived in Mesopotamia in the second millennium. They had at first attempted to enter it as conquerors in 1740 BC, as the old dynasty was collapsing after the death of Hammurabi, but without success. In 1708, a second attempt also failed. But the Kassites had a destiny rather like that of the Germanic tribes vis-a-vis Rome in later times. They began the peaceful penetration of Mesopotamia as mercenaries or even labourers. It was an accidental event from outside (a Hittite chariot attack, taking Babylon by surprise) which opened up the gates of power to them on the rebound in 1594. A Kassite dynasty took over and reigned until 1160, which is something of a record in length, but the conquerors had themselves been absorbed by the local culture and language well before their victory. In the absence of any other achievements, they did succeed in changing sartorial fashion: it was from them that there came the long tunic with short sleeves which was to be the classic garment later worn by the Assyrians. The history of the Kassites then is that of a poverty-stricken people who had several strokes of good fortune: they knocked at the gates of Mesopotamia when they were not securely closed; they took power thanks to the exploits of others; and they reigned when the general situation was in a prosperous phase.

  Seagoing peoples do not provide such striking examples of aggressive migration. Did they shrink from taking on a political role? Trade merely requires the absence of war and the co-operation of others. Cretans and Mycenaeans had settled in the Cyclades, at several points in Asia Minor, and in Rhodes and Cyprus. The Syrians had several small trading colonies in Egypt, which were certainly prosperous, and may even have begun to prospect in the western sea. These settlements are not negligible when viewed in detail, but cannot compare with the great waves of colonization of the western Mediterranean which were to follow during the first millennium BC.

  And yet, to warn us against making hasty judgements, it was the Peoples of the Sea (a name given them by the Egyptians) who were to play a leading role in the decisive crisis of the twelfth century. Their disturbances were the signal, if not the single cause, of the approaching catastrophe which brought the splendours of the bronze age to a close.6 And if they created panic everywhere, was that not primarily because no one was expecting them? An entire population crossing the sea was something astonishing, unheard of! Similarly, the Arab invasions in the seventh century ad were a total surprise: no one had anticipated an attack or a threat from that direction, from the desert which had for so many centuries seemed empty.

  Steppes and deserts: the threat from the nomads

  The desert is not the same thing as the steppe, but a steppe that sees its scanty grasslands disappear can quickly turn into a desert – and the reverse is sometimes true. The Syrian desert was a complete desert, on the borders of Lower Mesopotamia, isolating and protecting it to some extent, but also affecting it by its perpetual drought. But it was prolonged by steppes towards northern Mesopotamia, where non-irrigated agriculture remained the rule. Today, this border steppe is ‘desolate and uncultivable; it greens over after the short rainy season and a thousand flowers bloom: a precarious grazing area, this is the Arabian badiya’. Naturally, it was an ideal way into Mesopotamia for the desert nomads, who sometimes came as peaceful visitors and hirers of grazing lands.

  But the contrast between steppe and desert is not an essential one as regards population movements. Nor is that other contrast, clear-cut though it is, between hot and cold deserts: Iran, warm, yet cooled by the altitude of its plateaux and mountains, provides a transitional link between the two kinds. The important thing is that all these deserts of the Ancient World formed a continuous mass to be crossed, rather like linked seas, from the Atlantic to China: they ran from the Sahara to Arabia, to the Syrian desert, to Turkestan – linked, awkwardly but nevertheless the link is there, by the Dzungarian gate, to the deserts of Takla-Makan, the Gobi Desert and beyond it the steppes of northern Mongolia and southern Manchuria. The Dzungarian gate was also roughly the dividing line between Caucasians and Mongolians. But everywhere in this great tract cutting across the Ancient World, human populations faced the same imperatives: the scarcity of water and grass, the constant need for massive migration. In the end, sooner or later, they all devised the same difficult and ingenious responses, the same techniques of nomadism.

  Nomadic life cannot be assumed to have been perfected at thedawn of human history – although people often mistakenly think so. Large-scale nomadism, using fast-moving animals like the horse and the dromedary (and later the camel, from Bactria in Turkey), only emerged at a late date. It had taken a long time and many successive adaptations to reach this equilibrium, which was first achieved in the hot Syrian and Arabian deserts; and it happened even later in the Sahara, the last of the family of great deserts to be mastered.

  An elementary form of nomadism, almost older than agriculture, had nevertheless grown up from the early days of the domestication of animals. Men and dogs drove flocks of smaller livestock: sheep and goats. But it was the settled farmers who domesticated larger beasts, the ox and later the horse, creating a mixed economy of which the second type of nomadism was a mere by-product. Grazing in the steppes, where there were plenty of wide-open spaces, represented a way out for settled populations, whenever poor harvests, drought, or the existence of too many mouths to feed made village life difficult. Whole communities thus found themselves driven into an unbalanced and incomplete economy, and caught thereafter in a web of obligations. They had to use different grazing grounds at different seasons. In order to follow the herds, their houses became temporary shelters, tents or carts loaded with women, children and belongings. Their life remained precarious: it only took another drought, a lost battle for grazing grounds, a surplus of population, or a lack of success when trading at the markets on the fringes of settled communities, to generate panic, leading to migration and the invasion of cultivated areas.

  The northern steppes: the Indo-Europeans

  Before the twentieth century b c, the steppes and deserts from Hungary to the Black and Caspian Seas and to Bactria (Turkestan) were occupied by Indo-European peoples. They were semi-sedentary, and knew how to grow wheat and barley, but their numbers or the exhaustion of their arable land regularly turned them into pastoral people, wandering far and wide. We do not know much about these Indo-Europeans, who were probably divided into several different populations. But studies carried out by prehistorians – of the so-called Tripolye civilization near Kiev in 3 500-1900; of the Usatovo civilization near Odessa (c. 1800) and of Afanasievo (3000-1700) and Andronova (after
1700) – provide unequivocal evidence that all the economies which have left any traces were mixed, being both agricultural and pastoral and therefore still connected to village settlements. Herds of livestock were, however, becoming a major feature: sheep, goats and cattle (though not pigs) and later camels and horses.

  The use of horses was obviously a decisive factor, but they did not become available overnight. Large herds of wild horses were in existence in the paleolithic, reaching even into western Europe. They may have been domesticated for the first time in southern Russia, before being tamed elsewhere. But when the chariot first appeared in the fourth millennium, it was pulled by teams of oxen. The harnessed horse made its appearance only in the second millennium, probably by way of the Hurrians, a people originating in Armenia who had settled in northern Mesopotamia. It was here, on the edge of the great plains, that the light two-wheeled chariot was probably invented: it was harnessed to one or two horses and its complicated construction would have required an expert workforce: this was to revolutionize the conduct of war for centuries to come. The suggestion that it originated in this area on the borders of present-day Iran and Armenia is plausible. Between Lakes Van, Sevan and Urmia was an area characterized by forests and metal-working. Excavations by Soviet teams have established that there were many two-wheeled vehicles in the region, and later on four-wheeled ones, at dates as early as – or even earlier than – in Mesopotamia. These vehicles had solid wheels: spokes were a later invention.