The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  One final image complicates the picture: the reliefs at Medinet Habu depict the ships of the Peoples of the Sea during the naval battle with Ramses III. These are sailing-ships, without oars, having both ends raised up at right angles, one of them decorated with an animal’s head. From which Mediterranean region did these boats come? Of the images known to us so far, the only ones that are anything like them are the Phoenician hippoi which we find several centuries later hauling rafts of timber behind them along the Syrian coast; or the boats which King Assurbanipal used for hunting; or the boats which brought tribute from Tyre, depicted on the bronze gates of Balawat, and the image of a ship on a Phoenician jewel found in Spain. In other words the only parallels come from a single region: Syria. And therefore they may also have links with Cyprus and Cilicia.

  A long-lasting ‘dark age’

  The events of the twelfth century were followed by a long dark age. Light seems to dawn again, to some extent, only three or four hundred years later. So the chief problem is not the twelfth century, dramatic though it was, so much as this dark age which seems to have followed and which seems concealed in the thickest of shadows.

  The move back into the past seems to have been most marked in Greece. Along with writing, that jewel amongst achievements, all the luxury arts vanished too: jewellery, mural paintings, engraved precious stones and seals, sculpted ivory and so on. Only pottery turned on the wheel seems to survive, with the last relic of the Mycenaean style vanishing during the eleventh century to be replaced by the first proto-geometrical ceramics.

  At the same time, all links with the Middle East seem to have been severed after the Dorian invasion and would only be restored much later when Greece and the Aegean in the full flush of expansion began to trade once more with the Syrian ports and Egypt, establishing outposts on the coast of Asia Minor. But this Middle East, which fascinated the Greeks when they first saw it, leaving a powerful influence on the artistic period known as ‘orientalist’, had itself only recently and imperfectly recovered its former prosperity and health.

  There are no doubt some deep-seated explanations for this general relapse, and not only those we might connect with climatic change. Above all, one must certainly reckon with the fragile nature of the early forms of long-distance trade, dependent upon luxury goods which served the needs and wants of a very narrow circle, a thin upper layer of society. The dazzling civilizations we have glimpsed may have been no deeper than a layer of gold leaf. The palace economy had already entered on a slow, internally generated decline, well before the catastrophic twelfth century. War was too expensive, and so was long-distance trade. The under-privileged were restless and the privileged had little sense of noblesse oblige. The Hatti Empire fought endlessly against the feudal regime which was undermining it. Egypt had the greatest difficulty maintaining its political and economic protectorates in Asia. After its victory over the Peoples of the Sea, it was to lose all of them. A serious decline in Egyptian royal power followed, marked as always by countless tomb-robbings, revolts by the fellahin, anarchy, and administrative impotence. In Mesopotamia too, things were falling apart, except in the pugnacious state of Assyria. If we are looking for medium-term explanations, we find a recession lasting several centuries and doing so because it corresponded to a particularly stubborn structural crisis.

  We should not be too hasty to call this crisis the ‘crisis of the bronze age’. F. M. Heichelheim suggested long ago that the end of the bronze age meant that in the Middle East – the most advanced part of humanity on the globe – a transformation of the basis, the infrastructures of life came about. Iron-smelting, which may first have been accomplished by the metalsmiths of Cilicia and northern Syria, may have already been spreading before the twelfth century BC. The disturbances provoked by the Peoples of the Sea, which contributed to destabilize, open up and bring new elements to local communitites, probably helped it spread even further. And in the long term, iron permitted the widespread use and ‘democratization’ of weapons, bringing to an end the centuries when bronze had been available only to the privileged. Any people, however poor or however inexperienced in battle, now had iron at its disposal. Iron ore was available everywhere. There followed, still according to Heichelheim, a chain of linked mutations. The newinvention undermined the great centralized states of the past, with their extravagant palaces, their mercenary armies and their downtrodden masses. Iron was a kind of liberator.

  This may well be true. But a unilateral explanation is always dangerous and this one has the disadvantage of anticipating on events. Iron displaced bronze only slowly, just as bronze before it had taken a long time to oust cut and polished stone, even in the decisive domain of weapons. The most advanced peoples took centuries to digest the new invention – as we shall see. When the mutation was entirely accomplished, the entire world moved forward. But this would be a completely different world, and some ancient wounds and cracks never quite healed. As W. S. Smith remarks, the ‘close understanding’ which had linked the Aegean and the eastern world ‘would never again be recovered’. There are some rifts which time cannot heal.

  5

  All Change: the Twelfth to

  the Eighth Centuries BC

  After the great upheaval of the twelfth century, the Middle East took a long time to recover. Some light appeared on the horizon in the tenth century but real improvement did not come until the long upward movement in economic fortunes which became established in the eighth century or possibly a little earlier.

  Nevertheless, after the traumatic episode of the Peoples of the Sea, life went on somehow. A rich cultural heritage had been saved. Egypt remained Egypt, despite internal strife, low living standards and devastating foreign invasions. Mesopotamia remained Mesopotamia, despite all its disturbances; the coast of Canaan, or as we should now call it Phoenicia, continued to play its role of intermediary. But now, a sign of the times, the intermediary was no longer a subordinate: at least it began to take some liberties towards its former masters. When in about i ioo b c Uenamun, the envoy of the priests of Amun, travelled to Byblos, he received a rather dusty answer and found it hard to obtain the timber he needed to build the sacred boat for the god.

  So the world went on turning, and logically enough new patterns and a new world-map emerged in these centuries with no apparent history. When in the eighth century b c everything moves into the light, when human existence becomes easier and more readable to us, the new world picture was nothing like the one that had been shattered in the age of the Peoples of the Sea.

  The ‘Balkanization’ of the Middle East

  The map of the Middle East had become extremely complicated. The simultaneous decline of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the collapse of the Hittite Empire had brought into being a multitude of small warring states, which occupied the forefront of history with their minor but noisy squabbles.

  In Asia Minor, Urardhu, centred in Armenia, received part of the legacy of the Hurrians, the talented artisans mentioned earlier. This was a mountain state, energetic and aggressive. It made good use of its metal-working (as revealed by Russian excavations at Karmir Blur). The area under its domination had its centre of gravity near Lake Van and ran broadly from the high valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates to the Caucasus. Phrygia had taken root, at about the time of the Dorian invasion, on the plateaux of Anatolia where the Hittite Empire had first built then lost its dominion (the Phrygian capital Gordium has been brought to life before our eyes by the American excavations begun in 1950). Westwards, Lydia occupied the parallel valleys of the Hermos and the Meander and was expanding towards the Aegean, where in about 1000 a string of early Greek cities appeared on the coast: their decisive moment would come later. To the south, some neo-Hittite states still survived. Then out of the desert came the Aramaic states, the chief of them centred on Damascus: we should not underestimate them since they controlled the caravan routes leading to Asia, which were the overland counterparts to the Phoenicians’ active sea crossings. Further south again
was a Jewish state, whose brief days of splendour ended in about 930, when it split into two kingdoms, Judah to the south, Israel to the north.

  The Jews had had to win their rather poor territories one by one from the Semitic Canaanites, whose traditions, culture and language they appropriated. They underwent the same process as the Hittites and Greeks: they were absorbed by what they took over. A further disadvantage for them was that despite having a seaboard, they had difficulty reaching navigable stretches of the coast since they were hemmed in both by their enemies the Philistines and by the Phoenicians who were their friends or indeed allies. It was Phoenicians from Tyre who had built the temple and royal palace in Jerusalem in the age of Solomon (c. 970-930), and Phoenician boats which had sailed on behalf of the Jewish king to Ophir (in southern Arabia or India?), taking the long route via Esion Gaber on the Gulf of Akaba and down the Red Sea. In the same city of Esion Gaber and also in the reign of Solomon, Phoenician artisans had built large metal-working furnaces for smelting copper and iron, the most advanced in the ancient world, according to W. F. Albright. These were the good times for the Jewish state. Nobody could then have foreseen either the hard times ahead or the fabulous future of the spiritual message of Israel, as it slowly matured through the vicissitudes of history.

  Although its territory, hemmed in by the Hebrews and Philistines to the south, and the neo-Hittites to the north, represented only part of the ancient land of Canaan, Phoenicia1 was nevertheless the first power in the Middle East to recover a degree of prosperity. It was a sort of ‘sheltered sector’, like Holland in the general recession of the seventeenth century ad . All this took place despite certain upheavals whose nature remains obscure: the former supremacy of Byblos fell away, as first Sidon then Tyre gained prominence, with Tyre becoming the leading city after about 1000 BC. The Phoenician coastline began to revive, thanks to the bounty of the sea. The Jewish state by contrast had built its prosperity around the crossroads of overland routes, between the Euphrates, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, a good bet in peacetime but dangerous in time of war. And war was becoming endemic in the Middle East.

  In this relentless and soon terrifying series of wars, the tiny state of Assyria was the principal actor. To start with, it was no more than ‘a small triangle’, a limited area and a poorly guarded one, in the high valley of the Tigris, wedged between Mesopotamia with its irrigation and its cities to the south, the harsh mountains to the north, and the desert with its Aramaic marauders to the west. Assyria was a house open to the winds, its people forced to live in fear and insecurity. It could achieve peace of mind only by threatening others and intimidating them in turn. Without holding any brief for the Assyrians, I should record that their cruelty was a response to cruelty from their neighbours, particularly the Aramaeans. In order to survive, Assyria had to stamp out those it conquered, crippling them with taxes or deporting entire populations, bringing them into its own territorywhere, in days to come, their large numbers would make them a permanent threat. The friezes on the palace at Nineveh graphically recount the whole sad story.

  But in the process, Assyria became rich: gigantic palaces rose from the ground. War had become an industry, a way of obtaining the wealth which previously had reached the Babylonian cities via trade. From the end of the tenth century to the end of the seventh, the Assyrians would live off plunder and tribute exacted from Urardhu, Damascus, Tyre, Sidon and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They even committed the sacrilege of destroying Babylon, abolishing the cult of Marduk and sacking the temples. Then it was Egypt’s turn. In 671 BC, Lower Egypt was occupied and a few years later, Thebes was sacked in indescribable fashion. When in 630 the great prince Assurbanipal, a man of learning as it happened, died in his sumptuous palace in Nineveh (its gardens were as magnificent as its library), the empire was at its zenith. But a few years later it collapsed in the face of a widespread assault by its enemies and subordinates. In 612, the Medes and Babylonians formed an alliance and stormed Nineveh to the general satisfaction of all the peoples in the area. The Assyrian cities were themselves destroyed and the survivors carried off into captivity. They became the builders of the palaces for the king of Persia, palaces which recall vanished Assyria in every respect.

  For all the valour of the Assyrian army, ever ready under its priest-kings and its warlords to wage a holy war against all its neighbours at once, and for all the efficacy of its troops under their harsh commanders, with their powerful siege-engines and cavalry armed with pikes and arrows, Assyria would never have achieved these bloody triumphs if Egypt and Babylon had not both gradually been declining to the rank of second-rate powers, mere pieces in the ‘Balkan’ jigsaw that the Middle East had now become. Babylon at this time was not unlike Constantinople in the fifteenth century ad, the only living outpost of a Byzantine Empire at its last gasp. In ancient Mesopotamia, everything was falling apart, even the admirable system of irrigation canals, which were now worn out and allowing the calamitous infiltration of salt water. Egypt was even worse off. The future belonged from now on to ‘users of iron’. But Egypt, which had received iron in the past from the Hittites, was embarking on the iron age without owning any. The land of the pharaohs would from now on, as an Assyrian general ironically reminded the people of Jerusalem, be ‘a broken reed… whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it’ (Isaiah 3 6.6). Thebes was looted to death and never recovered.

  So the Middle East was doomed to experience a vicious round of constant alerts and internal warfare. To this was added another calamity, the dramatic appearance of the horsemen of the northern steppes.

  Cavalry from the steppes of Asia

  Between the Caucasus, the Ukraine, the loess plateaux of Podolia, and the immense forests of central Russia, changes were coming to completion which were to affect lands further south, throughout the Middle East. Nomadic life, which had first developed centuries earlier, was coming to maturity here. Its essential revolutionary element was horseback travel; now everything would echo to the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. Away to the south, the old seats of civilization and countries which were regaining civilized status were more vulnerable than ever to the incursions of the nomads.

  The first signs of the hurricane came, as we noted earlier, with the Cimmerian invasion at the end of the ninth century. The Cimmerians were probably half-sedentary, half-nomadic peasants, who had been driven south from their previous home in southern Russia by natural forces, or rather by pressure from Scythian attackers on horseback. Of their former territory the Cimmerians retained only the Kuban peninsula and part of the Crimea, and this only for a time. Fleeing with their carts and chariots, they crossed the centre and the west of the Caucasus. Their pursuers, according to Herodotus, took the wrong turn, crossed the Caucasus on the eastern side and emerged in Media, which they sacked.

  The Cimmerian invasion quickly exhausted itself in repeated raids on Urardhu, Assyria, Anatolia, the kingdom of Phrygia (which was destroyed), and Cilicia. In Lydia, the looters took Sardis, but were unable to capture the citadel; they inflicted damage on several Greek cities on the Aegean before finally becoming completely absorbed into the populations of Asia.

  The Scythians, whom they had drawn south quite unintentionally, represented danger of a quite different order – skilled horsemen, and the first ‘real’ nomads known to history. Their violent adventure, which lasted some thirty years (twenty-eight, according to Herodotus), resembles the familiar image of the Huns galloping across Europe in the fifth century ad. The only difference was that the Scythians were white Indo-Europeans, whereas Attila’s hordes were predominantly olive-skinned. Skin colour is hardly significant – the phenomenon was basically the same. The Scythian raids, devoted to pillage, were carried out at great speed and over long distances by gangs of determined young men. Sometimes they were joined by adventurers from outside the ‘royal’ tribes. This was a ‘democratic’ system of sorts, based on the fact that the new fighting machine – the horse – was available to all
, whereas previously the war chariot had been the prerogative of the rich and powerful. This social change added to the incredible power of the explosion. The sacking of Media by the Scythians already represented a formidable leap forward over the Caucasus and Armenia, but they penetrated much further, into Anatolia and even Assyria, with excursions as far afield as Syria and Palestine. Psammeticus kept them out of Egypt only by bribing their chiefs with gold! And the permanent threat they posed was driven back northwards only by the eventual victories of the Medes. At this point the Scythians made their way back home to their old stamping-ground, the immense steppes of southern Russia.

  It was here that Herodotus, with his insatiable curiosity, was able to observe them on the spot. He studied them with the same care and the same astonishment that he had bestowed on the strange customs of Egypt. He describes at length the great plains where these half-civilized people led their nomadic lives: this was a land of extraordinary rivers, where prodigious falls of snow in winter filled the air with flying ‘feathers’, where rivers and even seas froze over so that they could be crossed on foot. Everything surprised and delighted him, the manners, the soothsayers, the horse sacrifices, the scalps or skins of conquered enemies carried as trophies, the burial rites, and above all the life of the tribes in their tents, on their carts, a life of endless wandering governed by the movement of their herds.