The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  But the modern historian will not find in these long descriptions any mention of what for us constitutes the chief glory of the Scythians. While Herodotus writes of the masses of gold, of jewels, belts and ornaments on reins and harnesses, he says nothing about the beauty of an art which reached its maturity once they had returned to the southern Russian steppes. It was a remarkable art of animal representation, an ornate, barbaric art, whose style was to be adopted towards the end of the first millennium BC by all the nomadic horse-borne tribes, as far afield as the distant borders of China. It is a strange and satisfying synthesis, drawing at once on the cultures of the forested steppes of the north, on that of Karasuk towards China, and on Caucasian, Anatolian, Assyrian and Iranian influences picked up during voyages or more prolonged sojourns in the Middle East. Some Greek influence gradually made itself felt as well, becoming stronger when the Scythians, driven back by the Medes, returned to their territory on the Black Sea. Scythian motifs and Greek mythological figures – Pegasus or the Gorgons – sit side by side on the golden ornaments of tombs in the Crimea, for instance. Here the Scythians came into direct contact with the Greeks. And in due course this was where Athens was to recruit its picturesque police force, the Scythian archers who on meeting days marshalled latecomers towards the Pnyx.

  Eventually, the area settled down. But it would be wrong to underestimate these intrusions of the peoples of the steppes – or indeed their subsequent invasions of Europe and Asia – on the grounds that they were fairly rapidly wiped off the surface of the civilized world. These violent incursions had more than merely marginal significance.

  In the first place, they penetrated deeply into the countries of the Middle East, and these were too closely linked for a shock received by one not to be passed on down the line, from Anatolia to the banks of the Nile. The balance of power in the Middle East worked in the invaders’ favour: the Cimmerians were supported by Egypt, while the Scythians, if we are to believe Herodotus, were relatively loyal allies of the implacable Assyrians, even if they pillaged them from time to time. In other words, the nomads increased the military capacity of the various powers, dragging the Middle East ever deeper into this game in which there could be no winners.

  More importantly, the Scythians subjugated the Medes, and the latter lived for years under their rule and learned from them. TheMedian cavalry, which was the ancestor of the great cavalry of Persia, was no doubt inspired in part by these revolutionary warriors on horseback. And without that exceptional cavalry, there would have been no Persian Empire, no unification of the Middle East, no ‘Pax Persica’, perhaps no temptation for Alexander the Great… As long as the Middle East was absorbed in its endless quarrels, throughout the long and monotonous tragedy of the ‘Assyrian centuries’, it had been to all intents and purposes absent from world history, which was being played out in the distant western reaches of the Mediterranean. Once the Persian conquests had taken place, at the end of the sixth century, so much power had accumulated in the east that the Mediterranean world suddenly tipped towards it again. It was this pendulum swing which tied the destiny of Greece to the east – to the great regret of the present writer!

  The west no longer totally barbarous

  The west was not created ex nihilo by colonization from the east. During the millennia and centuries which preceded their meeting, immense changes had taken place. The west had become a major historical force, a central player in the destiny of the Mediterranean.

  ‘West’ is an imprecise term. Let us take it to mean central Europe, from the Alps to the Baltic and the North Sea, the Italian peninsula (rather than the surrounding islands), the territory that would become Gaul, the Iberian peninsula, and North Africa in the narrow sense of the term, from the Gulf of Gabes to the Atlantic.

  But this part of North Africa was to acquire an ambiguous status: geographically western, it quite soon became culturally oriental, for the great migrations which affected the west during the first millennium, while encompassing the Mediterranean from Asia Minor to Iberia, did not reach as far as the ‘Maghreb’. They crossed the great rivers, Danube or Rhine, and the mountains, Balkans, Alps or Pyrenees, but stopped short at the ‘flowing Ocean’, at Gibraltar. Was this because the Phoenicians were present very early on – if not with trading posts, at least with commercial contacts – from the bay of Cadiz to present-day Tunisia? At the height of their colonial prosperity at any rate, the Phoenicians were alone in their access to the immense resources of Africa, a sparsely populated primitive land where wild beasts abounded – and they exploited their monopoly shamelessly. The African peoples, still partly nomadic and strangers to progress, were easily tricked. Carthage profited in the same way, and over a long period of time, from the native peoples surrounding it, and from those equally primitive tribes who brought gold dust across the Sahara, whether to the present-day Rio de Oro on the Atlantic or to the shores of southern Tunisia.

  Such trade implies a civilization capable of mastering the immensity of the Sahara. But we do have evidence of such a civilization from neolithic times: take, for example, the widespread use of specialized stone tools, whose distribution coincides significantly with that of the rock paintings showing horse-drawn carts. The latter must have derived from the Libyan mercenaries who served in the Egyptian army under the New Kingdom, in the the sixteenth century BC (when Egypt had just adopted the horse-drawn chariots of the Hyksos). Thus there were already routes leading from Egypt to Morocco in the west and to the Niger in the south. At certain points along them, traders from civilized countries could obtain gold on the cheap, thanks to the profitable and unfair barter which Herodotus describes so vividly.

  Leaving North Africa on one side, what we mean by ‘the west’ is above all central and western Europe, that entity which Emmanuel de Martonne liked to describe as a funnel narrowing from east to west: Europe, that little ‘promontory of Asia’, is still very wide at the Russian ‘isthmus’, grows narrower at the German ‘isthmus’, and narrower still at the French ‘isthmus’. The steppe has always driven its surplus population westward: landless peasants, fugitives, shepherds with their families and their flocks. To the south, the funnel has a series of apertures, a wide one leading to the Balkan peninsula, then two narrow gaps leading to those partially isolated worlds, Italy south of the Alps and Iberia south of the Pyrenees.

  A number of obstacles thus faced the peoples moving west: the increasing narrowness of the European peninsula, the barriers of mountain and river, the dense forests, not to mention the peasant populations already occupying the land. But the journey from east to west, on the Caucasus-Atlantic axis, was shortened by the invention of revolutionary forms of transport (cart, chariot and horse), hencethe sequence of invasions which over the centuries hesitated between the Middle East and the European west, but always ended up on the shores of the Mediterranean.

  These population movements were stop-and-start affairs, as temporary halts became the next points of departure. Staging-posts of this kind were provided by Bactria (Turkestan), the plains of the Black Sea, the foothills of the Caucasus, Thracia, the plain of Hungary and the Illyrian coast. In the first millennium, the formidable area of central Europe, still a wild country of immense forests among spreading rivers, rather like the Siberian forests of today, was a sort of holding bay for the west. As early as neolithic times, sizeable peasant populations had settled there on the easily cultivated loess strips, clear of trees. These clayey deposits, following the rim of the former glaciers, form a continuous corridor from Russia to central France. Clearings were also opened in the forests, using stone or metal axes or fire. Thus neolithic farmers occupied this area with their villages, plants, domestic animals, primitive ploughs and draught oxen. Even more significantly, the mineral wealth of the region favoured the early development of metallurgy, which had already begun when travelling metal-workers (the ‘torque-wearers’) arrived in central Europe from the east, via the Adriatic and the Balkans, early in the second millennium. With a skill
ed labour force, abundant ore, and fuel galore in the forests, everything was thus set for this part of Europe to be radically transformed by the use of metals – copper, lead, gold, and before long iron.

  For all these reasons, population accumulated between the Rhine, the Danube, the Baltic and the North Sea. The history of the west did not all originate in this region, but it was fed by this human reserve army always on the point of bursting out of its confines, a ‘pressure cooker in constant danger of exploding’, as it has been put, and one which did explode on two or three occasions. The image is not an absurd one, so long as it is not taken to imply something rapid and sudden. The Indo-European invasions lasted centuries; their history was often played out in slow motion.

  Indo-Europeans and the Celtic invasions

  The end of the bronze age (twelfth century) saw a major new development in this prehistory of central Europe: the arrival of new Indo-European populations. Several peoples were involved: they differed from one another, but over the centuries came to intermingle, exchanging material objects and even languages. From the beginning they shared one common feature by which they are known to archaeologists: they all cremated their dead. This was not something absolutely new – cremation had already been practised by some Europeans – but the novelty lay in the scale of the phenomenon, which marked a clear break with preceding civilizations. Throughout the area ‘urn fields’ have been discovered, great cemeteries of ‘flat tombs’ in which urns containing the ashes of the dead are buried side by side.

  The existing populations, those who buried their dead, first resisted this influx, then gave ground, and abandoned vast areas to the new peoples. Having occupied central Europe, some urn people – probably the Umbrians and the Villanovans – moved into Italy, driving back the Ligurians (to use an outdated word designating earlier invaders, probably of pre-Indo-European origin); they next occupied eastern France, advancing to the Rh6ne valley, and carrying on across the Pyrenees into Catalonia and the region of Valencia. They reached as far as the coasts of the British Isles in the north. All these newcomers, practising cremation, were probably Indo-Europeans, who mingled with the neolithic peasants they found in situ – and these encounters prepared the way for the ultimate disappearance of urn burial.

  This must have been a period of turbulence in Europe. It still belonged to the bronze age, but the ninth century saw the appearance of iron, which was to hasten the course of events. The word ‘hasten’ needs some clarification, however. The first iron age corresponds to the so-called Hallstatt civilization (named after a resort in the Tyrol); but although iron was used then, it was not of central significance. It became widely used only after the sixth century, in the second iron age, the so-called Hallstatt civilization (named after a resort north of Neuchatel), which lasted until the Roman conquest. And it was in the La Tene period that the real explosion took place with the tumultuous waves of Celtic invasions.

  The two maps in Appendix II showing the expansion of the urn-burial peoples and the movements of the Celts give an oversimplified view of the problem, presenting as definitive solutions which still remain uncertain, but they do have the merit of indicating correctly and clearly the two enormous flows of blood which complemented and overlapped with one another. Europe, from Bohemia to Gaul, became a powerful heart, and its heartbeats sent pulses racing in the distant Mediterranean, land of sunshine and vines, so different in nature and in history from the north. A dialogue began, and it was to prove of crucial importance.

  The first exchanges in this conversation had of course taken place long before the La Tene or even the Hallstatt period. When the Achaeans had arrived in the Balkan peninsula at the beginning of the second millennium, the great machine for multiplying and spreading people was already in place. But in the first millennium everything began to happen more quickly. The civilizations of the Mediterranean discovered the biological potency of their turbulent and alarming neighbours. Using different names – Celts, Gauls, Galatians – they described these strange people, tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, courageous and given to boasting. They came in waves – we no longer imagine them as Henri Hubert did, arriving ‘in small groups, slipping side by side across the great continental spaces’. As Andre Varagnac puts it, ‘the pre-Celtic and Celtic invasions took the form of vast population movements, as described by Caesar in his account of the migration of the Helvetii at the beginning of the Gallic Wars’.

  It was their demographic weight which made the Celtic invasions so important. When they arrived, these peoples were a turbulent force; they had to be domesticated, by warfare if necessary. In our history books they appear as the losers, the vanquished. But these masses of peasants and skilled craftsmen put down lasting roots. It seems wrong therefore to speak of the great defeat of the Celts who, having ‘civilized Europe as the Greeks had civilized the Mediterranean’, were supposedly swept away by the Romans. What do words such as defeat and victory mean when applied to living masses who settle down permanently and are still recognizable today? Any civilization at full strength can only survive thanks to a continuous supply of people. These biological necessities made themselves felt in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as in Rome; they give a deeper meaning to the sound and fury of the ‘invasions’.

  But while the Celts possessed a highly developed material civilization, they remained backward in their social organization. In the Hallstatt era, monarchical governments had led to a concentration of wealth in large fortified houses, a sort of palace civilization. The La Tdne period was marked by greater ‘democracy’, or more accurately by the appearance of turbulent aristocratic republics. In the Celtic world, powerful tribes lived side by side, making it hard for towns to develop. Polybius, describing the Boyans of Cisalpine Gaul, portrays them scattered through the countryside ateikhistoi, without towns; when there were towns, they lacked walls. In such circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that these elementary cells should be swallowed up by those higher organisms, the urban civilizations, of the Mediterranean.

  The origins of the Celtic migrations

  General history has yet to explain the origins of these immense population movements. The Celts may have been fleeing from overpopulated regions north of the Alps, where from the year iooo BC the climate was becoming more or less that of today. The increasing cold reduced the habitable area and perhaps drove out some of the urn people of the Hallstatt period. What seems even more certain is that these were chain reactions, beginning in the east. The Cimmerians who settled in southern Russia in the ninth century were descendants of the semi-nomadic Indo-Europeans who had established themselves there towards the second millennium, driving out the peasant population of the Tripolye culture. Then the Scythian horsemen, who reached the Carpathians in the ninth century, defeated the Cimmerians, ‘something which corresponds remarkably closely to the beginnings of the first iron-based culture’, i.e. the Hallstatt period. Several hundred years later, at the beginning of the sixth century BC, it was again the Scythians who returned en masse to ‘Scythia’, the Black Sea steppe, a movement which coincided with the La Tene culture, the migrations of several Germanic peoples, and the arrival of the Celts in Gaul, complete with their chariots of war; in the Champagne region, Gaulish chiefs had themselves buried with their chariots, like their distantequivalents in Armenia. This battle vehicle, although soon falling into disuse, kept going long enough for Julius Caesar to have the surprise of coming face to face with chariots of war in England.

  To conclude, then, the earliest of the successive waves of Indo-Europeans, those human explosions we call invasions, took place towards the year 2000, originating in the Black Sea region, between the Caucasus and Hungary; the second group, between 1500 and 1000, began in Hungary and Bohemia; and the final sequence after 600, the Celtic invasions, affected the lands beyond the Rhine and Gaul. The centre of the explosion thus gradually moved westward. But perhaps these were all chapters in a single story.2

  Iron-working

  We have so far been able to ske
tch out a picture of these dark centuries (twelfth to eighth centuries) without saying a great deal about iron-working. The carburization of iron (the manufacture of hardened iron by an admixture of carbon), had begun in the Caucasus or rather in Cilicia, and was long a monopoly of the Hittite Empire. If the Peoples of the Sea, in particular the Philistines, owned iron tools and weapons, this may have been through their links with the Hittites or Cilicia. It is thus possible, as has often been claimed, that the break-up of the Hittite Empire contributed to the worldwide diffusion of ironsmiths and their mysterious craft, often seen as the work of the devil. After all many peoples had a blacksmith god in their pantheon, often a distinctly sinister character. But iron-working depended on unfamiliar processes which inevitably took time to spread and be mastered. The transition between the old order, the bronze age, and the new iron age, lasted a very long time.

  In Mesopotamia, where things normally moved faster than elsewhere, the collapse of the price of iron, which is proof of its widespread use, only really began in the tenth century. In Egypt, widespread use of the new metal dates only from c. 600 BC, if that. Central Europe, with its wealth of mines, remained ambivalent for a long period: until the sixth century, bronze remained the principal metal for tools and weapons.

  This creeping progress of the iron ‘revolution’ fits the general pattern of this period which ruled out any rapid change. What after all did it imply? The replacement of one metal by another. Almagro Basch (i960) was not entirely wrong in claiming that ‘iron did not represent such a radical change in the history of civilization as that introduced by the working of copper and its alloys’. The slow advance of iron thus supports a sceptical approach to the materialist explanation which might at first sight have seemed quite plausible. No, iron did not mean an immediate democratization of warfare; and no, iron weapons did not appear overnight. Some crucial elements were very late to emerge, for example, the important invention of soldering. According to legend, it was invented in Cos on the Aegean. The first soldered object we know about is an iron head-rest, found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and dating from around 1350. But the process remained very unusual, to the point that a soldered iron tripod was kept until Roman times in the treasury of Delphi as a rare object. And we may recall that in Homeric times (the eighth century BC), the prize which Achilles offers at Patroclus’ funeral games is an iron ball!