Similarly, iron did not immediately transform tool-making. No doubt it subsequently played a crucial role in improving agricultural yields. But when did this begin? It seems a piece of risky guesswork to present it as the cause of the fall in grain prices in Assyria between the eighth and seventh centuries. These prices depended on so many other factors: security, foreign imports, the seasons… Rhys Carpenter would no doubt point out that the eighth century saw the return of a wetter climate!
The invention of the alphabet
The alphabet is another revolution that belongs to these obscure centuries. The whole of the Middle East had known writing systems in the bronze age: hieroglyphics in Egypt, cuneiform script in Asia during the preceding centuries, Linear A and Linear B in Crete, Linear B alone in ‘Minoan’ Greece. These were all already simplified systems, but they remained difficult and called for expert hands. The scribes formed a literate caste, determined to defend its prerogatives and the prestige of its profession by insisting on its mysteries and difficulties. It is not entirely surprising that this costly luxury should havedisappeared virtually overnight in the land that became Greece after the end of the Mycenaean period. A simpler technique might have been more readily accepted among the Indo-European barbarians.
It was in the end such a technique of wonderful, revolutionary simplicity that evolved some time before the end of the second millennium, to emerge into the full light of day with the linear alphabet we call Phoenician. The twenty-two symbols of this alphabet corresponded only to the consonants, which form as we know the essential structure of the Semitic languages. When the Greeks copied the Phoenician language in the eighth century, they needed signs corresponding to the vowels in order to provide an intelligible notation of their language. So they used for the vowels the symbols for a number of Semitic consonants which did not exist in Greek and, hey presto, a complete alphabet with both consonants and vowels. But it was the culminating point of a long history.
It was in Syria (broadly understood), and particularly in Ugarit and Byblos, that the revolutionary simplification had first been worked out centuries earlier. All manner of trades, languages and peoples had come together in these two busy cities throughout the second millennium. But the merchant, not possessing the costly services of a scribe with his stylus, needed a rapid means of transcribing his contracts, bills, accounts, and letters. So a complicated writing system, the grandiose creation of the state, gave way to an accelerated form of script, the logical creation of the merchants. The earliest of these experiments, the Ugaritic of the documents of Ras Shamra, uses cuneiform signs for its thirty-letter alphabet. This ABC (the oldest known to man) has been found on a tablet dating from the fourteenth century BC.
A linear alphabet was developed at the same same time in Canaan, between the fifteenth and tenth centuries. Some experts believe that its origins lie in a form of writing used in the second millennium by the Semitic workers in the Egyptian turquoise mines on the Sinai peninsula. This was a half-hieroglyphic, half-alphabetical script, in that it employed the principle of acrophonia: the use of a consonant-plus-vowel symbol to represent the consonant alone, so that it is in effect a genuine alphabetical letter. The idea is like that of spelling out the name Robinson on the telephone by saying R for Richard, O for Obadiah; or the Abel, Baker, Charlie system. The Semitic peoples proceeded in the same way to choose names for their letters: the sign Beth – meaning house – becomes the letter B in the alphabet (B for Beth), whence in due course the Greek beta.
This very gradual process culminated in the Phoenician script which became widely used in the first millennium. It was simple, and could be rapidly written with a brush on a roll of leather, parchment or papyrus, or with a sharp point on a lead tablet or a wax-coated wooden board – a kind of ‘slate’ which could easily be scraped clean and recoated with wax. The oldest example of the script is an inscription, probably from the tenth century, carved on a much older sarcophagus, that of Ahiram, king of Byblos. As early as the tenth century, Hebrew inscriptions were copying this script exactly. As for the Greeks, it was possibly in Al-Mina, a city originally founded at the mouth of the Orontes by the Greeks of Euboea, but which became Phoenician, that they learned to use the alphabet at the beginning of the eighth century. At the same time, as the inscription at Gordium shows, the neighbouring Phrygians also adopted an alphabet derived from the Phoenician.
A Greek cup found at Pithecussae on the island of Ischia near Naples, and dating from the late eighth century, carries an inscription in verse, and it was this Chalcidian alphabet (named after Chalcis, capital of Euboea) that was eventually adopted by the Etruscans. It is possible therefore that it was Cumae, a Euboean colony, that passed on the new writing to Italy. However, nothing is eyer entirely simple in these gradual transfers, and an ivory tablet with twenty-six Phoenician letters has been discovered at Marsiliana d’Albegna in a rich Etruscan tomb dating from around 700 BC. It closely resembles Phoenician tablets of the same type found at Nimrud in Assyria, and among the objects found nearby there is a little box (pyxis) and a comb sent by a merchant of Tyre. One can see in this a kind of invitation to use the alphabet for commercial correspondence, and in any case proof that the Phoenician alphabet was available to the Etruscans through direct contacts as well as in a Greek adaptation.
Nowhere, in fact, was the spread of the alphabet simple or rapid, any more than that of iron or bronze. Indeed, it was hardly any more rapid than the spread of agriculture, and certainly no faster than the gradual spread of money and a money economy. Yet who could fail to describe the invention of the first alphabet as truly ‘revolutionary’?
PART II
Figure 6 Phoenician warships with rams and roundships carrying freight. Drawing after a bas-relief in Sennacherib’s palace (704-681 BC), Nineveh.
After the particularly obscure centuries between i ioo and 700, Mediterranean life emerges into the full glare of history and everything seems much simpler. The drama can be said to unfold in three great acts:
• The colonization of the western Mediterranean by peoples from the east (Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks), a move which provided the Inland Sea with dynamic unity for the first time.
• The rise of Greek civilization, founded on sea-power but eventually coming to grief after the over-ambitious war of conquest against the Achaemenid Persians.
• The victorious destiny of Rome, whose empire became coterminous with the Mediterranean.
These are three classic stories, so familiar that it will be difficult to retell them here, given the wealth of attested facts and the number of theories they have inspired. But we shall consider them from a very specific point of view, that of the sea. Broadly, we are faced with three great movements: first, the Mediterranean expanded westwards with the colonization of the western seas, then the balance swung back towards the east with the insane conquests of Alexander the Great, and finally Rome created a sort of equilibrium. But to control the whole of the Mediterranean world from east to west for centuries on end was an arduous task, and even Rome could not maintain its power for ever.
This very simple view of things is not without its problems. The history of the ancient world may be separated from us by two millenniaor more, but it continues to arouse strong feelings. In the previous chapters we have already encountered partisans of Mesopotamia and of Egypt, admirers of Crete and Greece, advocates of the west and passionate defenders of the east. Ideally, of course, I would like to strike a balance: to avoid both uncritical praise of the Etruscans and over-adulation of the Greeks; to avoid joining the chorus of historians who criticize the Phoenicians and condemn the Carthaginians for their child sacrifices to the gods; to resist being endlessly dazzled by the Greeks (though heaven knows there is reason enough!) or tempted into repeating Hegel’s charge that Rome was the ‘prose of history’– as if prose had no beauty. In short, I ought not to lean to one side or the other, but to keep an open mind. But is this always possible, or even desirable? These contradictory passion
s are the flame that keeps history alive, both the history that is told to us and the history we try to create in turn. And as we do so, how can we avoid feelings of pain or enthusiasm, even if these are a sin against the sacrosanct rules of impartiality?
6
Colonization: the Discovery of
the Mediterranean ‘Far West’ in the
Tenth to Sixth Centuries BC
Colonization is an ambiguous word. It is one thing to cast anchor in a creek and do a little trading before sailing off again, quite another to settle permanently. The word colonization will here refer to the latter activity, which may have come long after the former.
In broad terms, from the tenth century to the sixth, if we leave aside the occupation of the Black Sea (essentially by the Ionian Greeks), it was the central and western Mediterranean which were colonized. This ‘Far West’, hard to reach and harder still to take possession of, was fought over by Phoenicians, Etruscans and Greeks. All of them came bearing a superior civilization from the east. (The Etruscans are a special case, in fact, since we know little about their origins or the chronological and geographical development of their contacts with the east.)
There is no mystery about the Phoenicians or the Greeks. The former came from the coastal regions of the Levant, the latter from the Aegean and from a maritime city of central Greece, Corinth;1 both had behind them an advanced civilization. This conforms to the usual pattern of colonization, whereby the weak are dominated and instructed by the strong. Strength in this instance meant civilization, the intense activity of the cities, techniques of navigation and metal-working, the practice of trading and the power of the markets. To set out from the Middle East at this time was like setting out from all-powerful Europe many centuries later, after the voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ad. The colonizers of antiquity, when they set up their trading posts and their towns on distant shores, did not, admittedly, have to confront advanced civilizations comparable to those of the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Incas and the Great Mogul.
But like modern Europe, the Orient of antiquity exported to distant places not only its strengths, but also its inner divisions, its conflicts of interest and its inveterate hatreds. These god-given lands, where the colonizer and the merchant could impose their will without too much difficulty, and where towns sprang up overnight, would eventually be divided up between rival masters, who brought war in their train.
I The first in the field: probably the Phoenicians
Scholarship has not yet provided all the answers in this area but if I were putting money on the first ships to arrive in the west, my choice would be: Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks, in that order. But we use the language of betting only when we have no real evidence. In any case, the order refers mainly to the earliest voyages, the first attempts at bartering along the coasts, the really pioneering ventures. The serious settlements and first towns appeared more or less simultaneously. They began in the eighth century, at the time when economic activity was taking off again, and they may have coincided with the spread of the ribbed hull, the high-sided ship better able to weather storms at sea. This opened up a whole vast area in the western Mediterranean – and opened it to all comers.
Half a century ago, our current favourite would not have seemed a likely winner. Everything that was said in the Phoenicians’ favour (by the admirable writers Victor Berard or Eduard Meyer) was immediately ruled out as ‘Phoenicia-mania’ or ‘Herodotomania’. The Greeks were flavour of the month. Recent as they are, these days are now gone – though perhaps not for good.
The Phoenicians as pioneers
For some specialists, two or three small pieces of evidence have been enough to undermine the case of the ‘Grecomaniacs’ and the reluctance of the archaeologists who until quite recently had found no tangible trace of a Phoenician presence in the western Mediterranaean before the seventh century BC. Naturally, these three traces of evidence are controversial. First there was the discovery in the Museum of Cyprus in 1939 of a damaged inscription, unnoticed until then, which can be dated to the ninth century BC. The script on it provided a neat explanation of a strange Phoenician inscription discovered long ago (in 1773) in Sardinia, near Pula (Nora in antiquity) and now in the museum of Cagliari. Its archaic character had been recognized by R. Dussaud in 1914. But according to W. F. Albright (1941) the script is identical with that on the Cyprus inscription, and must therefore belong to the same period. Since then, two similar fragments of inscriptions have been found in Sardinia, dating presumably from the first half of the ninth century.
Putting up monumental inscriptions is not of course the first priority of sailors on voyages of discovery. It is therefore possible that the first visit of the Phoenicians to Sardinia could go back to the tenth century or even earlier, since it would be normal for colonial settlements or even seasonal trading posts to be preceded by a long period of sailing from harbour to harbour, with the ship acting as a kind of mobile trading post. If we take this view, we might even return to the traditional dates, probably too early though, given for the ‘foundation’ of the Phoenician colonies: Gades (Cadiz) in c. 1100 BC; Lixus in Morocco earlier still, if we are to believe Pliny; Utica a little later; and Carthage (which means new town) in 814-813. On the other hand, deep excavations have found no foreign influence before the sixth century at Lixus or before the seventh at Mogador. Some traces apparently belonging to the period of the earliest voyages (tenth century) have been discovered in Spain by the archaeologist B. Nazar (1957), and Pierre Cintas (1949) has noted on Salammbo beach near Carthage some very fragmentary indications of a visit there by sailors from Cyprus at the beginning of the second millennium.
In a word, there is as yet no definite proof for the explanatory hypotheses of Sabatino Moscati (1966), which are based essentially on the fact that after the arrival of the Peoples of the Sea, the only power to survive miraculously intact was that of Phoenicia. Three centuries – the eleventh, the tenth, and the ninth – separate the fall of Mycenae from the first beginnings of Greek expansion westward. ‘It is natural’, writes Moscati, ‘that Phoenician expansion should have filled this historical gap’. And indeed, nothing prevents us from imagining that during this eclipse of Greek seafaring the Phoenicians had aclear field to exploit the distant – and empty – sea, launching simple maritime expeditions of a kind very common in history; and then that to counter Greek competition from the eighth century on, they were obliged to consolidate their presence at key points of this vast network. Thus a purely commercial presence may have preceded genuine colonization.
This hypothetical account has to answer a number of common-sense objections. What about the so-called logical sequence of a gradual westward expansion of Phoenician discoveries and settlement, by successive moves along the North African coast? In that case, Utica and Carthage would have to be older than Gades and Lixus – which would bring us back to the shorter time-span. But it is quite conceivable, contrary to this theory, that the Phoenicians preferred to use the open sea routes and settle first in the west, close to the silver of Spain and the Atlantic trade; only later would they have felt the need to strengthen their intermediate staging-posts. This makes a long time-span more probable, the essential thing after all being to find out what happened in the earliest, most distant stages. Only the archaeologists can decide the question, so only time will tell!
Phoenicia: a sea power by force of circumstance
Before trying to unravel this long thread, let us return to Phoenicia itself, a very long thin strip running between the mountains and the sea. From Acco in the south to Arados in the north, its width varied from about seven miles to hardly more than thirty miles. It was in fact a string of small ports, set among little valleys, steep hillsides and tiny off-shore islands. Communication between the towns was difficult on land, but excellent by sea.
Each of these ports saw itself as an autonomous world. Having sited themselves on easily defended headlands or islands, they turned their backs on t
heir mountainous hinterland. Tyre, which is now connected to the mainland by alluvial deposits, was originally built on a narrow island. This gave the city what it most needed: defences which defied all attackers except in the end Alexander the Great; two harbours, a natural one to the north linking the city to Sidon, an artificial one to the south for trade with Egypt; and finally, located in the sea itself, a bubbling spring of fresh drinking water which could easily be tapped separately from the surrounding salt water. Everything else had to be brought in by sea. Thereafter, the Phoenicians constantly strove to recreate this ideal urban geography in their colonial settlements, situating them where possible on islands or promontories.
On the strip of coast dominated by the mountains of Lebanon, these strange urban excrescences were an ancient Canaanite legacy. The people whom the Greeks called Phoenikes, the Red People (no doubt because of their famous purple cloth), and whom we call Phoenicians, were directly descended from the Semitic Canaanites, who had long been settled on the Syrian-Palestinian coast. The original Phoenicia was part of Canaan, the part which survived the onslaught of the Peoples of the Sea.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 26