The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  All its towns thus had their roots in the distant past. Byblos was trading with the Nile Delta before the beginning of the third millennium. Egypt still exerted much influence there at the beginning of the following millennium, but it was as yet that of an important customer, admired and even copied, rather than of a political master. In the seventeenth century BC, the Canaanite cities managed even to escape the threat of the Hyksos. Indirectly, though, it was the Hyksos who put their freedom in jeopardy. From 1580 on, the Egyptian New Kingdom, while driving the invaders out of the Delta, felt the need to guarantee its security by creating strongholds in Asia. After the battle of Megiddo (1525), Egypt took control of the cities of Canaan. Quite soon, it is true, this control became more nominal than real. Although the army of Ramses HI helped to defend the Canaanite ports against the onslaught of the Peoples of the Sea, Egypt did not maintain much authority there beyond 1200. Canaan was once again free. This was the time when Sidon enjoyed a certain supremacy over the other cities of the coast before being ousted around 1000 by Tyre, the proud city described by Ezekiel. Meanwhile Byblos had become a second-rank town. Amid the general economic recession, though, Phoenicia remained a ‘sheltered sector’.

  These Canaanites, though favoured by fortune, now had only a much reduced territory. To the south, the Philistines had taken the southern littoral from them, but without really competing with them, since as iron-workers and farmers the Philistines tended to establishtheir towns inland. To the north, the Syro-Hittites and the Aramaeans kept them away from the coast of northern Syria and the strategic mouth of the Orontes. Even so, Phoenician influence was strongly felt in this area, at Al-Mina for example, or further north at Karatepe, where Phoenician was spoken. To the east, the Hebrews had seized the hinterland of Canaan, but the maritime cities were not greatly concerned by the loss of this poor land, much of it occupied by a semi-nomadic population. When Solomon offered several Galilean towns to Hiram, king of Tyre, as a reward for his loyal services, the king went to inspect them and turned the offer down, preferring to ask Solomon for an annual supply of grain and oil.

  So this was a tiny but independent country, forced by the proximity of the mountains, by its neighbours, and by its own way of life to make do with a poor, barely existent territory, a few cornfields, some beautifully cultivated orchards, the occasional forest and a little grazing land. The over-populated cities had to buy from abroad the food they lacked, to compensate for their disadvantages.

  Industry: a necessity

  Industry was thus indispensable to the Phoenician cities. They all contained an active body of artisans, weavers, ironworkers, goldsmiths and shipbuilders. These skilled workers were often called on by foreign states, as engineers are in our own industrial age.

  The ‘industries’ of Phoenicia excelled in everything. Their woollen cloths were famous, as were their dyes, extracted from the shells of the Murex trunculus or the Murex brandaris, with shades ranging from pink to purple or violet. This essential industry was kept well away from the towns, since the flesh of the molluscs had to be allowed to decompose at length in the open air, producing disgusting smells. Enormous piles of murex shells marked the presence of numerous dyers’ workshops, both in Phoenicia itself and in its western colonies. The weavers, the most highly skilled of all craftsmen, produced precious carpets, using a technique still employed two millennia later in the Gobelins tapestry works in France, as well as the multicoloured fabrics which are often mentioned in Homer. These are the colourful clothes worn by the ‘Asiatics’ who are seen being trampled underfoot by the victorious Tutankhamun in paintings on wooden caskets, or by the prisoners of Ramses III depicted on the enamelled tiles of the temple of Medinet Habu.

  Other traditional arts were extensively developed by the Phoenicians with a view to the export market. Large numbers of intricately carved ivory plaques inlaid with gold and coloured stones have been found at Nimrud (Assyria), Samaria, Khorsabad and Arslan Tash, but also at Samos in Greece and in Etruria. Most of these ivories, which date for the most part from the ninth to the seventh century, have been attributed, following the work of R. D. Barnett, to the Phoenician workshops at Hamat on the Orontes. Some may come from Syrian centres further north, and a few reflect a local Assyrian or even Iranian style (Ziwiye), but these people were inspired by the work of Phoenicians who had been brought in voluntarily or involuntarily.2 The style derives directly from the ‘international style’ of the bronze age, with a mixture of disparate influences from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, the Hittite Empire, Assyria and elsewhere.

  We find the same continuity of style in the silver or gold cups which have been found in Assyria, Cyprus, Greece, and Crete, or in Italy in countless Etruscan tombs. Their archaeological context dates them from the seventh century, but they could easily be mistaken for work of the second millennium with their repousse technique and their varied motifs taken from the stock images of the oriental peoples. This was a Phoenician speciality; Homer speaks of ‘craters [bowls] from Sidon’, when one of these precious objects is presented to Menelaus or given as a prize at the funeral games after the death of Patroclus.

  But there was one new element in the productions of the Phoenician craftsmen: glass – seen in the countless baroque globules, amulets, pendants and beads, the glass phials and little multicoloured vases, all of them sold by the thousand all around the Mediterranean. This did not call for any new technical invention. The production of glass – which was originally simply the potter’s glaze without its earthenware base, in other words opaque glass – had developed independently and simultaneously in Egypt and Mesopotamia before the second millennium. The techniques were similar, even if the raw materials and colouring agents differed. Glass-blowing remained unknown until Graeco-Roman times, but glass was sometimes moulded or evenhollowed out from a solid mass. More normally, a nucleus of clayey sand, compressed in a mould of fine cloth and mounted on a copper rod, was plunged into the liquid glass to cover it with a layer of glaze. Before it hardened, little pieces of coloured glass were inserted into it (the charming patterns of lines and festoons which one sees on so many Egyptian or Phoenician vases), then the whole surface was smoothed, usually by rolling it on a table, and handles and ornaments were attached. Once it had cooled, it only remained to remove the core of sand and the cloth surrounding it.

  The Phoenicians and Cypriots imitated the Egyptian glass-workers at first. But from the seventh century on, the Phoenician and later the Punic cities created a homegrown glass industry, developing among other things transparent glass (which in Egypt made its appearance rather late, from the time of Tutankhamun).

  On the other hand, being the sensible traders they were, the Phoenicians never tried to compete with Egypt in the field of ceramics, where the Egyptians were themselves engaged in the industrial production of trinkets. They contented themselves with selling, alongside their own glassware, the innumerable amulets (of cat- or crocodile-headed goddesses, figures of the god Bes or eyes) and scarabs which Egypt had long been exporting to the Aegean and which are found in great numbers in the earliest tombs of Carthage.3

  Similarly, although they had had settlements in Cyprus since at least the tenth century, they did not try to compete with the local speciality: extraordinary painted pottery, a Mycenaean legacy transmuted by oriental fantasy. Nor, unlike the Etruscans, did they imitate Greek pottery, even though they sold it all over the Mediterranean. They remained faithful to their own ceramic tradition, with its polished iridescent red pots from the Lebanese coast. This was imitated by the towns of Israel in the tenth century in the elegant crimson pitchers and cups known as ‘Samarian ware’. The most widespread Phoenician vessel – the pear-shaped pitcher which is found in both Carthage and Phoenicia – was copied in other materials: glass, bronze, silver, and even ivory. But the art of painted pottery was never adopted by the Phoenicians.

  The impact of maritime trade

  Industry would have been nothing without trade. The Phoenician ports, crowded wit
h ships, were obliged to engage in large-scale commercial activity, stretching from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to Gibraltar and the Atlantic. The whole of the Mediterranean was caught up in this far-reaching network.

  Broadly speaking, there were three routes from the east to the western Mediterranean. The first kept close to the northern coasts, going by Greece and the Greek islands as far as Corcyra (Corfu). From there, with a favourable wind, a light sailing vessel could cross the Strait of Otranto in less than a day, and then follow the Italian coastline to the Straits of Messina. This narrow passage was the final destination of the earliest Greek travellers, and no doubt of the ships of Crete and Mycenae. In due course the Tyrrhenian Sea was to be the crossroads by which the Greek sailing ships reached the west, though not without difficulty.

  The southern route followed the African shoreline from Egypt to Libya and what we now call North Africa, an endless coastal navigation leading finally to the Pillars of Hercules and the Straits of Gibraltar. On this lengthy route, the Phoenicians had ports of call in friendly countries, for instance in the Nile Delta, and trading posts, such as those on the coast of Cyrenaica or the Maghreb. They always chose sites either on inshore islands – Nora in Sardinia, Cadiz opposite the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Motya in Sicily, Utica at the mouth of the Bagradas (Medjerda), Mogador in Morocco – or on easily defended isthmuses. Carthage, on the hill of Byrsa between its two lagoons, was compared by Appian to a ship at anchor.

  The third, shorter, route went straight across the middle of the sea, by way of a chain of islands: Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearics. Two millennia later, at the time of Philip II and Don John of Austria, this was still the ‘straight and rapid’ route, the one followed by Spanish ships from Sicily to the Balearics or the Balearics to Sicily; further east, from Sicily to Crete, Cyprus and Syria, it was the central axis of the famous Levant trade. Sailing on the direct route obviously meant abandoning coastal navigation for the high seas.

  Did the ships of the Phoenicians take this central sea passage, farfrom the coasts? Probably they did, since there are clear indications that the Phoenicians, and later the Carthaginians, at least called, and possibly stayed, at all the islands along this route. Moreover, the Phoenicians had earned the reputation of outstanding seamen: ‘Thy wise men, O Tyrus, that were in thee, were thy pilots… thy rowers have brought thee into great waters’ (Ezekiel 27; my italics). According to Strabo and Aratos, the Phoenicians taught the Greeks a sure method of telling the north by the Little Bear (rather than the Charioteer and the Great Bear). They sailed even by night, venturing far from the coast and outdoing all other mariners of the time, who only sailed by day. In addition, they had drawn up marine charts and made tables of distances and winds; the detailed account of the voyage of Hanno down the African coast was publicly displayed in a temple.4

  It is probable that of the two coastal routes the northerly one was the safer for sailing boats and for oarsmen (to judge by the practice of the Turks in the sixteenth century ad, when they controlled both routes). The land provided shelter from northerly winds. But the southern route too was possible and in its western sector often preferable. In the west, the northern route had to cross the wide seas between Italy and Spain; the Phocaeans and later the Marseillais only overcame this very real difficulty by using larger ships. As for the central route, it offered speed (relatively speaking), space, and liberty: the large expanses of water between the islands gave ships the protection of an empty sea and safety from pursuers. No wonder then that the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians were so determined to hold on to the islands from Cyprus to the Balearics, including invaluable Sicily, and to keep control of the ‘Sicily-Balearic bridge’. Once Rome had captured Sicily, that was the end of Carthage’s naval supremacy.

  The prosperity of Phoenicia thus depended on long sea voyages. A passage in the Bible indicates, if our interpretation of it is correct, that a given ship, fitted out by King Solomon and sailing with the Phoenician fleet, could go to Tartessos in far-off Spain and back in three years. This was about the time taken for a return journey between Seville and Spanish America in the sixteenth century ad .

  Both the voyage to Tartessos and that to America implied the existence of cities with rich capital resources, capable of waiting years for a return, and profits proportional to the immense investment of time. In both cases, it was silver (plus tin arriving from the north in Andalusia) which allowed the miracle to take place. A great deal of Spanish silver must have been circulating, because in Egypt the gold : silver exchange rate went from i: z to i: 13! There must indeed have been a glut of silver on the Egyptian market, as there was in Europe in the sixteenth century with the arrival of silver from America. From Spain, the ‘conquest’ of the mines seems to have moved to Sardinia5 which was also colonized early on, and where silver mines were the first to be worked; the copper mines of the Barbagia region were established only in about the eighth century, and the copper they produced was mostly consumed on the island. Diodorus of Sicily, for his part, has no hesitation in attributing the power of the Phoenicians to the trade in the silver they extracted from Spain and Sardinia.

  The miracles of bitumen (pitch)

  The miracle of the Phoenician voyages, the first systematic use of the sea, was at first sight due to human skill and courage. But perhaps there was something else. The Phoenicians possessed abundant supplies of bitumen, if only that of the nearby Dead Sea, which had been in use from time immemorial. Pierre Cintas writes: ‘I am inclined to believe that their success at sea was largely due to the use of bitumen for caulking their vessels.’ Leaks and inadequate watertightness were indeed the enemies of early navigation. In those far-off days, ships were invariably pulled up out of the water, either on to the sand for the night, or in port, where the hull could be exposed to the air for checking and careening. Bitumen, a kind of natural tar, was certainly used for this purpose by the Phoenician sailors.

  Indeed the architects in Carthage used it too. The clay walls of the tall houses were often tarred on the outside, and Pliny speaks of their ‘pitch-covered roofs’. Therein lies the explanation for the terrible fire of 146 BC. The Romans would never have been able to burn the city down to ground level had it not been for the highly inflammable bitumen, which is still being found by archaeologists in ‘little plaques’ in the layer of ashes covering Punic Carthage.

  Carthage: a new lease of life for Phoenicia

  Communications between Tyre and Cadiz in the Far West of the Mediterranean depended on a fragile thread – fragile because of its great length. For many years the system survived thanks to the presence of Carthage as a halfway house. It collapsed only in the seventh century, for a number of different reasons.

  Firstly, the Phoenicians no longer had the Mediterranean to themselves as in the early days,6 but faced competition from the Etruscans (which was manageable) and then the Greeks. Secondly, Phoenicia was under attack from the Assyrians, who took Cyprus in 709. Arados, Byblos, Sidon and Tyre resisted for a long time, but events took a dramatic turn when the Assyrians occupied Egypt in 671. Thereafter, the ‘kings’ of the Phoenician dties were obliged to manoeuvre, submit-ting, scheming and launching vain attempts at revolt. ‘Yakimlu, king of Arados in the middle of the sea [Arados was indeed on an island] had not submitted to my royal ancestors’, says a text of Assurbanipal, ‘but I made him wear my yoke. He himself brought his daughter to Nineveh with a rich dowry to be my concubine, and he kissed my feet’; he also paid a tribute of ‘wool dyed purple and violet, fish, and birds’. The ‘Baal of Tyre’ had similarly to hand over one of his daughters and even his son, whom Assurbanipal returned to him. In 574, almost forty years after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, when everyone might have been able to breathe freely again, the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar in turn conquered Tyre.

  These wars, and further upheavals in cities where the kings were giving way to suffetes (magistrates), causing disruption to trade, did not immediately wipe Phoenicia and its ships
from the world map. But they impelled Carthage to become a power in its own right, all the more so because it did not have to free itself from the bonds of colonial power in the modern sense of the word. What linked it to the mother country was the common worship of Melkart in Tyre, and business connections between groups. These links slackened of their own accord without Carthage or its ruling aristocracy of merchants having to struggle for independence. The centre of Phoenician life now shifted to Carthage, which was better situated than Tyre, at the exact meeting point of the two Mediterraneans and out of reach of foreign aggression. Phoenician civilization continued there, at once the same and different, rather like modern European civilization in America.

  The differences were accentuated by distance, by the inevitable gap between two sets of cultural practices, and not least by the mixed origins of the town. Pierre Cintas went so far as to say that Carthage was founded by various peoples ‘from the sea’ as much as by the Phoenicians themselves. Perhaps this is to give too much weight to the evidence from two early Carthaginian cemeteries dating from the seventh century; one, at Darmesch to the north-east of the city, was reserved for those who buried their dead (Phoenicians), while the other, on the hill of Juno, was for those who practised cremation (were they Greeks?). Cintas concludes that at the time of the first permanent colonial settlements, there was a mix of different peoples emigrating westward. Unfortunately this all remains unclear. And in any case the Phoenicians were the majority; they set the tone and it was their language that was spoken.