Even if you just gaze idly at a map of the Mediterranean you’ll notice something curious about the outline of the northern half compared to the southern side, the coast of Africa. The northern coastline is peppered with islands. These range in size from the tiny specks of the Cyclades archipelago in the southern Aegean to large landmasses a few hundred kilometres across – Sardinia, Crete and Cyprus. Many of these Mediterranean islands are now popular holiday resorts, but the sheer number of ancient ruins scattered across them attests to how critical they were in setting the stage for civilisation throughout antiquity. And it’s not just the myriad islands poking above the Mediterranean waters that distinguish the north from the south. The coastline around the top lip of the Med is also fantastically detailed – it is full of inlets, coves, headlands and bays. The shore and islands of the Aegean, the region that hosted many ancient Greek city states, for example, constitutes a full third of the length of the entire Mediterranean coastline but only a tiny fraction of its land area.11 By stark comparison, the African shoreline is just a bit – well, plain. The coast running along modern Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt is monotonously smooth with essentially no offshore islands.
You may have thought that a land area broken up into many small parcels would be an encumbrance to early societies. But before the development of modern roads, railways and engines, travel and trade along overland routes was arduous. Transportation along calm rivers, or by sailing the seas, was much easier and faster, especially when carrying bulk cargo for long-distance trade. So the segmentation of the northern coast into many small pockets of land, separated by the relatively calm waters of the Mediterranean, was of huge assistance to the movement of people and goods between city states and kingdoms. The northern coastlines also provided a great selection of good natural harbours. In short, the northern Med is ideally set up for maritime activity and consequently many ancient cultures thrived along these northern shores.12
The African coastline forming the southern lip of the Mediterranean, on the other hand, is on the whole woefully unsupportive of seafaring societies. It offers very few protected natural harbours, and is backed by desert that has hampered agriculture and inhabitation. The cultures that did survive on the North African coast were generally restricted to thin slivers of land along the shoreline where farming was possible; but with the exception of the Egyptian civilisation supported by the mighty Nile, they could not extend very far inland. There have been some major ports on this African coastline of course. Carthage was located on the tip of modern Tunisia with a good natural harbour. This port began as a Phoenician colony in 814 BC and over the next five centuries came to dominate commerce in the western Mediterranean. It became a major rival to the Roman Republic, and the conflict between them led to a series of wars that resulted in the complete destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.fn2
Another major city on the North African coast was Alexandria, located in the delta of the River Nile. It was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC,14 and on his death served as the capital of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty for the next three centuries (until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC). It also came to flourish as the major cultural and intellectual centre of the ancient world, not least because of its famous library. The city was built atop a stable bar alongside the vast river delta, and its 100-metre-high lighthouse tower on the island of Pharos guided ships into its port.15 The location was carefully chosen. Alexandria was built on the western side of the Nile to prevent its harbour from silting up, as the water currents within the Mediterranean sweep the sediment pouring out from the river towards the east. This sediment is carried anticlockwise from the delta which smothers a huge area of the eastern Mediterranean, producing a straight, sandy coastline. It is not until as far north as Haifa, where a mountain juts into the sea to protect the bay beyond from silting up with the longshore drift, that the south-eastern Mediterranean offers a decent natural harbour.
So it was the dry climatic conditions of North Africa (to which we’ll return in Chapter 7) and its unobliging coastline that conspired to hinder the rise of many great civilisations along this whole stretch of the Mediterranean. With the exceptions of Carthage and Alexandria, the roughly 4,000 kilometres of African coastline between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Nile Delta have been historically very quiet compared to the vigorous bubbling of different cultures, cities and civilisations around the northern shores.
The closing of the Tethys Ocean to create the Mediterranean.
But why is it that the northern and southern rims of the Mediterranean Sea, no more than a few hundred miles apart, are geologically so very different? Once again, there are planetary causes for this profound distinction.
Today’s Mediterranean Sea is in fact nothing more than a puddle of water left behind after the disappearance of a once great ocean. About 250 million years ago, the face of our world would have been all but unrecognisable. The ceaseless roving of the planet’s tectonic plates occasionally brings all the major chunks of continental crust together to create a single, unified landmass: a supercontinent. And at the end of the Permian Period, the supercontinent Pangea – meaning the All-Land – stretched from pole to pole in a rough horseshoe shape, holding within its arms an ocean called the Tethys.fn3 At this time you could have walked from the North to the South Pole across Pangea without ever getting your feet wet, although you would have needed to cross huge desert plains in the interior heartland of the immense continent.
But soon after the assemblage of Pangea had been completed, the supercontinent began to break up again. The land masses we are familiar with today tore from one another and rode into their current configuration. First, North America began to tear away, unzipping along the seafloor-spreading rift that created the North Atlantic, and then South America ripped from Africa – their coastlines are still clearly complementary today. India separated from Antarctica and headed north, and Africa turned and rode towards Europe. In the last 60 million years, Africa, Arabia and India have all collided back into Eurasia, rippling up the great band of mountains along its southern margin from the Alps to the Himalayas.
The Mediterranean today, rimmed by mountain ranges thrown up by the closing of the Tethys Ocean.
Pangea is no more, and the Tethys Ocean has all but vanished. As the African plate slid northwards, the Tethys has steadily disappeared as its oceanic crust was swallowed beneath Europe, and its seafloor sediments crumpled into mountains. By around 15 million years ago the Tethys was no more than a narrow seaway, still open at both ends, between the North African coast and the Iberian Peninsula on one side, and through the Persian Gulf on the other; it also had a long northern arm inundating western Asia. But as the Red Sea rifted open it forced the Arabian Peninsula to swing away from the Horn of Africa and slam into the southern edge of the Eurasian plate, rippling up the Zagros mountain range. This created the Middle East region as we know it today, and closed off the eastern opening of the Mediterranean. The northern arm of the Tethys dried up, leaving behind as remnants the Black, Caspian and Aral Seas across western Asia. Meanwhile, as Africa was still pushing north, its north-western tip crunched into the Iberian Peninsula, finally cutting off the Mediterranean from the Atlantic on its western end between 5.5 and 6 million years ago.16
Now completely severed from the rest of the world’s oceans, and lying in a hot climatic zone, the Mediterranean was losing water to evaporation faster than the rivers flowing into its basin were able to top it up, and it rapidly dried out. As the water level dropped, the Mediterranean was split into two halves by a ridge that continues as an off-shoot of the Atlas Mountains in Tunisia.fn4 The western half of the Mediterranean desiccated completely, and laid down great salt deposits on the sun-baked floor. In fact, the sheer thickness of these deposits – up to 2 kilometres in places17 – beneath the Mediterranean today indicates that the sea must have dried out and been refilled by the Atlantic spilling back in many times in succession.18 This process reduced the salt content of the world’s oceans by about 6 per cent.1
9 The eastern Mediterranean basin is deeper, and received some flow from the Nile and the Black Sea via the Bosphorus, so although its waters dropped thousands of feet below sea level it didn’t completely dry out but persisted as a brackish lake, not unlike the Dead Sea today.
Then, around 5.3 million years ago, ongoing tectonic activity saw the western rim of the basin subside again and the Mediterranean permanently reopened. Waters of the Atlantic began trickling in, before developing into a surging torrent with huge volumes of water gushing down the slope to refill the empty, dusty Mediterranean basin, perhaps in as little as two years. The current Strait of Gibraltar was gouged out by this scouring megaflood.20
The Mediterranean is still shrinking today as the African tectonic plate continues its northward march, and will eventually disappear completely. And it is this tectonic process that explains the geological differences between the sea’s northern and southern coastlines. The southern Mediterranean coastline is relatively smooth and bereft of natural harbours because the African plate is being tipped downwards to be subducted and destroyed beneath the Eurasian plate. The entire northern Mediterranean coastline, on the other hand, is mountainous because of this continental collision. Here the combination of tectonic subsidence and the fact that we are currently in an interglacial period with high sea levels has produced a submergent coastline. The fantastically intricate northern Med with its multitude of islands, headlands, bays and an abundance of protected, natural harbours is the result of this drowned landscape. It is this fundamental tectonic fact that has empowered seafaring cultures along the northern rim, and so influenced history from the Bronze Age to the present day.
SINBAD’S WORLD
The interior sea of the Mediterranean linked together the cultures at the far western extremity of the Eurasian continent into a great trade network. But maritime trade over much greater distances has also shaped the history of civilisations. Through the ages, numerous cultures and empires have emerged across the southern half of Eurasia, the region to the south of the great band of arid steppe grasslands ranging across the continent to which we’ll return in Chapter 7. These societies traded with each other by sea routes along the southern margin of this broad continent.
The maritime routes linking eastern and western Asia reached across the Indian Ocean. By around 3000 BC, merchants in Mesopotamia were transporting their goods south to where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers merge and flow into the Persian Gulf. From here, they sailed down the Gulf, through the narrow Strait of Hormuz at its mouth, and then along the South Asian coast to the mouth of the Indus river. As civilisation spread to Egypt, Phoenicia and Greece on the Mediterranean shores, a second major artery of trade opened. From the Nile Delta, goods were carried overland by camel caravans across the mountainous Eastern Desert to ports on the Red Sea. From here, ships sailed down the long channel of the Red Sea, around the southern edge of Arabia, and then entered the Indian Ocean.21
It was not an easy journey. Hidden shoals along the Red Sea coast made navigation potentially treacherous, the heat was punishing, and the extreme aridity of the region, with vast deserts on either side, meant there were few sources of fresh water along the shores. Indeed, the narrow strait forming the entrance into the Red Sea came to be known by Arab sailors as Bab-el-Mandeb – the ‘Gates of Woe’. Before embarking on the long passage up the Red Sea, ships would call into the port of Aden, sitting just around the lip of the Arabian Peninsula and commanding the Bab-el-Mandeb gateway. Nestled in the crater of an extinct volcano, Aden was a vital stop for taking on water, and as a busy entrepôt developed into a prosperous and well-fortified city.fn5
Both the Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes into the Indian Ocean buzzed with merchant shipping and both these maritime thoroughfares are consequences of the same episode of tectonic activity.23 As we saw in Chapter 1, the Red Sea is one of the three branches of the Y-shaped system of rifts that ripped open the skin of the planet as a huge magma plume swelled beneath the African crust. The growth of the southerly branch, the East African Rift, set the stage for our evolution as a species, while the deeper fracture to the north-west tore off the Arabian Peninsula as a shard from Africa, with water pooling into this 2,000-kilometre-long crack to create the Red Sea.fn6
The major east–west Eurasian maritime trade routes and crucial straits.
The Arabian Peninsula remains hanging off Africa by only a narrow sinew of land in the north – the Sinai Desert – and as the Red Sea has widened the Arabian block has swung east to slam into the southern edge of the Eurasian plate. This folded up the Zagros Mountains in Iran, and along the foot of this range, where the crust has been depressed down into a wedge-shaped foreland basin, the Indian Ocean washed in to create the Persian Gulf.
The earliest trade routes from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to India hugged the coastline. But by around 100 BC24 the merchants of Ptolemaic Egypt had discovered how to use the south-westerly monsoon winds in summer to sail from Bab-el-Mandeb directly across the Indian Ocean to the west coast of India in just a few weeks,25 returning in winter when the monsoon winds reversed direction. Exploiting this feature of the planet’s atmospheric patterns – to which we’ll return in Chapter 8 – led to a surge in maritime commerce across Eurasia.26 But by the end of the seventh century AD, the Islamic conquests across Arabia, North Africa and south-western Asia had closed the gates of Bab-el-Mandeb to European sailors. For centuries the dhows and caravans of Muslim merchants now dominated the three great east–west trade routes across Asia: the maritime passages from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean, and the Silk Road through Central Asia.27 This is the world of Sinbad the Sailor in One Thousand and One Nights, who loaded up with trade goods in Baghdad and set sail from Basra down the Persian Gulf on his seven adventurous voyages.
Prior to the rise of Islamic supremacy over these trade routes, India had been well known to Greek and Roman geographers like Strabo and Ptolemy, but after the blocking of the Red Sea passage knowledge of its location faded into the obscurity of myths.28 It would be the best part of another millennium before Europeans once again sailed into the Indian Ocean, as we’ll see in Chapter 8. And when they did, they would find a trade network in South East Asia just as vibrant as that of the Mediterranean.
SPICE WORLD
Indeed, in many respects the maritime area of South East Asia is much like the Mediterranean. But rather than an internal sea bounded on all sides by land, this region is a dispersed splattering of islands open on both sides to the expansive Indian and Pacific Oceans. The East Indies are part of the continental shelf of Eurasia: here the seas are relatively shallow and the land masses are simply the higher ground of this landscape poking above the waves. Like the northern rim of the Mediterranean, the margins of this region are volcanically active, as the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates are being subducted under the Eurasian to melt and release rising blobs of magma.
A whole chain of volcanoes runs along the backbone of Sumatra and Java, and curves all the way round to the Banda Islands. This volcanism has produced fertile soils, but also some of the most violent eruptions in history, such as Tambora in 1815 and Krakatoa in 1883. The eruption of the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia around 74,000 years ago was the largest of the past two million years. It ejected an enormous amount of ash that smothered 1 per cent of the planet’s surface and may have darkened the skies sufficiently to cause a global chilling for several decades. (This has even prompted the controversial claim that the Toba eruption caused a crash in the surviving population of humanity.)29
Whereas the Mediterranean sports a few hundred islands, South East Asia contains over 26,000, ranging from thousand-kilometre-long landmasses like Borneo and Sumatra to minute specks of calderas. This extreme dispersal of the land area, coupled with the rugged, mountainous terrain of the islands, inhibited the unification of territory into large empires as had happened in China or around the Mediterranean.30 Yet trade flourished across these South East Asian seas. Alongsi
de cotton from India, porcelain, silk and tea from China, and precious metals from Japan,31 the most highly valued commodities were spices: pepper and ginger from India, cinnamon from the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and nutmeg, mace and cloves from the ‘Spice Islands’ of the Moluccas.fn7
The South East Asian archipelagoes, and the tiny size of the spice islands of the Moluccas and Bandas.
These were valued not just for flavouring food, but for the aphrodisiac and medicinal properties they were considered to have.32 The spices came from different kinds of plants growing in the region’s tropical climate. Pepper is the fruit of a rainforest vine, ginger a root, cinnamon a tree bark, and cloves the dried buds of unopened flowers. Nutmeg is the seed and mace the seed covering of the same evergreen tree.33 Some of these plants were widespread through the region. Pepper, for example, is found right across South and South East Asia, although historically most was produced on the Malabar Coast of south-west India.34 Here the Western Ghats, a low range of mountains, trap the rainfall from the summer monsoons to produce a moist, tropical climate ideally suited to this particular vine.35
But other spices were extremely limited in their native habitat. Cloves originally grew in the volcanic soils of only a handful of small islands in the northern Moluccas archipelago: Bacan, Makian, Moti, Tidore and Ternate.36 And the nutmeg tree appeared on only nine pinprick-sized islands – the Bandas – further south in the Moluccas.37 These rare spices commanded premium prices, especially by the time merchants had carried them all the way west to the Mediterranean: the commercial importance of these minute specks of volcanic islands was vastly out of proportion to their size.fn8
The maritime trade network of South East Asia was far larger than that of the comparative puddle of the Mediterranean. Routes from the Indian Ocean threaded through the narrow Strait of Malacca, others stretched down from the East China Sea, and also from the Moluccan Spice Islands in the east, all converging on trading ports on the Malay Peninsula or the islands of Java and Sumatra.38 By AD 1400, the port of Malacca on the south-east Malaysian peninsula had grown from a small fishing village to one of the largest centres of maritime trade in the world.39 It was strategically located roughly halfway along the 800-kilometre Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and the long island of Sumatra, at a point where the funnel-shaped strait narrows to just 60 kilometres wide. The Strait of Malacca was one of the most important waterways in the Eastern Hemisphere as it served as the crucial marine thoroughfare between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.40 The port’s heaving markets burst with a huge diversity of trade goods: wool and glass from Venice, opium and incense from Arabia, porcelain and silks from China, and of course the spices from the Bandas and the Moluccas.41 Malacca was one of the most cosmopolitan places on Earth, its port a forest of masts where the dhows from the Indian Ocean berthed alongside the junks from China and the Spice Islands, and with a population larger than Lisbon speaking scores of different languages that could be heard over the din of the markets.42 It was the riches of this spice trade that provided the major draw for European navigators trying to find new sea routes to the east at the end of the fifteenth century.fn9
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