by Charles King
The prevailing current runs along the coast in a counterclockwise motion, with two spurs moving across the middle of the sea to the north and the south. In 1823 a British navy captain claimed that he could travel from Odessa to Istanbul without hoisting a sail, simply by letting the current carry him along.20 While ancient sailors generally preferred to hug the coastline, navigating by the headlands and taking advantage of the breezes coming off the shore, the Black Sea’s currents would have made it easy to cross the narrow midriff—a journey of only a day and a night, according to Greek sources.21
The complementary currents are matched by the basic symmetry of the shoreline. The eastern and western extremities are fed by important rivers, the Danube and the Rioni, both of which produce strong currents that run counterclockwise at their mouths. In the northeast, the Don river flows into the Sea of Azov and, through the Kerch strait, into the Black Sea. That arrangement is copied in the southwest by another strait, the Bosphorus, where a top current carries the cooler Black Sea water out into the Sea of Marmara and then into the Mediterranean. (As the Greeks knew, a warmer, denser bottom current runs through the Bosphorus in the opposite direction.) In the north, the Crimean peninsula juts out like an arrow pointing south; on the southern shore, twin headlands, Kerempe and Ince, stretch up to meet it. The symmetry is so striking that some ancient geographers actually thought of the Black Sea as, in reality, two seas, a western and an eastern one, separated by the narrowest crossing point between Cape Sarych in Crimea and Cape Kerempe in Anatolia, a distance of only about 225km.22 Sailors were warned to beware of the sudden change when crossing this boundary line, where currents and winds could shift and spin a ship around.23
None of these features is exactly a mirror image of the other, however, for each serves as a channel of communication with different lands beyond. Follow the Danube upstream and you reach the heart of Europe, passing the great Hungarian plain and the Alps. Paddle up the Rioni and, after a brief tour of the flatlands, you discover the river’s home in the raging streams of the Caucasus. Crimea gives way to the Eurasian steppe in the north, while the southern capes jut out from the Anatolian uplands.
The symmetry of geography thus masks an asymmetry of endowments. On the Asian side of the Bosphorus, the violent winds and waves have denuded the coastline. Above, the hills lead on to a plain that stretches south across Anatolia to the Taurus mountains. Farther along, the coast rises to steep hills and finally mountains, the first reaches of the Pontic Alps. The shoreline is narrow, at most a mile or so wide, at its narrowest no more than a beach of sand or gray pebbles and, today, a paved coastal highway. Lush forests of oak and pine cling to the mountains and press down to the sea. Then come the Caucasus mountains, angling from northwest to southeast across the land corridor separating the Black Sea from the Caspian. To the north, the Eurasian steppe comes right down to the sea, sometimes halting abruptly at a rocky cliff, at other times easing into the water along the shores of wide rivers and ending in a jumble of brackish estuaries, or limans. The wetlands of the north and west, fed by the wide Danube, Dnestr, Dnepr, and Don rivers, contrast with the minor deltas of the south and east, produced by the swift Kızılırmak, Yeşilırmak, and Rioni. The differences in climate are also striking. In the steppeland of the northwest, cold winters give way to hot, dry summers. In the uplands of the southeast, the subtropical climate produces mild winters and humid summers with considerable precipitation. It is the meeting of these two climatic zones—the cooler, drier continental with the warmer, wetter subtropical—that is responsible for the spectacular storms that sailors for millennia have dreaded.
The sea has a peculiar ecology and one perhaps linked to the sudden flooding of the Neoeuxine lake. When the Mediterranean intruded, the dense seawater sank to the bottom of the lake, leaving a far less salty upper layer, about half the salinity of the oceans. Water is now continuously exchanged between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean via the counterflowing top and bottom currents in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. But in the sea, the stratification in salinity is constant; there is little circulation of water from bottom to top. This means that at depths below around 200 m the water remains without oxygen—anoxic—and, therefore, dead (save for some hardy bacteria). The bottom is a morass of black sludge, seething with hydrogen sulfide and giving off the odor of rotten eggs. A constant cascade of dead plant and animal life from the upper reaches falls to the sea floor, covering it like a blanket of snow. Low-oxygen strata can be found in many other bodies of water, but the Black Sea’s is by far the largest. Nearly 90 percent of the sea’s water volume lies in the anoxic zone, the biggest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide in the world.
The natural oxygen deficiency is enhanced by the decay of organic substances in the oxygenated zone. The sea’s drainage basin covers roughly 2 million sq. km, including the catchment areas of the Danube, Dnepr, and Don, the second, third, and fourth largest rivers in Europe. This influx of freshwater brings with it vast amounts of organic matter, including the run-off from agricultural areas and waste produced by human communities. As the organic matter decays, it consumes yet more oxygen and further depletes the thin stratum of life-supporting surface water.
Marine life hangs on precariously in the thin top layer of an otherwise noxious sea. There are the ancient life-forms that have survived from the time of the Neoeuxine lake, such as the herring and sturgeon. Other species—the flounder, whiting, sprat, and Black Sea trout—migrated down the rivers from colder climes and adapted to life in the least saline areas along the coasts. The largest number of fish are the interlopers which swam into the newly formed sea from the Mediterranean several thousand years ago. These warm-water creatures now form some 80 percent of Black Sea animal life and include the species that have been the great prize of seafaring communities for millennia, many having similar names in otherwise unrelated languages around the coast: the Greek pelamys and the Romanian palamida, or bonito; the Russian lufar’ and the Turkish lüfer, or bluefish; the Georgian skumbria and the Bulgarian skumriia, or mackerel; and the diminutive hamsi, or anchovy, so prized along the Turkish coast that songs are sung in its praise and even desserts made from its succulent flesh.
Fish have managed to adapt to the sea’s ecological peculiarities and flourish in the upper strata. The barren depths, however, may hold their own treasures. In the early 1970s, the pioneering oceanographer Willard Bascom suggested that deep water, particularly the anoxic zone, might provide the perfect environment for marine archaeological research. With no oxygen, the water would be free of the wood-boring mollusks and other creatures that could destroy the hulls and frames of ancient ships.24 Bascom was later proven right.
In the late 1990s, the explorer Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic, led a team of researchers in a path-breaking study of the anoxic layer off the Turkish coast, around the ancient seaport of Sinope. With the aid of a small underwater robot, the team explored the depths, for the first time accomplishing what a lack of technology and the tensions of the cold war had previously hindered. One of the first finds was a Byzantine-era ship, dating to the fifth century AD, with some of the halyard still intact and the mast’s knotted wood looking as if it had been shaped only days earlier.25 Further research turned up a much older shipwreck, perhaps from the fourth century BC, off the coast of Bulgaria, which carried a cargo of amphoras and dried freshwater fish. As Ballard enthused, “the fuller picture is wonderfully bizarre: The possibility that every ship that sailed and perished on the Black Sea, from humankind’s earliest wanderings to our own time—perhaps 50,000 separate wrecks—lies preserved” on the seabed.26 These discoveries also had a tragic twist, however. Willard Bascom died only a few days before Ballard’s team announced the first confirmation of his theories about the sea’s depths.
There is little clear evidence to help us understand the cultures and customs of the earliest peoples of the Black Sea littoral or the precise ways in which they might have interacted. Inhabitants of the new, higher coas
tline raised permanent settlements, farmed, and worked precious metals; the world’s oldest gold artifacts, from around 4500 BC, have been found along the Bulgarian coast. They probably knew of the existence of other peoples beyond the water and may have followed the coastline to meet, trade, marry, and fight. Ceramic and metal artifacts recovered from various sites reveal a consonance of design that suggests interaction and exchange.27 Jade axes and spearpoints from the northwest, dating to the early second millennium BC, bear a striking resemblance to those found at Troy.28
Yet much of what we know of the groups that populated the littoral and perhaps even sailed across the sea comes from the Mediterranean culture whose representatives pushed through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus and began to establish permanent trading outposts in the region toward the middle of the first millennium BC. It was the ancient Greeks who ushered the sea into history and provided the first vision of it as a distinct place.
NOTES
1. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), p. 4.
2. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972).
3. For a general argument about the relevance of waterways, see Martin W. Lewis and Kãren E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). On various seas, see: Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979, 1983, 1988); Walter A. McDougal, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC–AD 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4. Larry Wolff argues persuasively that the template of “Eastern Europe” as an underdeveloped and uncivilized borderland originated in the Enlightenment. But while Wolff is certainly right that Enlightenment thinkers came to think of Europe’s eastern reaches in a particular way, it is doubtful that they conceived of “Eastern Europe” in the coherent political sense that the label acquired during the cold war. See Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
5. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Other Balkan Wars (Washington: Carnegie Endowment, 1993), p. 11.
6. Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: American Geographical Society, 1951), chapter 8.
7. Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 33.
8. Stanley Washburn, The Cable Game: The Adventures of an American Press-Boat in Turkish Waters During the Russian Revolution (Boston: Sherman, French, and Co., 1912), pp. 73–4.
9. W. S. Allen, “The Name of the Black Sea in Greek,” Classical Quarterly, Vol. 41, Nos. 3–4 (July–October 1947):86–8.
10. Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, 5.47.
11. Strabo, Geography, 1.3.6, 7.3.18.
12. Flavius Arrianus, Arrian’s Voyage Round the Euxine Sea (Oxford: J. Cooke, 1805), p. 7.
13. Procopius, History of the Wars, 8.6.25–28.
14. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant, trans. John Ozell, Vol. 2 (London: D. Browne, A. Bell, J. Darby et al., 1718), pp. 95–6. Besides Tournefort, the other important early geological study of the Black Sea is Peter Simon Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Years 1793 and 1794, 2 vols. (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees et al., 1802–3).
15. The paper that launched the debate over the sudden flooding of the Neoeuxine lake is W. B. F. Ryan et al., “An Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf,” Marine Geology, No. 138 (1997):119–26. For a counter-argument, see Naci Görür et al. “Is the Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf at 7150 yr BP a Myth?” Marine Geology, No. 176 (2001):65–73.
16. William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), pp. 234–5.
17. Robert D. Ballard, D. F. Coleman, and G. D. Rosenberg, “Further Evidence of Abrupt Holocene Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf,” Marine Geology, Vol. 170, Nos. 3–4 (November 2000):253–61.
18. Strabo, Geography, 7.4.3.
19. Strabo, Geography, 2.5.22; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, 21.8.10.
20. George Matthew Jones, Travels in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Turkey; Also on the Coasts of the Sea of Azov and of the Black Sea, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1827), pp. 393–4.
21. Jamie Morton, The Role of the Physical Environment in Ancient Greek Seafaring (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 164, note 28.
22. Strabo, Geography, 2.5.22.
23. Black Sea Pilot, 2nd edn. (London: Hydrographic Office, Admiralty, 1871), p. 3.
24. Willard Bascom, “Deep-Water Archaeology,” Science, Vol. 174 (October 15, 1971): 261–9. Bascom developed a ship, the Alcoa Seaprobe, with the capacity to lift wrecks from the seabed. It was his design that the CIA used to build the ship that clandestinely raised a sunken Soviet submarine in 1975. Bascom sued, unsuccessfully, for patent violation. Willard Bascom, The Crest of the Wave: Adventures in Oceanography (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 266–9.
25. Robert D. Ballard et al., “Deepwater Archaeology of the Black Sea: The 2000 Season at Sinop, Turkey,” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 105, No. 4 (October 2001):607–23.
26. Robert D. Ballard, “Deep Black Sea,” National Geographic (May 2001):68.
27. See Fredrik Hiebert et al., “From Mountaintop to Ocean Bottom: A Holistic Approach to Archaeological Survey along the Turkish Black Sea Coast,” in J. Tancredi (ed.) Ocean Pulse (New York: Plenum, 1997), pp. 93–108; and Ballard et al., “Deepwater Archeology,” p. 608.
28. Fredrik T. Hiebert, “Black Sea Coastal Cultures: Trade and Interaction,” Expedition, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2001): 12.
Round the Black Sea … are to be found, if we except Scythia, the most unlearned nations in the world.
Herodotus, fifth century BC
The sea! The sea!
Xenophon’s troops on reaching the Black Sea coast, fourth century BC
How do you think
I feel, lying here in this godforsaken region …?
I can’t stand the climate, I haven’t got used to the water,
even the landscape somehow gets on my nerves.
There’s no adequate housing here, no diet suited
to an invalid, no physician’s healing skills,
no friend to console me, or with a flow of conversation
charm the slow hours away: weary, stretched out
amid frontier tribes, in the back of beyond, I’m haunted
in my illness by all that’s not here.
Ovid, first century AD
2
Pontus Euxinus, 700 BC–AD 500
Our image of the Black Sea in antiquity is inevitably influenced by a limited set of literary sources, all with inescapable problems: the work of outside observers such as Herodotus, the historian of the fifth century BC, who may or may not have ever visited the region; self-serving memoirists such as Xenophon, who marched along the southern coast in the fourth century BC; geographers such as Strabo, from three centuries later, a more reliable guide since he was born not far from the coast (in modern Amasya, Turkey); and a bevy of political exiles and second-hand reporters, the former with a vested interest in playing up the insalubrious climate and hostile natives, the latter never beyond spicing up, or making up, a good story.
From a distance
, Greek writers generally held a dim view of the peoples of the Black Sea, both the barbarians of the hinterland and the transplanted Greeks who founded the cities and settlements that eventually grew up along the coastline. Xenophon noted that the only truly “Greek” city he encountered all along the southern coast—from Trapezus to the Bosphorus—was Byzantium; the rest had been so influenced by contact with non-Greeks in the interior that they seemed barely recognizable.1 What mattered most to many ancient writers was the contrast between the worlds they knew and the strange customs and beliefs of the peoples they encountered or heard about around the sea. Yet, as the work of generations of archaeologists and other scholars has shown, the Black Sea was not so much a place where the “civilized” and “barbarian” worlds met, but rather one where outsiders—Greeks and, later, Romans—became yet another part of the melange of lifestyles and customs that had long swirled around the shores. From the earliest Greek expeditions through the coming of Roman imperial legions, the blurring of lines between languages, peoples, and cultures was the hallmark of life along the water.
The Edge of the World
Greeks entered the Black Sea in the first half of the first millennium BC, maybe even earlier. At first perhaps searching for metals on the southern coast, they eventually extended their reach up the northern rivers into the Eurasian steppe zone. The attractions were clear. Wide rivers made navigation easy, and the abundance of fish and timber for shipbuilding were promising prospects for commerce. Burgeoning populations around the Aegean and the resulting pressure on food resources may also have propelled them to launch expeditions to the north.2