Detail from a Ptolemaic atlas, Ulm, 1486
Book Details
Cyprian Broodbank
THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE SEA
A history of the Mediterranean from the beginning to the emergence of the classical world
672pp. Thames and Hudson. £34.95.
978 0 500 05176 4
The middle sea, from prehistoric times to the ancient world
COLIN RENFREW
Cyprian Broodbank's imposing and engaging work, The Making of the Middle Sea, approaches the prehistory and ancient history of the Mediterranean with high ambition and with a thoroughness never before attempted. Its territorial scope takes in the entire Mediterranean basin – Southern Europe, the Levant, North Africa – with abundant reference to Egypt and the early civilizations of the Near East. Its temporal span is vast, ranging from the period before the first human population, with our Neanderthal predecessors and their successors, through the Ice Age and the coming of the first farmers, discussing the civilizations of the Bronze Age in some detail, and continuing to the development of the archaic age of Greece and the Classical world. To cover so much ground – the early origins of Western civilization – with clarity and authority is a notable achievement.
Such an approach was not possible until the radiocarbon revolution of half a century ago. But no one since has taken on the formidable task of shaping a historical narrative out of the abundant prehistoric data now available for the Mediterranean. Gordon Childe attempted that task in 1925 with his pioneering The Dawn of European Civilisation, but the lack of a secure chronological framework led him to a diffusionist position which exaggerated the role of the early Near Eastern civilizations, and he did not have the data to go back before the first farmers. Nor did he attempt to cover the difficult transition from the Bronze Age (which for most of the area is literally prehistoric, lacking the narratives which only writing make possible) to the first millennium BC, when the literate Greeks and their Levantine contemporaries provided the first readable contemporary accounts. To shape a coherent story out of the abundant yet much dispersed archaeological data, as Broodbank has done, is a major intellectual feat, not attempted before over this time range and area.
In his introductory chapter, "A Barbarian History", Broodbank asserts: "This is an emphatically polyglot history", that is to say one in which the peoples of the Aegean possess "no privileged position of manifest destiny". He rightly pays his respects to Fernand Braudel, whose The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972) was perhaps the first book successfully to explore the Mediterranean's unity and distinctiveness as a field of study, as well as to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, authors of The Corrupting Sea: A study of Mediterranean history (2000), which does not, however, seek to integrate the long millennia of prehistory into the Mediterranean story. Here Broodbank introduces the dating frameworks, climatic data and other applications of archaeological science that underpin his synthesis. The second chapter, "Provocative places", is an interpretive description of the physical land- and seascapes of the Mediterranean, reviewing its geological history and natural resources.
The narrative begins with "The speciating sea", in which the first hominins reach the Mediterranean coast of Africa around 1.8 million years ago. Here Broodbank deals with the Old Stone Age period up to 50,000 years ago and the first peopling of the northern Mediterranean. His discussion of the Neanderthals is particularly readable. Their story continues in a chapter entitled, "A cold coming we had of it", where "we" refers to our own species, Homo sapiens. The arrival of our species 50,000 years ago is discussed, along with our experiences during the cold of the Last Glacial Maximum. Broodbank evokes well the passing of the last Neanderthals: "It is a thought-provoking geographical coincidence, or no coincidence at all, that Iberia was both a focus for the earliest hominins in Mediterranean Europe, and the place from which the last who were not us walked out forever into the night".
Seafaring is naturally one of the key themes of the book. From around 8500 BC came what the author terms "the nuclear explosion of the Levantine Neolithic" and the subsequent neolithization of Mediterranean Europe. Not until the widespread development of metallurgy, the use of the donkey and above all the development of the sail do we see the rise of state societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Boats with sails are documented on the Nile from around 3000 BC, with seagoing sailing ships from around 2500 BC. Broodbank deals first with North Africa, where climate change led to the return of the Sahara. He then considers the first superpowers, Egypt and Mesopotamia, before turning to the Levant, where the evidence from Ebla (in Syria) "blazes across our horizons like a comet". He then surveys the north coasts of the Mediterranean, starting from the west with Iberia and France and reaching the Aegean and Troy, concluding with "Calypso's isles": Malta and Cyprus. This chapter gives a lively and readable account of a crucial period of change, from 3500 to 2200 BC.
"Pomp and circumstance", the longest chapter in the book, covers in 100 pages the period from 2200 to 1300 BC, including the "Palace of Minos" at Knossos, the treasures of Mycenae, and the frescoed interiors of Akrotiri, buried by the Thera volcano. Further east lie the city of Ugarit, the time capsule of the Uluburun shipwreck, and the urban giant of Tell el-Daba'a in the Nile Delta – and that is just the first half of the chapter. Broodbank then doubles back to the west and central Mediterranean in the mid-second millennium BC, a time when sailing ships were commonplace in the east, incipient as visitors in the centre, and effectively unknown in the west. The communities centring on El Argar in southern Spain in the earlier second millennium are fascinating for the detailed picture they provide of a rising elite of powerful families. Sardinia and Italy at this time show contacts with the Aegean which herald closer ties between the Mediterranean and temperate Europe.
Between 1300 and 800 BC there was certainly a time of transition, with political collapse in Egypt, the Hittite Empire, and the Mycenaean world – a "horizon of turbulence", as Broodbank puts it. "From our perspective the real victor to emerge from the changes on either side of 1200 BC was the Mediterranean, or more accurately, the hugely dynamic, volatile and potentially destabilising, power- diffusing cultural and economic practices that people living around and in it were able to promote." It is now that the "centre becomes central", and Sardinia and the nascent states of Etruria in central Italy are accorded a leading place. In the west, Tartessos near Huelva in southern Spain was now in direct touch with the Phoenician traders of the east, and Carthage comes into prominence. In this chapter Broodbank relegates the Nile Delta and Greece to "the rest of the Mediterranean". But their day will come again.
Broodbank's narrative concludes with "The end of the beginning", a "Greek Renaissance" in the Aegean, and a Neo-Assyrian dominance in Mesopotamia and the Levant. He starts his survey with the emerging trading centre of Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, where "almost every theme worth exploring in the eighth and seventh centuries BC can be introduced". Shipping and trade expanded, purple dye industries and wine and oil production developed, and traded elite goods came from the Levant, Cyprus, Egypt and Anatolia, as so abundantly seen in the cemeteries of Etruria. With the goods (and the accompanying myths) came alphabetic writing. Broodbank stresses that this was a time of the rise of sanctuaries and of ethnicity. It saw also the burgeoning of towns and of civic life: "the urban explosion around the Mediterranean's perimeter and right through its heart". The last great intakes brought some areas, including southern France, until then backwaters, into the mainstream of Mediterranean life and trade. By the "end of the beginning" there were three major powers in the central Mediterranean: Syracuse, Carthage and Rome. Athens was to dominate in the Aegean. Yet, as Broodbank remarks, "what went wrong in 500–499 BC in the east Aegean . . . is veiled in obscurity". Just fourteen years later the Persian Empire met its nemesis in the naval battle at Salamis.
The final chapter, "De Profundis", summarizes and draws together the principal strands that contributed to the emergence of the Middle Sea. The expansion in the zones of active seafaring across the Mediterranean from 6000 BC to 1300 BC was accompanied by the perennial factors of diversity, connectivity and uncertainty. The author poses four questions for the later Mediterranean, and reflects briefly on the later dominance of Greek cultural traits which came to be adopted as a common vocabulary across the Mediterranean basin.
So scanty an outline summary of the book as this can certainly not do justice to the quality of the discussion that accompanies Broodbank's narrative, nor to the richness of the details he adduces, abundantly illustrated in the drawings and plates. Central to his achievement is his close study of the development of seafaring; a main theme underlying the book is the increasing length and reliability of sea voyages and the consequent transformation of the Middle Sea from a diverse bundle of terrestrial enclaves separated by unnavigable waters into a single unit linked by efficient and low-cost maritime trade.
This allows him to avoid the "migrations of peoples" as a key explanatory device, much favoured by an earlier generation of writers. Here, though, the ongoing advances of molecular genetics may yet hold a few surprises. Broodbank, perhaps wisely, makes little reference to current DNA studies, since the systematic analysis of ancient DNA is only now beginning to supplement the rather simple picture derived over the past twenty years from the study of the mitochondrial DNA (and increasingly the Y-chromosome DNA) of living populations. It is too early, perhaps, to draw firm conclusions, but ancient DNA will soon be making a significant contribution to the understanding of Mediterranean population history.
It is a strength of his narrative that he situates the rise of "ethnicity" in the first millennium BC. That can only be a matter of speculation, but earlier authors, including Childe, all too often ascribed significant changes in material and spiritual culture to the inherent qualities of different "peoples". Students of ethnicity are now aware that the self-recognition of a social group or "people" is a complex issue, and that, as Broodbank rightly states, it is not a matter automatically to be assumed. In particular it is a poor explanation for cultural change.
Perhaps it is a little unfair to criticize the author of a book on the Mediterranean region for laying emphasis on precisely that area. Yet the striking originality and high antiquity of the great "megalithic" monuments of northern Europe is passed over rather lightly, even when their southernmost developments do feature here, as in the splendid Cueva del Romeral at Antequera in southern Spain. The precocity of the Balkan Copper Age, whence metallurgy first reached the Aegean, and the riches of the cemetery at Varna in Bulgaria, are largely overlooked.
The tradition in Mediterranean studies, since the time of Oscar Montelius, has been to maintain the thesis of ex oriente lux – light from the east – which Childe later sought, not entirely successfully, to modify. Broodbank has worked manfully to right the balance. His approach, refreshingly, is both "barbarian" and "polyglot", in that he does not unduly privilege the Greeks. But perhaps he is still a little bedazzled by that Oriental light. The extraordinary "temples" of Malta are, for instance, discussed in the same chapter as the metallurgy of the early Bronze Age of Italy and the Aegean, but their origins lie deeper in a truly neolithic tradition, which could further illuminate their alterity.
In such a compendious work there will always be much to debate, and there are times when one might wish to hear more: for example, the origins of the Indo-European languages, already dominant on the northern shores of the Mediterranean in the Classical period, are dealt with rather briefly. Yet overall there is much to wonder at here. The theoretical disputes that loom so large in much current archaeological writing are almost absent. Marxist theory is not debated; there is not much allusion to world systems; the term "post-processual" is, I think, entirely avoided. Concerns with phenomenology or ontology are not explicitly expressed. Cyprian Broodbank wears his scholarship lightly, and the book is all the more readable for that.
This is one of the rare books – I can think of no other – in which the treatment of prehistoric times (lacking any access to ancient written sources) moves seamlessly into the historic period of the ancient world. It is to be applauded as a major work which sets new standards in scholarship, coherence and readability.
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