The ancients were never cognizant of the true place of the Mediterranean in the world’s geography, but their knowledge and understanding of it evolved and expanded considerably over the long period extending from the Bronze Age to the end of antiquity. In second millennium Egypt and the Levant, the Mediterranean was referred to simply as the “the Great Sea,” and was still so identified as late as the sixth century by the Greek logographer Hekataios (FGrH 1 F26). Phoenician and Greek exploration and colonization of the western Mediterranean beginning in the tenth century increased awareness of the existence of the Atlantic Ocean and a consequent shift in Greek identification of the sea as “our sea,” “the inner sea,” or the “sea in our part of the world (oikoumene)” (W. Harris 2005). Pliny the Elder took this more nuanced conceptualization one step further and asserted that the Mediterranean was essentially a creation of the ocean having pushed its way through the straits of Gibraltar (HN 3.1.5). Indeed, as the few surviving ancient maps demonstrate, the sea was not entirely distinguishable in ancient thinking from other smaller bodies of water such as rivers and gulfs.
It should hardly be surprising, therefore, that both the Atlantic and Mediterranean competed in geographic importance with the continents in the estimation of Greek and Roman geographers. Strabo in particular makes plain, that it is on the great landmasses where men, governments and resources are to be found (2.5.26), though interestingly, as a Greek geographer writing in the early Roman principate, he accords the Mediterranean shores of Europe terrestrial pre-eminence as the place where “tradition places more deeds of action, political constitutions, arts, and everything else that contributes to practical wisdom” (2.5.18).
Despite its carefully circumscribed place in ancient thought the importance of the Mediterranean lay in its capacity to promote interregional connectivity. This is first evident on a significant scale in the Bronze Age with the emergence of highly centralized states in the eastern Mediterranean - in particular Anatolia, the Levant, Crete, and Egypt (Van de Mieroop 2005; Horden and Purcell 2000: 143, 400; Bresson 2005; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 249-50). The nature of trade and exchange in this period, as illuminated in the archival and archaeological record, does not point inexorably to any sort of essential[ist] economic interdependence in the eastern Mediterranean, but rather to a world in which sufficient surpluses were being generated to promote a healthy seaborne commerce, despite its risks. As one scholar has observed, “there was, perhaps, an inexorable expansionist logic in this Bronze Age social formation [which] given time. . . might have spread around the entire Mediterranean” (Morris 2003: 44).
The destruction of the eastern Mediterranean state system around 1200 bc put an end to this cycle. However, a new and sustained period of state-driven interregional connectivity materialized in the tenth century with the appearance of the highly militaristic and tribute-based Assyrian empire in the Near East and the emergence of dynamic city-states in Phoenicia and the Greek Aegean. Assyrian tribute, as well as a growing elite demand in the Eastern Mediterranean for raw materials, especially metals, fuelled first Phoenician and then Greek commercial expansion into Europe and the western Mediterranean. This was followed in the early eighth century, thanks in part to growing population pressures, by the establishment of both Phoenician and Greek colonies and emporia along the coasts of Italy, Sicily, North Africa, France, and Spain, a very notable extension and intensification of the connections between the eastern and western Mediterranean. The growth of the Greek polis system and the extension of the Persian empire into Anatolia in the archaic and classical period led to an increasingly competitive political and economic environment within the Aegean and Black Seas. Naval military activity and expeditions were commonplace. Trade also intensified though often within the constraints imposed by imperial systems such as the Persian, Athenian, and Spartan empires.
These developments were paralleled in the western Mediterranean by the appearance of institutionally sophisticated and territorially large city-states such as Carthage and Syracuse, as well as indigenous proto-states in Spain, the Maghrib, and along the riverine and land routes to central and western Europe, first exploited by Marseille (Massalia) and the Etruscan city-states, well beyond the Mediterranean. Their emergence was no doubt stimulated in part by their long and deep connections, in some instances as colonial foundations themselves, with older city-states in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as the Greek and Punic communities in south Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.
Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire and the Greco-Macedonian successor states the Levant and Egypt that were established upon his death introduced the large kingdom/empire as a new political form into the eastern Mediterranean. These states promoted the intensification of connections across the region, leading to greater complexity in governmental institutions and enhanced exchanges of technologies and ideas. Within the domain of ideology this included the introduction of an overarching Hellenic cultural veneer, as evidenced in the spread of Greek as the language of urban-elite interaction, as well as hybridized forms of Greek social and political institutions, and material culture.
In sum, the period from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period may be characterized as one of increasing levels of regional interconnectivity across the Mediterranean, driven largely by ancient forms of state imperialism. Cabotage or small-scale coastal trade continued unabated throughout this period, but it was states that proved to be the crucial force in the creation of a Mediterranean increasingly defined by common institutions and social formations. Indeed, any privileging of the role of the Mediterranean in shaping and defining interconnectivity in antiquity must be set against the equally important and no less complex evolution of land-based communications and interaction in the period.
Despite the increasing complexity of the Mediterranean down to the Hellenistic period, the ancient world remained deeply fragmented politically and highly compartmentalized economically. However, it is clear that the potential for the creation of just such a space was emerging much in the way that it occurred in Europe on the eve of the Age of Exploration: i. e. through the emergence of large, populous states, first in the eastern Mediterranean, but ultimately in the west, with the emergence of the powerful Roman republic on the Italian peninsula.
World History
