SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 95
Alexandria on the way to Arabia and India, Byzantium/Constantinople at
the entrance to the Black Sea, Venice as gateway to Central Europe, or Mar-
seille as point of access to Western Europe. It was not out of lack of some-
thing else to do that Kemal Atatürk spent his last illness forcing France to
cede the sancak of Hatay (İskenderun, Antakya) to Turkey (1939).^11 But be-
yond these mundane considerations, Seleuceia had been founded after a di-
vine sign given when Seleucus Nicator (d. 281 BCE) sacrificed to Zeus Ka-
sios on Jabal Aqra—Mount Cassius as the Greeks and Romans called it—on
the coast just south of the city. Later rulers who climbed this holy mountain
and honored its patron included three Roman emperors—Trajan, Hadrian,
and Julian.^12 Already in Hittite texts Cassius is closely associated with both
divine supremacy and human kingship.^13
In the present context, though, it is sufficient to retain one point, namely
that according to the written record the Mediterranean was first discovered
from the East. It provided, from the perspective of successive Oriental mon-
archies, no more than a watery and variously suggestive, but alien, western
horizon for the world of the Fertile Crescent, at whose heart lay vast plains
and deserts ringed about by mountains. The Mediterranean paradigm’s hold
over the European mind is still so strong that it is essential to relativize it in
this way, before we tackle it directly.^14 Malik- Shāh reminds us that the Orien-
tal perspective is that of the Islamic world too.
As it happens, reconceiving the Mediterranean as not merely a westerly
horizon, but a whole world in its own right, was likewise the achievement of
men from the Fertile Crescent, at least its western coastlands. It was one
thing to survey the sea from a mountain eminence, to bathe in it or even sail
along the shore; another to cross it and take its full measure. The Mediterra-
nean first came into focus as an autonomous space in its full East- West ex-
tent^15 thanks to the voyages of Phoenician merchants and their establish-
ment, from the ninth century BCE onward, of trading posts in Cyprus,
Crete, North Africa, Italy, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia and Spain (already in the
ninth century). They even ventured out into the Atlantic. And as we have
seen, about the beginning of the first millennium BCE we find the name
“Great Sea” applied to the Mediterranean—whether all of it is not clear—in
11 A. Mango, Atatürk (London 1999) 506–9.
12 R. Lane Fox, Travelling heroes (London 2008) 256–64.
13 Lane Fox, Travelling heroes [4:12] 273–75, 281. Emphasizing the ritual aspect of the texts dis-
cussed in the previous pages, see R. Rollinger, “From Sargon of Agade and the Assyrian kings to Khusrau
I and beyond,” in G. B. Lanfranchi and others (eds), Leggo! (Wiesbaden 2012) 725–43.
14 For other criticisms of “Mediterraneanism,” see S. Stroumsa, Maimonides in his world: Portrait
of a Mediterranean thinker (Princeton 2009) 3–5; S. Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean society?
(Princeton 2010) 21–25.
15 D. Abulafia, The Great Sea (London 2011) 63–99; cf. M. Koch, “Von Tarschisch bis nach In-
dien,” Palaeohispanica 10 (2010) 567–78.