the mediterranean and asia 443
resources. Social complexity, in other words, was the product of a regional dynamic
that expanded in a protracted fashion, but which meant that the networked societies
that emerged also came to manifest many structural and cultural similarities. During
the course of the third millennium bce, societal paradigms that were first developed
among the intensely engaged cities of Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) influenced
imitation in northern Mesopotamia and Egypt. Throughout the Bronze Age the
Mediterranean was peripheral to these great centers, although comparable social com-
plexity did emerge, most notably in Minoan Crete.
Evidence of such geographically-extensive uniformity was particularly marked in
the late Bronze Age (1500–1200 bce), when sophisticated societies across West Asia
and the eastern Mediterranean shared very similar state structures, architectural styles,
tributary and resource distribution systems and cultural tastes. The similarities were
not coincidental. Rather, these societies operated within a system (van de Mieroop,
2009) that resulted from what Colin Renfrew has described as “peer-polity interac-
tion,” whereby common traits were generated through ongoing and direct commu-
nication and cultural transmission (Renfrew, 1986). Each of these palace-centered
states also had their own sub-systems, or their own peripheries whose economic for-
tunes and local social structures were shaped by exchanges with their centers. David
Christian has usefully likened such centers to gravitational fields, whereby the core
tilts, twists and alters the behavior and motion of everything within the field, while
the field itself grows to capture more energy: “Exchanges of information, of goods,
and of people were most dynamic where there were large communities,” which “acted
like centers of gravity” that “sucked in people, ideas and produce from huge hinter-
lands,” and that “exerted a powerful gravitational pull over less densely settled regions
that lay in between them” (Christian, 2004: 291)
The “Mediterranean world” was created during the early Bronze Age (3300–2000
bce) through the gradual extension of a West Asian–Egyptian “gravitational field: ”
specifically along the stretch of coastline between present-day Lebanon and the Nile
delta (see also Broodbank, this volume). The Egyptian state became dependent on
the Lebanon–Syria region for wood and resin, and hence it took a special interest in
monitoring the trade. Sea transport between the delta and Byblos, the principal
Levantine port, began as early as 3500–3350 bce, had vastly increased the volume and
decreased the costs of trade. The sea-lane spawned new settlement patterns along the
coast and created dependencies between these coastal settlements and agricultural
settlements further inland. Despite the absence of natural harbors, anchorage points
beyond the beach gave locals access to materials being trafficked along the route. If
settlements before 2900 bce were concentrated inland, by the early third millennium
bce many settlements were now located on the coastline, at such sites such as Ashkelon
and Tel Megadim (Gophna, 2002: 420). This early development initiated a pattern
that was to be replicated throughout the Mediterranean basin: small coastal settle-
ments that were linked to hinterlands, and which were connected by sea to other
coastal settlements, and which in turn were tied to one or more “gravitational centers.”
Asia played a pivotal role in the proliferation of urban settlements in the eastern
Mediterranean during the middle Bronze Age (2200–1500 bce) and late Bronze Age
(1500–1200 bce) periods. Regions closest to the Levant, such as the Aegean, were
inevitably drawn earliest into the system. The Aegean became a minor gravitational
center, with trade networks extending into the Balkans, Sicily, and the Italian main-