444 nicholas doumanis
land. The westward expansion of social complexity was slow, however. Urban centers
certainly did emerge in relative isolation, such as Los Millares in Spain, but as Cyprian
Broodbank explains, the survival chances of such independent “bottom-up” cases of
social complexity were greater if linked to the interaction zones and huge consump-
tion centers in the east (Broodbank, 2009: 698, and this volume). Given time, sug-
gests Ian Morris, the entire Mediterranean might have become urbanized but for an
invasion of “Sea Peoples” in the period 1200–1150 bce that precipitated the collapse
of states throughout the eastern Mediterranean (Morris, 2003: 44). The “Bronze Age
collapse” was so severe that it saw to a decline in social complexity in the Aegean,
where bureaucratic states and literacy temporarily disappeared.
States, cities and literacy reappeared in the Aegean and further west by 800 bce,
although as Morris notes, the period witnessed a genuinely endogenous regeneration
that resulted in a broader Mediterranean world of networked city-states that were
more dynamically expansive than the “old” world (Morris, 2006). Thus a
Mediterranean–Asian divergence emerged based on different levels of social develop-
ment. If the eastern states re-emerged from the Bronze Age collapse with their power
structures intact, further west, where such structures were much weaker, political
sovereignty became an open question (Sherratt and Sherratt, 1993). As shown by the
classic cases of Athens and Rome, power was incessantly contested within and between
social orders, which in turn saw the formation of novel types of polities in which
sovereignty was negotiated but somehow shared.
Indeed many kinds of city-states emerged across the basin as an artifact of
Mediterranean connectivity. Thus, whereas scholars of early Mediterranean urbaniza-
tion once believed that the Phoenicians and Greeks had merely transposed their
versions of the city-state from the metropolis to the colonies, more recent research has
confirmed that the defining features of the Greek “polis” (institutions, physical layout,
ideology) were refined through the interactions of Greek and non-Greek settlements
(Malkin, 2011). Scholars in the field also emphasize the role of cultural exchange and
mutual influence, and the fact that the Greek city-state was to a large extent the prod-
uct of cultural intermingling. Historians of early Greek settlement expansion to places
as dispersed as northern Spain and the Crimea claim that there was substantial
Phoenician and other non-Greek involvement in the making of these Greek polities
(Malkin, 2011; Demand, 2012).
The role of the Phoenicians, as merchants, settlers and purveyors of Asian innova-
tions, is particularly important in understanding the development of Mediterranean
urbanization in the Iron Age (c. 1200–500 bce) (Aubet, 2001). Thus, the Greeks and
Italic peoples had the Phoenician alphabet augmented with vowels, and with it they
did much more than record accounts, write poetry and compose sacred texts. Aside
from inventing works of critical inquiry (history, philosophy, and so on), Mediterranean
peoples used literacy to invent politics. Among the city-states that predominated
between Spain and the Levant, which ascribed sovereignty to the community, consti-
tutions were written down and laws were recorded for public viewing in the form of
epigraphy. The Phoenicians’ alphabet was therefore critical to the western invention
of open and deliberative politics. There is a suggestion even that Phoenicians’
influence was more direct, for it appears that Phoenician cities were administered by
quasi-democratic institutions, and that these traditions fostered democratic systems
being emulated further west (Martin and Snell, 2005: 401).