mediterranean “prehistory” 51
(sensu stricto) these combined conditions had led to a wild growth of small sprouts of
aspiring power. Some remained at the level of the individual, visible in the form of rich
burials with accumulations of markers of social status and connection, but in a few
regions, primarily the notably marginal zones of southern Iberia and the Aegean,
consolidated into strikingly larger, wealthier communities, often jealously fortified.
Such developments tended to concentrate at points that enjoyed unusual opportuni-
ties for preferential direct control of resources, or, just as often, at key locations within
the networks that allowed such resources to be moved around, or accumulated.
Examples include Los Millares in the rugged landscapes of Almeria, sprawling
Valencina de la Concepción, at the then mouth of the Guadalquivir, near modern
Seville, and places such as Lerna, Troy, Knossos, and several archipelagic trading
centers in the Aegean.
To a greater extent than is commonly realized, the picture just sketched could—
and, in comparative Mediterranean terms, should—also apply to the Levant. But
here, our third dynamic also becomes very much evident. For the fourth millennium
witnessed the emergence of the world’s first large, urban, state-level societies on the
rivers of Mesopotamia and along the Nile, and as these societies expanded across the
connecting Syria jazira and into the Nile delta, respectively, the Levant gained a fur-
ther, and entirely new role, as the connecting corridor between two economic and
political superpowers. Whether or not the temporal coincidence between this epochal
development and the aforementioned horizon of widespread social change within the
Mediterranean was due to mere chance, or finds its common denominator in a climate
altering over all these regions alike, remains to be decided; but in spatial terms the
proximity of the Mediterranean to the earliest such civilizations to arise on the planet
was undoubtedly yet another in the sequence of contingencies that have shaped the
basin’s long-term history.
For a long time the least significant impact of these new neighbors on the lives of
most Mediterranean people was their direct political power (even in the first millen-
nium enormous Near Eastern empires struggled to assert their authority over the
maritime realm). More decisive from an early date were their roles as major consum-
ers, within a market-place environment, of Mediterranean materials and goods (whose
production they thereby stimulated), as hothouses of technological innovation, and as
progenitors of cultural values, aesthetics and social practices that aspiring Mediterranean
elites who came into contact with them, directly or indirectly, would seek to emulate
and appropriate. Only the Levant experienced a closer embrace at this juncture, and
even here external influences and local variants of Mediterranean traditions were
intertwined. An outstanding example is Ebla, a late-third-millennium town in north-
west Syria, which boasted a palatial building and an archive of tablets, written in
cuneiform, that capture in staggering detail a society, economy and culture indebted
both to Mesopotamian norms and millennia of native Levantine practice, located at
the center of flows of metals, people and information from all points of the compass.
Even on the marches of an initially interventionist Egyptian state, the smaller towns
and villages of the southern Levant became closely integrated in economic terms with
their gigantic Pharaonic neighbor, as providers of wine and other Mediterranean-
zone luxuries, but remained far from simulacra of it. Meanwhile, long-range trade
routes striated the region, by the later fourth millennium bringing central Asian lapis
lazuli to the Nile, and soon thereafter the famous cedar of Lebanon to both Egypt and