52 cyprian broodbank
Mesopotamia. Much of this traffic was seaborne, and handled by new Levantine
coastal entrepôts, several ancestral to later Phoenician centers along the same coast.
Among these, Byblos gained an early prominence as a destination, and gave its name
in Egypt to one further vital innovation: the first seagoing sailing ships, adapted from
riverine prototypes on the Nile, and by the mid-third millennium bringing a new
speed and bulk capacity to maritime transport that endured, using this generic means
of propulsion, until the threshold of the present.
While such “Byblos ships” initially plied a limited route along the Levant, with
forays out to Cyprus and perhaps rarely further west towards the Aegean, spectacular
maritime journeys of unprecedented duration were simultaneously being undertaken
elsewhere in the Mediterranean, still in bigger variants of an ancient canoe technology
powered by human muscle. This fourth and final new development is distinguishable
from the adept medium-range activity of the Neolithic by a new ideological inflection,
apparent in the earliest regular depictions of boats (most in ritually charged contexts),
and regular visitations to ultra-remote islands such as mid-Adriatic Palagruža, as well
as by pioneering long-range crossings, including a tardy landfall in the Balearics and
direct links between Sicily and Sardinia. Another index was the far-flung circulation of
small prestige goods, notably among the ‘beaker’ network delineated by distinctive
drinking vessels and other paraphernalia found in Atlantic and Mediterranean Iberia,
the Maghreb, southern France, and parts of Italy, Sardinia and Sicily. Comparable
networks formed in the Aegean and then the Adriatic and Ionian seas. Intriguingly,
this new maritime reach coincided with the demise, by the later third millennium, of
two consciously sequestered island societies, one on Malta associated with famous
megalithic “temples,” the other on Cyprus an archaic outcome of extended diver-
gence from the nearby mainland since initial colonization. By 2000 both islands
looked much more like their neighbors—a telling inkling of the future power of
maritime connections not simply to people regions but to encourage them to converge
culturally.
Big worlds, small worldsThe Mediterranean of the second and very early first millennia (the Middle and Late
Bronze Ages, shifting to the Iron Age in the east and center between 1200 and 1000
bce) tends to be regarded by enterprising later historians as a distant ancestor of their
own Mediterranean, a place to be mined for precursors of later activity. Yet from a less
teleological perspective the second and early first millennia are more instructively
understood as the period during which the consequences of dynamics established
earlier, during the “long” third millennium, became worked through, sometimes on
a dramatically increasing scale. The scalar difference is least evident in the west and
center, where non-state societies continued to flourish, often at village level, with
several instances of boom and bust, and marked cultural differences between them
that underscore the continued role of substantial sea-gaps between the major regions.
Two of the most impressive are the Argaric societies of southern Iberia, which arose
after the collapse of their Copper Age predecessors, and display stark evidence of
unequal social relations and clear foci of local power, and the idiosyncratic Nuragic
communities of Sardinia, whose tall round towers became the standard domestic
units, scattered across the landscape. In other areas, including southern France and