mediterranean “prehistory” 53
much of peninsular Italy and the Adriatic, there is little sign of change, at least until
close to the end of the second millennium in the latter regions. The impression of
discrete, uncoordinated regional patterns is largely confirmed by the waning of the
widespread connections attested during the previous millennium, although a substan-
tial degree of maritime linkage is attested between indigenous centers in the southern
Tyrrhenian, around the south Italian and Sicilian coasts, and within the Adriatic.
It is in this period that the contrast with the eastern Mediterranean is perhaps at its
most stark. There, the model encountered earlier at Ebla became widespread: an
urban polity with an extensive territory, and controlled by a “palace” that served as an
elite residence, ideological center, literate administrative hub, focus of capital accumu-
lation and hive of specialist production, storage, trade and consumption. Two further
features of such polities that became evident both now and later, were, first, their
tendency to have one foot in the sea and the other in an often montane hinterland
with connecting routes into or beyond the basin’s margins, thereby straddling the key,
highly productive coastal lowlands, and, second, their highly variable scale, which
renders “state” an unevenly comfortable term to apply to them. In the Levant, a con-
tinuous zone of interacting palatial polities was created between the Nile delta and
Mesopotamia. Generically comparable institutions, albeit with considerable cultural
variation in their realized form, emerged across Anatolia and, in conjunction with the
third millennium bottom-up developments within the adjacent Aegean, first on
Minoan Crete and then, following strong economic and cultural interconnections, on
the Mycenaean mainland. Cypriot polities also thrust into the network from about
mid-millennium, in a less overtly palatially organized guise than their neighbors and
deriving much of their wealth from exporting the island’s abundant copper. The over-
all result was a vast burgeoning in the east, the benefits of which were unevenly dis-
tributed in favor of a small urban elite. Populations soared, sometimes to levels
comparable to much later times; fine craftwork in a range of media pushed out new
frontiers in terms of skill and technological prowess; and a sophisticated agricultural
base was exploited to generate personnel-feeding surplus, to cash-crop mainly olives
and vines for export, and, in terms of animal husbandry, to create extensive plough-
based estates and huge herds of sheep that supplied wool to a vibrant textile industry.
Both material remains and a series of extraordinary textual windows from well-
preserved archives confirm, in certain cases building on hazier third-millennium ante-
cedents, the establishment of standard commodities such as ingots, weight systems,
units of precious liquids (plus their visibly branded containers), and value regimes
grounded in metal-based equivalents that entailed, in effect, the emergence of proto-
currencies. While the records from major polities tend to emphasize formal interac-
tions between royal houses, based upon ideas of ostensible equivalence, other texts,
notably from the great trading town of Ugarit in the northern Levant, leave no doubt
that much activity was motivated by a desire for profit within a fluctuating market,
and that personae identifiable as merchants had become vital to production and trade.
By the later second millennium interconnections in the east Mediterranean were
most intensive between the Levant, Cyprus, Egypt, and Anatolia, with a more distant
and episodic link out to the Aegean, and a wider continental penumbra from which
exotic goods flowed in. This situation is neatly exemplified by the cargo of the
Uluburun shipwreck, dated to the late fourteenth century, with its bulk cargo of
Cypriot copper, central Asian tin, Levantine resin, and Egyptian or Levantine glass