54 cyprian broodbank
ingots, to which were added an astonishing range of further goods, including fine
Sudanese blackwood, scrap gold work, a wooden writing tablet indicative of mobile
forms of literacy and a few Aegean pots. Somewhat peripheral to this system as the
Aegean’s palatial economies may have been, this region did play a vital role in articu-
lating, by around the middle of the second millennium, the core of maritime interac-
tion further east with still more distant regions, including the Balkans, probably the
Black Sea and, most relevant in the present context, the pre-existent networks of the
central Mediterranean. By the fourteenth century, Aegean pottery and other finds,
perhaps traded for metals circulating in the central Mediterranean, were widespread
in the southern Tyrrhenian, along the bottom of the Italian peninsula and at the
entrance to the Adriatic. Most of this contact was conducted via medium-range coastal
routes, but from the thirteenth century, something altogether new becomes visible:
the first signs of direct, ultra-long-range voyages between an aggressively mercantile
Cyprus and the central Mediterranean, principally metal-rich Sardinia, with stop
offs on the open coast of southern Crete and in southeast Sicily. At much the same
time, finds from the Adriatic reveal that this recently more secluded sub-basin also
began to participate in inter-regional trade, quite probably prosecuted primarily
by native groups based in the north, and close to further rich metal sources in the
south-eastern Alps.
The immediate sequel to this expanding network of producers and consumers,
extending over more than half the basin, places the Mediterranean in the horns of an
historiographical dilemma. For on either side of roughly 1200, after a crescendo of
political ambition that culminated in proto-imperial hegemonies over the Levant on
the parts of Egypt and a massive Hittite polity based in highland Anatolia, the east
Mediterranean palatial system crashed. The traditional explanation is that it fell at its
acme to a confederacy of invaders from its periphery, including central Mediterranean
and outlying Aegean groups, demonized then by royal sources and today known as
the “sea peoples.” The reality of violent disruption is abundantly evident in burnt-out
palaces, and a participatory role for hitherto fringe groups now able to penetrate right
to the heart of the network thanks to their likely adoption, under contact conditions,
of eastern sailing technology, is perfectly plausible. Indeed, it is very striking that
central Mediterranean societies, especially those on Sardinia and at the head of the
Adriatic, became markedly more complex and widely connected in the closing centu-
ries of the second millennium. But a thought-provoking alternative, or indeed
complementary, explanation would instead see this palatial paroxysm in terms of a
deeper and longer-term economic transformation. For as the amount of economic
activity, participants and connections, especially across the ungovernable sea, gathered
pace through the later second millennium, the ability of strongly centralized, dynasti-
cally embedded palace structures to control an ever more powerful and volatile net-
work in the east must have become strained beyond endurance, and ever more at odds
with the overtly mercantile values with which they had once cohabited. From this
perspective, it is extremely suggestive that those parts of the east that were least
invested in palatial institutions, in particular Cyprus and by now parts of the Levant,
enjoyed effectively seamless records of ebullient town-based economic activity straight
across the 1200-bce “crisis” (regardless of short-term destructions), while the clearest
victims were those most committed to centralized, hierarchical economic manage-
ment. The latter included the unsophisticated polities of the Aegean, an area which