mediterranean “prehistory” 55
soon dropped away from the wider Mediterranean scene for several non-literate
centuries. Over the long-term, however, the greatest loser was the immensely rich and
venerable Nilotic state of Egypt, whose tightly controlled ideology, culture and
economy had already been subverted once before by Mediterranean values (in the
mid-second millennium, at the hands of a cosmopolitan “Hyksos” polity with
Levantine ties, centered on the delta city of Avaris), and which would experience an
Iron Age characterized by cycles of political fission, economic penetration, unprece-
dented invasions and long-term eclipse. The reality of a “corrupting” sea, detrimental
to fixed terrestrial authority and inimical to pretensions of economic autarky, was
coming of age with a vengeance.
The opening centuries of the first millennium built upon this latest set of develop-
ments. Shortly beforehand, Cyprus lost its primacy in long-range trade to the stretch
of central Levantine coast known from now on as Phoenicia—an unfortunate shift in
nomenclature that disguises strong continuities from the previous millennium in the
mercantile and other practices of maritime centers such as Sidon and, above all, the
island city of Tyre. Initially, their trading circuits resembled those of the east-Mediter-
ranean Bronze Age, if with a greater acquisitiveness in terms of territory, including
overseas nodes, that may be attributable to the temporary eclipse of the larger territo-
rial powers that had policed such efforts earlier. But the decisive departure from the
late second millennium is seen in the fact that by the ninth century, and possibly
slightly earlier, Phoenician-type material was showing up in quantity not merely as far
west as Sardinia, but at Huelva on the Gulf of Cadiz, just beyond the gates of the
Mediterranean, and very close to the immensely rich silver and otherwise polymetallic
sources of the Rio Tinto region. Traditionally, this dramatic surpassing of the western
limits of regular Bronze-Age long-range trade has been attributed to Phoenician nav-
igational genius and the need to supply colossal tribute to the resurgent Iron-Age
empire of Assyria. But although the expansion of sail-driven craft clearly played a key
role, the former suggestion seems naïve in view of the long “prehistory” of maritime
exploits (most recently, those open-sea ventures by Cypriot sailors a few centuries
before), while the early dates now affirmed at Huelva decisively precede the major
phase of Assyrian expansion. Instead, the answer may lie in the emergence over the
interim of indigenous connections between center and west, in which flourishing
Nuragic coastal communities on Sardinia played a key role; these certainly led to an
eastward influx of Atlantic as well as west-Mediterranean metalwork, and arguably
facilitated the ultimate link-up right across the basin. In this sense, the Phoenician
phenomenon was as much a consequence as cause of the first truly pan-Mediterranean
networks, and the people involved must surely have been more diverse than has been
generally allowed. Regardless, from the start this spinal route meshed in with other,
older networks, especially in the Aegean and the Tyrrhenian, which now relegated
Adriatic activity to its own sub-basin. The nascence of political formations in Etruria,
an immensely fertile but hitherto backwoods area in Mediterranean terms, owed
much to a combination of its own resources and shifting connections between the
Alpine metals to its north and access to this wider Mediterranean world. New nodes
did not always imply wider continental integration, however; one of the earliest
Phoenician way-stations to be established, at Carthage, superbly situated at the sea’s
wasp waist, at first turned its back on its hinterland, leaving most of coastal Africa
unintegrated for several more centuries.