56 cyprian broodbank
From here it is a comparatively short step to an ostensibly more familiar, but in fact
long-emerging, world. A slightly wetter phase from the eighth century seems to have
stimulated a further burst of demographic growth in many regions, notably the
Levant, Aegean and Italy, while simultaneously the expansion of ever-larger Near
Eastern empires, from the later Assyrian to Persian, enormously boosted markets, far
beyond the inflow of tribute. These factors, in combination with a pre-existent set of
pan-Mediterranean and regional networks, decisively eased conditions for long-range
mobility as sailing ships spread throughout (and shrank) the basin, and already partly
established modalities of cross-cultural interaction and trade (not least convergences
in media, values, forms and practices such as wine drinking), provided the immediate
nexus of conditions for the long-predictable ultimate take-off.
In the eighth and earlier seventh centuries, developments were most dramatic along
a billowing ribbon of interconnected land and sea between the Levant, Aegean,
Tyrrhenian Italy, Sicily and its surroundings (whose potential centrality only now
became manifest), Sardinia, and southern Iberia. There, coalescing groups of people,
both local and from overseas, created at advantageous points the nuclei of what would
soon become towns (a phenomenon hitherto restricted to the east), a process rather
subtler than simply the imposition of “colonies” on “native” landscapes. Hitherto often
minor elites competed and interacted on a dizzily-booming scale, often most visibly in
the sphere of funerary display, as their access to resources and status goods burgeoned,
creating in effect new Iron-Age oligarchies (aristocracies being too self-serving a term).
Given the absence of effective political control over markets (in the east since the collapse
of the Bronze-Age palaces), a new generation of sanctuaries to often cross- culturally
recognizable deities provided much of the neutral ground for trade between individuals
with different prior histories. In a converse reaction to the rapid exposure of more of the
basin’s people to each other, concepts of identity and otherness began to take on a
firmer and more distinguishing form (hence such terms as “Phoenician,” and the rise of
a more strongly self-conscious group identity in Israel and Greece).
By the later seventh and sixth centuries, this system was thrusting into most of the
remainder of the basin, especially the south of France (where the foundation of
Massalia around 600 had been preceded by Etruscan contacts), North Africa (notably
the intake from the Aegean of Cyrenaica, expansion in the center from Carthage and
elsewhere, and the increasing integration of western Morocco), and slightly later, the
circum-Adriatic. From this perspective, increasingly strong ties to the Black Sea, Red
Sea, “Mediterranean Atlantic,” temperate Europe and arguably Saharan Africa were
seamless dimensions of rapid economic growth and cultural efflorescence on the part
of a pan-Mediterranean world, one bizarrely known as the “Archaic” but, as we
have seen, far more of a culmination than a new beginning.
The making of a middle seaEven as a geographical expression the Mediterranean is far from eternal, but rather a
slowly-forming fragment of the older Tethys Ocean created by movement of the
earth’s crust. The Mediterranean as an historical theater and cultural ecumene has also
long been in the process of becoming, and surely experienced many periods of growth
and contraction prior to its recognition as an entity in the first millennium bce, and
possibly prematurely announced recent “death.” The Pleistocene basin was, as we have