mediterranean “prehistory” 57
seen, pre-Mediterranean save for the tectonically-derived characteristic of dense
fragmentation, which often allowed its occupants to ride out the worst of times in
sequestered niches. While overland connections were as old as the basin’s first inhabit-
ants, the formation of the vital maritime connections that would tie the basin together
and create a thalassocentric world was protracted, and broadly stadial in nature. Short
ultra-early crossings of variable plausibility aside, the first substantial threshold in terms
of proficient seafaring was attained near the end of the Pleistocene, and in the opening
millennia of the Holocene this helped to disperse farming across much of the basin.
During the “long” third millennium, more ambitious voyaging extended the effective
range and added an ideological charge, while at the same time, in the east, the inven-
tion of seaworthy sailing ships enabled a sharp increase in the amount of goods that
could be carried, and in the speed of transport. The surprisingly slow uptake of such
craft further west must owe much to the capital investments and technological changes
required, but by the centuries that bracketed the transition to the first millennium
sailing ships had spanned the Mediterranean. Within the next few hundred years the
remaining sea-deserts were conquered, and last shores drawn into the web.
Meanwhile, environmental Mediterraneanization had already gone into full swing
during the “long” third millennium. (Its Saharan corollary knocked North Africa,
aside from Egypt, out of a major role in Mediterranean developments for 3000 years,
and from this time onwards anthropogenic imprints on Mediterranean ecologies also
became more apparent.) With this third element slotting into place, the scene was set
for the emergence of recognizably Mediterranean dynamics, often but not always
initially in microcosm, and particularly well evinced from an early date in the Levant,
Aegean and Iberia, then gradually spreading all over the basin. For all the impact of
the Near East, which from the third to early first millennia tended to encourage more
durable development and integration in the eastern parts of the basin, this expansion
of Mediterranean ways of doing things is best understood in terms of the co-evolution
of interacting regions, rather than as a centrally driven process.
With so many of the widely-acknowledged fundamentals of Mediterranean life
owing their inception to “prehistoric” initiatives, we can ask, finally, which elements
of the later Mediterranean do indeed stand out as genuinely new and unfamiliar from
a deep-time perspective. Among these, and none readily evident during “prehistory,”
might be the emergence of large-scale intra-Mediterranean imperial formations, the
sudden success of Mediterranean powers in exerting dominion far beyond the basin,
the spread of so-called “hellenizing” culture within and beyond it, and, last but not
least, the striking currency of new conceptions of the place of the individual within
society and relative to divine order from the mid-first millennium onwards. In these
respects, at least, the classical Mediterranean represented a new departure, and one of
wider global significance.
Endnotes1 This chapter is a condensed summary of a longer book on the early Mediterranean
(Broodbank, 2013). Rather than attempt to reference so vast a topic adequately in the
present piece, the reader is directed to this latter work for a fuller exploration and supporting
sources.
2 All dates in what follows are bce.