60 nicholas purcell
accused of reasserting a misleading prominence of Greek and Roman civilization
which has constantly been burdened with political and ideological meanings. In a
Companion to Mediterranean History, therefore, a discussion of the period from
c. 1000 bce to 500 ce must tackle the problem of how the histories of this age have
configured general assumptions about Mediterranean history.
Such formative or prescriptive effects on the understanding of the Mediterranean
actually belong themselves largely in the—sometimes distant—history of ideas.
“Ancient history” has, since the nineteenth century, already been quarantined suffi-
ciently, in the Mediterranean as elsewhere. In the Anglophone tradition, moreover, it
has traditionally been distinguished sharply from prehistory. Such a stadial approach,
still highly influential, has severely inhibited the drawing of potentially extremely
fertile comparisons across the boundary between late Bronze-Age prehistory and the
age of documentation in alphabetic scripts, and between the patterns of economic and
social life in the region during the complex sequences of prosperity and crisis which
pattern ancient history and their continuation through to the early modern period
and beyond. The residual dangers of a revived Greco-Roman exceptionalism are
outweighed by the promise of such longue-durée analysis, while the abundant new
evidence also helps remedy any lingering partiality for Greek or Roman history.
The quantity of new archaeological and documentary information about the
ancient Mediterranean is remarkable, and to it is already being added the first results
of genetic work which will further transform our knowledge of the movements of
people and their plants and animals. Archaeology has also displayed in considerable
detail cultural formations which fit with societies distinguished by Greek or Roman
writers—Etruscans, Phoenicians, Thracians—as well as ones which scarcely feature in
mainstream ancient ethnology, such as the peoples of prehistoric Sardinia or Spain. At
the same time, the older disciplinary boundaries which split off Egypt and ancient
Israel have become much more permeable. The eastern coastlands of the Mediterranean
basin emerge as a focus of research which includes both west Asia and the
Mediterranean, and to which the relation between the two, characterized by diver-
gent macro-ecologies though they are, but closely intertwined, is central. Common
denominators linking the cultures of these interacting worlds are in demand, and
some of them are necessarily Mediterranean.
New evidence exemplifies the transformation of once-familiar worlds. An Aramaic
wisdom text from late fifth-century bce Egypt is written over a year’s accounts of a
Nile-delta customs station, revealing exchanges of earlier in that century in which east
Greek and Phoenician captains bring very varied cargoes into Egypt in their search for
mineral soda (most probably as an astringent in textile production). No other com-
plete annual tally of shipping in a single port is preserved before late-medieval Genoa.
The complexity of east Mediterranean circuits suddenly revealed provokes reconsid-
eration of long-held conventional views of the differences between ancient and medi-
eval Mediterranean histories. Lively economic exchange comes to the fore, but its
nature is unexpected.
Historians have therefore begun to aspire to a désenclavement which might over-
come the geographical subdivisions traditional to the discipline. A general reawakening
of interest in Mediterranean questions, in and around (in both temporal and spatial
senses) Greece and Rome, reflects the appeal to scholars of investigating ways of
doing pre-modern global history, and which have notably included the exploration of