the ancient mediterranean 61
maritime horizons. The purpose of today’s Mediterranean history is not to police old
regional boundaries, but to explore how the Mediterranean might be situated among
other “worlds.” In this unbounded investigation, where older scholarship saw uncross-
able limits, the zones of ambiguity, where different milieux abutted, acquire a new
prominence, and, in the categorization of the large spaces of historical comparison,
new attention is being given to the effect on each zone of the nature of its edges.
“The Mediterranean,” then, should be seen by historians of antiquity as a heuristic
category rather than an immutable set of physical frames for human activities. First
must come the study of the behaviors and interactions which have been characteristic
of the sea and its coastlands, but the enquiry is orientated precisely toward the com-
parison between Mediterranean space and the adjacent continental and oceanic zones.
A larger historiography results, which can embrace the changing constructions of
geography, locality, environment, nature, landscape, interdependence and community
among the societies of the Mediterranean basin itself alongside their neighbors to
north, south and east. Mediterranean exceptionalism becomes a subject in
Mediterranean history, and not its sinister subtext.
One significant pay-off concerns the important cluster of difficult issues concern-
ing the spatial cohesion of ancient cultures. If they are coherent, how far is the
Mediterranean the agent? How do discontinuities and imperfections in Mediterranean
space affect those cohesions? Where edges and transitions around the Kulturraum of
antiquity map onto Mediterranean frontiers, is there an explanatory connection? And
where they do not, what are the implications? The place of the sea in ancient reflection
on cultural identity and change suggests lines of fertile enquiry. There is also new
interest in ancient economic history, and especially in “endogenous” explanations of
success, real growth, even “efflorescence”—and especially in its social and political
institutions. The effects of the integration of social and economic spaces, and the
concentration of resources, above all through compulsion and aggression, deserve a
place too. To that enquiry the sea and its connectivities must remain central.
Primary production marks out a different world^2No aspect of human behavior makes a more suitable foundation for historical differ-
entiation than the conditions of the primary production of food and the other essen-
tials of survival, clothing and shelter. Their most distinctive feature in the Mediterranean
is intense micro-local diversity of geology, hydrology, pedology, vegetation, relief, and
aspect, inflected by equally varied relationships to the sea, by way of a typically very
complex coastal façade, and to the continent, through major river catchments and
steep, high, dissected uplands or mountains. The intense variety of physical factors is
echoed in the divergent trajectories of local production, and above all, of the prudent
response to environmental and social risk. That response can be either the intensifica-
tion of productive effort, or its abatement; both processes are fundamental, but in this
essay it is the consequences of intensification which will be to the fore.
The coexistence of the agrarian and the pastoral was fundamental, and in a climate
where the single most important risk is unhelpful distribution of rainfall, the manage-
ment of water played a vital role. Pastoralism and hydrology both had complex manifes-
tations in ancient culture, and in both analogous behaviors were generated, or existing
strategies shared, between the Mediterranean basin and Asia west of the Iranian plateau,