64 nicholas purcell
their contribution to the infrastructure of exchange, such communities owed to their
connective vocation the development of artisan activities:
Malta has many harbors, various in their advantages, and inhabitants who are blessed as
to their estates. For it has artisans of every kind in its workshops, and above all those who
make linen which is exceptional in its softness and fineness ... The island is a settlement
of Phoenicians, who, reaching in their commerce the Ocean of the Sunset, held it as a
refuge, with its excellent harbors and location in the deep sea. Hence the inhabitants
succeeded in many respects because of the presence of merchants, and rapidly shot up in
the quality of their lives and were advanced in reputation. (Diodorus, Library, 5.12)Many of the most frequently exchanged items in the ancient Mediterranean became
significant precisely because of the needs of local interdependence, rather than because
they had some abstract preordained vocation as raw materials or natural resources.
Pastoralists’ need for salt for their animals tied uplands and coasts together in a rela-
tionship of which the most famous example is the Salt Road of the Tiber valley, on
which early Rome grew up. Crops which could be stored, packaged, and easily moved
had advantages over more perishable or cumbersome ones, and the prominence of
cereal crops, especially barley and wheat, is not inevitable, but patterned by regimes
of labor, storage and distribution.
The availability of the sea as a medium privileged goods which could be handled
readily in small ships, which meant, in many cases, packaging in robust pottery jars,
with a similar privileging of what could be distributed in the convenient and ubiquitous
storage amphora. Ceramics of other kinds were readily moved by sea too, so that the
ancient Mediterranean was—and certainly appears to the modern archaeologist as—a
sea of pottery. Moreover, the enormous production and widespread circulation of cer-
tain broad types of pottery, both containers and tableware, have served to map con-
nectivity, and to distinguish its periods. Painted ceramics from the Aegean patterned
the archaic and classical periods. In the second century bce economic and political
change are reflected in a new scale in Roman amphora production, and by the moment
at which the tablewares called red slip began, a type of ceramic which would be mass-
produced in many different locations well into late antiquity. The seafarer has access to
the resource bases of the coastlands, which can be liberated from their local context
and made available across the frictionless continuum of redistribution in classic fashion.
The sea becomes the medium by which remote producers and consumers are brought
into surprisingly effortless contact. The mobilization of metal resources, making
available in the eastern basin the mineral wealth of Andalucía, of Sardinia, or of
Etruria, was a fundamental structure of ancient Mediterranean communications.
It was, further, accessibility by sea to the gathered surpluses of a wide range of dif-
ferent producing localities which enabled such communities to grow much larger
than entirely landlocked ones. Mediterranean history is characterized by such “misfit
cities” which grew, as no merely terrestrial city could, far beyond the resources of the
immediate vicinity. If the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean were in some senses
intrinsically urban, then a major cause and enabler of that degree of urban nucleation
must be sought in the dynamics of Mediterranean survival and in the possibility of
relatively cheap and easy mass distribution of staple foodstuffs. If, as is now generally
thought, pre-modern urbanization had to contend with an unremitting epidemic
pressure of high mortality, that could only be countered by a constant throughput of