68 nicholas purcell
The analysis which evoked a whole Mediterranean united by the shared exposure to
raiders labeled as Etruscan or Cretan or Cilician might be self-interested and tenden-
tious: but it recognized integration as an essential variable in social experience, and
measured it on the largest of scales.
The accidents of integration^4The main historical contribution of the Mediterranean sea itself is thus to be the
joiner up, the medium which diminished practical distance, a special kind of space
where movement of people and things was faster and took less energy, a unifier abso-
lutely different in kind from the land, and its own historical encounters and interde-
pendences. The abstraction needs to be tempered with maritime actuality. Seaborne
movements, easy in some senses, were vulnerable to the dangers of sudden storm or
human depredation. Choices about movement were, in important ways, free, but
constantly perturbed by the accidents of seafaring; and though it was far less easy to
control than land movements, shipping could be constrained, though imperfectly, by
the loose and more stochastic logic of ancient sea power. Against these uncertainties
were pitted the skill and knowledge of seafarers, themselves an important variable.
All these factors combined with the differentials of economic, social and political con-
ditions in the coastlands to make the integration of the seaways into a single
Mediterranean space always imperfect, always mutable, and a matrix in which there
were “low-energy zones” or backwaters alongside tracts which were for the moment
intensively integrated.
Archipelagoes or island chains could channel connectivity; sometimes truly iso-
lated, islands could be opened up (as were the northern Balearics in the late second
century bce), or wax and wane in their engagement with surrounding worlds, as the
history of Crete shows. That was true also of “islands not surrounded by sea,” such
as—on the largest scale—the Jezirat al-Maghreb. Partnerships formed among chains,
or small groups, or pairs, of connective centers, especially harbors, uniting the anchor-
ages of the Algerian or the Provencal littoral; the super-connected Delos of the late
Hellenistic period formed the island hub of a constellation of such links. The small
change of second-century bce Pompeii was dominated by Ibiza and Marseilles.
History-patterning integration is also to be seen in larger geographical relation-
ships, reborn in many different epochs: the competition and recursive conflict between
the rulers of the lower Nile and the rulers of the Levant, with control over Judaea at
their core, the symbiosis of the delta with Cyprus and the south-Anatolian littoral, the
alternation between integration of the east and west basins of the Mediterranean and
a separation of their fortunes at the pinch points of the narrow seas on either side of
Sicily, the face-off of Rome and Carthage, opposing foci of symmetrical systems,
across what could feel like a narrow sea.
Perhaps most important of all was the changing geography of integration on the
Mediterranean periphery. The edges of Mediterranean space have been the locus of
political power based on controlling access to and from the Mediterranean world,
power which has been expressed through ethnogenesis and state formation, creating
polities of the border zone which sometimes reached into the coastlands, and some-
times formed the object of domination by Mediterranean hegemonies. Around the
emporion of Pistiros on the upper Hebros in the fourth and third centuries bce, both