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This chapter appraises the ways in which the Mediterranean world was configured by
these “Asias,” although the first problem one encounters from an analytical standpoint
is the fact that Asia was essentially a figment of the “occidental” imagination, contrived
in order to create “Europe” and an Occident–Orient binary. To the Greeks, who coined
the term, “Asia” referred to anything east of the Aegean, and it cohered on the mere
fact that it was not Greek. Even so, the Greeks understood that the external political,
economic and cultural influences that mattered most to their own world emanated
mostly from that easterly direction. From a broader Mediterranean and European per-
spective, that point applies to the entire period through to the beginning of the early
modern era. The Greeks, Romans, and the Latin West understood that most of the
wealth lay in the East, as did most of the innovative ideas and technologies. Thus, in that
limited sense, “Asia” is a useful category of analysis, although it is more useful to think
of many “Asias,” each of which impacted on the Mediterranean in different ways.
This chapter will limit discussion to the four most significant such Asias. The first
part deals with West Asia, better known as the Near East or Middle East, and its role
in the promotion of social complexity in the Mediterranean world. Along with Egypt,
West Asia played a critical role in the formation of the Mediterranean as that con-
nected, human unit that Braudel identified in his Mediterranean. The second part
reflects mainly on Persia and the succession of super-states or empires that persisted in
the eastern Mediterranean until the end of World War One. It asks why that particular
region has had a history of durable empires that compares with the Chinese experi-
ence. The third part concerns those segments of vast regions of Asia that produced
the luxury items and commodities that Mediterranean peoples coveted. The flow of
expensive goods via the Silk Roads, the Iranian plateau, western Arabia and the south-
ern sea routes (Persian Gulf and Red Sea) satisfied important desires among social
elites within the Mediterranean, which in turn reinforced the Mediterranean’s
economic and cultural primacy vis-à-vis Europe. The fourth part deals with Asia’s
pastoralists, who were responsible for some of the greatest ruptures in Mediterranean
history. As conquerors and the unwitting purveyors of pestilence, they played an
indelible role in triggering some of the great political, demographic and cultural
transformations in the Mediterranean world.
West Asia and the making of the Mediterranean worldAll narratives on the history of civilizations begin in the late fourth millennium bce
in West Asia, specifically in the Fertile Crescent: Mesopotamia, the Zagros foothills,
the Levant (Syria–Palestine) and Anatolia. Together with Egypt, West Asia served as
the fulcrum of social complexity within the western half of Eurasia. The fact that
cities, states, writing systems, bureaucracies and monumental structures were first
developed here had implications for the eastern Mediterranean, although simple dif-
fusion theories do not adequately account for the slow and protracted manner in
which the region was transformed. Current orthodoxy has it that social complexity
spread as a consequence of the interactions between centers of various levels of social
complexity and differing resources: between cities, villages and various ecological
niches (for example, woodlands, steppe regions, mining regions) (McNeill and
McNeill, 2003: 42). Thus, a city like Ur necessarily fed off a much larger geography
where its merchants and soldiers could routinely procure complementary and surplus