Indeed, 500 enjoyable pages pass before we reach a Mediterranean that functions across its length and breadth; and the whole point of many early chapters is that the sparse human population did not travel across the sea, even the short space between Iberia and North Africa, but lived around the rim of the sea and only gradually percolated onto its islands. This does raise the question when even very short sea journeys were possible, though if one goes far enough back in time some of the islands such as Sicily were joined to the mainland. Since our very distant ancestors were perfectly capable of constructing simple boats to cross rivers and lakes, a short sea-crossing was easy enough to achieve by, say, 11,000 BC when people crossed the Aegean to reach Melos and to carry away its volcanic glass or obsidian, which was a marvellous material for hard, sharp tools.
Like Braudel's, this very impressive book oscillates between being an account of the lands around the Mediterranean, at some points disconnected from one another even by land, and an account of the human relationship with the sea itself. People who call themselves Mediterranean historians often do not say much about the sea, and there are sections of this book that rather fall into that category. It is really two books closely intertwined, and maybe no worse for that. But there is a longstanding perplexity among historians of the Mediterranean (who are increasingly thick on the ground not just in the Mediterranean but as far away as Australia, the US and Finland): where does the space addressed by Mediterranean history begin and end? Broodbank is intent on showing how empires based quite far from the Mediterranean, for instance in Babylonia and Assyria, influenced the development of Mediterranean trade and politics; and he has a fair amount to say about Pharaonic Egypt even when it looked away from the Mediterranean, which the ancient Egyptians sometimes referred to as the "Great Green".
At times he talks too much about the people who remain off-stage and needs to say more, particularly towards the end of his book, about the actors who actually moved around the stage. Admittedly, the evidence can be very patchy. He is convinced that the phenomenal expansion of trade out of Phoenicia (roughly modern Lebanon) from 1,000 BC — though some would date the real start later — only became possible because there already existed networks of Iron Age maritime traders in the western Mediterranean, around Sardinia and the coast of Spain and Italy. This is a nice idea, but hard to prove. There are only scraps of evidence, and the presence of eastern Mediterranean objects as far away as Huelva in southern Iberia may only show that they were passed from hand to hand over a long distance and over a long period.
He does not dwell at length on the calamity that brought the walls of Troy crashing down and saw the end of the palace culture of Bronze Age Crete and Greece; and he is clearly not impressed by arguments that the Philistines who became such an irritant to the early Israelites were migrants from Greece and the eastern Mediterranean islands, the war companions of people similar to Agamemnon and Menelaus. Indeed, he is wary of ethnic labels, with some justification: the first evidence that Greeks thought of themselves as collectively different from "barbarians" comes quite late, when the Greek world was under pressure from the Persians and others.
This striking ability to provoke and stimulate, while drawing together vast amounts of material over many millennia, means that The Making of the Middle Sea is a book that will be relished by general readers as well as by academics. Sometimes he tries to pack too much into very long sentences, and his exuberant style can verge on the baroque; but this book is a tremendous achievement, enhanced, as one would expect from Thames & Hudson, by many hundreds of excellently chosen illustrations. It might have been better entitled Before the Making of the Middle Sea, but it is a work of exceptional range, insight and interest.
Like Braudel's, this very impressive book oscillates between being an account of the lands around the Mediterranean, at some points disconnected from one another even by land, and an account of the human relationship with the sea itself. People who call themselves Mediterranean historians often do not say much about the sea, and there are sections of this book that rather fall into that category. It is really two books closely intertwined, and maybe no worse for that. But there is a longstanding perplexity among historians of the Mediterranean (who are increasingly thick on the ground not just in the Mediterranean but as far away as Australia, the US and Finland): where does the space addressed by Mediterranean history begin and end? Broodbank is intent on showing how empires based quite far from the Mediterranean, for instance in Babylonia and Assyria, influenced the development of Mediterranean trade and politics; and he has a fair amount to say about Pharaonic Egypt even when it looked away from the Mediterranean, which the ancient Egyptians sometimes referred to as the "Great Green".
At times he talks too much about the people who remain off-stage and needs to say more, particularly towards the end of his book, about the actors who actually moved around the stage. Admittedly, the evidence can be very patchy. He is convinced that the phenomenal expansion of trade out of Phoenicia (roughly modern Lebanon) from 1,000 BC — though some would date the real start later — only became possible because there already existed networks of Iron Age maritime traders in the western Mediterranean, around Sardinia and the coast of Spain and Italy. This is a nice idea, but hard to prove. There are only scraps of evidence, and the presence of eastern Mediterranean objects as far away as Huelva in southern Iberia may only show that they were passed from hand to hand over a long distance and over a long period.
He does not dwell at length on the calamity that brought the walls of Troy crashing down and saw the end of the palace culture of Bronze Age Crete and Greece; and he is clearly not impressed by arguments that the Philistines who became such an irritant to the early Israelites were migrants from Greece and the eastern Mediterranean islands, the war companions of people similar to Agamemnon and Menelaus. Indeed, he is wary of ethnic labels, with some justification: the first evidence that Greeks thought of themselves as collectively different from "barbarians" comes quite late, when the Greek world was under pressure from the Persians and others.
This striking ability to provoke and stimulate, while drawing together vast amounts of material over many millennia, means that The Making of the Middle Sea is a book that will be relished by general readers as well as by academics. Sometimes he tries to pack too much into very long sentences, and his exuberant style can verge on the baroque; but this book is a tremendous achievement, enhanced, as one would expect from Thames & Hudson, by many hundreds of excellently chosen illustrations. It might have been better entitled Before the Making of the Middle Sea, but it is a work of exceptional range, insight and interest.
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