Prehistory and ancient history, even of the Mediterranean, wasn't Braudel's real field; and this book is decades old and was put away unfinished; but it's still a characteristic pleasure to read. He made a story of the rise and recombination of civilizations, but does not hang it all on single persons, or ascribe intent to a civilization that would only make sense in a person. Instead, he describes the little that is known, leaves clear his chain of reasoning when leaping to a conclusion, and is affectionate towards quite disparate groups, especially as they managed to spend their energies on trade or food or dancing or anything but war. Two current scholars, one of prehistory and one of ancient history, put in tiny emendations - usually just footnotes referring to more recent discoveries, or a phrase indicating that Braudel was right or wrong in a conjecture.
Notes to myself, of things I wondered at:
Chickens in Egypt in 1500BCE? So early? I thought Gallus gallus was SE Asian. Has anyone mapped the dispersal of the common chicken? and if so, who had to count the bones in the middens?
He has a careful, serious explanation of the layout of story graphics in Egyptian and Mesopotamian friezes, like a strip cartoon
. Oddly, he says Movement is therefore sacrificed.
Depends on where you learned the convention, I guess. (p 131)
In the rise of the nomads (always part of a mixed economy with agriculture): Herds of [...] sheep, goats and cattle (though not pigs)
. (p. 139) Pigs later? Wild pigs are terrifying, but so were wild cattle. Pigs may well have been worse. So, when pigs? Compare with chickens.
Hittites: the nice warrior-nomads. At least, after sweeping through Asia Minor and fighting Egypt to a draw, they turned to diplomacy, leaving the signature in 1280 of the oldest peace treaty of which the text has survived
. Also, nice art, not a theocracy, and womens' status seems to have been as liberal as in Crete.
(p 144) It's the (later but loosely similar) Scythians who may have had women warriors, depending on how recent excavations are interpreted, I think.
The Hittites also look better because they come before the hardly-understood collapse of the 12th century BCE, in which the Mycenaean cities were burnt or deserted, writing and technologies were lost, whole peoples moved as—refugees? nomads? invaders? The climate explanation, p. 151, makes one think of ENSO. The only records, apparently, were left by Egypt, who didn't really know where the masses were coming from. Egypt called them the "People from the Sea", and fought off waves of them, or at least diverted their settlement. As for the Philistines, with or without the pharaoh's consent, they settled in the land to which they would give their name—Palestine—which they had to defend against the Hebrews.
(p 154)
And after that, which sounds bad enough, several hundred years of dark age - the Iron Age, which Braudel associates with the common possession and "democratization" of weapons, and also with war becoming endemic and more cruel. He also looks at it as an enormous economic depression. (pp. 155-163, various)
Indo-Europeans burble into or out of central Europe, identifiable because they cremated their dead and left the remains in fields of urns. (p 168) Urn Buriall?
Eventually civilization restarts, especially the Phoenicians trading with, or colonizing, the back-of-barbarian West of the Mediterranean. Braudel skips over many "who was first" quibbles. He probably doesn't have a dog in the fight; in the first place, he's happy when people are making and trading and moving about; and in the second he regards the whole Med as one culture.
Historical humor: Carthage made a mint by trading with the backward people in Spain for silver. Enough silver has circulating to move the gold:silver exchange rate in Egypt from 1 : 2 to 1 : 13!
(p. 188). This is funny because that makes twice that Spain has been a conduit for a significant fraction of the coinage in its world-circuit and apparently come off the worse for it both times.
Creepy but consistent bit of Carthaginian religion: in times of crisis, they sacrificed the aristocrats' young sons. (On altars, not in war.) Late in their history some aristocrats bought and sacrificed other children, to save their own; this was such a sacrilege that it required another two hundred children to be sacrificed to expiate it. (p. 199) (No note as to how they checked, er, provenance the second time. And really, at that point sacrificing the fathers would have seemed more effective.)
Economic viewpoint, related to the Phoenician success making landing in primitive places, and Alexander's unsuccess despite conquering Persia; best strategy is to have both primitive and advanced areas in your circuit. ...the Mediterranean belonged to whoever could embrace it from end to end, linking up the high point and the low point of commerce...
. (p. 224) Over and over, a city lucks into cheap grain from a hinterland it acquired for other reasons, and leaps to a much more productive, division-of-labor material economy. This was good for the people on top of the city on top of the division. Not so clear about everyone else.
Added on the 11th:
The Etruscans seem to have popped up out of nowhere. Hunh.
Wishing that Alexander had conquered to the West instead of the East is ambitious! Fits the pattern of 'embracing the high point and the low point' as done by the Phoenicians, above; east of Greece was more of a par with the Greek citystates. His other comment is that some of Alexander's cities lasted a thousand years and then collapsed in the Muslim conquests, leaving no trace of Greek language, thought, cultural ties (pp. 249-250). Hm. I'd want to know more about how Greek those cities were after his death. Merv, Harat, Kandahar; all are named, in the map of Alexander the Great's empire in 323 BC, (p. 338) as "Alexandria 'of ...'". What institutions had they taken, did they exchange people as well as trading goods?
His history of Rome is extremely brisk, probably because there's so much written about it elsewhere; and the end was written in the expectation of a second volume on Byzantium, which is more a tease than tidy. Wondering about the Greekness of the cities above especially invites curiosity about Byzantium.
ISBN: 0-375-40426-0
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