The Mediterranean in the Ancient World by Fernand Braudel

Author:Fernand Braudel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780141937229
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1972-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The ‘Balkanization’ of the Middle East

The map of the Middle East had become extremely complicated. The simultaneous decline of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the collapse of the Hittite Empire had brought into being a multitude of small warring states, which occupied the forefront of history with their minor but noisy squabbles.

In Asia Minor, Urardhu, centred in Armenia, received part of the legacy of the Hurrians, the talented artisans mentioned earlier. This was a mountain state, energetic and aggressive. It made good use of its metal-working (as revealed by Russian excavations at Karmir Blur). The area under its domination had its centre of gravity near Lake Van and ran broadly from the high valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates to the Caucasus. Phrygia had taken root, at about the time of the Dorian invasion, on the plateaux of Anatolia where the Hittite Empire had first built then lost its dominion (the Phrygian capital Gordium has been brought to life before our eyes by the American excavations begun in 1950). Westwards, Lydia occupied the parallel valleys of the Hermos and the Meander and was expanding towards the Aegean, where in about 1000 a string of early Greek cities appeared on the coast: their decisive moment would come later. To the south, some neo-Hittite states still survived. Then out of the desert came the Aramaic states, the chief of them centred on Damascus: we should not underestimate them since they controlled the caravan routes leading to Asia, which were the overland counterparts to the Phoenicians’ active sea crossings. Further south again was a Jewish state, whose brief days of splendour ended in about 930, when it split into two kingdoms, Judah to the south, Israel to the north.

The Jews had had to win their rather poor territories one by one from the Semitic Canaanites, whose traditions, culture and language they appropriated. They underwent the same process as the Hittites and Greeks: they were absorbed by what they took over. A further disadvantage for them was that despite having a seaboard, they had difficulty reaching navigable stretches of the coast since they were hemmed in both by their enemies the Philistines and by the Phoenicians who were their friends or indeed allies. It was Phoenicians from Tyre who had built the temple and royal palace in Jerusalem in the age of Solomon (c. 970-930), and Phoenician boats which had sailed on behalf of the Jewish king to Ophir (in southern Arabia or India?), taking the long route via Esion Gaber on the Gulf of Akaba and down the Red Sea. In the same city of Esion Gaber and also in the reign of Solomon, Phoenician artisans had built large metal-working furnaces for smelting copper and iron, the most advanced in the ancient world, according to W. F. Albright. These were the good times for the Jewish state. Nobody could then have foreseen either the hard times ahead or the fabulous future of the spiritual message of Israel, as it slowly matured through the vicissitudes of history.

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