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PART ONE
Chapter One
Seeing
the Sea
The best witness to the
Mediterranean's age-old past is the sea itself. This
has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be
seen and seen again. Simply looking at the
Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything
about a complicated past created by human agents,
with varying doses of calculation, caprice and
misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently
recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new
life into them, locating them under a sky and in a
landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a
landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment's
concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes
back to life.
An ancient scar on the
terrestrial globe
But if that is true, if the
Mediterranean seems so alive, so eternally young in
our eyes, "always ready and willing," what
point is there in recalling this sea's great age?
What does it matter, the traveller may think, what
can it possibly matter, that the Mediterranean, an
insignificant breach in the earth's crust, narrow
enough to be crossed at contemptuous speed in an
aeroplane (an hour from Marseille to Algiers,
fifteen minutes from Palermo to Tunis, and the rest
to match) is an ancient feature of the geology of
the globe? Should we care that the Inland Sea is
immeasurably older than the oldest of the human
histories it has cradled? Yes, we should: the sea
can be only be fully understood if we view it in the
long perspective of its geological history. To this
it owes its shape, its architecture, the basic
realities of its life, whether we are thinking of
yesterday, today or tomorrow. So let us look at the
record.
In the Paleozoic era, millions and
millions of years ago, removed from us by a
chronological distance that defies the imagination,
a broad band of sea known to geologists as Tethys
ran from the West Indies to the Pacific. Following
the lines of latitude, it bisected what would much
later become the landmass of the Ancient World. The
present-day Mediterranean is the residual mass of
water from Tethys, and it dates back almost to the
earliest days of the planet.
The many violent
foldings of the Tertiary era took place at the
expense of this very ancient Mediterranean, much
larger than the present one. All the mountains, from
the Baetic Cordillera to the Rif, the Atlas, the
Alps and the Apennines, the Balkans, the Taurus and
the Caucasus, were heaved up out of the ancient sea.
They reduced its area, raising from the great sea
bed not only sedimentary rocks-sands, clays,
sandstones, thick layers of limestone-but also
deeply buried primitive rocks. The mountains
surrounding, strangling, barricading and
compartmentalizing the long Mediterranean coastline
are the flesh and bones of the ancestral Tethys.
Everywhere the sea water has left traces of its slow
labour. The sedimentary limestones outside Cairo,
"so fine-grained and of such milky whiteness
that they allow the sculptor's chisel to give the
sensation of volume by working to a depth of only a
few millimetres"; the great slabs of coraline
limestone from which the megalithic temples in Malta
were built; the stone of Segovia which is easier to
work when wet; the limestone of the Latomies (the
huge quarries of Syracuse); the Istrian stones of
Venice and many other rock formations in Greece,
Italy and Sicily-all these came from the sea
bed.
Volcanoes and earthquakes
At the
end of this process, since the series of
Mediterranean trenches was never filled in, the sea
was left as a deep basin, its hollows as if scooped
out by some desperate hand, its depths in places
equal or superior to the heights of the tallest
Mediterranean mountains. Near Cape Matapan runs a
sea-trench 4600 metres deep, easily enough to drown
the tallest peak in Greece: Mount Olympus, 2985
metres high. Whether under the water or on land, the
relief of the whole area is unstable. Networks of
long fault lines are visible everywhere, some
reaching as far as the Red Sea. The narrow passage
of the Pillars of Hercules between the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic Ocean is the result of at least a
twofold fault.
All this suggests a tortured
geology, a process of orogenesis not yet stable even
today. It accounts for the frequent and often
catastrophic earthquakes, for the hot springs which
the Etruscans had already discovered in Tuscany, and
for the broad volcanic zones, with their strings of
volcanoes, extinct, active or potentially active.
Mount Etna was the fabled home of the Cyclops,
blacksmiths and makers of thunderbolts, wielding
their mighty bullhide bellows; here, much later, the
philosopher Empedocles is supposed to have cast
himself into the crater, from which a lone sandal
was recovered. "How often we have seen boiling
Etna spill forth balls of fire and molten
rock!" remarked Virgil. Vesuvius really did
destroy Pompeii and Herculaneum in ad 79. And in the
years before 1943 its plume of smoke could be seen
hanging over Naples. Every night, in the Lipari
archipelago, between Sicily and Italy, Stromboli
still lights up the sea with its incandescent lava
displays. Earthquakes and eruptions have continually
punctuated the past and still threaten the present
in Mediterranean countries. One of the most ancient
of mural paintings (and I mean mural, not cave
painting) in a temple in Anatolia dating from 6200
b.c., represents a volcanic eruption, probably of
the nearby Hasan Dag.
We shall have occasion
to return to the "Plutonian" convulsions
of the earth's crust apropos of Minoan Crete,
notably the cataclysmic explosion of the nearby
island of Thera (known today as Santorini) in about
1470-1450 b.c. Half the island was hurled into the
air, creating a massive tidal wave and an
apocalyptic rain of ash. Today the strange island of
Santorini is a semi-crater, partially submerged
under the sea. According to the archaeologist,
Claude Schaeffer, earthquakes and seismic shocks
also contributed to the swift and unexpected
destruction of all the Hittite cities in Asia Minor
in the early twelfth century b.c. In this instance,
nature rather than human intervention may have been
responsible for a cataclysm that still puzzles
historians.
The ever-present
mountains
Mountains are all around in the
Mediterranean. They come right down to the sea,
taking up more than their share of space, piling up
one behind another, forming the inescapable frame
and backdrop of every landscape. They hinder
transport, turn coast roads into corniches and leave
little room for serene landscapes of cities,
cornfields, vineyards or olive-groves, since
altitude always gets the better of human activity.
The people of the Mediterranean have been confined
not only by the sea-a potential means of escape, but
for countless ages so dangerous that it was used
little if at all-but also by the mountains. Up in
the high country, with few exceptions, only the most
primitive ways of life could take hold and somehow
survive. The Mediterranean plains, for lack of
space, are mostly confined to a few coastal strips,
a few pockets of arable land. Above them run steep
and stony paths, hard on the feet of men and the
hooves of beasts alike.
Worse still, the
plains, especially those of any size, were often
invaded by floodwaters and had to be reclaimed from
inhospitable marshland. The fortunes of the
Etruscans depended in part on their skill at
draining the semi-flooded flatlands. The larger the
plain, of course, the harder and more backbreaking
the task of drainage, and the later the date at
which it was undertaken. The great stretches of the
Po valley, watered by the wild rivers of the Alps
and Apennines, were a no man's land for almost the
entire prehistoric period. Humans hardly settled
there at all until the pile-based dwellings of the
terramare, in about 1500 b.c.
On the whole,
human settlement took more readily to the hillsides,
as being more immediately habitable than the plains.
Lowland sites, which called for land improvement,
could be occupied only by hierarchical societies,
those able to create a habitable environment by
collective effort. These were the opposite of the
high-perched hill settlements, poor but free, with
which they had contacts born of necessity, but
always tinged with apprehension. The lowlanders felt
and wished themselves to be superior: they had
plenty to eat and their diet was varied; but their
wealth, their cities, their open roads and their
fertile crops were a constant temptation to
attackers. Telemachus had nothing but contempt for
the acorn-eating mountain-dwellers of the
Peloponnese. It was logical that Campania and Apulia
should dread the peasants of the Abruzzi, shepherds
who at the first sign of winter swarmed down with
their flocks to the milder climate of the plains.
Given the choice, the Campanians would rather face
the Roman barbarians than the barbarians from the
local mountains. The service Rome rendered southern
Italy in the third century b.c. was to bring the
wild and threatening massif of the Abruzzi to
heel.
Dramatic descents from the mountains
took place in every period and in every region of
the sea. Mountain people-eaters of acorns and
chestnuts, hunters of wild beasts, traders in furs,
hides or young livestock, always ready to strike
camp and move on-formed a perpetual contrast to
lowlanders who remained bound to the soil, some as
masters, some as slaves, but all part of a society
based on working the land, a society with armies,
cities, and seagoing ships. Traces of this dialogue
remain even today, between the ice and snow of the
austere mountain tops and the lowlands where
civilizations and orange-trees have always
blossomed.
Life was simply not the same in
the hills as in the plains. The plains aimed for
progress, the hills for survival. Even the crops,
growing at levels only a short walk apart, did not
observe the same calendar. Wheat, sown as high up
the mountainside as possible, took two months longer
to ripen there than at sea level. Climatic disasters
meant different things to crops at different
altitudes. Late rains in April or May were a
blessing in the mountains but a disaster lower down,
where the wheat was almost ripe and might rust or
rot on the stalk. This was as true of Minoan Crete
as of Syria in the seventeenth century a.d. or
Algeria in our own time.
The Sahara and the
Atlantic
The one exception, where the
mountains do not come right down to the sea, is the
very long and unusually flat seaboard starting at
the edge of the Sahara and running hundreds of
kilometres, from the Tunisian sahel or coastal hills
and the round island of Jerba (home of the
Lotus-Eaters) to the Nile delta, which empties its
fresh, muddy waters far out into the sea. The flat
coastline runs even further round, as far as the
mountains of Lebanon, which lent the cities of the
Phoenicians, on their crowded islands and terraces
overlooking the sea, their thoroughly Mediterranean
character. Viewed from the air, when landscapes
appear in brutal simplicity, the sea and the Sahara
come into stark contrast: two great immensities, one
blue, the other white shading away into yellow,
ochre and orange.
In fact, the desert has had
a powerful impact on the physical and human life of
the sea. In human terms, every summer saw the desert
nomads, a devastating multitude of men, women,
children and animals, descend on the coast, pitching
camp with their black tents woven from goat or camel
hair. As neighbours, they could be troublesome, at
times marauding. Like the mountain people, high
above the fragile strips of civilization, the nomads
were another perpetual menace. Every successful
civilization on the Mediterranean coast was obliged
to define its stance towards the mountain-dweller
and the nomad, whether exploiting them, fighting
them off, reaching some compromise with one or
other, sometimes even keeping both of them at
bay.
In spite of its great size, the desert
never completely contained the peoples who inhabited
it, but usually propelled them at regular intervals
towards the coast, or on to the sahels. Only small
numbers of people took the caravan routes which
criss-crossed the deserts like so many slow
sea-passages across the stony and sandy wastes of
Africa and Asia-oceans incomparably greater than the
Mediterranean. But in the long run, these caravan
routes created a fantastic network of connections
reaching out to sub-Saharan Africa and the primitive
gold-panning of the Senegal and Niger rivers, or the
great civilizations bordering the Red Sea, the
Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, the sites of the
earliest experiments in ceramics, metal-working,
jewellery, perfumes, miraculous medicines, spices
and strange foods.
Physically, too, the
desert has always invaded the Mediterranean. Every
summer, the hot dry air above the Sahara envelops
the entire sea basin, extending far beyond its
northern shores. This is what creates those dazzling
skies of startling clarity to be seen over the
Mediterranean, and a starry night sky found nowhere
else in such perfection. The dominant
north-easterlies, from April to September, the
Aetesian winds as the Greeks called them, bring no
relief, no real moisture to the Saharan furnace.
There, the summer sky is clouded only for a few
short days when the khamson blows, or the sirocco,
the wind Horace called the plumbeus Auster, heavy as
lead. These southerly winds carrying grains of sand
sometimes dropped from the sky that "rain of
blood" which made sages wonder and simple
mortals tremble.
Six months of drought,
without a drop of rain, is a long time to wait,
whether for plants, animals or humans. The forests,
the indigenous vegetation of the Mediterranean
mountains, could only survive if the inhabitants
left them alone and did not build too many roads
through them, burn too many clearings for crops,
send flocks to graze in them, or fell too many trees
for fuel or shipbuilding. Ravaged forests declined
fast: maquis and scrub, with their rocky outcrops
and fragrant plants and bushes, are the decadent
forms of these mighty forests, which were always
admired in the ancient Mediterranean as a rare
treasure. Carthage, disadvantaged by its African
site, sent to Sardinia for timber to build ships.
Mesopotamia and Egypt were even worse
placed.
The desert retreats only when the
ocean advances. From October onwards, rarely earlier
and often later, Atlantic depressions, heavy with
moisture, begin to roll in from the west. As soon as
a depression crosses the Straits of Gibraltar, or
makes its way from the Bay of Biscay to the Gulf of
Lions, it heads east, attracting from every compass
point winds that propel it further eastwards. The
sea grows dark, its waters take on the slate-grey
tones of the Baltic, or are whipped up by gales into
a mass of spray. And the storms begin. Rain starts
to fall, sometimes snow: streams which have been dry
for months become torrents, cities disappear behind
a curtain of driving rain and low cloud, giving the
dramatic skyline of El Greco's paintings of Toledo.
This is the season marked by the imbribus atris of
the ancients, "dark rains" cutting off the
light of the sun. Floods are frequent and sudden,
rushing down through the plains of Roussillon, or
the Mitidja of Algeria, striking Tuscany or Spain,
or the countryside round Salonika. Sometimes this
torrential rainfall invades the desert, swamping the
streets of Mecca, and turning the tracks through the
northern Sahara into torrents of mud and water. At
Sefra, south of Oran, Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian
exile fascinated by the desert, was killed in 1904
when a flash flood swept down the wadi...
Excerpted from Memory and the Mediterranean by
Fernand Braudel
Copyright 2001 by Fernand Braudel. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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