The Mediterranean: A 1.8 Million-Year Journey to Becoming a World

The epic voyage of Odysseus, a 10-year journey home after the Trojan War, paints a vivid picture of the Mediterranean as a vast, complex sea dotted with islands and coastlines, where both hospitality and peril awaited. While ancient Mediterranean history often conjures images of Greece and Rome, their civilizations did not emerge in a vacuum. The Greeks had extensive contact with older civilizations in Egypt and Asia Minor, and Rome absorbed Greek culture. The question remains: when did this sea truly become a 'Mediterranean world,' a passage for civilization rather than a barrier?

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The Mediterranean region is one of the best places in the world for studying early history through archaeology.

Cyprian Broodbank's "The Making of the Middle Sea" tackles this question by pushing the timeline back to an astonishing 1.8 million years ago. The Cambridge University professor, with a background in history and archaeology, meticulously reconstructs the Mediterranean's grand transformation from its geological origins to the cusp of classical Greek civilization (around 800-500 BCE). His work synthesizes research from diverse fields, archaeology, geology, climatology, and ecology, to bridge the gap between prehistory and history, offering a fluid narrative of the sea's genesis.

The book's scope begins long before the familiar Bronze Age civilizations of the Cyclades and Crete around 3000 BCE. Broodbank guides readers through geological epochs, starting with the Messinian Salinity Crisis around 5.9 million years ago, when tectonic shifts temporarily closed the straits connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. This event turned the sea into a vast salt lake, facilitating the movement of early hominins and animal species between Africa and Europe. When the straits reopened, the sea became a connector once more, with land bridges like the Suez Isthmus and the Levant serving as crucial pathways for hominin migration into Eurasia.

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The Mediterranean is not a barrier but a passage connecting people.

Evidence from sites like the Algerian Chlef River basin and Dmanisi in the Caucasus mountains reveals hominin presence, including Homo erectus, dating back 1.8 million years, marking the earliest point Broodbank uses to define the 'Mediterranean' in a human context. As geological time progressed, the end of the last Ice Age around 11,700 years ago ushered in the Holocene epoch. Warmer climates, rising sea levels, and abundant marine resources created ideal conditions for the emergence of the first Neolithic farming communities. These early agricultural centers, overlapping with the Mediterranean basin, significantly altered the region's landscape and ecology, paving the way for the domestication of animals and the establishment of settled life.

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The earliest agricultural regions overlap with the Mediterranean region.