The Penguin History of the World

For the most part, even the greatest centres of civilization were indifferent to what lay outside their spheres for at least 2,000 years after the fall of Babylon, except when troubled by an occasional invasion. It was a world in which the contents of some of these civilizations were deepening to create an age that would set patterns for what was to come later. This is what we mean by a classical age. But not all of the civilizations that were established around Year 0 produced classical heritages that were to survive up to our own time. Some were transformed by conquest, migration or profound religious change. In China elements of the classical age, centred on the Han dynasty, were preserved through the continuity of the Chinese state. In India, they were preserved through continuities in religion and the shape of society. And from the eastern Mediterranean a classical age emerged that would last for over a thousand years without a break in its tradition and that would, much later, become the seedbed of global change in the modern age.

1 Remaking the Old World

The appearance of a new civilization in the eastern Mediterranean owed much to older Middle Eastern and Aegean traditions. From the start we confront an amalgam of Greek speech, a Semitic alphabet, ideas whose roots lie in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and reminiscences of Mycenae. Even when this civilization matured it still showed the diversity of its origins. It was never to be a simple, monolithic whole and in the end was very complex indeed. For all that integrated it and gave it unity, it was always hard to delimit, a cluster of similar cultures around the Mediterranean and Aegean, their frontier zones blurring far outwards into Asia, Africa, barbarian Europe and southern Russia. Even when its boundaries with them were clear, other traditions always played upon Mediterranean civilization and received much from it.

This civilization also varied in time. It showed greater powers of evolution than any of its predecessors. Even when they had undergone important political changes their institutions remained fundamentally intact, while Mediterranean civilization displays a huge variety of transient political forms and experiments. In religion and ideology, whereas other traditions tended to develop without violent changes or breaks, so that civilization and religion were virtually coterminous, the one living and dying with the other, Mediterranean civilization begins in a native paganism and ends by succumbing to an exotic import, Christianity, a revolutionized Judaism which was to be the first global religion. This was a huge change and it transformed this civilization’s possibilities of influencing the future.

Of all the forces making for its crystallization, the most fundamental was the setting itself, the Mediterranean basin. It was both a collecting area and a source; currents flowed easily into it from the lands of the old civilizations, and from this central reservoir they also flowed back to where they came from and northwards into the barbarian lands. Though it is large and contains a variety of peoples, this basin has well-defined general characteristics. Most of its coasts are narrow plains behind which quickly rise fairly steep and enclosing mountain ranges, broken by a few important river valleys. Those who lived on the coasts tended to look along them and outward across the sea, rather than behind them to their hinterland. This, combined with a climate they all shared, made the spreading of ideas and techniques within the Mediterranean natural for enterprising peoples.