The Penguin History of the World

Trade was the Phoenicians’ preoccupation and it did not at first require settlement overseas. Yet they came to base themselves more and more on colonies or trading stations, sometimes where Mycenaeans had traded before them. The furthest lay just beyond the entrance to the Mediterranean, where Gadir was founded on the site of modern Cadiz and Mogador, now Essaouira, in Morocco, to link Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, and assure supplies of silver and tin. There were in the end some twenty-five such ports up and down the Mediterranean, the earliest set up at Kition (the modern Larnaca) in Cyprus at the end of the ninth century BC. Sometimes colonies followed earlier Phoenician commercial activity on the spot, such as in Sicily.

These colonies might also reflect the time of troubles which overtook the Phoenician city-states after a phase of independence at the beginning of the first millennium BC. In the seventh century Sidon was razed to the ground, and the daughters of the king of Tyre were carried off to the harem of the Assyrian Ashurbanipal. Phoenicia was then reduced to its colonies elsewhere in the Mediterranean and little else. Yet their establishment may also have reflected anxiety at a wave of Greek colonization in the west which threatened the supply of metal, especially of British tin and Spanish silver. This could explain the Phoenician foundation of Carthage a century earlier; it was to become the seat of a power more formidable by far than Tyre and Sidon had ever been and went on to establish its own chain of colonies. Phoenicia lived on well after its origins had been crushed.

The Phoenicians were among the most important traffickers in civilization but so, willy-nilly, had been others – the Mycenaeans by their diffusion of a culture, and the Hellenes by their stirring up of the ethnic world of the Aegean. The Cretans had been something more; true originators, they not only took from the great established centres of culture, but remade what they took before diffusing it again. These peoples helped to shape a more rapidly changing world. One important side-effect, of which little has yet been said, was the stimulation of continental Europe. The search for minerals slowly took explorers and prospectors further and further into that unknown. Already in the second millennium there are the first signs of a complicated future; beads found at Mycenae were manufactured in Britain from Baltic amber. Trade was always slowly at work, eating away isolation, changing peoples’ relations with one another, imposing new shapes on the world. But it is hard to relate this story to the stirring of the ethnic pot in the Aegean, let alone to the troubled history of the Asian mainland from the second millennium BC.

For about 800 years from, say, the end of Knossos, the history of the Middle East is indeed very confused if our standpoint is that of world history. What was essentially going on were disputes about control of the slowly growing wealth of the best-defined agricultural region of the ancient world (the empires which came and went could not find resources in the desert and steppe area on the borders of the Middle East which could justify their conquest), and in that story it is hard to find any continuing thread. Invaders came and went rapidly, some of them leaving new communities behind them, some setting up new institutions to replace those they overthrew. These quick transitions could hardly have been grasped by those to whom these events would only have come home occasionally, and suddenly, when (for instance) their homes were burnt, their wives and daughters raped, their sons carried off to slavery – or, less dramatically, when they discovered that a new governor was going to levy higher taxes.

On the mainland, wandering peoples moved about in a zone where there were long-established centres of government and population, powerful and long-lasting political structures, and numerous hierarchies of specialists in administration, religion and learning. These partly explain why the coming of new peoples obliterates less of what had already been achieved than in the Aegean. Another conservative force was the contact many of the barbarians had already had with civilization in this region. It left them wanting not to destroy it but to enjoy its fruits themselves. These two forces helped in the long run to diffuse civilization further and to produce the increasing cosmopolitanism of a large and confused, but civilized and interconnected, Middle East.