Carved out millions of years before mankind reached its coasts, the Mediterranean Sea became a ‘sea between the lands’ linking opposite shores once human beings traversed its surface in search of habitation, food or other vital resources. Early types of humans inhabited the lands bordering the Mediterranean 435,000 years before the present, to judge from evidence for a hunters’ camp set up near modern Rome; others built a simple hut out of branches at Terra Amata near Nice, and created a hearth in the middle of their dwelling – their diet included rhinoceros and elephant meat as well as deer, rabbits and wild pigs.1 When early man first ventured out across the sea’s waters is uncertain. In 2010, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced the discovery in Crete of quartz hand-axes dated to before 130,000 BC, indicating that early types of humans found some means to cross the sea, though these people may have been swept there unintentionally on storm debris.2 Discoveries in caves on Gibraltar prove that 24,000 years ago another species of human looked across the sea towards the mountain of Jebel Musa, clearly visible on the facing shore of Africa: the first Neanderthal bones ever discovered, in 1848, were those of a woman who lived in a cave on the side of the Rock of Gibraltar. Since the original finds were not immediately identified as the remains of a different human species, it was only when, eight years later, similar bones were unearthed in the Neander Valley in Germany that this species gained a name: Neanderthal Man should carry the name Gibraltar Woman. The Gibraltar Neanderthals made use of the sea that lapped the shores of their territory, for their diet included shellfish and crustaceans, even turtles and seals, though at this time a flat plain separated their rock caves from the sea.3 But there is no evidence for a Neanderthal population in Morocco, which was colonized by homo sapiens sapiens, our own branch of humanity. The Straits apparently kept the two populations apart.
In the long period of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic (‘Old and Middle Stone Age’), navigation across the Mediterranean was probably rare, though some present-day islands were accessible across land bridges later covered by the rising sea. The Cosquer grotto near Marseilles contains carvings by homo sapiens from as early as 27000 BC and paintings earlier than 19000 BC; it now lies well below sea level, but when it was inhabited the Mediterranean shore lay a few miles further out. The first good evidence for short sea-crossings comes during the Upper Palaeolithic (the late ‘Old Stone Age’), that is, before about 11000 BC. At this point, visitors set foot on Melos in the Greek Cyclades, in search of the volcanic glass obsidian, used in stone tools, and offering sharper edges than flint. Sicily has yielded dozens of Palaeolithic sites from the same period, very often along the coast, where settlers consumed large quantities of molluscs, though they also hunted foxes, hare and deer. They took care of the dead, covering the body with a layer of ochre and sometimes burying the corpses with decorated necklaces. On the western extremity of Sicily, they occupied what are now the easternmost Egadian islands (which were then probably small promontories connected to Sicily itself); on one of them, Levanzo, somewhere around 11000 BC, they decorated a cave with incised and painted figures. The incised figures include deer and horses, drawn with liveliness and a degree of realism. The painted figures are more schematic, rough representations of human beings, and are thought to date to a later occupation of the cave. The drawings and paintings from the Sicilian caves demonstrate the existence of a hunter-gatherer society adept, as we know from other evidence, at the creation of effective tools out of flint and quartzite, whose rituals included sympathetic magic aimed at the winning of prey. They hunted with bows and arrows and with spears; they lived in caves and grottoes, but also inhabited camp sites in the open. They were thinly spread and, while their ancestors had reached Sicily on whatever simple boats were available to them, later generations did not explore the seas further.4
The style of life of the first inhabitants of Sicily was not markedly different from that of hundreds of generations of other Upper Palaeolithic people spread around the shores of the Mediterranean, from whom they were, nonetheless, isolated. This is not to say that their lives lacked complexity; a comparison with nomadic hunter-gatherers in Australia or the Amazon suggests that elaborate myths and rituals have for millennia bonded together families and groups, irrespective of their level of technology. Change, when it occurred, took place very slowly and did not necessarily consist of what might be called ‘improvement’, for skills such as those of the cave artists could be lost as well as gained. Around 8000 BC there was a very gradual warming, and this resulted in changes in flora and fauna that sometimes set these small groups of people on the move in search of their traditional prey, and sometimes encouraged a search for alternative types of food, especially that provided by the sea. The sea gradually rose, by as much as 120 metres, as the ice caps melted. The contours of the modern Mediterranean become more recognizable as isthmuses turned into islands and sea coasts retreated to roughly their current position; but all this was too slow a process to be readily visible.5
There was little social differentiation within these wandering bands of people, travelling in search of food, arriving at convenient hilltops and bays, moving from settlement to settlement, zigzagging back and forth. But as groups became familiar with particular areas, they adapted their diet and customs to that area. Possibly, as they buried their dead and decorated the caves, they acquired a real sense of attachment to the land. Occasionally stone tools passed from hand to hand and moved between communities, or were acquired in skirmishes between tribes. In essence, though, they were self-sufficient, relying on what the sea and land offered in wild animals, fish and berries. Although the human population remained tiny, maybe a few thousand in the whole of Sicily at any one time, the effect on the animal stock of climatic change and of human intervention was increasingly severe; larger animals began to disappear, notably the wild horses which had arrived before the humans arrived, when Sicily was still linked physically to Italy; these horses were recorded in the Levanzo cave drawings and provided massive feasts.
During the transitional period to about 5000 BC known as the Mesolithic (‘Middle Stone Age’), when tools became steadily more refined but animal husbandry, ceramics or the cultivation of grain had yet to emerge, the diet of prehistoric Sicilians shifted towards products of the sea, from which they fished sea-bream and grouper; large numbers of mollusc shells have been found on archaeological sites, some incised and decorated with red ochre. By 6400 BC, in what would become Tunisia, the ‘Capsian culture’ emerged, which was heavily dependent on shellfish and has left large mounds or middens along the coast.6 Further east, in the Aegean, Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic seafarers made their way occasionally along the island chain of the Cyclades to Melos, collecting its obsidian and transporting it back to cave sites on the Greek mainland such as the cave at Franchthi, 120 kilometres from Melos; their boats were probably manufactured from reeds, which could be shaped and cut using the small sharp-edged stones, or microliths, that they had developed. Since sea levels were still rising, the distance between islands was shorter than now.7 Mesolithic Sicily also knew obsidian, which was obtained from the volcanic Lipari islands off Sicily’s north-east shore. Movement across the open sea had begun. It was local; it was spasmodic; but it was deliberate: the aim was to collect precious materials in order to make superior tools. This was not ‘trade’; there was probably no one living permanently on either Melos or Lipari, and even had there been, the settlers would not have expressed a proprietary right to the volcanic glass that lay about the islands. Those on Sicily or in Greece who acquired pieces of obsidian did not manufacture blades in order to send them inland to neighbouring communities. Autarchy was the rule. It is necessary to take a leap forward into the Neolithic period in order to find regular evidence for purposeful travel in search of desired products, in an age when societies were becoming more hierarchical and complex and the relationship between mankind and the land was changing in revolutionary ways.
The ‘Neolithic Revolution’, which eventually encompassed all human communities across the globe, was really a series of independent discoveries of how to control food resources, from about 10,000 BC onwards. The taming of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs provided a consistent source of meat, milk, bone for tools, and in due course fibres for cloth; the realization that crops could be selected and sown in seasonal cycles resulted in the cultivation of various types of wheat, starting with semi-wild emmers, and culminating in the production (in the Mediterranean) of early wheat and barley. The earliest ceramics, at first moulded rather than wheel-thrown, began to be used as food containers; tools were still made of flint, obsidian and quartzes, but they became smaller and more specialized, a trend which was already visible by the Mesolithic period; this speaks for growing specialization, including a caste of skilled toolmakers whose training in what seems a deceptively simple craft was no doubt as long and as complex as that of a sushi chef. Neolithic societies were perfectly capable of creating complex, hierarchical political institutions such as monarchy, and of dividing society into castes defined by status and labour.
Concentrated settlements developed, permanent, walled, dependent on local supplies but also on goods brought across distances: the first, around 8000 BC, was Jericho, with about 2,000 inhabitants in the early eighth millennium; its obsidian was Anatolian rather than Mediterranean. From around 10,000 BC, the inhabitants of Eynan (Ayn Mallaha) in what is now northern Israel cultivated crops, ground flour and also had the time and inclination to produce schematic but elegant human portraits carved on stone. As the population of the eastern Mediterranean grew, fattening on the new sources of food, competition for resources led to more frequent conflict between communities, so that weaponry was used increasingly against fellow-humans rather than animal prey.8 Conflicts generated migrations; folk from Anatolia or Syria moved towards Cyprus and Crete. By 5600 BC a community of several thousand people had settled in Cyprus, at Khirokitia, making pots not from clay but from carved stone; these first Cypriots imported some obsidian, but they mainly concentrated on their fields and flocks. They built houses out of mud-brick, on stone foundations, with bedrooms on a first-floor gallery, and the graves of their ancestors under the hut floor. Less impressive was the first Neolithic settlement in Crete, at Knossos, dating to around 7000 BC; but it marked the beginning of the process of intensive settlement of the island which would dominate the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. The inhabitants arrived already equipped with seed grain and animals, from the coast of Asia Minor, for the animals they raised had no wild cousins on Crete itself. They grew wheat, barley and lentils. Pottery was a skill they did not develop for about half a millennium; weaving was practised by the first half of the fifth millennium. The lack of pottery suggests an isolated community which did not copy the methods of its neighbours further east; obsidian arrived from Melos, which lay not far to the north-west. Generally, though, the Cretans looked away from the sea: the relatively few sea shells that have been discovered in the lowest stratum of Knossos show water wear, indicating that they had been collected for decorative use long after the molluscs they once contained had died.9 But external contacts started to transform the lives of early Cretans. When pottery began to be produced, around 6500 BC, it was of a dark, burnished variety that has some similarities to Anatolian styles of the period; the craft does not seem to have developed gradually, but to have been imported wholesale. During later Neolithic phases, further settlements emerged in other parts of the island, such as Phaistos in the south; but the process took 3,000 years, during which Crete turned increasingly outwards to the sea. The extraordinary civilization that eventually emerged in Crete can best be understood as an interplay between a slowly evolving native culture with a powerful local identity and growing contacts with the outside world which provided new technology and models, idiosyncratically adapted by the Cretans to meet their own uses.
Querns and mortars had to be fashioned; stone foundations were built for houses which now became permanent dwelling-places; potters needed equipment for moulding and firing their vessels. Specialization increased the demand for specific types of tool, and demand for obsidian grew. Its attractions were many, and compensated for the trouble involved in acquiring it: it was easy to flake, and the edges were exceedingly sharp. The obsidian quarries of Melos, which were exploited for about 12,000 years, reached their peak of popularity in the early Bronze Age, when one might expect metal tools to have become more fashionable. But obsidian was appreciated precisely because of its low value: in the early Bronze Age, metals were scarce and the technology to produce copper and bronze was not widely available, and difficult to set in place. Even allowing for increased specialization within Neolithic villages, quarrying on Melos long remained casual and lacked any commercial character. Although a settlement developed on the island, at Phylakopi, it emerged when the extraction of obsidian was already long established, and flourished just as the obsidian quarries began to decline; the first settlers were not obsidian merchants but tuna fishermen.10 Melos offered no special port: those in search of obsidian found a suitable cove, beached their vessel, and came to the quarries, where they hacked off pieces of the volcanic glass.
For startling evidence of massive building projects from Neolithic Europe it is necessary to turn westwards, to the temples and sanctuaries of Malta and Gozo, which predate even the pyramids. The Maltese temples were created by people who crossed the sea and created an isolated culture with their own hands. The eminent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has observed that ‘something really exceptional was taking place in Malta more than five thousand years ago, something quite unlike anything else in the Mediterranean world or indeed beyond’; this society was in full ascendancy around 3500 BC.11 The old diffusionist assumption that the temples were in some way imitations of the pyramids or ziggurats far to the east is patently false. But, although they were not imitations, neither did they become models followed by other cultures within the Mediterranean. Malta was settled by about 5700 BC, from Africa or more likely from Sicily, whose culture is reflected in the earliest Maltese rock-cut tombs. The early Maltese arrived quite well prepared: they brought with them emmer, barley and lentils, and they cleared parts of the island to create cultivable fields, for the archipelago had extensive tree cover, now completely lost. They acquired tools from the volcanic islands around Sicily, employing obsidian from Pantelleria and Lipari. The island culture began to develop in distinctive ways from 4100 BC. Then, very approximately in the millennium after 3600, great underground tombs or hypogea were carved out for collective burial, suggesting that the Maltese community had a strong sense of identity. Massive building works were already under way at Ġgantija on Gozo, and at Tarxien on Malta itself. With great concave decorated façades, and fronted by forecourts, these were enclosed structures, roofed buildings with hallways, passages and compartments, with a preference for a clover leaf arrangement of semi-circular rooms. The aim of the builders was to erect massive temples which could be seen from a great distance away, rising above the islands as one approached by sea, such as the temple at Ħaġar Qim in the south of Malta, where steep cliffs drop down to the Mediterranean.12
The buildings emerged slowly, over time, rather like medieval cathedrals, and with a less coordinated plan.13 Oddly, there were no windows, but there must have been extensive wooden fittings, and the stone fittings, which are all that survives, are often handsomely decorated with carved designs, including spirals. For the culture of prehistoric Malta encompassed more than monumental buildings. The temples contained massive statues of which fragments survive, assumed to represent a Mother Goddess associated with childbirth and fertility. At Tarxien a female statue nearly two metres high was the focus of the cult; there is quite simply nothing similar anywhere in the western Mediterranean at this time. The chambers at Tarxien have left clear evidence of sacrificial ceremonies. An altar at Tarxien was found to contain, in a hollowed space, a flint knife; around the altar were the bones of cattle and sheep. Shells were unearthed, confirming that seafood was an important part of the local diet; and among the carvings are graffiti of ships.14 All this building and carving was achieved without the use of metals, which reached Malta only around 2500 BC.
Culturally as well as physically this was an insular world. In the Neolithic period, the population of the islands has been estimated at less than 10,000. Yet the workforce was capable of building half a dozen large shrines and many smaller ones, suggesting the islands may have been divided into several little provinces. One might then expect evidence of warfare – spearheads, for instance. But virtually no such evidence survives: this was a community at peace.15 Malta and Gozo were perhaps sacred islands that commanded the respect of the peoples of the central Mediterranean, rather like Delos in the classical Greek world. A hole in a slab in the temple at Tarxien may be proof that this was the site of an oracle. Yet it is remarkable that so little evidence has been found of foreign visitors. If these were sacred islands, part of their sacredness must have consisted in a rule that they were unapproachable, inhabited only by native Maltese in the service of the Great Goddess, who was represented not just in the statues and figurines the Maltese carved, but in the very shape of the temples, with their billowing exterior and womb-like internal passages.
The end of this culture is as perplexing as its creation. The long peace came to an end by the middle of the sixteenth century BC. There is no sign of a decline in the temple culture; rather, there was a sharp break, as invaders arrived, lacking the skills that had created the great monuments, but possessing one advantage: bronze weapons. Judging from finds of clay whorls and of carbonized cloth, they were spinners and weavers, who arrived from Sicily and south-eastern Italy.16 By the fourteenth century they had been replaced by another wave of Sicilian settlers. But Malta had by now lost its distinctiveness: the migrants and their descendants squatted in the monuments left by people who had vanished from the face of the earth.
Whereas on Malta nothing changed greatly over many hundreds of years, Sicily was more volatile, as one would expect of a large, accessible landmass with a great variety of resources. Settlers were drawn to the region by the availability of obsidian on the Lipari islands; they brought their culture with them ready-made, as can be seen at Stentinello, near Syracuse, which flourished at the start of the fourth millennium BC, while the Maltese temples were still being constructed. The site, filled with huts, had a perimeter of about 250 metres, and was surrounded by a ditch; within, pottery and simple animal-head figurines have been found. This was a busy village, with its own artisans and command of the surrounding countryside and shoreline, from which it could draw its food. The settlements of these people are very reminiscent of those found in south-eastern Italy, whence their ancestors clearly came.
As much as 3,000 years separate the very first Stentinello culture from the coming of copper and bronze; changes did not take place fast, and these migrations were spasmodic – as yet, there was no great wave of migrations that convulsed the Mediterranean. But it was precisely this slow, osmotic contact that created some elements of a common culture. The style of life of the Neolithic Sicilians from Stentinello shared many features with that of other Neolithic peoples in the Mediterranean; this does not mean they all spoke the same languages (lacking writing, they have left no traces of their language), nor that they shared a common ancestry. But they all participated in the great economic and cultural changes that resulted in the adoption of farming, the domestication of animals and the manufacture of pottery. A similar rough, incised pottery can be found on sites from Syria to Algeria, from Spain to Anatolia. In the same period, Lipari ceased to be simply a depot where obsidian could be collected at will, and was settled by people of similar tastes and habits to those of Stentinello. The open sea was no barrier: settlers headed southwards, and pottery similar to that from Stentinello has been found on sites in Tunisia, as has obsidian from Pantelleria, between Sicily and Africa.17
Lipari enjoyed an especially high standard of living as a result of its command of obsidian supplies. Whether the succession of different styles of pottery indicates changes in the composition of the settler population can be debated endlessly. Fashions change without populations changing, as any observer of modern Italy is well aware. Ceramics decorated with red flames characteristic of the sixth millennium BC were succeeded by others which were plain brown or black, remarkable for their smooth, polished surfaces, and carefully and precisely made. By the end of the fifth millennium BC these gave way to ceramics decorated with meandering patterns, zigzags or spirals, painted on the surface, very similar to items found in the interior of southern Italy and the Balkans. This too was succeeded by new fashions, as plain red pottery was introduced early in the fourth millennium BC, ushering in the long-lived ‘Diana culture’, as it has become known from the principal find-site. The important point is the slowness of change and the stability of these island societies.18
Mariners took advantage of their voyages across the Adriatic Sea, the Ionian Sea or the Sicilian Channel to carry and offer goods, most of them perishable – pottery and obsidian are simply what have tended to survive. It is only possible to guess at what sort of boats these early mariners used. On the open sea skin coverings probably provided insulation; nor can the boats have been tiny, since they were used to carry not just men and women but animals and pots.19 Later evidence, crude drawings on ceramics from the Cyclades, suggests that the boats had a low draught, making them unstable in choppy seas, and that they were powered by oars. Practical experiments with a reed boat named the Papyrella have suggested that movement was slow – four knots at best – and that time was easily lost to bad weather. Reaching Melos in the Cyclades from the mainland of Attika, island-hopping along the way, may often have been a week’s work.20
There were still Mediterranean islands where settlement was very limited, including the Balearics and Sardinia. Majorca and Minorca were already inhabited in the early fifth millennium, though pottery was not introduced until the middle of the third, and it is quite possible that there was an occasional hiatus, as early settlers gave up the battle against the environment. The earliest inhabitants of Sardinia appear to have been stock-raisers, who must have brought their animals with them.21 Along the shores of North Africa, there were no monumental buildings, no efflorescence comparable to that on Malta. Most of those who inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean ventured no further than the fishing grounds within sight of their home. The emergence in the fifth millennium of farming communities in the Nile Delta and in the Fayyum to the west was a local rather than a Mediterranean phenomenon; that is to say, it marked a creative response by the inhabitants of well-watered, indeed waterlogged, lands to the environment in which they lived, and, for a few centuries at least, Lower Egypt was a closed world. Malta, Lipari, the Cyclades were still highly exceptional island communities that performed very specific roles, in two cases as the source of material for stone tools, and in one, very mysterious, case as the focus of an elaborate religious cult.