The Mediterranean Sea: Historical Crossroads and Trade Hub

Since the beginning of recorded history, the Mediterranean Sea has served as a network of trade routes for the people who lived along its shores. The sea and the trade it enabled led to the rise of several important civilizations: Egyptian, Carthaginian, Greek, and Roman.

The influx of Muslim Arabs in the early Middle Ages into the Mediterranean Basin marked the entrance of yet another people who benefited from the trade afforded by the sea. It formed a backdrop for the events that inspired the great novels of Algerian-born writer and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Even “The Myth of Sisyphus” contains references to the sea. Camus doubtless meant the Mediterranean Sea. Whether one considers trade, geopolitics, literature, or a variety of other fields, the Mediterranean Sea has been important to humans for millennia.

THE BASICS. The Mediterranean Sea is roughly oblong in shape and on its surface covers almost 1 million square miles of water. At its greatest length, the sea spans roughly 2,300 miles. As a large body of water, the Mediterranean Sea is not particularly deep, having an average depth below 5,000 feet, though near Greece the depth plummets to its greatest measure of almost 17,000 feet. Such variability is not unusual. These calculations do not include the Black Sea, to which the Mediterranean Sea is connected through two straits that separate Turkey and Greece. The Mediterranean Sea is also separate from, though connected to, the easternmost extreme of the Atlantic Ocean. One may move between these bodies of water through the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Spain in the north from Morocco in the south.

The shores of the Mediterranean Basin touch a number of modern nations. From the southwest, one may move along North Africa from Morocco to Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. East of Libya is Egypt, which is not formally part of North Africa. The Romans partitioned Egypt from its neighbors. That practice will guide us here. As one moves east, Egypt gives way to the Sinai Peninsula in southwestern Asia. Moving along the Mediterranean Basin as it curves east and then north, one encounters Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Crossing Turkey, one enters Mediterranean Europe, first encountering Greece. From Greece, one moves north and west along the Adriatic coast, encountering Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia. These small nations give way to Italy, France, and Spain, the last of the Mediterranean countries. One might observe that the Mediterranean Sea borders three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe.

EARLY INHABITANTS. Africa is the cradle of humanity, though it is difficult to know when humans first inhabited North Africa. Anatomically modern humans date to about 200,000 years ago, though North African finds do not appear to be this old. It is possible that modern humans were not the first to reach the Mediterranean Basin. Fossilized remains of Neanderthals, a type of human that was morphologically different from modern humans, date to about 60,000 years ago in Italy and along the Adriatic coast of southeastern Europe. Neanderthals might have interbred with modern humans throughout the Mediterranean Basin. It is interesting to note that Mediterranean people tend to have large noses and may have acquired this trait from Neanderthals, who themselves had large noses. Neanderthals may have been shorter than modern humans. Again it is worth noting that Mediterranean people tend to be short.

In prehistory, the movement of people throughout the Mediterranean Basin was notable. It may be that the Ice Ages, locking up water, caused sea levels in the Mediterranean to fall. During these times, migrations and interbreeding between the people of North Africa and Spain, Sicily and then Italy, and between Turkey and Greece must have been common. Widespread interbreeding must have led the peoples of the Mediterranean to share many characteristics in common.

THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA AND TRADE. About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians may have been the first people to enter the Mediterranean Sea in search of trade. In Egypt, the focus on the Mediterranean Sea must have been keen because the Egyptians followed the Nile River south to its outlet in the Mediterranean Sea. The Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great strengthened this orientation by founding Alexandria on the westernmost branch of the Nile as it entered the Mediterranean. Alexandria was an important commercial hub, but it was also more. It was a place of learning with what was reputedly a famous library before the Romans destroyed it. Important treatises in mathematics, the sciences, and geography flowed from Alexandria to the rest of the Mediterranean and ultimately much of the world.

In addition to Egypt, Greece embraced trade and with it a commerce in ideas. The Greeks encountered many new ideas from throughout the Mediterranean Basin: western Asia, Africa, and the rest of southern Europe. It may be that philosophy developed as an attempt to create a system that could evaluate a staggering number of ideas.

As a Mediterranean trade empire, perhaps nothing surpassed Rome. More than any other power, Rome unified the Mediterranean Basin into a single network of trade. From North Africa came olive oil as the Romans intensified the cultivation of olive trees there. From Gaul (France) and Italy itself came the wine that was the daily beverage of people throughout the Mediterranean Basin. From western Asia came more olive oil as well as figs and dates. If the canonical gospels are any guide, pork came from western Asia, and fish must have come from a multitude of places.

THE DIVERSITY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. The French historian Fernand Braudel conceived of the Mediterranean Sea as a composite of bodies of water, each catering to a different group of people and their culture. Certainly with the fragmentation of Rome and the rise of powerful states like Spain in the west and the Ottoman Empire in the east, one may envision a more decentralized Mediterranean Sea. Yet the Mediterranean in the novels of the aforementioned Albert Camus has a unity that seems to transcend the differences that Braudel accentuated. But Braudel is right that the Mediterranean Sea means different things to different peoples: tourism, trade, subsistence fishing, and a host of other activities.

FURTHER READING: Abulafia, David. 2011. The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Goffredo, Stefano and Zvy Dubinsky, eds. 2013. The Mediterranean Sea: Its History and Present Challenges. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.