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Ecology and Beyond 101
the New Kingdom showed great interest in the control of
Cyprus and of the coast of the Levant. However, Egypt was
anything but a sea-oriented country. As for exploration and the
acquisition of prestige commodities, its interest focused on the
Red Sea or further south to East Africa, but not on the West.
Other powers, like the Hittites, whatever may have been their
great achievements in eastern and southern Asia Minor, never
seem to have had any interest in the far west. In fact, the
Mycenaeans were probably the first people to be involved in a
relationship both with Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Levant, and
Egypt on the one hand, and with the west (Italy and Sicily) on
the other. 21 But this is better seen as a relationship which
allowed them, as a people situated in a key position at the
junction of the two zones, to be present in both of them, rather
than as a real connectivity between the two basins themselves.
In other words, this does not show that the Mycenaean Greeks
played the role that was to be later that of their descendants of
the first millennium. At the end of the second millennium, a
new phenomenon was the invasion by sea of the Shardanes, who
definitely seem to have come from Sardinia, and other Sea
Peoples who represented a direct form of connectivity, if a
violent one, between the two horizons. Their failure to invade
Egypt did not prevent the installation of some of these people
on a portion of the coast of the Levant, to which they gave the
name of Palestine. We could define this connectivity as a transfer
of men instead of a transfer of goods.
Then the tempo became ever quicker. The Phoenicians and
the Greeks soon became the two go-between people par excellence
of the whole Mediterranean Sea. As early as the beginning
of the first millennium, Phoenicians founded settlements in
southern Spain and even Portugal, and also the new city of
Carthage and its surrounding cities in north-east Africa. The
closeness of the links between these western settlements and
their mother cities has been an object of discussion. Some have
argued that the mention of Tyre in the second treaty between
21 On the Mycenaean presence in the West, see L. Vagnetti, ‘Les Premiers
Contacts entre le mende égéen et la Méditerranée occidentale’, in G. Pugliese
Carratelli (ed.), Grecs en Occident: De l’âge mycénien à la fin de l’Hellénisme
(Milan, 1996), 109–16.