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The Mediterranean and Ancient History 25
to the relative importance or otherwise of other, non-Mediterranean
connections. Consider, for instance, how the use of bronze
is now thought to have spread across Europe from the Middle
East: to judge from a recent study by C. F. E. Pare (Map 2), the
Mediterranean was not the sole or even a crucial vector. 74
In the period of the Twelfth Dynasty (1991–1786 bc), though
Egyptian ships could have reached the Aegean, they seem not to
have done so; during the Eighteenth Dynasty (1575–1308), on
the other hand,—or perhaps during the period of the Hyksos
in the seventeenth century bc—the two areas were in contact. 75
In the second millennium bc the western half of the Mediterranean
was mostly untouched by the peoples of its eastern half
until Mycenaeans reached South Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia—a
by now very familiar story. 76 When the network of connections
grew stronger, in the age of colonization, it of course affected
the western Mediterranean environment profoundly, not only
by means of vines and olive trees, but through intensified mineral
extraction, urbanization, hydraulic engineering, and in
other ways too. How these connections came into being, and
how they weakened in late antiquity, are much-studied problems,
hardly to be eliminated by the thought that they were
always there potentially. It was especially disappointing that
The Corrupting Sea did not really address the evidence, simply
enormous in extent, for a prolonged period of late-antique and
early medieval economic decline, except to say in effect that it is
a historiographical commonplace (in part traceable back to Ibn
Khaldun); not all historical commonplaces are false, 77 and
much of the evidence is in any case material.
74 Pare, ‘Bronze and the Bronze Age’, in Pare (ed.), Metals.
75 For the first two dates see D. O’Connor, ‘Egypt and Greece: The Bronze
Age Evidence’, in M. R. Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers (eds.), Black Athena
Revisited (Chapel Hill, 1996), 49–61: 54, 55. For the other chronology see
Cline, Sailing the Wine-dark Sea, 5–8.
76 See among others D. Ridgway, ‘The First Western Greeks and their
Neighbours, 1935–1985’, in J.-P. Descoeudres (ed.), Greek Colonists and
Native Populations (Canberra and Oxford, 1990), 61–72; K. Kilian, ‘Mycenaean
Colonization: Norm and Variety’, ibid. 445–67, O. Dickinson, The
Aegean Bronze Age (Cambridge, 1994), 249–50.
77 Much of the evidence which an economic historian would adduce to
show that economic connections tended to decline between ad 200 and 700
is mentioned by McCormick, Origins. Ibn Khaldun: CS 154. This is a huge