[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
This edited volume originates in a conference held at the University of Chicago in 2018. Though the volume opens by invoking the famous trio of big books on Mediterranean diachronic unity and connectivity (Braudel 1972 [1966], Horden and Purcell 2000, Broodbank 2013), it quickly defines its scope as the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the first millennium BCE. In their introduction, co-editors James Osborne and Jonathan Hall review the challenges that confront archaeologists and historians seeking to understand the movements of things, people, and ideas in the Early Iron Age. These range from the philosophical (the difficulty of inferring ethnicity from material culture) to the evidentiary (the geographical unevenness of the evidence for Early Iron Age trade). They then present four research directions that they promise to develop further throughout the volume: (1) the complexity of the Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean and the plurality of models required to understand it; (2) the role of the environment (including climate, topography, and distribution of natural resources) in shaping Mediterranean networks; (3) exchanges on a local and quotidian scale (as opposed to a traditional focus on the long-distance movement of luxury goods); and (4) the study of geographical regions beyond the Aegean, the Levant, and Cyprus (and, by implication, a new cast of characters beyond the familiar Greeks and Phoenicians).
Contributions to the volume engage with these themes to varying degrees. Carolina López-Ruiz forcefully rejects a trend she calls “Phoenicoskepticism,” which presents the Phoenicians as a construct of both ancient Classical authors and modern nationalisms (e.g., Quinn 2018). López-Ruiz maintains instead that that the Phoenicians possessed a shared set of ritual and cultural traits and constitute a meaningful emic category. Horden and Purcell’s history “of” rather than “in” the Mediterranean is critiqued for occluding historical agents of all stripes and especially those less well-represented in ancient texts — a valid sentiment that has often been expressed in reviews of the Corrupting Sea (e.g., Fentress and Fentress 2001: 217–18, Algazi 2005: 230–37, Morris and Manning 2005: 19–22). While I am convinced by López-Ruiz’ argument that the Phoenicians deserve recognition as a historical group (and indeed that it is inconsistent to deconstruct “Phoenicians” without also deconstructing “Greeks”), I am less persuaded that the term “Orientalizing” should be resurrected and redefined as the synthesis and propagation of a cultural “kit” (40–41). Such an interpretation of the term struggles, I think, to accommodate the non-Phoenician Eastern Mediterranean actors discussed in other contributions to the volume, as well as the class or religious aspects of strategic acceptance, rejection, or modification of cultural borrowings (Brisart 2011, Arrington 2021, Daniels 2022).
Catherine Kearns takes up this theme while fruitfully expanding the discussion of Mediterranean connections into the rural sphere. She focuses on the hinterland of the Cypriot city-kingdom of Amathus, where Greek and Levantine pottery is found in abundance in tombs. In contrast, surface surveys and limited excavations in the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys of Amathus’ hinterland have yielded only a few imports or imitations of foreign vessels from the first millennium BCE, a pattern that contrasts sharply with those of the Late Bronze Age and the Hellenistic period. Kearns interprets this not as rural backwardness or isolation, but rather as a conscious disinterest in the consumption of imported pottery. Social display instead found expression in other channels, such as the deposition of iron weapons in tombs (62–63). Small ports on the coast in Kearns’ study area attest to shorter-distance connections geared towards the exchange of amphoras and their contents, as well as mortaria for agricultural processing. It would be interesting to compare Kearns’ results to those observed in other Iron Age Mediterranean rural contexts, although as Kearns acknowledges, further excavations outside urban centers are necessary to flesh out these dynamics.
The distribution of various artistic styles has been critical to our archaeological understanding of cultural connections in the Early Iron Age Mediterranean. Marian Feldman’s contribution discusses the decorated metal bowls (often known as “Phoenician,” though Feldman eschews this classification) found across the Mediterranean and Near East between the 10th and 7th century BCE — a category of artifact that unfortunately does not lend itself well to geochemical analysis for provenance due to metal recycling. Feldman rejects cultural-historical approaches that draw one-to-one correspondences between style and culture and calls for a “bottom-up” approach to the study of elite materials — one that focuses on procurement of materials and labor, manufacturing processes and technology, and the many different actors involved in various stages of the chaîne opératoire of these metal bowls. This is a promising direction for future work, especially if new studies can move beyond stylistic and technical aspects of bowl production to interrogate how non-elite populations were engaged in the production of prestige objects, as Feldman suggests in her conclusion (91).
The central chapters, all authored by prominent senior scholars who have published abundantly on Eastern Mediterranean cultural exchange, explore cross-cultural encounters in both familiar sites and regions (the Knossian cemeteries, Kommos, Lefkandi) and more unorthodox ones (central Anatolia, the north Aegean, the Black Sea). Sarah Morris argues that mobile warriors or soldiers served as important agents of exchange in the centuries following the Eastern Mediterranean-wide perturbations around 1200 BCE. This is a possibility, although the main sources of evidence invoked to support the claim (namely, Aegean burials richly furnished with weapons and a prominent iconographical role for warriors in Early Iron Age Cretan art) could have many alternative explanations. Both Morris and John Papadopoulos draw attention to the north Aegean as an area rich in timber and minerals with evidence for early Greek and Phoenician involvement, as well as interaction between Trojans, Phrygians, and local populations. This makes the north Aegean, Papadopoulos suggests, the perfect breeding ground for the adaptation of the Greek alphabet: a suggestion strengthened by the presence of many early alphabetic inscriptions at Methone (159–60).
Susan Sherratt’s chapter foregrounds the Black Sea region and attempts to understand a series of related questions: why do Phoenicians show little interest in the Black Sea during the Early Iron Age, despite its rich metal resources, and why do Greeks fail to make inroads into the region until the late seventh century BCE with the foundation of Sinope? Sherratt reconstructs a political and economic scenario where increased Phoenician control of silver from the western Mediterranean, combined with a growing appetite for silver as a medium of exchange across the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, compelled Milesian Greeks to finally overcome the considerable disincentives to enter the Black Sea, including the difficulty of passing the Bosporus and, more importantly for Sherratt, Phrygian resistance. Sherratt’s suggestion that the setting of Homer’s Iliad at Troy, where Phrygians join the Trojans to fight the Greeks, reflects “Greek aspirations to penetrate the Bosphorus in the face of Phrygian hostility at the end of the eighth or in the early seventh century BCE” (134) is intriguing, if by necessity speculative. A deeper archaeological understanding of the political geography of the strategically important location of northwest Anatolia would provide important further support for this argument.
Ann Gunter further emphasizes the Phrygians as often overlooked, but critically important power players in interactions between the Neo-Assyrian empire and the Greeks in the first millennium BCE, both before and after the reign of the ruler known as Midas (in Greek sources) or Mita (in Neo-Assyrian inscriptions) in the late eighth century BCE. Drawing on new stratigraphical evidence from Gordion, Gunter argues that sophisticated glass technologies diffused from Gordion to the Assyrian imperial capital at Nimrud, and not the other way around. She emphasizes the prominence of Phrygian imports, local imitations, and Phrygian-inspired designs in Archaic Greek sanctuaries, which may indicate the mobility of craftspeople, the adoption of certain Phrygian dining styles, or the emergence of hybrid elite traditions. Gunter’s call to re-evaluate our assumptions about the dichotomy between “true” imports and local imitations or reinterpretations is an important one.
After these discussions of the Iron Age cultures of Anatolia and the Near East, Brian Muhs adds a much-needed player, Egypt. In a helpful synthesis of Egyptian connections with the Mediterranean in the Iron Age, Muhs reviews the distribution of Egyptian inscriptions and luxury items. He also discusses the archaeologically less recoverable commodities of grain, linen, and papyrus, arguing from later historical analogies that it is unlikely Egypt exported grain on a large scale in the Iron Age. Finally, Tamar Hodos advocates for the analytical usefulness of the concept of globalization as a way to model Mediterranean-wide connections, in what is essentially a précis of her recent book on the subject (Hodos 2020).
Although it uses “network” in the title, the volume provides some salutary critiques of applications of network theory to the first-millennium BCE Mediterranean. Notably, none of the contributors to the volume use formal network analysis to model the interactions they discuss. While Osborne and Hall note in their introduction the limitations of networks when used as an overarching system to explain cultural or historical developments — a practice that can become at best purely descriptive and at worst tautological (13–14) — the most sustained critique of the connectivity paradigm comes at the end of the volume. In a self-consciously provocative chapter that would make productive reading for a graduate seminar discussing network theory and connectivity, Michael Dietler, best known for his work on the colonial Western Mediterranean, levies a series of powerful intellectual, methodological, and ethical challenges at the network approaches and pan-Mediterraneanism that have been ascendant in the discipline of Mediterranean archaeology since the turn of the twenty-first century. Dietler’s comments on the analytical vagueness (and perhaps uncritical presentism) of the term “connectivity,” the problems of quantifying archaeological data to the degree required by formal network models, and the fact that cultural exchange can reinforce borders and boundaries as well as dissolve them, are well-taken.
This well-produced volume succeeds in its stated goal of emphasizing the complexity of cultural exchange in the Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean. It also admirably fulfills the aim of drawing attention to often-overlooked regions: as a reader who works largely in the Aegean and was trained in a Classics department, I found the discussions of Egypt, the Black Sea, and Phrygia particularly valuable. The other two themes broached in the introduction — the importance of the natural environment and the role of smaller-scale exchange — were less fully developed across the papers but are certainly critical directions for future research. Another avenue that would be fruitful to explore, though it is only referenced sporadically in this volume, is the use of scientific methods that can shed new light on the movement of people and commodities across the Mediterranean. These include analyses such as NAA and XRF to help determine the provenance of artifacts, the archaeologically responsible analysis of aDNA and isotopes to better model the movement of populations, and attempts to integrate paleoclimatic data with historical time-scales (e.g., Knapp and Manning 2016, Gilboa et al. 2017, Gimatzidis 2022, Moots et al. 2023, Riehle et al. 2023). Such projects will require a collaborative approach that unites specialists working in different subfields and across different regions. What emerges most clearly from the diverse and stimulating collection of papers under review is the importance of pursuing an understanding of Iron Age interregional networks at multiple scales, from highly localized case studies of communities and their engagement in local and regional exchange systems, to Mediterranean-wide flows of prestige artifacts and ideas.
Authors and Titles
- Interregional interaction in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Iron Age (James F. Osborne and Jonathan M. Hall)
- Phoenicians and the Iron Age Mediterranean: A Response to Phoenicoskepticism (Carolina López-Ruiz)
- Mediterranean Interactions beyond the City: Rural Consumption and Trade in Archaic Cyprus (Catherine Kearns)
- Connectivity, Style, and Decorated Metal Bowls in the Iron Age Mediterranean (Marian H. Feldman)
- Close Encounters of the Lasting Kind: Greeks, Phoenicians, and Others in the Iron Age Mediterranean (Sarah P. Morris)
- The Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the Early First Millennium BCE: Greeks, Phoenicians, Phrygians, and Lydians (Susan Sherratt)
- Greeks, Phoenicians, Phrygians, Trojans, and Other Creatures in the Aegean: Connections, Interactions, Misconceptions (John K. Papadopoulos)
- Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire: Material Connections (Ann C. Gunter)
- Egypt and the Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age (Brian Muhs)
- Globalizing the Mediterranean’s Iron Age (Tamar Hodos)
- Six Provocations in Search of a Pretext (Michael Dietler)
References
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