Domhnall

The exchange of luxury goods was at the heart of Bronze Age diplomacy between c3,300 BCE and c1,200 BCE. In order to engage in high level diplomacy, the powers of the Near East required access to the relevant materials and, while some were obtained locally, many could only come from a distance. The merchants making this possible acquired the status of representatives for their various rulers and the rulers of the coastal cities of Canaan (modern day Lebanon), known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, were able to obtain and keep their autonomy by virtue of their mastery of the Mediterranean Sea. When the Assyrian Empire reached this region in the Ninth Century BCE, Tyre held onto its independence because it controlled a trading network reaching to the Atlantic which would not have the same loyalty (and might break away from Tyre) if Tyre had been absorbed by the Assyrians and what the Assyrians wanted from Tyre was a steady, plentiful supply of silver.

Carthage was possibly founded close to the year 831BCE, as a "daughter city" to Tyre. It was strategically located on the coast of North Africa, positioned to control two separate trade routes, one leading Westwards to Gades (now Cadiz) on the Atlantic coast of Southern Spain, a major source of the silver required to meet the demands of the Assyrians, the other running North - South, to trade with Sicily, Sardinia and the Western coast of Italy. It follows that there was in existence a thriving mixture of societies around the Central and Western Mediterranean, with reasons and resources to trade with the Near East.

Well written and entertaining, this book describes seven centuries of history around the Western Mediterranean from the perspective of a substantial civilisation that was neither Greek nor Roman. In the year 146BCE, not only Carthage but also Corinth were utterly destroyed by the Romans, reduced to rubble and their populations massacred or enslaved. History since then has been told from the viewpoint of the victors and it is useful to be reminded that there was another point of view, which saw Rome as a violent oppressor of the diverse communities which shared the Mediterranean Sea and its environs, dependent for its rule on brutality and force. Similarly, when the Western Roman Empire eventually reached its end, this was certainly a mighty transformation, but it was also a release and an awakening for the diversity and complexity which might otherwise have always characterised this huge region. This might also be seen therefore, as a challenge to the very foundation myth on which Western people have relied for too long at the expense of their supposedly barbarian neighbours. For what we learn from this history is that they were never barbarians at all. They were present and civilised before the Greeks or the Romans and they taught them both a great deal.