How was the Mediterranean culture formed? What are its deepest roots and how have such different cultures integrated and clashed over the centuries? Can we speak of a shared ideological, social and technological heritage? A group of more than fifty researchers from three universities (Sapienza di Roma, the University of Sassari, the University of Tuscia) and the Institute of Sciences for Cultural Heritage of the National Research Council, is trying to answer these questions through the project The peoples of the “middle sea”. Innovation and integration in the ancient Mediterranean.
Everything starts from a simple idea: inventions and innovations spread spontaneously even among communities of different cultures and this stimulates comparison and integration. Tracing the most ancient technological inventions, the first economic and social changes in the “middle sea”, according to a happy definition of the British archaeologist Cyprian Broodbank, can serve to identify the times and mechanisms of cultural exchange and social integration.
The research was divided into three strands: culture, technology and society. For example: when and how did you start writing with the alphabet (and how did you write before)? When and how did the use of the potter’s wheel spread? How are the cults and beliefs of the prehistoric peoples of the Mediterranean integrated with those of the oriental sailors who went west? What are the culinary traditions of each culture and how were they formed and interacted? These are not things already known. Indeed, the research has highlighted basic problems, such as chronology. The periodizations established by scholars in the different areas of the Mediterranean and in the Levant do not coincide: the same find can be dated to one epoch in the east and another in the west.
For this, new samples were collected to be subjected to radiocarbon analysis, paying attention to the archaeological sites, which must be very well excavated, and to the results of published studies, in order to have reliable chronological points of reference. When the volcanic eruption of Santorini around 1600 BC put an end to the Minoan civilization, leaving the gates of the West open to oriental sailors, abysmal differences exist between one side of the Mediterranean and the other. In the Near East, in Egypt and in the Levant as early as 3000 BC there are city-states and writing, advanced societies with religious, civil institutions, ideological and political systems and technological tools that are unparalleled in the West.
The latter in turn is not without “high” cultures, on the contrary, the prehistoric civilizations of Europe, the major islands (Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearics) and North Africa produce impressive monuments that testify to the skills of different cultures, no less complex than the oriental ones.
Through a database and a tracking system, archaeologists have compared countless distributive and qualitative data, observing how the model of the torch of civilization spreading from east to west (Ex oriente lux) is not sufficient to represent what has happened along the shores of the Mediterranean for more than a thousand years.
On the contrary, it was the interaction between different cultures that generated the inventions and progress, the clashes and overlaps which, in a thousand-year-old process, made very different experiences common heritage, constituting the Mediterranean civilization well before the advent of Rome. .
Lorenzo Nigro he is professor of archeology and art history of the ancient Near East at the faculty of literature and philosophy of the La Sapienza University of Rome.