The new civilization that appeared in the first millennium
B.C. can be
traced to the Phoenicians, who were perhaps the first people to
establish a maritime presence that extended over the entire length of
the Mediterranean. In their homeland on the central Syrian coast they
lived in a number of small states, which were linked with the
establishment of modest coastal colonies in other parts of the
Mediterranean. This was the limit of their territorial ambitions. They
were not empire builders, nor were they commanding arable land. Their
business consisted in trade with the indigenous peoples.
One such people was the Greeks, and it was from the
Phoenicians that
in—or by—the eighth century B.C. the Greeks derived the alphabetic
script that they use to this day. The Greeks transmitted the alphabet
to peoples farther west, to regions in which any form of writing had
previously been unknown. Thus in the seventh century a form of the
Greek alphabet was being used by the Etruscans in central Italy. They
in turn transmitted it to some minor Italian peoples who by the sixth
century included the Romans. A little later a script of unclear,
perhaps mixed origin came into use among the indigenous population of
Spain; and the native population of North Africa eventually adopted the
Phoenician script. By now writing was established all around the
Mediterranean, though outside the east only the Greeks and the Romans
produced literary heritages that survived the vicissitudes of history.
One thing this spread of writing reveals is the ethnic
makeup of the
Mediterranean world. As an environment in which to develop ethnic
homogeneity, a peninsula is almost as good as an island; but by and
large this potential had yet to be realized in the first millennium
B.C. In the east Anatolia was inhabited by numerous distinct peoples
speaking different languages, and the Hittite records show that this
had also been true in the second millennium. To the west the much
narrower Italian peninsula was almost as varied. In the far west of the
Mediterranean the indigenous population of Spain was less
heterogeneous, but there was still a plethora of peoples and languages
(one of them doubtless ancestral to Basque). In each of these
peninsulas at least one of the languages was Indo-European and at least
one was not.
A situation of this kind may also have characterized
Greece in the
second millennium: Greek was Indo- European, whereas Minoan clearly was
not; and on the mainland the Greeks later remembered having shared
their country with a people they called the Pelasgians. But in the
first millennium non-Greek peoples and languages were no more than a
residual presence, and Greek itself was a single language divided only
into dialects. The Greeks thus possessed an unusual ethnic and
linguistic homogeneity, and they were conscious of it. They called
themselves Hellenes, saw themselves as a people sharing the same
ancestry, language, and customs, and even possessed a few pan-Hellenic
institutions like the Delphic Oracle and the Olympic Games.
