It is a key fact about the prehistory of the Mediterranean
world that
it includes within itself the western margin of the Near East and Egypt.
The role of the Near East is already evident in the
Upper Palaeolithic.
Archaeology suggests that modern humans appeared in Europe about forty
thousand years ago and that their arrival was followed by the
extinction of the indigenous Neanderthal population within the next ten
thousand years. The genetic evidence confirms this picture and points
to a parallel occupation of northern Africa by a related population in
roughly the same period. It further indicates that both these modern
human populations originated in the Near East.
It is likewise clear that farming spread to Europe
from the Near East,
just as it seems to have done in northern Africa. Several of the
domesticated species involved could only have been of Near Eastern
origin. Moreover, the relative dates at which they appear point to an
expansion from the Near East; thus we already find farming in Greece in
the eighth millennium B.C., whereas it does not appear in Spain until
the sixth. By 5000 B.C. farming was firmly established over most of the
Mediterranean world.
For a generation it was widely accepted that migration
was the dominant
process, but currently the genetic evidence indicates that the
population of Europe today is mainly of Palaeolithic origin. A broadly
similar pattern of diffusion is likely to hold for the spread of
metalworking. The northern shore of the Mediterranean had entered the
Bronze Age by the end of the fourth millennium in Greece and by the end
of the third in Spain; likewise Greece entered the Iron Age in the
eleventh century and Italy around the eighth.
The earliest appearance of civilization in Mediterranean
Europe again
points eastward. About 2000 B.C. Minoan civilization emerged on the
island of Crete; writing appears around the eighteenth century. A
century or so after that the closely related Mycenaean culture appeared
on the Greek mainland, but as yet no comparable culture is in evidence
farther west. This tradition of civilization was not a direct local
adoption of any one Near Eastern culture. For example, both the Minoans
and the Mycenaeans wrote on clay tablets, but the scripts they used,
which were obviously related, have no known Near Eastern model. Yet it
can hardly be an accident that these civilizations made their
appearance in the part of Mediterranean Europe closest to Egypt and the
Near East, and in fact the chronology of Minoan civilization turns on
Egyptian and Near Eastern artifacts found in association with its
pottery.
This first European civilization is known mainly from
the ruins of
palaces and their administrative records, which must have represented
ruling rather small states. In the Mycenaean case the records have been
deciphered to establish that they are written in an early form of
Greek, the language that has been spoken in the region ever since.
Greek is an Indo-European language, and is likely to have been brought
to Greece at some point in the Bronze Age. Since the language of the
earlier Minoan tablets seems not to be Greek, the presumption is that
Mycenaean culture represents a Greek adoption of that of the non-Greek
Minoans. Toward the end of the second millennium B.C. this whole
tradition of civilization collapsed; and when civilization reappeared
in Mediterranean Europe in the first millennium, it represented a fresh
start. Only on Cyprus did a script of Mycenaean origin survive, perhaps
brought there by refugees, and this was to prove a dead end.
There is an obvious parallel here to the demise of
India's first
civilization. But at least two things were different: there was
linguistic continuity across the divide, and a memory of the Mycenaean
world survived, however hazily, to find its place in the Homeric epics.
