One of France’s foremost post-war historians and an authority on the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, Fernand Braudel was surprised, but immediately tempted, when he was asked to write on the region’s ancient history. But, believing that ‘history cannot really be understood unless it is extended to cover the entire human past’, he seized the opportunity to take ‘a fabulous journey’ back through time. The result is a rich, scholarly and meditative work which takes the reader all over the Mediterranean from prehistory to the Roman conquest.
Braudel’s approach is informed at every step by the idea of continuity, of the past and the present forming an indivisible whole. Equally crucial is an understanding of the way in which the physical landscape has shaped cultural and political achievement across the millennia. As with physical geography, so to with nomadism, agriculture, trade, politics and religion. Thus a development in some epoch of prehistory reminds the author of an identical moment in the history of Genoa in the sixteenth century, or Venice in the seventeenth. In exploring the fluctuating development of these ancient civilizations, whether in Mesopotamia or Tuscany, Braudel is constantly aware of new departures, a revolutionary moment which carries through time: the invention of the Phoenician alphabet which made trade more practical or the emergence of the Roman republic. At the same time he offers a fresh perspective on the achievements of those giants of the ancient world, Greece and Rome, seeing their stunning accomplishments in arts and technology not as unique flowerings, but the result of a process which preceded them.
Illuminating, authoritative and also immensely readable, The Mediterranean in the Ancient World reveals Braudel’s ability to convey the vivid detail of history as well as the grand panorama. His insights, his curiosity and his acute visual ability give us a keener appreciation of the courage, enterprise and daring of the long forgotten humanity on which our own civilization rests. As we read these pages and ‘see the megaliths, the pyramids, the Greek temples and basilicas outlined against the clear blue sky’ we are ‘shown the image of a past which is ever present.’
More information?
Please contact Ruth Killick Head of Publicity
0207 010 3258 / ruth.killick@penguin.co.uk
‘Fernand Braudel, (1902-1985) was the greatest historian of the twentieth century. So universal has his influence been on the study of history since the publication of his first major work fifty years ago, that it is almost impossible for us to remember what history was like before Braudel’
From the Introduction by Oswyn Murray
When Braudel began this book in 1968, he was most famous for The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II which had focussed on the period 1450-1650. To be invited to a write a history that stretched back into prehistory was for him a thrilling prospect.
For the region had, in Braudel’s words, a ‘long and dazzling past’. The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, published by Allen Lane on 4 October, extends from ‘the endless Palaeolithic era’ through the great civilisations of Mesopotamia (‘first off the mark. Does this matter?’) and Egypt (‘an over-obedient society, no doubt’), through to the Greek and Roman empires. It asks provocative questions about the region’s history:
Who were the first seafarers in the Mediterranean?
Were the catastrophes of the 12th century BC comparable with the decline of the Roman Empire?
Was Alexander’s constant push eastward actually his great mistake?
Did ancient Rome stray too far beyond the Mediterranean and thereby hasten its own downfall?
Braudel was an outsider all his life and his writing is often controversial. His unique approach was, according to Oswyn Murray, ‘a new way of looking at the past.’ Braudel would re-create a lost reality through ‘a feat of historical imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter and the weaver, the skills of the vintage and the olive press, the keeping of records of bills and lading, tides and winds.’ The Mediterranean in the Ancient World is Braudel’s last significant work.
Fernand Braudel has been called ‘the greatest of Europe’s historians’ (Sir John Plumb). He was the author of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; Civilization and Capitalism, The Identity of France and A History of Civilizations.
Sian Reynolds, Braudel’s translator, is Professor of French at the University of Stirling.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World by Fernand Braudel will be published on 4 October 2001, price £20 hardback, ISBN 0713993316. For more information please contact Ruth Killick, Head of Publicity, on 0207 010 3258 / ruth.killick@penguin.co.uk
