Author(s): Fernand Braudel

History

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.?

Fernand Braudel was born in 1902. The son of a teacher, he took his degree in history at the Sorbonne in 1923. He spent much of the war as a prisoner in Germany, where he wrote most of his Mediterranean thesis. In 1949 it was published as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and it remains one of the twentieth century?s seminal works. Among his many other books are the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism,The Identity of France and A History of Civilizations. In 1984 he was elected to the Acad?mie Fran?aise. Braudel died in Paris in 1985. The Mediterranean in the Ancient World is be the last major posthumous publication of his work.

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