Mediterranean Metamorphosis: Lessons From the Past
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How can a historical approach to the Mediterranean help us understand modern dilemmas? And by historical approach I mean not a study of the last 20 or 30 years but an analysis of trends within the Mediterranean reaching far back in time, into antiquity and the Middle Ages. After all, this is not the same Mediterranean as that of 2,000 years ago, in any number of ways: tree cover has disappeared from islands and coastal regions, rich agricultural terrain has experienced abandonment and even desertification, the choice of crops has shifted back and forth, including the arrival of a great many New World products such as maize and potatoes
Then, thinking of the human setting, we can observe waves of migration that have altered the ethnic, religious and social composition of the lands around the Mediterranean and the islands within it. It is roughly 90 years since the Treaty of Lausanne resulted in massive population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, including the departure of the Muslim (but Greek-speaking) population of Crete, who numbered about 30,000 people. Against this, we can point to sometimes surprising signs of stability. Between the emergence of Venice and the foundation of Tunis in the early Middle Ages, and the foundation of Tel Aviv a century ago, no major city was built on the shores of the Mediterranean, and even Tunis was a replacement for its Christian and pre-Christian neighbour nearby, the great city of Carthage. The urban map of the Mediterranean was in large measure created by the ancient Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans.