The Interconnected Mediterranean of the Iron Age
Tides of History
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The Mediterranean World in the Iron Age
In the Roman period, for example, a trip by ship across the Mediterranean from Carthage in North Africa to Rome might take between five days and a week. More goods and more people were traveling over both greater and smaller distances. You could feed a city, Athens, with grain grown along the fertile coasts of the Black Sea. And you could drink a trusskin wine made in Italy and a Gallic settlement in southern France using a Greek pottery vesselmade all the way to the eastern quarant. Those kinds of connections simply hadn't existed in the preceding Bronze Age, at least not on that far-flung a scale.
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