Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (review)

This massive work on the ancient Mediterranean world, Egypt, Greece and Rome, by Charles Freeman, is a delightfully well written and researched work. It is an introductory book that makes a solid textbook. The author has worked with an advisory committee of experts, including some very prominent British scholars, such as A.Cameron, A. Kuhrt, and R. Whitehouse.

In the case of a work as comprehensive as this one, it is tempting for a reviewer to critique areas that were discussed briefly or overlooked entirely. These critiques are not meant to detract from the overall excellence of the work. A look at the table of contents will make readers aware that this is actually a work on classical history with a seventy-five-page preface on Egypt and the ancient Near East. Though Freeman disregards the old convention of ending ancient history with the major restructuring of Diocletian, he somewhat arbitrarily (as he readily admits) ends his work with the advent of Islam in the Mediterranean area in the seventh century A.D. Freeman is to be lauded for providing a larger context for the Greek and Roman world, but there is no lack of information for the preclassical civilizations; more than a million cuneiform texts have been uncovered from western Asia. Moreover, this is not in reality a complete "Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean," as the subtitle promises. Crucial areas ofthe Mediterranean world either are overlooked or are not described in proportion to their importance. North Africa and western Europe are not mentioned until after their contact with Greece, although there is evidence from archaeology and from Phoenician sources. More serious is the relative lack of importance ascribed to Syro-Palestine and Anatolia (certainly Mediterranean areas), cultural forces that influenced Greece (arguably more than Egypt did), though Freeman cites W. Burkert's Orientalizing Revolution (Cambridge, 1992). Greek religion and culture were influenced by neo-Hittite/Phoenician civilization of the Iron Age. Because of economic and military activity, a cultural continuum was created in the eighth century B.C. over the Mediterranean. Ionians were involved militarily in Syria, as attested in Assyrian sources of Tilgath-Pileser III (see H. Saggs in Iraq25 [1963]: 76-78), while a Greek graffito has been found on a shard at al-Mina in Syria (P. McCarter in American Journal of Archaeology79 [1975]: 140). The titans of the Iliad, held prisoner in the underworld, reflect a modeof thought evidenced in the Hurrian-Hittite Kumarbi myth. There are also associations with the Aegean from Hattusha and Ugarit, showing evidence that cultural transmission occurred during the late Bronze Age.

Freeman shows caution when discussing the ideas of the interaction of Egypt and Greece, now well known because of M. Bernal's Black Athena,2 vols. (London, 1987, 1991). Freeman argues that there is little support for Bernal's hypothesis that Egypt held sway over the Aegean in the fifteenth century B.C., though he rightly consents that Bernal has exposed many prejudices against Eastern influence in Greece. However, there is a lack of emphasis on the diversity of the Hellenistic and Roman world, and little is said about the Aramaic (Syriac) East. Freeman depicts the Seleucid state as internally unstable, although a fresh reevaluation of the Hellenistic East has been done by S. Sherwin-White and A. Kuhrt (From Samarkand to Sardis [London, 1993]). Though the section on early Christianity is adequate, Freeman says very little about the developments in either Egypt or Syria.

Freeman is adept at making modern application of classical themes. There are numerous modern parallels showing the legacies of classical civilization in the modern world (e.g., Louis XIV of France fancied himself in allegories as Jupiter, Apollo, or Hercules). He also shows an occasional interest in the topics of gender and minority groups in the Mediterranean world. Freeman...