David Abulafia is not the first author to realize the importance of the civilizations that grew up and fought around the Mediterranean. In fact, his book The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean is the latest in a long line of great stories emerging from an otherwise nearly landlocked ocean.

At a time called the “Gates of Poseidon”, Gibraltar and North Africa stare across a strait some 50 miles wide and yet gave birth to two civilizations that are as different as Germany from Libya. The Mediterranean was the road that the Phoenicians used as they extended their trading empire from the Fertile Crescent, at one time the area that included the Saudi Arabian Peninsula and areas like Dubai, were green and fertile places that exported their products and their bronze in Vuelve for the gold of the western Mediterranean. All of this was done, incidentally, 20 miles from land because Phoenician sailors believed there were demon-infested waters beyond the horizon.

They set the tone for trade that opened the Mediterranean world to more trade, conquest, and war. In fact, the Greeks, whose islands are surrounded by the Mediterranean, faced not only the Persian threat from the north under Darius and Xerxes in the era of 470 BC. C., but they also used their dominance in shipbuilding to drive back the Persians at Salamis into the sea. and Plataea on land. The mortal enemies Athens and Sparta put aside their enmity long enough to defeat the Persians and drive them away.

The Athenian sailors then began to spread their way of thinking and ideas about man throughout the maritime lands of the Mediterranean. The thought of Aristotle; The philosophy of Socrates; Pythagoras and his mathematical talent. Playwrights such as Euripides and his reflections on the condition of man were also disseminated.

The Mediterranean was also the highway that Alexander traveled in his conquest of the Greeks, while it was the highway that Rome used in his conquest of all lands, at one point from India in the east to Great Britain in the west.

From the south, the Mediterranean helped spread new religions as they emerged and took them far away. Monotheism, Christianity and, later, Islam, used the Mediterranean as a channel for their thoughts.

It has been an ocean that has seen great civilizations rise and fall and contribute to another and has served as a path of conquest for four thousand years. The importance of David Abulafia’s work is the focus he puts on the sea itself, be it as a food provider, traveling religious pilgrims who sent their representatives only to be attacked by pirates and thieves. Yet they still went and Abulafia’s work focuses on how that interaction also helped shape the civilizations touched by the Mediterranean.

Sparkling writing and a concentration on the chronology of the first monoremes that nailed their bows in the Mediterranean make the Mediterranean the protagonist of this work and what you will learn just by reading it will surprise you.