People and the global trade in the Mediterranean’s port cities of Antiquity and the 21st century

A crossroads for people and ideas down the millennia, a place receptive to difference, to the new and to the questioning of received ideas, the Mediterranean basin has given us collaborations and conflicts, great civilizations and the world’s three major monotheistic religions. It was here the Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilizations were born and flourished, and it was in the Mediterranean basin that the ideas and ideals of contemporary Western culture took shape in the fertile ground of the ports and cities where people and ideas interacted for centuries. How can we, at the dawn of the 21st century, continue to draw on this rich heritage?

People and the global trade in the Mediterranean’s port cities of Antiquity and the 21st century.

In antiquity, boats had to sail close to shore and needed a string of safe ports of call between their starting points and their destinations. These routes along which goods and men sailed were as perilous as they were fascinating, and boats, the best means of moving commodities from place to place, played their part in the flowering of the Mediterranean’s major civilizations. Today, technology has shrunk the distances and minimized the dangers, though not for everyone: immigrants, the misérables of our day and age, often follow very similar routes, albeit on dry land. With the sea lanes to Spain and Italy closed to them, setting off from Mali or Tunisia they may have to circle the entire Mediterranean basin before reaching the Greek border and Thrace. Now as then, they embark for the unknown with hope alone to keep them afloat.