ABSTRACT
The Mediterranean basin is one of the oldest nuclear areas of human settlement and civilization. Similarly, it is one of the oldest routes for the movement of human habitation, the transport of people and goods. It is also one of the oldest centres in the meeting and confrontation-peaceful and hostile -between different peoples, cultures, civilizations, states and empires. Historically-decisive clashes between rival races and cultures, as well as between different religions, took place within its confines: Persians versus Greeks, Romans against Asians and Africans, Muslims against Christians, barbarians and vandals against settled societies and civilizations. It was from the Mediterranean that Greeks ventured to colonize the coast of Western Asia Minor a thousand years before the Christian era, or to settle the Cyrenaican coast and Egyptian Delta, Sicily and parts of southern Italy. Alexander the Great conquered the Levant and Egypt, the whole of Asia Minor and reached far into the Asian subcontinent to Transoxania and India. Clearly, the early period was dominated by the eastern Mediterranean with its classical Hellenic, Hellenistic, Roman and later Christian thrust. The western Mediterranean remained in obscurity at least until the eighth century AD and, as far as its European side is concerned, until well into the twelfth century.
