Presents general reader's history of the ancient mediterranean that combines a grasp of the scholarship of the day with a great historian's gift for imaginative reconstruction and inspired analogy. This book features notes that allow the reader to appreciate the state of scholarship at the time of writing.

Part 1: seeing the sea; the long march to civilization - the lower paleolithic - the first artefacts, the first people, fire, art and magic, the Mediterranean strikes back - the first agrarian civilization, conclusion; a twofold birth - Mesopotamia and Egypt - the beginnings, boats on the rivers, ships on the sea, can the spread of megaliths explain the early history of the Mediterranean?; centuries of unity - the seas of the Levant 2500-1200BC - ever onward and upward?, Crete - a new player in the cosmopolitan civilization of the Mediterranean, accidents, developments and disasters; all change - the 12th to the 8th centuries BC. Part 2: colonization - the discovery of the Mediterranean "far west" in the 10th to 6th centuries BC - the first in the field - probably the Phoenicians, the Etruscans - an unsolved mystery, colonization by the Greeks; the miracle of Greece - Greece - a land of city-states, Alexander's mistake, Greek science and thought (8th to 2nd centuries BC); the Roman takeover of the greater Mediterranean - Roman imperialism, Rome beyond the Mediterranean, a Mediterranean civilization - Rome's real achievement; appendices.