Born on the Beach

The seaside​ was invented in the 18th century, along with freedom, fraternity and the rights of man. The beach was Britain’s contribution to modernity, a product of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of cities. A new interest in fresh air and exercise took hold, especially among the upper classes: labour took care of the bodies of their workers. Before that the coast was a source of danger or at best mystery, but now the sea became restorative, especially when taken cold. Decades before Brighton, the first real resort was Scarborough. Men swam naked but women were if anything more than fully clothed, and were pulled to the water by horse-drawn hut. Over the years Romantic artists added emotional respectability to a day at the beach and trains brought the tourists in ever greater numbers. The fashion spread with the British to the Continent and even to the Mediterranean: the Promenade des Anglais at Nice was originally funded by the local Anglican church.

Now the sea is back in vogue. Blue Humanities has taken over large parts of the academy in the last decade, bringing the human relationship with oceans, rivers, lakes and seas to the top of the scholarly agenda just as those waters gather to end humanity for good. Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific Studies give way to Oceanic Thinking, alongside sophisticated analyses of the sea shanty. Life within the sea is of as much interest now as the ships that cross its surface, as maritime archaeologists uncover lost worlds and learn to call the octopus a co-worker not a complication. And plenty of books have been published on the ancient sea, most of them considering the ways of water in Greek and Latin literary texts. The problem for historians trying to muscle in is that you can’t historicise water on anything other than a very longue durée. Seas are repetitive creatures, working in cycles of tides, migration and climate change, which is normally to say the waxing and waning of the Ice Age. It is the coast that creates the past.

The ancients knew this. As Paul Kosmin points out, ‘history begins on the shore, and there it finds its limit.’ Herodotus, the first to record the results of historical ‘inquiries’ in the late fifth century bce, begins by surveying a series of legends of Phoenician, Trojan and Greek sailors kidnapping each other’s women from the shoreline: these he says helped his predecessors explain the long history of resentments and misunderstandings leading up to the wars of his own era between Greeks and ‘Barbarians’ (mostly Persian).

Kosmin’s case is that the coast was ‘central to the economic, political and social dynamics of the ancient Mediterranean and west Asia and to the inner life of their inhabitants’. This isn’t a retrojection of the British day out at the seaside: notorious Roman coastal resorts like Baiae were more like modern spa towns. Instead, for Kosmin the shore is ‘the single most significant setting in antiquity for cultural contact, interregional mobility, trade and predation’, and his relentless curiosity in pursuit of these themes makes The Ancient Shore an exemplary instance of an underserved genre: the beach book for academics.

Kosmin ranges widely around ancient coastlines, but the chronological focus is on the Hellenistic period from the mid-fourth to the late first century bce, or from Alexander of Macedon’s conquest of much of the known world to the Roman conquest of Cleopatra, the Mediterranean’s last Macedonian queen. This works because it is, as Kosmin says, a period of ‘thickening’: the coast exerts an increasing pull on the collective cultural imagination as Greco-Macedonian ships enter new waters under Alexander and his successors. It is also a logical step on from Kosmin’s earlier books, which concentrated on the Seleucid dynasty, the Macedonian generals who inherited Alexander’s empire in Asia as far east as India. Land of the Elephant Kings (2014) described the Seleucid creation of imperial space by establishing clear-cut borders to a territory made up of vastly different lands and peoples. Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (2018) explored the ‘Seleucid Era’ introduced by the new kings, breaking with older methods of dating by annual office-holders or the years of individual reigns to create the first calendar of continuous time from Seleucus I’s reconquest of Babylon in 311 bce, the model for counting anno domini. Now Kosmin, a professor at Harvard and as close to a superstar scholar as you get these days in ancient history (it’s been a long time since Theodor Mommsen won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for his History of Rome), moves well beyond studies of the state. He also bypasses the current fad for global antiquity, with its focus on human history, to engage directly with the ‘planetary’: ‘vast, untameable and heedless geological, climatic and astronomical processes’. Like earthquakes and eclipses, ‘the shore draws us into conference with forces that precede and surpass all human measure.’

His study falls into three sections. The first examines connectivity around and across the Indian Ocean, which was to the Greeks ‘Erythraean’, or Red – not to be confused with our own ‘Red Sea’, a minor inlet of that ocean. Unlike the cosy world of the Mediterranean coast, united by overlapping culture, taste and stories spread by intensive shipping from the start of the first millennium, Kosmin’s ‘Southern Sea’ was a vast ‘sovereignty void’. Its tides and difficult coastline kept polities sparse and oriented mostly inland. Along with the ocean’s immense size, that coastline tended to prevent the emergence of state domination, dense interaction or widespread cultural cohesion. Instead, interlocking maritime regions or cells were known well only to their own sailors, vaguely to their neighbours, and in the Mediterranean before Alexander hardly at all.

Greek intellectuals soon moved to fill this void with a ‘progressive encompassment’ of the new sea. This culminated in the second century ce with Ptolemy of Alexandria in his Geography enclosing the Indian Ocean entirely with a fictional southern coast. It began, however, with Agatharchides of Cnidus who worked at Alexandria in the mid-second century bce. His On the Erythraean Sea is the earliest known encyclopedic discussion of that ocean, collecting together traders’ reports as well as the royal journals and legal codes of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian dynasty that had inherited Alexander’s Egypt. The text survives only in fragments, but Kosmin traces its construction of ‘an unbroken beach horizon’ brought together by the ‘Fisheaters’, a single community found along much of the ocean shore, living in the intertidal zone and living off the sea. This imaginary ‘people’ has no hinterland and no property, territory or culture; they are ‘born on the beach’ and they return each other’s bodies to the sea. Kosmin labels this ‘an autarchic utopia of the foreshore’, though it was not all that utopian, at least once Greek-speakers turned up: Agatharchides cites the report of a Ptolemaic envoy to the southern Red Sea on the extraordinary emotional passivity of the Fisheaters, to the extent that ‘even when their children or women are slaughtered before their eyes, they remain unmoved.’

Opportunities for such experimentation blossomed in the period Agatharchides was writing, with the Ptolemies’ ‘discovery’ of the monsoon winds. Long known to Indian and Arabian sailors, these air currents sweep past the bottom of the Red Sea at the edge of the ancient Egyptian watery world, bearing ships north-east towards India in the summer and south-west towards Arabia and East Africa in the winter. Only from there did goods from India and beyond finally reach the Red Sea and Mediterranean, until Greco-Macedonian ships too learned to ride the trade winds.

Various tales appeared to explain the arrival of this new knowledge. The best is that of an Indian sailor discovered shipwrecked and half-dead by the Ptolemaic coastguard on the Red Sea shore. Unable to get any sense out of him, the authorities at Alexandria send him for Greek lessons. He then tells them that he set out from India, his ship lost its course and the rest of his crew died of starvation. He agrees to lead an expedition directly back to India, no doubt the price of his own ticket home, and the Ptolemies send with him the scholar-adventurer Eudoxus of Cyzicus. Eudoxus makes a successful return and then leads a second trading voyage of his own to the Indian coast. This time, however, he runs into difficulties on the way back and is himself shipwrecked on the African coast. As he waits for repairs he busies himself learning the local language and investigating the remains of a ship with a prow in the shape of a horse’s head. Learning that it must have belonged to Phoenician sailors who had set out from Gades (modern Cádiz) down the Atlantic coast of Africa, he makes his way west through the Mediterranean to attempt the same circumnavigation, only to be lost at last at sea.

It’s a great story, and Kosmin gives it a new reading, pointing out its interest in sailors learning new languages in the new ocean and its focus on predecessors there to the Greeks. He also argues for its ‘underlying historicity’; this feels decadent – could the little evidence we have from the ancient world really tell us something about it? – but the circumstantial details check out, and the setting in the reign of Ptolemy VIII (146-116 bce) certainly coincides with an intensification of Ptolemaic activity in the Southern Sea.

However it happened, the Greco-Macedonian apprehension of the trade winds was transformative. The monsoon was a ‘time-space compression … like the wormholes imagined by science fiction … it blasted ships directly across the Southern Sea … annihilating ocean space.’ The journey from Egyptian Red Sea ports to India and back could now be completed in under a year, bypassing the ports of Arabia, and Greek-speakers were fully integrated into the wider northern Indian Ocean network. This marked the beginning of a new expansion of knowledge by trade rather than, as in the old Mediterranean, via conquest.

For Kosmin it also brought about an increasing sense of commonality among Indian Ocean traders, emerging perhaps from a sense of common risk. A second-century bce papyrus mentions those ‘who sail the outer sea’, an ‘oceanic’ identity not found in relation to other bodies of water. This would have been encouraged by their working environments. The port towns of the Indian Ocean were ‘extensions of the social world of ships’, more similar to one another than to their own hinterlands, with defensive walls separating them from the mainland and much evidence of resident alien communities, from the remains of foreign foods such as rice and coconuts to inscriptions in different languages: twelve different languages at the Red Sea port of Berenike, for instance, including Tamil. Sailors gathered too on mid-sea islands like Socotra, three hundred kilometres south of the Arabian coast, where graffiti dating from the second century bce to the second century ce cover the deep Cave of Hoq with a blizzard of names, cities of origin and maritime professions: helmsmen, captains, merchants. These sailors from India, Syria, Egypt, East Africa and Arabia speak many languages: Abgar of Palmyra writes in Greek and Aramaic in different parts of the cave. They respect each other’s cultures too, never invoking the gods by specific names, not even the god of the cave itself.

The Mediterranean presents a different picture, a world of states, politics and battles for control of coastal territory and resources. The middle part of Kosmin’s book describes the symbolic conquest of these shores, from Mesopotamian kings washing their weapons in the sea to the construction of altars and lighthouses that proclaim their political nature: the lighthouse at Alexandria was decorated with statues of the Ptolemaic family. There is also the strange storytelling genre of gifts of fish to kings – always from the sea, already dead and good only for immediate consumption. These tales bring the king into direct contact with shore-dwellers, but they also mark ‘the absorption of the giver’s home landscape’ not only into the ruler’s territory, but into the monarch himself. This is the context, Kosmin argues, in which we should understand the adventures of Caligula at the English Channel. For two millennia historians have laughed at the boy-king doing battle with the sea instead of launching an invasion of Britain, a venture he left to his successor, Claudius. Kosmin takes Caligula more seriously, arguing that the episode should be understood not as a cowardly parody of conquest, but within a ‘tradition of symbolic occupation of the strand’, noting that it aligned with local Celtic practice, and that Caligula also constructed a lighthouse on the beach, ‘as proof and confirmation of his victory over the shoreline’.

Elsewhere states competed with one another. Kosmin describes a ‘specifically coastal kind of diplomacy’, pioneered at Phoenician-speaking Carthage, which was the largest port in the Western Mediterranean for much of its existence. A series of treaties struck with Rome (and no doubt others too) from the sixth century bce designate an increasing proportion of the Mediterranean shoreline as closed to other shipping. Wrecks were permitted, as long as they cleaned up and cleared out quickly, but other ships found in Carthaginian coastal waters would be sunk.

The extension of Roman imperial power across the Mediterranean finally rendered such measures obsolete, but the shore could still produce only ‘semi-sovereignty’, not lending itself easily to ownership or exploitation. As a result, much state energy went into the suppression of ‘assertive coastal groups’, and above all pirates, a word that first appears in Greek inscriptions of the third century bce. Pirates were a product of state formation in the Mediterranean, which encouraged a distinction between ‘authorised forms of aggression … and similar activities that fell outside the state’s embrace’. However much it suited coastal polities to criminalise them, they were ‘fully integrated into ancient economies’, from serving Mediterranean states as mercenaries to stocking the slave markets that kept them going.

Kosmin describes a new era of pirate archaeology in the 21st century, revealing an ephemeral landscape of temporary and recycled settlement: a connected series of small fortified sites hidden from the sea along the Cilician coast of Turkey, for instance, and highly defended clifftop settlements on the islands of Antikythera and Crete, facing each other across the western entrance to the Aegean, hard to access and without farmland. This was coastline used not for spectacle but camouflage. Resistance to the Roman state is also clear: we hear about self-identified Romans dressed by pirates in full official regalia before being invited to climb a ladder down into the sea. In return, pirates were subject to especially gruesome state punishments, chained up alive or displayed as corpses on the coast in ‘a symbolic undoing of piratic dominance over shoreline space’.

In his​ final section, Kosmin proposes that we are all undone in coastal space, a ‘simultaneous … setting for and an object of contemplation’ of the cosmos. The search for rational explanations of coastal phenomena in the Hellenistic period prompts the theorisation of time on a deeper scale, in the face of evidence of inland beaches and catastrophic floods: when Plato makes up his lost island continent of Atlantis, he locates it nine thousand years before his own time. And encounters with tides inspire bigger notions of space, raising the question of ‘the totality, unity and coherence of the world we inhabit’. Before the first Greco-Macedonian encounter with the Indian Ocean, occasional tidal effects in the micromareal Mediterranean – in the northern Adriatic, for example, or in the curious currents of the strait of Euripus between Attica and the island of Euboea, which reverse direction several times a day – were seen as localised phenomena, not part of a system. Tides outside the Mediterranean were barely noticed. It was therefore a dreadful shock to Alexander’s fleet in the fourth century bce when they were unexpectedly grounded on their way down the Indus into the delta – and then refloated with such force that they crashed against each other. Around the same time, but at the other end of the known world, Pytheas of Massalia voyaged from Gades into the western ocean as far as Britain and perhaps even Iceland, exploring Atlantic tides and theorising their relation to the phases of the moon. Gades itself became ‘a destination of coastal-cosmic pilgrimage’ where ‘the Mediterranean was both parochialised by integration into a planetwide marine system and differentiated by comparison as a (mostly) tideless, (mostly) monster-free, inward-facing haven’. By the first century ce, the Iberian travel writer Pomponius Mela could describe the tides as the breathing of a single animal world.

Kosmin ends with death, another shoreline business. Entrances to the underworld were usually located on the coast (the passage to Hades at Taenarum on the Mani peninsula, Lake Avernus in the Bay of Naples), while the highest and lowest of men were buried there, from local heroes to dead fisherfolk. The Hellenistic period also saw the invention of nauagika, a new genre of epigrams for the shipwrecked dead in which the shoreline was both a place of ‘catastrophic desocialisation’ – these poems are full of horribly broken bodies – and a place to imagine a new world ‘founded on ideas of mutuality, substitution and a common littoral identity’, as people buried their unknown comrades in coastal society to establish a ‘translocal community of grief’.

In all these ways, Kosmin argues, the Hellenistic coastline became a ‘hyperobject’, like evolution or global warming today: ‘massively distributed entities relative to humans in ways that make interacting with them wondrous, daunting and uncanny’, prompting ‘the discovery that we are on the inside of huge forces and slow processes’. States and empires were rendered insignificant in the face of ‘profound, sustained cogitation on the cosmos, and our modest and inconsiderable position in it’.

Of course the story of the ancient shore goes deeper than a single book can dive. Even if the coastline we know is young – its features only relatively stable for the last five or six thousand years – mental traces of earlier configurations survive. In The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World (2018), the geographer Patrick Nunn collected consistent, detailed, verifiable tales of flooded landscapes, disappearing coastlines and newly born islands preserved in oral traditions from Australia to the Scottish highlands. They only make sense as transmitted memories of the great expansion of the seas at the end of the last Ice Age, about ten thousand years ago.

The story must go wider too. ‘Ancient’ in Kosmin’s world means for the most part ancient Greek, or at least Greco-Macedonian. There’s good reason for that, as he says: ‘the Greek world was a coast-oriented civilisation par excellence,’ with the coast of the Aegean Sea ‘more complexly indented than any other part of the Mediterranean’. All the same, there were active trade routes between India and Qin China in the fourth and third centuries bce, and while the rise of the Han Empire in the Hellenistic period could complicate the notion that ‘the history of antiquity … is a coastal story,’ its attention to shipbuilding and sailing technologies might also call into question the notion of a sovereignty void throughout the Southern Sea. This is only to say that I’d love to read a second volume.