On the Ocean

‘The sea, then, is an inspiration to humans: it cajoles and lures them into its presence and drives them on to great feats of achievement’ (p. v). The sea has clearly inspired and driven Sir Barry Cunliffe. Since at least the 1970s he has been an author not only of excavation reports for the specialist but of books for the general reader who wants further reading rather than footnotes. This century, he has favoured the general reader even more and has produced a rapid stream of very substantial monographs that interpret, in the light of movement and contact across seas and oceans both real and virtual, the long continuum linking the Neolithic and the Middle Ages. The sequence of monographs began with perhaps the most originally conceived, in that it created a new geographical framework for comparative discussion: Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC–AD 1500 (2001). There followed (among other books) Europe between the Oceans (2008), Britain Begins (2012), and By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: the Birth of Eurasia (2015), Cunliffe’s silk-road history from the first farmers to the Mongols. After history-cum-archaeology on such a scale, where next but the inseparable narratives of the enclosed Mediterranean and the vast Atlantic? This, his new book, builds on several previous works. It marks a return especially to the 2001 volume, Facing the Ocean, but also a return to The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (2001)—that Massaliot explorer of Ultima Thule, whose book On the Ocean (‘on’ meaning about, not sailing on) survives only in fragments

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Prehistory · Geology · History · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Oceanography