Ancient Trade Routes in the Mediterranean

The Mare Nostrum, or Mediterranean Sea, was the centre of the world until Europeans arrived in the Americas in the late 15th century AD. From the earliest incursions into the Mediterranean area, humans have created exchange and later trade routes in order to survive. These spider’s webs of interconnectivity linked people at one end of the Mediterranean with those at the other and, over time, crawled out to reach people in the Far East, Asia, northern Europe and deep into the African continent. The first routes were obviously on land and ranged from single tracks between settlements to the formalised series of routes such as the Silk Road. The maritime routes similarly began as courses between safe havens one day’s paddle apart and developed into formalised routes transversing the Mediterranean from north to south and east to west.