Historians of the Mediterranean world have sought to unravel the juxtapositions of myth and therefore to separate history from myth. Herodotus was an inveterate traveler, and he therefore connected time to specific events and specific actors in the cultures of their origins, many of which Herodotus visited as an ethnographer. Greek Map History dispelled myth for the Greeks, and it became a voice for colonial expansion from the Mediterranean's northern shore, into the Middle East, as in the case of Josephus's accounts of the Jewish wars. The birth of history that Ibn Khaldun imagined, however, simply shifted the borders between myth and history, literally so, for Ibn Khaldun's perspective was that of a North African, who traveled widely also in Europe and the Middle East. Myth needs to be interpreted from literary, religious, and musical standpoints, all of which offer ways of recognizing the historical and anthropological functions of the narrative genres of myth, for example epic.
Epic repertories locate history and religion along the Mediterranean littoral.
In the Eastern Mediterranean the Pentateuch embodies the central myth of creation, exodus, and settlement in Israel. Myth is not, of course, history in the strictest sense, which is precisely why it draws our attention to a musical anthropology of the Mediterranean. The timelessness of the mythological world, to borrow from Mircea Eliade, contrasts with the timeboundedness of an historical world. Among the most important of these passages are sacred journeys. In this essay, it will be one of the most historically powerful sacred journeys, diaspora, that focuses my remarks on a musical anthropology of the Mediterranean.