Imagining the Mediterranean Music begins in the myths of the ancient Mediterranean world, and it ends in the diasporas of modernity. In between the ancient and the modern is the intellectual history of imagining the Mediterranean as a border between the West and what lies beyond, between self and other, between us and them. Myth and history intersect and interact wherever we search in the Mediterranean, and they are perpetually being interwoven with music and music-making. So sweeping is the interaction of music and myth that we might argue that it is the sheer abundance of myths that narrates the landscapes of the Mediterranean, landscapes past and present, which become the basis for the sacred journeys that geographically connect the mythologies of the Mediterranean. Myth represents a Mediterranean musical landscape that is both complex and unified, both bounded and unbounded.
History forms along the borders the Mediterranean in different ways.
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.