"Globalism is ironing out the fabulous texture and diversity of the old world"

COMING FROM INDUSTRIAL MANCHESTER IN the cold, rainy north of England, I have loved the Mediterranean all my life.

- MICHAEL WOOD

The wondrous diversity of landscapes, cultures and histories, and the peoples around its shores - all are an inexhaustible delight.

Recently, I've gone back to an old favourite book, A Mediterranean Society by Shelomo Dov Goitein. Published from 1967, it's never included in those 'great historians' debates, but it is a masterpiece. A portrait of medieval merchant communities in the eastern Mediterranean, its canvas is huge, stretching across Europe to India, and from Morocco to Crimea. It centres on one of the world's most amazing historical archives: the Cairo Geniza ('storeroom' in Hebrew) of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo - a stone's throw from the Nile.

A windowless box of a room on the second floor, reachable only via a rickety wooden ladder, by the 19th century it was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of documents. A photo from 1898 shows some of them: heaped, crumbling, wrapped in cloth, crammed in wooden tea chests. These were the business documents – and so much else - of medieval Jewish merchant communities, and are especially rich for the period 950-1250. There were 400,000 of them - the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts anywhere in the world.