<p>"Such is history. A play of life and death is sought in the calm telling of a tale, in the resurgence and denial of the origin, the unfolding of a dead past and result of a present practice. It reiterates, under another rule, the myths built upon a murder of an originary death and fashions out of language the forever - remnant trace of a beginning that is as impossible to recover as to forget." <em>Michel de Certeall</em></p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong>INTRODUCTION: THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORIES AND THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES</strong></p> <p>The study and writing of history rely on very specific circumstances to flourish. Such circumstances prevailed, in ancient Greece when a hyper-critical Athenian, Thucydides (c.460-400B.C.), after the Peloponnesian war in 420BC, produced his history.3 It was also a Europe which had been exposed to a belligerent Napoleonic France and the emergent awareness of Prussian sense of destiny, which inspired a youthful Leopold von Ranke, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to produce an anti-Enlightenment discourse in his hermeneutics.4 In more recent times a standard history of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world, by Fernand Braudel (1902-1985),5 made its appearance in a post-World War II era when the ambitions of global political domination had been transferred from a Western European nucleus to the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The totalitarian approach of the <em>Annales </em>historians opened up new vistas on historical studies that were incomprehensible at the beginning of the twentieth century.</p>