Reflection on A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC by Marc Van De Mieroop

          Author Marc Van De Mieroop writes, “The ancient history of the Near East is like a dark room in which the sources offer isolated points of light, some brighter than others. They shine especially clearly on certain places and periods, but leave much else concealed.” For historians, there are points in the historical record where there is much information, and then times when it all goes dark… ages of darkness. Dark ages. It is interesting to thing about the many dark ages that have occurred in different times and places throughout the world. In the West in the 21^st century we often think about the “dark age” that occurred in Europe from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire until the Renaissance, but really this is just one dark age in a series of many times when certain regions, big and small, have regressed from what they once were.

In 3000 BCE, the Near East is full of small city-states, each controlling small amounts of territory in their hinterlands. These agricultural lands held most of the people, and they fed the artisans and craftsmen in the cities, along with a warrior class that would grow more and more powerful. The history of the region, and much of the world, is the history of these agricultural communities coalescing to form cities and those cities expanding their territorial reach over hundreds and thousands of years to become kingdoms and empires. In 2950, Egypt unified its Upper and Lower halves for the first time. The area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was very prosperous, and many cities such as Uruk, Ur, Nippur, Mari, and more developed.

In many of these city states, there were local Gods, represented by a priest. As war-leaders arose in influence, and large scale conflicts began to occur between these growing cities, the war-leaders would often coopt the religion and proclaim themselves the sons of Gods, demi-Gods, or just Gods outright. Eventually these deified kings would regard themselves as gods of the entire land. A major path to power in the 3^rd millennium was this religious-political fusion that remained potent through the days of Mohammed and even now. The first record we have of a true territorial expansion outside Egypt came seven hundred years after Narmer united the Nile. Sharru-kin, meaning “the king is legitimate,” though better known as Sargon, rose to power in Kish and probably usurped authority from there. He was able to extend his territory through much of Iraq and likely founded Akkad, a city that would lend its name to the Akkadian Empire and the Akkadian language, which was to become the lingua franca of the known world.

Soon more territorial kingdoms were extending their reach beyond their immediate agricultural hinterlands. Diplomacy was important between them, so important that the palaces were full of tablets of diplomatic correspondence that survives to this day. The people they ruled over most certainly could not read or right. Many were pastoralists, living a semi-nomadic existence. However, those who were educated were educated very well. The Babylonians accurately calculated the square root of 2, used the Pythagorean Theorem (long before Pythagoras), and could calculate the volume of a grain heap given its slope and circumference. Huge advances in politics, science, and economics were made in the early second millennium BCE. In it, we see the city-state of Mari expand into a kingdom in the Middle Euphrates Valley, an Assyrian kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, the rise of the Hittites, and the old Babylonian period, featuring Hammurabi, who promulgated his famous law code in 1755 BCE. In the 16^th century, we know that the chariot was introduced just in time for a dark age. While some royal houses remained in Babylon, Terqa, and Hattusa, cities in general were at their smallest since the year 3000 BCE. Mari was completely destroyed.

The Middle East came out of this short dark age of just about a hundred years stronger and more interconnected than ever. From about 1500 to 1200 BCE, the area was full of very large kingdoms the covered the area from Iran to the Aegean Sea and from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) to Nubia. The states were Kassite Babylonia, Hittite Anatolia, Egypt, and the Mittani, who ruled northern Mesopotamia and Syria before being replaced by the Assyrians. On the eastern side in Iran there were the Elamites and on the Western fringe was the Mediterranean state of Mycenae. There were also many city states in the Levant area of modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria as well as the Sinai Peninsula. The author tells us that this is an unusual period in ancient history, as no one power was able to dominate the others for three hundred years. They all rose and flourished after the sixteenth century dark age before plunging into another in the 12th century.

In this age of balance, normal people probably didn’t benefit so much, besides being spared of war and conscription. Debt-slavery was a common practice and growing. The only way out was to leave the place you lived altogether, and many did. Outcasts beyond the reach of the states lived in the steppes and mountains, where they were nomadic or semi-nomadic, feared by the sedentary folks. They were called “Habiru” meaning robber or vagabond. It wasn’t an ethnic group but a social group that would help to destabilize everything in the 12^th century when over the course of several decades we see dramatic reductions in the archaeological records of overseas trade, burial with luxurious grave goods, and the size and number of fortresses built.

This collapse may have occurred for many reasons, but one major contributing factor is the arrival of the “Sea Peoples.” It is unknown where they came from exactly, but they arrived in mass to conquer and settle the eastern Mediterranean, coinciding with the collapse of each society they touched. In Palestine, the formerly urban culture regressed to villages, and new people settled the region, such as the Philistines. There is very little writing that survives from this period, though the Bible places the Israelite conquest of Canaan in this time period. The eastern states of Assyria, Babylonia, and Elam all diminished, allowing the Arameans to control the areas between them and isolate them from each other. This also led to the end of the courtly lingua franca Akkadian, which had dominated political writings for over a thousand years. However, in the 12^th and 11^th centuries, progress was made in the development of iron and steel. Another development was the domestication of the camel in the later second millennium/early first millennium, allowing people to trade (mainly incense) across the Arabian Peninsula. As the dark age lightens, we see a new world to come at the turn of the first millennium BC, a world of empires.

Some small states remained, such as the Phoenician harbor cities and the Neo-Hittite states in Anatolia. A few new ones popped up, such as Phrygians and Lydians (famous for Croessus) in Anatolia, as well as Judah and Israel plus some neighbors in Palestine. This is when Phoenician influence to spread and become very important. Unfortunately, they wrote on Papyrus, so we don’t have a lot of archaeological records from them directly, but we know that the inspired the writing systems of the Hebrew and Aramaic scripts, as well as the adoption of the Greek alphabet, which was to inspire the Romans, and eventually English, the language I’m writing in right now!

The fist millennium is witness to the first true empire: Assyria. The Neo-Assyrian empire (the third phase of Assyrian power after the Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian) was militaristic and named each year after a military campaign by its leader. They had a standing army of tens of thousands of men and began to dominate their surroundings in the beginning of the ninth century, conquering all of modern-day Iraq, parts of southeastern Turkey, and the Levant down to the Negev Desert. They portrayed themselves as very warlike and powerful to intimidate their enemies and promised death and bloodshed to all who opposed their might. It has been estimated that 4.5 million people were deported during the three centuries of the Assyrian Empire. They had a good run, but after almost 300 years of domination, the Medes and Babylonians teamed up to sack Nineveh in 612.

The Babylonians came out on top, as the Medes were still kind of less advanced, coming from the Zagros mountains and the steppes of Iran. Babylon would end up conquering the whole region including the Levant, taking many early Jews as hostages (the story of Daniel). However it wouldn’t be long before a new power arose. While King Nabonidas was away, an unknown people called the Achaemenid Persians marched into Babylon and took it without a fight. Their leader, Cyrus, just 100 years after Babylonian hegemony was established, destroyed it. Him and his successors would build  the world’s first super-empire, encompassing the Near East and more, including Egypt, parts of Greece, Iran, Armenia, and all the way up to India. The empire would survive for 200 years until conquered by another faraway people to whom civilization had just spread, the Greeks, led by Alexander. Starting at 20 years old and dying at 33, he was the conqueror of the Persian throne and is considered the last of the Achaemenid emperors.

               I’m not sure exactly what I got out of this book except the ability to fill in some space in my historical timeline that was missing. It feels very irrelevant to the modern era, but it’s interesting to know how human civilization took shape really early on. These empires were all really ephemeral in that unlike the governments of today, they didn’t really provide much for their people. They were really the property of wealthy overlords jockeying for power. All in all a very accessible survey of the origins of Mesopotamian civilization up until Alexander’s conquest, though the author does speed through the Persians a little too much in my opinion.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The chronology of the first millennium is secure based on lots of reliable data, including records of a solar eclipse that occurred on June 15, 763 BCE. Historians and astronomers working together is pretty cool.
• While the Nile floods in the late summer, just when it is needed to prepare wet fields for planting seeds, the Tigris and Euphrates flood in the late spring, damaging nearly full-grown plants. This lead to Mesopotamia developing a big system of canals and storage basins, control of which was very important.
• A typical city in the 15-13^th centuries BCE would have been something like Ugarit, a Phoenician city on the coast of modern-day Lebanon, which had a rural population of 20-25,000 in about 150 villages supporting approximately 6-8,000 people in the city.
• In Middle Assyria, women were strictly controlled. Unmarried women, slaves, and prostitutes were forbidden to cover their head and married women were only allowed to leave their house if they covered their heads.
• Modern Yerevan is where the ancient Urartian city of Erebuni used to be, and the name of the city remains the same (with slight tweaks) to this day. You can kind of see it: Yerevan, Erebuni.
• The Bible provides a controversial record of the states of Israel and Judah from their formation in the tenth century to their disappearance in the late eighth and early sixth centuries, respectively. Otherwise, we have Assyrian references to them, though the Bible was likely written in the sixth century “Babylonian Captivity,” making them substantially later than the events they describe. It is also biased as a polemical defense of the Jewish people. In both Israel and Judah, they worshipped Yahweh but tolerated other faiths, especially so in Israel, where Canaanite cults and traditions “flourished.”
• Assyria’s original capital was Assur, moved to Kalhu by Assurnasirpal II in 878 and to Nineveh by Sennacherib in 704.

Fantastic quotes and interesting writings:

“I am a king, offspring begotten by a king and born by a queen. I, Shulgi the noble, have been blessed with a favorable destiny right from the womb. When I was small, I was at the academy, where I learned the scribal art from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad. None of the nobles could write on clay as I could. There where people regularly went for tutelage in the scribal art, I qualified fully in subtraction, addition, reckoning and accounting. The fair goddess Nanibgal, the goddess Nisaba, provided me amply with knowledge and comprehension. I am an experienced scribe who does not neglect a thing. When I sprang up, muscular as a cheetah, galloping like a thoroughbred ass at full gallop, the favor of the god An brought me joy; to my delight the god Enlil spoke favorably about me, and they gave me the scepter because of my righteousness. I place my foot on the neck of the foreign lands; the fame of my weapons is established as far as the south, and my victory is established in the highlands. When I set off for battle and strife to a place that the god Enlil has commanded me, I go ahead of the main body of my troops and I clear the terrain for my scouts. I have a positive passion for weapons. Not only do I carry lance and spear, I also know how to handle slingstones with a sling. The clay bullets, the treacherous pellets that I shoot, fly around like a violent rainstorm. In my rage I do not let them miss.” – Tablet from Ur, a hymn dedicated to King Shulgi of Ur.

The below is extracted from an exchange between the leaders of Ugarit and Alashiya regarding the invasion of the “Sea Peoples.”

Letter from the king (of Alashiya) to Ammurapi of Ugarit

Regarding what you wrote me before: “Enemy ships were observed at sea!” If it is true that ships were observed, reinforce yourself. Where are your troops and chariots? Are they not with you? If not, who will deliver you from the enemy? Surround your cities with walls and bring your troops and chariots into them. Watch out for the enemy and reinforce yourself well!

Letter from the king of Ugarit to the king of Alashiya

Tell the king of Alashiya, my father; the king of Ugarit your son says… Father, the ships of the enemy have been coming. They have been burning down my villages and have done evil things to the country. Does my father not know that all my troops [and chariots] are in Hatti and that all my ships are in Lukka? They have not yet reached me, so the country is undefended. May my father be informed of this. Now the seven ships of the enemy that came have done evil things. If other enemy ships appear, send me a message so that I know.

Letter from the senior governor of Alashiya to the king of Ugarit

Regarding the things that the enemies have done to the people of your country and your ships, they have done these transgressions against the people of the country. Thus, do not be angry with me. Now, the twenty ships that the enemies earlier left in the mountainous areas, have not stayed behind. They left suddenly and we do not know where they are. I write to you to inform you so that you can guard yourself. Be informed!

From Sargon II of Assyria’s description of his campaign against the Urartians in the Zagros Mountains (modern-day western Iran):

“Mount Simirria, a great mountain peak that points upwards like the blade of a lance, and raises its head over the mountain where the goddess Belet-ili lives, whose two peaks lean against heaven on high, whose foundations reach into the midst of the netherworld below, which, like the back of a fish, has no road from one side to the other and whose ascent is difficult from front or back, ravines and chasms are deeply cut in its side, and seen from afar, it is shrouded in fear, it is not good to climb in a chariot or with galloping horses, and it is very hard to make infantry progress in it; yet, with the intelligence and wisdom that the gods Ea and Belet-ili destined for me and who broadened my stride to level the enemy land, I made my engineers carry heavy bronze axes, and they smashed the peaks of the high mountain as if it were limestone and made the road smooth. I took the head of my army and made the chariots, cavalry and battle troops that accompany me fly over it like eagles. I made the support troops and foot soldiers follow them, and the camels and pack mules jumped over the peaks like goats raised in the mountains. I made the surging flood of Assyrians easily cross over its difficult height and on top of that mountain I set up camp.”

Royal letter found in Nineveh

“The king's word to the governor (of Kalhu): 700 bales of straw and 700 bundles of reed, each bundle more than a donkey can carry, must arrive in Dur-Sharrukin by the first of the month Kislev. Should one day pass by, you will die.”

Van De Mieroop, Marc. A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (Blackwell History of the Ancient World) (Kindle Locations 6418-6420). Wiley. Kindle Edition.