The Penguin History of the World

4 Intruders and Invaders

Mesopotamia and Egypt are the foundation stones of written history in the Middle East. For a long time the first two great centres of civilization dominate chronology and may conveniently be dealt with more or less in isolation. But obviously their story is not the whole story of this ancient region, let alone that of the ancient world. Soon after 2000 BC the movements of other peoples were already breaking it up into new patterns. A thousand years later, other centres of civilization were in existence elsewhere and we are well into the historical era.

Unfortunately for the historian, there is no simple and obvious unity to this story even in the Fertile Crescent, which for a long time continued to show more creativity and dynamism than any other part of the world. There is only a muddle of changes whose beginnings lie far back in the second millennium BC and which go on until the first of a new succession of empires emerges in the ninth century BC. The sweeping upheavals and rearrangements which stud this confusion are hard even to map in outline, let alone to explain; fortunately, their details do not need to be unravelled here. History was speeding up and civilization was providing men with new opportunities. Rather than submerge ourselves in the flood of events, we can more usefully try to grasp some of the change-making forces at work.

The most obvious of these forces for change continue to be great migrations. Their fundamental pattern does not change much for a thousand years or so after 2000 BC, nor does the ethnic cast of the drama. The basic dynamic was provided by the pressure of peoples of Indo-European linguistic stocks on the Fertile Crescent from both east and west. Their variety and numbers grow but their names need not be remembered here even if some of them bring us to the remote origins of Greece. Meanwhile, Semitic peoples dispute with the Indo-Europeans the Mesopotamian valleys; with Egypt and the mysterious ‘Peoples of the Sea’ they fight over Sinai, Palestine and the Levant. Another group of northerners establishes itself in Iran – and from it will eventually come the greatest of all the empires of the ancient past, that of sixth-century Persia. Still another branch of these peoples pushes out into India. These movements must explain much of what lies behind a shifting pattern of empires and kingdoms stretching across the centuries. By the standards of modern times some of them were quite long-lived; from about 1600 BC a people called Kassites from Caucasia ruled in Babylon for four and a half centuries, which is a duration comparable to that of the entire history of the British overseas empire. Yet, by the standards of Egypt such polities are the creatures of a moment, born today and swept away tomorrow.

It would indeed be surprising if they had not proved fragile in the end, for many other new forces were also at work which multiplied the revolutionary effects of the wanderings of peoples. One of them which has left deep traces is improvement in military technique. Fortification and, presumably, siege-craft had already reached a fairly high level in Mesopotamia by 2000 BC. Among the Indo-European peoples who nibbled at the civilization these skills protected were some with recent nomadic origins; perhaps for that reason they were able to revolutionize warfare in the field, though they long remained unskilled in siege-craft. Their introduction of the two-wheeled war chariot and the cavalryman transformed operations in open country. In the river valleys horses were at first rare, the prized possessions of kings or great leaders, and the barbarians therefore enjoyed a great military and psychological superiority. Eventually, though, chariots were used in the armies of all the great kingdoms of the Middle East; they were too valuable a weapon to be ignored. When the Egyptians expelled the Hyksos, they did so by, among other things, using this weapon against those who had conquered them with it.

Warfare was changed by riding horses, too. A cavalryman proper not only moves about in the saddle but fights from horseback; it took a long time for this art to be developed, for managing a horse and a bow or a spear at the same time is a complex matter. Horse-riding came from the Iranian highlands, where it may have been practised as early as 2000 BC. It spread through the Middle East and Aegean well before the end of the next millennium. Later, after 1000 BC, there appeared the armoured horseman, charging home and dominating foot-soldiers by sheer weight and impetus. This was the beginning of a long era in which heavy cavalry were a key weapon, though their full value could only be exploited centuries later when the invention of the stirrup gave the rider real control of his horse.

During the second millennium BC chariots came to have parts made of iron; soon they had hooped wheels. The military advantages of this metal are obvious and it is not surprising to find its uses spreading rapidly through the Middle East and far beyond, in spite of attempts by those who had iron to restrict it. At first, these were the Hittites. After their decline iron-working spread rapidly, not only because it was a more effective metal for making arms, but because iron ore, though scarce, was more plentiful than copper or tin. It was a great stimulus to economic as well as military change. In agriculture, iron-using peoples could till heavy soils which had remained impervious to wood or flint. But there was no rapid general transfer to the new metal; from around 1000 BC iron very gradually supplemented bronze, as bronze and copper had supplemented stone and flint in the human tool kit, and did so in some places more rapidly than others.

Metallurgical demand helps to explain another innovation, a new and increasingly complex interregional and long-distance trade. It is one of those complicating interactions which seem to be giving the ancient world a certain unity just before its disruption at the end of the second millennium BC. Tin, for example, so important a commodity, had to be brought from Mesopotamia and Afghanistan, as well as Anatolia, to what we should now call ‘manufacturing’ centres. The copper of Cyprus was another widely traded commodity and the search for more of it gave Europe, at the margins of ancient history though she was, a new importance. Mine-shafts in the Balkans were sunk 60 to 70 feet below ground to get at copper even before 4000 BC. Perhaps it is not surprising that some European peoples later came to display high levels of metallurgical skill, notably in the beating of large sheets of bronze and in the shaping of iron (a much more difficult material to work than bronze until temperatures high enough to cast it were available).

Long-range commerce turns on transport. At first, the carriage of goods was a matter of asses and donkeys; the domestication of camels in the middle of the second millennium BC made possible the caravan trade of Asia and the Arabian peninsula which was later to seem to be of ageless antiquity, and opened an environment hitherto almost impenetrable, the waterless desert. Except among nomadic peoples, wheeled transport probably had only local importance, given the poor quality of early roads. Early carts were drawn by oxen or asses; they may have been in service in Mesopotamia about 3000 BC, in Syria around 2250 BC, in Anatolia 200–300 years later and in mainland Greece about 1500 BC.

For goods in quantity, water transport was already likely to be cheaper and simpler than transport by land; this was to be a constant of economic life until the coming of the steam railway. Long before caravans began to bring up to Mesopotamia and Egypt the gums and resins of the south Arabian coasts, ships were carrying them up the Red Sea and merchants were moving back and forth in trading vessels across the Aegean. Understandably, it was in maritime technology that some of the most important advances in transport were made.

We know that Neolithic peoples could make long journeys by sea in dugout canoes and there is some evidence of navigation from the seventh millennium BC. The Egyptians of the Third Dynasty had put a sail on a sea-going ship; the central mast and square sail were the beginning of seamanship relying on anything but human energy. Improvements of rigging came slowly over the next two millennia. It has been thought that these made some approach to the fore-and-aft rigging which was necessary if ships were to sail closer to the wind, but for the most part the ships of antiquity were square-rigged. Because of this, the direction of prevailing winds was decisive in setting patterns of sea-borne communication. The only other source of energy was human: the invention of the oar is an early one and it provided the motive power for long sea crossings as well as for close handling. It seems likely, though, that oars were used more frequently in warships, and sail in what it is at a very early date possible to call merchantmen. By the thirteenth century BC, ships capable of carrying more than 200 copper ingots were sailing about the eastern Mediterranean, and within a few centuries more, some of these ships were being fitted with watertight decks.

Even in recent times goods have been exchanged or bartered and no doubt this was what trade meant for most of antiquity. Yet a great step was taken when money was invented. This seems to have happened in Mesopotamia, where values of account were being given in measures of grain or silver before 2000 BC. Copper ingots seem to have been treated as monetary units throughout the Mediterranean in the late Bronze Age. The first officially sealed means of exchange which survives comes from Cappadocia in the form of ingots of silver of the late third millennium BC: this was a true metal currency. Yet although money is an important invention and one which was to spread, we have to wait until the eighth century BC for the Assyrians to have a silver standard for the first coins. Refined monetary devices (and Mesopotamia had a credit system and bills of exchange in early times) may help to promote trade, but they are not indispensable. Peoples in the ancient world could get along without them. The Phoenicians, a trading people of legendary skill and acumen, did not have a currency until the sixth century BC; Egypt, a centrally controlled economy and of impressive wealth, did not adopt a coinage until two centuries after that, and Celtic Europe, for all its trade in metal goods, did not coin money until two centuries later still.

As for economic exchange between communities, confident generalization about its earliest stages is even more hazardous. Once into the era of historical record, we can see many activities going on which involve the transfer of commodities, not all of them aimed at monetary gain. Payment of tribute, symbolic or diplomatic gifts between rulers and votive offerings were some of the forms it took. We should not rush to be over-definite; right down to the nineteenth century AD the Chinese empire conceived its foreign trade in terms of tribute from the outside world, and the Pharaohs had a way of translating trade with the Aegean into similar notions to judge by tomb-paintings. In the ancient world, such transactions might include the transfer of standard objects such as tripods or vessels of a certain weight or rings of uniform size which therefore present at an early date some of the characteristics of currency. Sometimes such things were useful; sometimes they were merely tokens. All that is wholly certain is that the movement of commodities increased and that much of this increase in the end took the form of the profitable exchanges we now think of as commerce.

New towns must have helped such changes. They sprang up all over the old Middle East, no doubt in part because of population growth. They register the successful exploitation of agricultural possibilities but also a growing parasitism. The literary tradition of the alienation of countrymen from the city is already there in the Old Testament. Yet city life also offered a new intensity of cultural creativity, a new acceleration of civilization of which one sign is the spreading of literacy. In about 2000 BC, literacy was still largely confined to the river-valley civilizations and the areas they influenced. Cuneiform had spread throughout Mesopotamia where two or three languages were written in it; in Egypt the monumental inscriptions were hieroglyphic and day-to-day writing was done on papyrus in a simplified form called hieratic. A thousand years or so later, the picture had changed. Literate peoples were then to be found all over the Middle East and in Crete and Greece too. Cuneiform had been adapted to yet more languages with great success; even the Egyptian government adopted it for its diplomacy. Other scripts were being invented, too. One, in Crete, takes us to the edge of modernity, for it reveals a people in about 1500 BC whose language was basically Greek. With the adoption of a Semitic alphabet, the Phoenician, the medium of the first western literature was in existence by about 800 BC, and so, perhaps, was its first surviving expression, in what were later called the works of Homer.

Such themes make nonsense of chronology; they register changes lost to sight if history is pinned too closely to specific countries. Yet individual countries and their peoples, though subject to general forces and in more and more frequent contact, also become increasingly distinct. Literacy pins down tradition; in its turn, tradition expresses communal self-consciousness. Presumably tribes and peoples have always felt their identity; such awareness is much strengthened when states take on more continuing and institutionalized forms. The dissolution of empires into more viable units is a familiar story from Sumer to modern times, but some areas emerge time and time again as enduring nuclei of tradition. Even in the second millennium BC, states are getting more solid and show greater staying power. They were still far from achieving that extensive and continuing control of their peoples whose possibilities have only fully been revealed in modern times. Yet even in the most ancient records there seems to be an unchecked trend towards a greater regularity in government and greater institutionalizing of power. Kings surround themselves with bureaucracies and tax-collectors find the resources for larger and larger enterprises. Law becomes a widely accepted idea; wherever it penetrates, there is a limitation, even if at first only implicit, of the power of the individual and an increase of that of the law-giver. Above all, the state expresses itself in military power; the problem of feeding, equipping and administering standing professional armies is solved by 1000 BC.

When such things happen, the story of governmental and social institutions begins to escape from the general categories of early civilization. In spite of a new cosmopolitanism made possible by easier intercourse and cross-fertilizing, societies take very diverse paths. In the life of the mind, the most conspicuous expression of diversity is religion. While some have discerned in the pre-classical era a tendency towards simpler, monotheistic systems, the most obvious fact is a huge and varied pantheon of local and specialized deities, mostly coexisting tolerantly, with only an occasional indication that one god is jealous of his distinction.

There is a new scope for differentiation in other expressions of culture, too. Before civilization began, art had already established itself as an autonomous activity not necessarily linked to religion or magic (often so linked though it continued to be). The first literature has already been mentioned and of other sides of the mind we also begin to see something. There is the possibility of play; gaming-boards appear in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete. Men were already gambling. Kings and noblemen hunted with passion and in their palaces were entertained by musicians and dancers. Among sports, boxing seems to go back into Bronze Age Crete, an island where a unique sport of bull-leaping was also practised.

In such matters it is more obvious than anywhere else that we need not pay much heed to chronology, far less to particular dates, even when we can be sure of them. The notion of an individual civilization is less and less helpful over the area with which we have so far been concerned, too. There is too much interplay for it to bear the weight it can do in Egypt and Sumer. Somewhere between about 1500 and 800 BC big changes took place which ought not to be allowed to slip through the mesh of a net woven to catch the history of the first two great civilizations. In the confused, turbulent Middle East and eastern Mediterranean of the centuries around 1000 BC, a new world different from that of Sumer and the Old Kingdom was in the making, that of the Aegean.

A new interplay of cultures brought many changes to peoples on the fringe of the Middle East but civilization in the Aegean islands was rooted in the Neolithic as it was elsewhere. The first metal object found in Greece – a copper bead – has been dated to about 4700 BC, and European as well as Asian stimuli may have been at work. Crete is the largest of the Greek islands. Several centuries before 2000 BC, towns with a regular layout were being built there by an advanced people who had been there through Neolithic times. They may have had contacts with Anatolia which spurred them to exceptional achievements, but the evidence is indecisive. They could well have arrived at civilization for themselves. At any rate, for about a thousand years they built the houses and tombs by which their culture is distinguished and these did not change much in style. By about 2500 BC there were important towns and villages on the coasts, built of stone and brick; their inhabitants practised metal-working and made attractive seals and jewels. At this stage, that is to say, the Cretans shared much of the culture of mainland Greece and Asia Minor. They exchanged goods with other Aegean communities. There then came a change. About 500 years later they began to build the series of great palaces which are the monuments of what we call ‘Minoan’ civilization; the greatest of them, Knossos, was first built about 1900 BC. Nothing quite as impressive appears anywhere else among the islands and it exercised a cultural hegemony over more or less the whole of the Aegean.

‘Minoan’ is a curious name; it is taken from the name of a King Minos who, although celebrated in legend, may never have existed. Much later, the Greeks believed – or said – that he was a great king in Crete who lived at Knossos, parleyed with the gods, and married Pasiphae, the daughter of the sun. Her monstrous offspring, the Minotaur, devoured sacrificial youths and maids sent as tribute from Greece at the heart of a labyrinth eventually penetrated successfully by the hero Theseus, who slew him. This is a rich and suggestive theme and has excited scholars, who believe it can throw light on Cretan civilization, but there is no proof that King Minos ever existed. It may be that, as legend suggests, there was more than one of that name, or that his name was a titular identification of several Cretan rulers. He is one of those fascinating figures who, like King Arthur, remain just beyond the borders of history but inside those of mythology.

Minoan, then, simply means the civilization of people who lived in Bronze Age Crete; it has no other connotation. This civilization lasted some 600 years, but only the outlines of a history can be put together. They reveal a people living in towns linked in some dependence on a monarchy at Knossos. For three or four centuries they prosper, exchanging goods with Egypt, Asia Minor and the Greek mainland, and subsisting on a native agriculture. It may have been this which explains Minoan civilization’s leap forward. Crete seems then, as today, to have been better for the production of olives and vines, two of the great staples of later Mediterranean agriculture, than either the other islands or mainland Greece. It seems likely, too, that she raised large numbers of sheep and exported wool. Whatever its precise forms, Crete experienced an important agricultural advance in late Neolithic times, which led not only to better cereal-growing but, above all, to the cultivation of the olive and vine. They could be grown where grains could not and their discovery changed the possibilities of Mediterranean life. Immediately they permitted a larger population. On this much else could then be built because new human resources were available, but it also made new demands, for organization and government, for the regulation of a more complex agriculture and the handling of its produce.

Whether or not this explains the appearance of Minoan civilization, its peak came about 1600 BC. A century or so later, the Minoan palaces were destroyed. The mystery of this end is tantalizing. At about the same time the major towns of the Aegean islands were destroyed by fire, too. There had been earthquakes in the past; perhaps this was another of them. Recent scholarship identifies a great eruption in the island of Thera at a suitable time; it could have been accompanied by tidal waves and earthquakes in Crete, 70 miles away, and followed by the descent of clouds of ash which blighted Cretan fields. Some people have preferred to think of a rising against the rulers who lived in the palaces. Some have discerned signs of a new invasion, or postulated some great raid from the sea which carried off booty and prisoners, destroying a political power for ever by the damage it inflicted, and leaving no new settlers behind. None of these can be conclusively established. It is only possible to guess about what happened and the view which does least violence to the lack of evidence is that there was a natural cataclysm originating in Thera which broke the back of Minoan civilization.

Whatever the cause, this was not the end of early civilization in Crete, for Knossos was occupied for another century or so by people from the mainland. Nevertheless, though there were still some fairly prosperous times to come, the ascendancy of the indigenous civilization of Crete was, in effect, over. For a time, it seems, Knossos still prospered. Then, early in the fourteenth century BC it, too, was destroyed by fire. This had happened before, but this time it was not rebuilt. So ends the story of early Cretan civilization.

Fortunately, its salient characteristics are easier to understand than the detail of its history. The most obvious is its close relationship with the sea. The Minoans exploited the sea as other peoples exploited their own natural environments. The result was an interchange of products and ideas which shows once more how civilization can accelerate where there is the possibility of cross-fertilization. Minoans had close connections with Syria before 1550 BC and traded as far west as Sicily, perhaps further. Someone took their goods up the Adriatic coasts. Even more important was their penetration of the Greek mainland. The Minoans may well have been the most important single conduit through which the goods and ideas of the earliest civilizations reached Bronze Age Europe. Certain Cretan products begin to turn up in Egypt in the second millennium BC and this was a major outlet; the art of the New Kingdom shows Cretan influence. There was even, some scholars think, an Egyptian resident for some time at Knossos, presumably to watch over well-established interests, and it has been argued that Minoans fought with the Egyptians against the Hyksos. Cretan vases and metal goods have been found at several places in Asia Minor: these are the things which survive, but it has been asserted that a wide range of other products – timber, grapes, oil, wood, metal vases and even opium – were supplied by the Minoans to the mainland. In return, they took metal from Asia Minor, alabaster from Egypt, ostrich eggs from Libya. It was already a complex trading world.

Together with a prosperous agriculture it made possible a civilization of considerable solidity, long able to recover from natural disaster, as the repeated rebuilding of the palace at Knossos seems to show. The palaces are the finest relics of Minoan civilization, but the towns were well built too, and had elaborate piped drains and sewers. This was technical achievement of a high order; early in the sequence of palaces at Knossos the bathing and lavatory provision is on a scale unsurpassed before Roman times. Other cultural achievement was less practical: art embodied Minoan civilization at its highest and remains its most spectacular legacy, influential across the seas, in Egypt and in Greece.

Archaeology has also provided evidence of the Minoan religious world, though this does not, perhaps, take us very far since we have no texts. We have representations of gods and goddesses, but it is not easy to be sure who they are. Nor can we much penetrate their rituals, beyond registering the frequency of sacrificial altars, sanctuaries in high places, double-headed axes, and the apparent centring of Minoan cults in a female figure (though her relationship to other deities remains a mystery). She is perhaps a Neolithic fertility figure, such as was to appear again and again as the embodiment of female sexuality: the later Astarte and Aphrodite.

The political arrangements of this society are obscure. The palace was not only a royal residence, but in some sense an economic centre – a great store – which may perhaps best be understood as the apex of an advanced form of exchange based on redistribution by the ruler. The palace was also a temple, but not a fortress. In its maturity it was the centre of a highly organized structure whose inspiration may have been Asian; knowledge of the literate empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia was available to a trading people. One source of our knowledge of what Minoan government was trying to do is a huge collection of thousands of tablets which are its administrative records. They indicate rigid hierarchy and systematized administration, but not how this worked in practice. However effective government was, the only thing the records certainly show is what it aspired to: a supervision far closer and more elaborate than anything conceivable by the later Greek world. If there are any analogies, they are again with the Asian empires and Egypt.

Successful invasion from the European mainland would itself have been a sign that the conditions which had made this civilization possible were crumbling away in the troubled times of the closing Bronze Age. Crete for a long time had no rival to threaten her coasts. Perhaps the Egyptians had been too busy; in the north there had long been no possible threat. Gradually, the second of these conditions had ceased to hold. Stirring on the mainland were others of those ‘Indo-European’ peoples who have already cropped up in so many places in this story. Some of them penetrated Crete again after the final collapse of Knossos; they were apparently successful colonists who exploited the lowlands and drove away the Minoans and their shattered culture to lonely little towns of refuge where they disappear from the stage of world history.

Ironically, only two or three centuries before this, Cretan culture had exercised something like hegemony in Greece, and Crete was always to hang about mysteriously at the back of the Greek mind, a lost and golden land. A direct transfusion of Minoan culture to the mainland had taken place through the first Achaean peoples (the name usually given to these early Greek-speakers) who came down into Attica and the Peloponnese and established towns and cities there in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries BC. They entered a land long in contact with Asia, whose inhabitants had already contributed to the future one enduring symbol of Greek life, the fortification of the high place of the town, or acropolis. The new arrivals were culturally hardly superior to those they conquered, though they brought with them the horse and war-chariot. They were barbarians by comparison with the Cretans, with no art of their own. More aware of the role of violence and war in society than were the islanders (no doubt because they did not enjoy the protection of the sea and had a sense of continuing pressure from the homelands from which they had come), they fortified their cities heavily and built castles. Their civilization had a military style. Sometimes they picked sites which were to be the later centres of Greek city-states; Athens and Pylos were among them. They were not very large, the biggest containing at most not more than a few thousand people. One of the most important was at Mycenae, which gave its name to the civilization that finally spread over Bronze Age Greece in the middle of the second millennium.

It left some splendid relics, for it was very rich in gold; strongly influenced by Minoan art, it was also a true synthesis of Greek and indigenous cultures on the mainland. Its institutional basis seems to have been rooted in patriarchal ideas but there is more to it than that. The bureaucratic aspiration revealed by the Knossos tablets and by others from Pylos in the western Peloponnese of about 1200 BC suggests currents of change flowing back from Crete towards the mainland. Each considerable city had a king. The king at Mycenae, presiding over a society of warrior landowners whose tenants and slaves were the aboriginal peoples, may have been at an early date the head of some sort of federation of kings. There are Hittite diplomatic records which suggest some degree of political cohesion in Mycenaean Greece. Below the kings, the Pylos tablets show a close supervision and control of community life and also important distinctions between officials and, more fundamentally, between slave and free. What cannot be known is just what such differences meant in practice. Nor can we see much of the economic life that lay at the root of Mycenaean culture, beyond its centralization in the royal household, as in Crete.

Whatever its material basis, the culture represented most spectacularly at Mycenae had by 1400 BC spread all over mainland Greece and to many of the islands. It was a coherent whole, although well-established differences of Greek dialect persisted and distinguished one people from another down to classical times. Mycenae replaced the Cretan trading supremacy in the Mediterranean with its own. It had trading posts in the Levant and was treated as a power by Hittite kings. Sometimes Mycenaean pottery exports replaced Minoan, and there are even examples of Minoan settlements being followed by Mycenaean.

The Mycenaean empire, if the term is permissible, was at its height in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. For a while, the weakness of Egypt and the crumbling of the Hittite power favoured it; for a time a small people enriched by trade had disproportionate importance while great powers waned. Mycenaean colonies were established on the shores of Asia Minor; trade with other Asian towns, notably Troy at the entrance to the Black Sea, prospered. But there are some signs of flagging from about 1300 BC. War seems to have been one answer; Achaeans took important parts in attacks on Egypt at the end of the century and it now seems that a great raid by them, which was immortalized as the Siege of Troy, took place about 1200 BC. The troubled background to these events was a series of dynastic upheavals in the Mycenaean cities themselves.

What can be called the Dark Ages of the Aegean were about to close in and they are as obscure as what was happening in the Middle East at about the same time. When Troy fell, new barbarian invasions of mainland Greece had already begun. At the very end of the thirteenth century BC some of the great Mycenaean centres were destroyed, perhaps by earthquakes or by invasions, and the first Greece broke up into disconnected settlements. As an entity Mycenaean civilization collapsed, but not all the Mycenaean sites were abandoned, at least not in full. Around 1000 BC some form of revival seems to emerge. Legendary accounts of this attribute much to one particular group among the newcomers, the Dorians. Vigorous and bold, they were to be remembered as the descendants of Heracles. Though it is very dangerous to argue back from the presence of later Greek dialects to identifiable and compact groups of early invaders, tradition makes them the speakers of a tongue, Doric, which lived on into the classical age as a dialect setting them apart. In this case, tradition has been thought by scholars to be justified. In Sparta and Argos, Dorian communities, which would be future city-states, established themselves.

But other peoples also helped to crystallize a new civilization in this obscure period. The most successful were those later identified as speakers of ‘Ionic’ Greek, the Ionians of the Dark Ages. Setting out from Attica (where Athens had either survived or assimilated the invaders who followed Mycenae), they took root in the Cyclades and Ionia, the present Turkish coast of the Aegean. Here, as migrants and pirates, they seized or founded towns, if not on islands, almost always on or near the coast, which were the future city-states of a seafaring people. Often the sites they chose had already been occupied by the Mycenaeans. Sometimes – at Smyrna, for example – they displaced earlier Greek settlers.

This is a confusing picture at best and for much of it there is only fragmentary evidence. Yet from this turmoil there would slowly re-emerge the unity of civilization enjoyed by the Bronze Age Aegean. At first, though, there were centuries of disruption and particularism, a new period of provincialism in a once cosmopolitan world. Trade flagged, and ties with Asia languished. What replaced them was the physical transference of people, sometimes taking centuries to establish new settled patterns, but in the end setting out the ground plan of a future Greek world.

Immediately, there was a colossal setback in civilized life which should remind us how fragile it could be in ancient times. Its most obvious sign was a depopulation between 1100 and 1000 BC so widespread and violent that some scholars have sought explanations in a sudden cataclysm – plague, perhaps, or a climatic change such as might have suddenly and terribly reduced the small cultivable area of the Balkan and Aegean hillsides. Whatever the cause, the effects are to be seen also in a waning of elegance and skill; the carving of hard gems, the painting of frescoes and the making of fine pottery all come to a stop. Such cultural continuity as the age permitted must have been largely mental, a matter of songs, myths and religious ideas.

Of this troubled time a very little is dimly and remotely reflected in the bardic epics later set down in writing in the Iliad and the Odyssey. They include material transmitted for generations by recitation, whose origins lie in tradition near-contemporary with the events they purport to describe, though later attributed to one poet, Homer. Exactly what is reflected is much harder to agree about; the consensus has recently been that it is hardly anything for Mycenaean times, and little more for what immediately followed them. The central episode of the Iliad, the attack on Troy, is not what matters here, though the account probably reflects a real preponderance of Achaean initiative in the settlement of Asia Minor. What survives is a little social and conceptual information carried incidentally by the poems. Though Homer gives an impression of some special pre-eminence enjoyed by the Mycenaean king, this is information about the post-Mycenaean Aegean of the eighth century BC, when recovery from the Dark Ages begins. It reveals a society whose assumptions are those of barbarian warlords rather than those of rulers commanding regular armies or supervising bureaucracies like those of Asia. Homer’s kings are the greatest of great nobles, the heads of large households, their acknowledged authority tempered by the real power of truculent near-equals and measured by their ability to impose themselves; their lives are troubled and exacting. The poems only fitfully illuminate a primitive society, still in confusion, settling down perhaps, but neither so advanced as Mycenae had been, nor even dimly foreshadowing what Greece was to become.

The new civilization which was at last to emerge from the centuries of confusion owed much to the resumption of intercourse with the East. It was very important that the Hellenes (the name by which the invaders of Greece came to be distinguished from their predecessors) had spread out into the islands and on to the Asian mainland; they provided many points of contact between two cultural worlds. But they were not the only links between Asia and Europe. Seeds of civilization were always carried about by the go-betweens of world history, the great trading peoples.

One of them, another seafaring group, had a long and troubled history, though not so long as its legends said; the Phoenicians claimed that they had arrived in Tyre in about 2700 BC. This may be treated like stories about the descent of the Dorian kings from Heracles. None the less, they were already settled on the coast of modern Lebanon in the second millennium BC, when the Egyptians were getting supplies of cedarwood from them. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people. Like the Arabs of the Red Sea, they became seafarers because geography urged them to look outwards rather than inland. They lived in the narrow coastal strip which was the historic channel of communication between Africa and Asia. Behind them was a shallow hinterland, poor in agricultural resources, cut up by hills running down from the mountains to the sea so that the coastal settlements found it difficult to unite. There were parallels with the experience of later Greek states tempted to the sea in similar circumstances, and in each case the result was not only trade but colonization.

Weak at home – they came under the sway of Hebrew, Egyptian and Hittite in turn – it cannot be entirely coincidental that the Phoenicians emerge from the historical shadows only after the great days of Egypt, Mycenae and the Hittite empire. They, too, prospered in others’ decline. It was after 1000 BC, when the great era of Minoan trade was long past, that the Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre and Sidon had their golden age. Their importance then is attested by the biblical account of their part in the building of Solomon’s Temple; ‘thou knowest’, says Solomon, ‘that there is not among us any that can skill to hew timber like unto the Sidonians’, and he paid up appropriately (1 Kings 5: 6). Ancient writers often stressed the Phoenicians’ reputation as traders and colonizers. They were the first people who ventured from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, trading up and down the coasts. As skilled long-distance navigators, they could undertake journeys that other peoples would not even think about.

They also had sought-after products to sell and so needed to develop the skills for long-distance trading. Their dyes were long famous and they delivered textiles, wood, glass and slaves. No doubt commercial need stimulated Phoenician inventiveness; it was at Byblos (from which the Greeks were to take their name for a book) that the alphabet later adopted by the Greeks was invented. This was a great step, making a more widespread literacy possible. Yet no remarkable Phoenician literature survives, while Phoenician art tends to reflect their role of the middleman, borrowing and copying from Asian and Egyptian models, perhaps as the customer demanded.

Trade was the Phoenicians’ preoccupation and it did not at first require settlement overseas. Yet they came to base themselves more and more on colonies or trading stations, sometimes where Mycenaeans had traded before them. The furthest lay just beyond the entrance to the Mediterranean, where Gadir was founded on the site of modern Cadiz and Mogador, now Essaouira, in Morocco, to link Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, and assure supplies of silver and tin. There were in the end some twenty-five such ports up and down the Mediterranean, the earliest set up at Kition (the modern Larnaca) in Cyprus at the end of the ninth century BC. Sometimes colonies followed earlier Phoenician commercial activity on the spot, such as in Sicily.

These colonies might also reflect the time of troubles which overtook the Phoenician city-states after a phase of independence at the beginning of the first millennium BC. In the seventh century Sidon was razed to the ground, and the daughters of the king of Tyre were carried off to the harem of the Assyrian Ashurbanipal. Phoenicia was then reduced to its colonies elsewhere in the Mediterranean and little else. Yet their establishment may also have reflected anxiety at a wave of Greek colonization in the west which threatened the supply of metal, especially of British tin and Spanish silver. This could explain the Phoenician foundation of Carthage a century earlier; it was to become the seat of a power more formidable by far than Tyre and Sidon had ever been and went on to establish its own chain of colonies. Phoenicia lived on well after its origins had been crushed.

The Phoenicians were among the most important traffickers in civilization but so, willy-nilly, had been others – the Mycenaeans by their diffusion of a culture, and the Hellenes by their stirring up of the ethnic world of the Aegean. The Cretans had been something more; true originators, they not only took from the great established centres of culture, but remade what they took before diffusing it again. These peoples helped to shape a more rapidly changing world. One important side-effect, of which little has yet been said, was the stimulation of continental Europe. The search for minerals slowly took explorers and prospectors further and further into that unknown. Already in the second millennium there are the first signs of a complicated future; beads found at Mycenae were manufactured in Britain from Baltic amber. Trade was always slowly at work, eating away isolation, changing peoples’ relations with one another, imposing new shapes on the world. But it is hard to relate this story to the stirring of the ethnic pot in the Aegean, let alone to the troubled history of the Asian mainland from the second millennium BC.

For about 800 years from, say, the end of Knossos, the history of the Middle East is indeed very confused if our standpoint is that of world history. What was essentially going on were disputes about control of the slowly growing wealth of the best-defined agricultural region of the ancient world (the empires which came and went could not find resources in the desert and steppe area on the borders of the Middle East which could justify their conquest), and in that story it is hard to find any continuing thread. Invaders came and went rapidly, some of them leaving new communities behind them, some setting up new institutions to replace those they overthrew. These quick transitions could hardly have been grasped by those to whom these events would only have come home occasionally, and suddenly, when (for instance) their homes were burnt, their wives and daughters raped, their sons carried off to slavery – or, less dramatically, when they discovered that a new governor was going to levy higher taxes.

On the mainland, wandering peoples moved about in a zone where there were long-established centres of government and population, powerful and long-lasting political structures, and numerous hierarchies of specialists in administration, religion and learning. These partly explain why the coming of new peoples obliterates less of what had already been achieved than in the Aegean. Another conservative force was the contact many of the barbarians had already had with civilization in this region. It left them wanting not to destroy it but to enjoy its fruits themselves. These two forces helped in the long run to diffuse civilization further and to produce the increasing cosmopolitanism of a large and confused, but civilized and interconnected, Middle East.

The story begins very early, somewhere back towards the beginning of the second millennium BC, with the arrival in Asia Minor of the Hittites. These were a new kind of people in the Middle East; Indo-Europeans, arriving from the western Eurasian steppe, different in both language and culture. But they were far from being primitive barbarians. They had a legal system of their own and absorbed much of what Babylon could teach. They had enjoyed a virtual monopoly of iron in Asia; this not only had great agricultural importance but, together with their mastery of fortification and the chariot, gave the Hittites a military superiority which was the scourge of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The raid which cut down Babylon in about 1590 BC was something like the high-water mark of the first Hittite ‘empire’. A period of eclipse and obscurity followed.

Then, in the first half of the fourteenth century, came a renaissance of Hittite power. This second and even more splendid era saw their hegemony stretch from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. It dominated all of the Fertile Crescent except Egypt and successfully challenged even that great military power while being almost ceaselessly at war with the Mycenaeans. But, like other empires, it crumbled after a century or so, the end coming in about 1200 BC. There is a closeness of timing which some have thought too pronounced to be merely coincidental between the collapse of Hittite power and the attacks of ‘sea peoples’ recorded in the Egyptian records. The particular conquerors of the Hittites were a people from Thrace called the Phrygians, another Indo-European group that later would have a significant influence on Greek culture.

The ‘sea peoples’ were yet another indicator of the great folk movements of the era. Armed with iron, from the beginning of the twelfth century BC they were raiding the mainland of the eastern Mediterranean basin, ravaging Syrian and Levantine cities. Some of them may have been ‘refugees’ from the Mycenaean cities who moved first to the Dodecanese and then to Cyprus. One group among them, the Philistines, settled in Canaan in about 1175 BC and are commemorated still by a modern name derived from their own: Palestine. But Egyptians were the major victims of the sea peoples. Like the Vikings of the northern seas 2,000 years later, sea-borne invaders and raiders plunged down on the delta again and again, undeterred by occasional defeat, at one time even wresting it from Pharaoh’s control. Egypt was under great strain. In the early eleventh century she broke apart and was disputed between two kingdoms. Nor were the sea peoples Egypt’s only enemies; at one point a Libyan fleet appears to have raided the delta, though it was driven off. In the south, the Nubian frontier did not yet present a problem, but around 1000 BC an independent kingdom emerged in the Sudan which would later be troublesome. The tidal surge of barbarian peoples was wearing away the old structures of the Middle East just as it had worn away Mycenaean Greece.

This is far enough into the welter of events to make it clear that we have entered an age both too complex and too obscure for straightforward narration. Mercifully, there soon appear two threads through the turmoil. One is an old theme renewed, that of the continuing Mesopotamian tradition about to enter its last phase. The other is quite new. It begins with an event we cannot date and know only through tradition recorded centuries later, but which probably occurred during the testing time imposed on Egypt by the sea peoples. Whenever and however it happened, a turning-point had been reached in world history when there went out of Egypt people whom the Egyptians called Hebrews and the world later called Jews.

For many people over many centuries, mankind’s history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, the sacred writings of the Jewish people, subsequently diffused worldwide in many languages by the Christian missionary impulse and the invention of printing. They were to be the first people to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources – origins so insignificant, indeed, that it is still difficult to be sure of very much about them.

The origins lie among the Semitic, nomadic peoples of Arabia, whose prehistoric and historic tendency was to press into the richer lands of the Fertile Crescent nearest to their original homes. The first stage of their story of which history must take notice is the age of the patriarchs, whose traditions are embodied in the biblical accounts of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There do not seem to be good grounds for denying that men who were the origins of these gigantic and legendary figures actually existed. If they did, it was in about 1800 BC and their story is a part of the confusion following the end of Ur. The Bible states that Abraham came from Ur to Canaan; this is quite plausible and would not conflict with what we know of the dispersal of Amorite and other tribes in the next 400 years. Those among them who were to be remembered as the descendants of Abraham became known in the end as ‘Hebrews’, a word meaning ‘wanderer’, which does not appear before Egyptian writings and inscriptions of the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC, long after their first settlement in Canaan.

It is in Canaan that Abraham’s people are first distinguishable in the Bible. They are depicted as pastoralists, organized tribally, quarrelling with neighbours and kinsmen over wells and grazing, still liable to be pushed about the Middle East by the pressures of drought and hunger. One group among them went down into Egypt, we are told, perhaps in the early seventeenth century BC; it was to appear in the Bible as the family of Jacob. As the story unfolds in the Old Testament, we learn of Joseph, the great son of Jacob, rising high in Pharaoh’s service. At this point we might hope for help from Egyptian records. It has been suggested that this happened during the Hyksos ascendancy, since only a period of large-scale disturbance could explain the improbable pre-eminence of a foreigner in the Egyptian bureaucracy. It may be so, but there is no evidence to confirm or disprove it.

None of this would matter very much, and certainly would not interest anyone except professional scholars, were it not for events which occurred 1,000–3,000 years later. Then, the destinies of the whole world were swayed by the Christian and Islamic civilizations whose roots lay in the religious tradition of a tiny, not very easily identifiable Semitic people, for centuries hardly distinguishable from many similar wanderers by the rulers of the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This was because the Hebrews somehow arrived at a unique religious vision.

Throughout the world of the ancient Middle East it is possible to see at work forces which were likely to make monotheistic religious views more appealing. The power of local deities was likely to be questioned after contemplation of the great upheavals and disasters which time and time again swept across the region after the first Babylonian empire. The religious innovations of Akhnaton and the growing assertiveness of the cult of Marduk have both been seen as responses to such a challenge. Yet only the Hebrews and those who came to share their beliefs were able to push the process home, at some point before the seventh century BC transcending polytheism and localism to arrive at a coherent and uncompromising monotheism. The first stage of refinement was the idea that the people of Israel (as the descendants of Jacob came to be called) owed exclusive allegiance to Yahweh, the tribal deity, a jealous God, who had made a covenant with his people to bring them again to the promised land, the Canaan to which Yahweh had already brought Abraham out of Ur, and which remains a focus of racial passion right down to the present day. The covenant was a master idea. Israel was assured that if it did something, then something desirable would follow. This was very unlike the religious atmosphere of Mesopotamia or Egypt.

As the Israelite religion developed, Yahweh could be seen as transcendent deity: ‘The LORD is in his holy temple, the LORD’s throne is in heaven’ says a psalm. He had created everything, but existed independently of his creation, a universal being. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ asked the Psalmist. The creative power of Yahweh was something else differentiating the Jewish from the Mesopotamian tradition. He was for Israel what was later described in the Christian creed, ‘maker of all things, by whom all things are made’. Moreover, he made Man in his own image, as a companion, not as a slave; Man was the culmination and supreme revelation of His creative power, a creature able to know good from evil, as did Yahweh Himself. Finally, Man moved in a moral world set by Yahweh’s own nature. Only He was just; man-made laws might or might not reflect His will, but He was the sole author of right and justice.

Though the biblical account cannot be accepted as it stands, it should be treated with respect as our only evidence for much of Jewish history. It contains much that can be related to what is known or inferred from other sources. Archaeology comes to the historians’ help only with the arrival of the Hebrews in Canaan. The story of conquest told in the Book of Joshua fits evidence of destruction in the Canaanite cities in the thirteenth century BC. What we know of Canaanite culture and religion also fits the Bible’s account of Hebrew struggles against local cult practice and a pervasive polytheism. Palestine was disputed between two religious traditions and two peoples throughout the twelfth century and this, of course, again illustrates the collapse of Egyptian power, since this crucial area could not have been left to be the prey of minor Semitic peoples had the monarchy’s power still been effective. It now seems likely that the Hebrews attracted to their support other nomadic tribes, the touchstone of alliance being adherence to Yahweh. After settlement, although the tribes quarrelled with one another, they continued to worship Yahweh and this was for some time the only uniting force among them, for tribal divisions formed Israel’s only political institution.

With the emergence of the Hebrew kingship at some time about 1000 BC appears another institution, that of the special distinction of the prophets, for it was the prophet Samuel who anointed (and thus, in effect, designated) both Saul, the first king, and his successor, David. When Saul reigned, the Bible tells us, Israel had no iron weapons, for the Philistines took care not to endanger their supremacy by permitting them. None the less, the Jews learnt the management of iron from their enemies; the Hebrew words for ‘knife’ and ‘helmet’ both have Philistine roots. Ploughshares did not exist, but if they had they could have been beaten into swords. Saul’s work was completed by David. Of all Old Testament individuals, David is outstandingly credible both for his strengths and weaknesses. Although there is no archaeological evidence that he existed, he lives still as one of the great figures of world literature and was a model for kings for 2,000 years.

Yet it was David’s son and successor, Solomon, who was the first king of Israel to achieve major international standing. He gave his army a chariot arm, launched expeditions to the south against the Edomites, allied with Phoenicia and built a navy. Conquest and prosperity followed. ‘And Solomon reigned over all kingdoms from the river [Euphrates] unto the land of the Philistines, and unto the border of Egypt … And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, all the days of Solomon’ (1 Kings 4: 21, 25). King Solomon made use of possibilities available to the weak when the great are in decline; the success of Israel under Solomon is further evidence of the eclipse of the older empires and it was matched by the successes of other, now-forgotten peoples of Syria and the Levant who constituted the political world depicted in the obscure struggles recorded in the Old Testament.

A tribal religion had successfully resisted the early dangers of contamination by the fertility rites and polytheism of the agriculturists among whom the Hebrews had settled in Canaan. In the end Israel would be remembered not for the great deeds of her kings but for the ethical standards announced by her prophets. They shaped the connections of religion with morality which were to dominate not only Judaism but Christianity and Islam. The prophets evolved the cult of Yahweh into the worship of a universal God, just and merciful, stern to punish sin but ready to welcome the sinner who repented. This was the climax of religious culture in the Middle East, a point after which religion could be separated from locality and tribe. The prophets also bitterly attacked social injustice. Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah went behind the privileged priestly caste to do so, denouncing religious officialdom directly to the people. They announced that all men were equal in the sight of God, that kings might not simply do what they would; they proclaimed a moral code which was a given fact, independent of human authority.

The Assyrians obliterated Israel in 722 BC and most of the Hebrew tribes disappeared from history in mass deportations. Judah lasted the longest. It was more compact and somewhat less in the path of great states; it survived until 587 BC, when Jerusalem’s walls and Temple were razed by a Babylonian army. The Judaeans, too, then suffered deportations, many of them being carried away to Babylon, to the great experience of the Exile, a period so important and formative that after it we may properly speak of ‘the Jews’, the inheritors and transmitters of a tradition still alive and easily traced. Once more great empires had established their grip in Mesopotamia and gave its civilization its last flowering. The circumstances which had favoured the appearance of a Jewish state had disappeared. Fortunately for the Jews, the religion of Judah now ensured that this did not mean that their national identity was doomed too.

Since the days of Hammurabi, the peoples of the Mesopotamian valley had been squeezed in a vice of migratory peoples. For a long time its opposing jaws had been the Hittites and the Mitanni, but from time to time others had ruled in Assur and Babylon. When, in due course, the Hittites also crumbled, ancient Mesopotamia was the seat of no great military power for a long time. A cluster of aggressive Semitic tribes whom scholars call Aramaeans, followers of the old tradition of expansion into the fertile lands from the desert, were the awkward and touchy neighbours of the reduced kings of Assyria for 200 years or so – for about as long as the United States has existed. Though one of these Semitic peoples was called the Chaldees and therefore subsequently gave its name somewhat misleadingly to Babylonia, there is not much to be remarked in this story except further evidence of the fragility of the political constructions of the ancient world.

Shape only begins to reappear in the turmoil of events in the ninth century BC when Mesopotamia recovered. Then, the Old Testament tells us, Assyrian armies were once more on the move against the Syrian and Jewish kingdoms. After some successful resistance the Assyrians came back again and again, and they conquered. This was the beginning of a new, important and unpleasant phase of Middle Eastern history. A new Assyrian empire was in the making. In the eighth century it was moving to its apogee, and Nineveh, the capital high up the Tigris, which had replaced the ancient centre of Assur, became the focus of Mesopotamian history as Babylon had once been. The Assyrian empire was unified in a way that other great empires were not; it did not rely on the vassalization of kings and the creation of tributaries. Instead, it swept native rulers away and installed Assyrian governors. Often, too, it swept away peoples. One of its characteristic techniques was mass deportation; the Ten Tribes of Israel are the best-remembered victims.

Assyrian expansion was carried forward by repeated and crushing victory. Its greatest successes followed 729 BC, when Babylon was seized. Soon after, Assyrian armies destroyed Israel; Egypt was invaded, its kings were confined to Upper Egypt and the delta was annexed. By then Cyprus had submitted, Cilicia and Syria had been conquered. Finally, in 646 BC, Assyria made its last important conquest, part of the land of Elam, whose kings dragged the Assyrian conqueror’s chariot through the streets of Nineveh. The consequences were of great importance for the whole Middle East. A standardized system of government and law spanned the whole area for the first time. Conscript soldiers and deported populations were moved about within it, sapping its provincialism. Aramaic spread widely as a common language. A new cosmopolitanism was possible after the Assyrian age.

This great formative power is commemorated in monuments of undeniable impressiveness. Sargon II (721–705 BC) built a great palace at Khorsabad, near Nineveh, which covered half a square mile of land and was embellished with more than a mile of sculpted reliefs. The profits of conquest financed a rich and splendid court. Ashurbanipal (668–626 BC) also left his monuments (including obelisks carried off to Nineveh from Thebes), but he was a man with a taste for learning and antiquities and his finest relic is what survives of the great collection of tablets he made for his library. In it he accumulated copies of all that he could discover of the records and literature of ancient Mesopotamia. It is to these copies that we owe much of our knowledge of Mesopotamian literature, among them the Epic of Gilgamesh in its fullest edition, a translation made from Sumerian. The ideas that moved this civilization are thus fairly accessible from literature as well as from other sources. The frequent representation of Assyrian kings as hunters may be a part of the image of the warrior-king, but may also form part of a conscious identification of the king with legendary conquerors of nature who had been the heroes of a remote Sumerian past.

The stone reliefs which commemorate the great deeds of Assyrian kings also repeat, monotonously, another tale – that of sacking, enslavement, impalement, torture and the final solution of mass deportation. The Assyrian empire had a brutal foundation of conquest and intimidation. It was made possible by the creation of the best army up to this time. Fed by conscription of all males and armed with iron weapons, it also had siege artillery able to breach walls until this time impregnable, and even some mailed cavalry. It was a co-ordinated force of all arms. Perhaps, too, it had a special religious fervour. The god Assur is shown hovering over the armies as they go to battle and to him kings reported their victories over unbelievers.

The Assyrian empire peaked quickly, and then waned. In one of the first examples of what the British modern historian Paul Kennedy has called imperial overstretch, their kings put too great a strain on Assyrian numbers. The year after Ashurbanipal died, the empire began to crumble, the first sign being a revolt in Babylon. The rebels were supported by the Chaldeans and also by a great new neighbour, the kingdom of the Medes, now the leading Iranian people. Their entrance as a major power on the stage of history marks an important change. The Medes had hitherto been distracted by having to deal with yet another wave of barbarian invaders from the north, the Scythians, who poured down into Iran from the Caucasus (and at the same time down the Black Sea coast towards Europe). These were light cavalrymen, fighting with the bow from horseback, and the first major eruption into western Asia of a new force in world history, nomadic peoples straight from Central Asia. When Scyths and Medes joined forces, Assyria was pushed over the edge, giving the Babylonians independence again; Assyria passes from history with the sack of Nineveh by the Medes in 612 BC.

This thunderbolt gave a Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, the chance to create Mesopotamian civilization’s grand Indian summer. He put together a last Babylonian empire, which more than any other captured the imagination of posterity. It ran from Suez, the Red Sea and Syria across the border of Mesopotamia and the old kingdom of Elam (by then ruled by a minor Iranian dynasty called the Achaemenids). If for nothing else, Nebuchadnezzar would be remembered as the great conqueror who destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC after a Jewish revolt and carried off the tribes of Judah into captivity, using them as he used other captives, to carry out the embellishment of his capital, whose ‘hanging gardens’ or terraces were to be remembered as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Ishtar Gate, which can still be admired at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, gives an indication of its magnificence. Nebuchadnezzar was the greatest king of his time, perhaps of any time until his own.

The glory of the empire came to a focus in the cult of Marduk, which was now at its zenith. At a great New Year festival held each year all the Mesopotamian gods – the idols and statues of provincial shrines – came down the rivers and canals to take counsel with Marduk at his temple and acknowledge his supremacy. Borne down a processional way three-quarters of a mile long (which was, we are told, probably the most magnificent street of antiquity) or landed from the Euphrates nearer to the temple, they were taken into the presence of a statue of the god which, Herodotus reported two centuries later, was made of two and a quarter tons of gold. No doubt he exaggerated, but it was indisputably magnificent. The destinies of the whole world, whose centre was this temple, were then debated by the gods and determined for another year. Thus theology reflected political reality. The re-enacting of the drama of creation was the endorsement of Marduk’s eternal authority, and this was an endorsement of the absolute monarchy of Babylon. The king had responsibility for assuring the order of the world and therefore the authority to do so.

It was the last flowering of the Mesopotamian tradition and was soon to end. More and more provinces were lost under Nebuchadnezzar’s successors. Then came an invasion in 539 BC by new conquerors from the east, the Persians, led by the Achaemenids. The passage from worldly pomp and splendour to destruction had been swift. The Book of Daniel telescopes it in a magnificent closing scene, Belshazzar’s feast. ‘In that night’, we read, ‘was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom’ (Daniel 5: 30–31). Unfortunately, this account was only written 300 years later and it was not quite like that. Belshazzar was neither Nebuchadnezzar’s son nor his successor as the Book of Daniel says, and the king who took Babylon was called Cyrus. None the less, the emphasis of the Jewish tradition has a dramatic and psychological truth. In so far as the story of antiquity has a turning-point, this is it. An independent Mesopotamian tradition going back to Sumer was over. We are at the edge of a new world. A Jewish poet summed it up exultantly in the Book of Isaiah, where Cyrus appears as a deliverer to the Jews: ‘Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms’ (Isaiah 47: 5).