Shortly before my birthday, I got a message from a good friend of mine: "Hey, what do you want for your birthday?". Well, not exactly, because it was obviously going to be a book. So I got some photos of books and I choose my birthday present. I know, it sounds lame, but I'm happy because I choose wisely. I chose one that looked... neutral, or almost boring: A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC , by Marc Van De Mieroop
I chose wisely because most books have some kind of agenda, they want to convince you of something. This, however, is just plainly informative. When something is clear-cut and there is expert consensus on the matter, Marc explains why the consensus is as it is (I'll just call him Marc during the whole thing). And when something is a matter of debate, Marc lifts up the veil and explains the basics of what the debate is about, and what are the main arguments of each side. He may hint about which side looks more convincing to him, but doesn't expect you to share his opinion. And of course, whether you agree with him on some issues or not, you'll still walk away from the book having learnt something of value. If you have some >10 years old son/nephew/etc who is into history, this would be a good gift.
This comes quite clear in sentences like this one, from the introduction:
The goal of this book is to give an introduction to a rich and fascinating topic that can be examined in many ways and from many different perspectives. It is A history, not THE history. The goal is not to write the definitive history of this region and era of human history, but to inspire readers to engage in their own journey through this world of the Ancient Near East.
(Short disclaimer. I read it in Spanish, and I am translating from Spanish, so your copy may have a different/better wording).
This reminds me of something that Romanian historian Lucian Boia used to say. If I understood him correctly, he said that the search of history "exactly as it was" is hopeless; we can only achieve A history that we can all agree to take on as THE history. The difference between history and fiction or myth, is that historians are not immune to facts, that is, they kind of aim towards being good Rationalists.
One of the main gains I have made from this book was to get some order in my head and give me a structure for this period of history. I have read and listened quite a bit about ancient history, which was quite useful to successfully overcome my fundamentalist religious upbringing, but there were always some areas that stayed kind of nebulous. This book does a great job of explaining clearly the history by dividing it into some significative periods, that give sense to the scattered facts one may have in mind. So at least it can be a bit easier to remember what came before/after what.
In short, the structure of this story is as follows:
And after Persia this ends because Alexander the Great from Macedon conquers the whole thing and makes it turn kind of Greek, but that's another story for another book. Now, with this structure in mind, the different historical data have a place to take root.
This is a process, at the broadest of levels, of progressive centralisation of political power in the area. It takes them a few dozen centuries, but at the end we have the Persian Empire, where one guy rules over the whole area and calls himself, among many other humble things, "King of Kings".
This was a description of the "when". It's worth having also a short description of the "where", in case someone didn't pay attention in Geography class. The best description, of course, is a map from Wikipedia:
There, now I saved you a trip to Wikipedia. (By the way, quick reminder to contribute to Wikipedia, it's one of humanity's greatest achievements). Almost anything you need to know to navigate the places mentioned is in this map. Marc seems to use the word "Babylonia" to refer to the whole south of Mesopotamia, which in the map appears as "Sumer". It was a bit confusing at first (specially because in Spanish both Babylonia and Babylon were translated as "Babilonia"), but at least it's consistent during the whole book; and it kind of makes sense, because the city of Babylon dominated the area often, and it's the most famous one for those who are not familiarised with the topic. It's way more likely that you've heard of Babylon, but not of Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, or Nippur. In fact, for most people, out of all the cities mentioned in this book, only Babylon and Jerusalem will ring a bell, and with some luck Nineveh and Ur, if they've had a religious upbringin.
There's 3 developments that put this whole story in motion. In fact, they kind of put ALL of history in motion: agriculture, ceramics and writing.
In many places, this area is known as the Fertile Crescent, because the area looks like a crescent moon if you squint a lot and really want to give it a cool name; there may have been proposals to call it "The Arch Around the Arabian Desert" or something, but the publicists had better ideas. Anyway, the Fertile Crescent, together with Central America and the Yellow River in China, is one of the few places where they invented... well, everything. Civilization.
There are many ideas about how agriculture could have appeared. Some are borderline crazy, or at least quite out there. Turns out it is challenging to figure out how it happened, because at an individual level it was kind of a step back (contrary to what I learnt at school). Yuval Noah Harari, for example, in Sapiens, explains that people who switched to agriculture lived less years, had less health, a less varied diet, and was more dependant on the weather (they couldn't do like the hunters, who could just go hunt somewhere else when the weather didn't help). Ant they also worked more hours a week. This is similar to other stuff along the lines of "Grain is Fascist".
Some other stuff I had read a long time ago (I don't remember where anymore, sorry), argued that agriculture was a banding together of bad hunters, which together were stronger than individual good hunters. According to this theory, agriculture could sustain a bigger mass of people in the same place, which allows for a stronger local military. It's better to have 1000 mediocre warriors than 10 elite ones (contrary to what Rambo movies may make you think). There are even theories about how agriculture made it possible to make alcoholic beverages, like beer, and that this could have been a decisive factor when deciding which way to go, either hunting or planting. These are related ideas that got in my notes while reading the book, not exactly what Marc describes, and I am in no way capable of evaluating the claims above, so if anyone here is, I will be glad to learn about it in the comments.
Marc's explanation is quite similar to the one that I had read before in Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens. Hunters collected whatever plants they liked to eat, and sometimes they "helped" mother nature a little bit, by leaving some seeds planted randomly to make use of the fruits next time they walked through the same place. The plants in the area, specially cereals, were useful for that, because they can be stored for long times, contrary to stuff like fresh fruit or meat.
But what originally was a back-up plan for the days of scarce hunt, started occupying a greater role in the diet. So over thousands of years the agriculture lifestyle started taking shape, in which one stays in one place and takes care of those plants instead of running around hunting. This is a long process, and both ways of life coexisted for a looooong time. Apparently, agriculture was efficient in some strategic places, where there were lots of resources available, and that's where it flourished.
Agriculture is what motivates and also makes possible for lots of people to gather and live together in one place, giving birth to villages and, eventually, cities. It isn't difficult to imagine why; protection, work collaboration, specialization (we can have some metal working guy who works metal and doesn't plant anything, but works the metal really well), and with specialization come better tools to make life easier.
Before reading this book I had no idea about how important ceramics were, further than "hey, we can carry water from here to there!". Turns out that ceramic survives well through time, so it's a key element in Archaeology.
Imagine that you find a Coca-Cola bottle, and you try to date it by the way the logo looks. You won't be able to know if it's from 2021 or 2022, probably. But you can tell if it's from the 2010s or the 1920s. The same thing happens with ceramics. There were "fashions" that appeared in one place, expanded to neighbouring areas, and were eventually replaced by different fashions. This allows the experts to know, looking at a fragment of a vase, to know that it's before or after this or that other object.
This is good for relative chronology, but there's here a relevant debate about absolute chronology. People in the ANE didn't know they were in 2300 AC, because they didn't know who Christ was going to be. So they each counted years as they wanted. For example, with a list of kings, and how many years each of them reigned. There is a key document that helps there, because it describes the movements of Venus during the reign of Ammisaduqa (Sumerians were quite good astronomers/astrologers). But there's 3 different moments that could fit their description, giving rise to 3 possible chronologies of the first 20 or so centuries of ANE history. They are helpfully called high, middle and low chronologies.
Marc seems quite honest when recognising the limits of what is known, and his conclusion if basically that the middle chronology, which is the most widely accepted, is just "too useful to be abandoned". The difference is of, at most, "just" 120 years.
From the ceramics, we got writing. It actually surprised me to find out there is a relationship between them, which makes the first few moves in Civilization IV make a lot more sense. apparently, in one of the first cities, Uruk, we get at the beginning of the 4th millennium (AC, of course) one of the most boring-sounding discoveries ever: some undecorated bowls. It looks as if they stopped making cool decorated bowls, to mass-producing huge amounts of identical simple bowls.
This seems to be a democratization of ceramics. They lose aesthetics, but for the average citizen this was great, because he could now have some cool vases or bowls at home. But this is more than just having bowls for everyone. The important thing is that everyone had IDENTICAL bowls.
Having many people in one city, there was work specialization. In Uruk, the way the goods were distributed, was through the city God, who received all the food, and then distributed it in a supposedly fair manner. Marc doesn't say this, but in my mind there's a jump to some word like "proto-communist"; but who knows, we probably need to know much more before using any label like that.
Having to distribute that much food among so many people, it made sense to have a new work specialization: administrators, who counted who received how much stuff and for what. For this purpose, they created the first instrument of bureaucracy: THE BOWL. ALL HAIL THE BOWL?
It sounds anti-climactic, but that bowl was key. Having standard-sized bowls to distribute the different stuffs, it was easier to keep track, because there was a standard unit of measure: the volume of one bowl. And since they start measuring things with the bowls, they have to count how many bowls worth of grain is in this big box, so we may as well make some kind of mark on the side of the big box to remember.
The first thing to be written was probably some short-hand about how many standard bowls could be fit with the grain in some box. They started having sealed boxes, where the seal says what is inside, and how much. And eventually, this evolves into WRITING.
Over time, these first cities started having influence over the surrounding villages. This is what's called "city-states".
I find it interesting that here we already find the first wars of some scale, although I also find it possible that this was not too far removed from 2 groups of adolescents that beat each other with sticks and whatever else they had at hand. Of course, they later recall it in writing as "I am a great warrior, and I vanquished all of my enemies" or whatever, but it's never too clear how much of these declarations is reality and how much is wishes.
Another curious thing is that these city-states were culturally diverse. They had people of different ethnicities, that spoke different languages. Looks like the ANE was already a mix of wildly different ethnicities and languages 4000 years ago, so that's worth keeping in mind whenever someone proposes any solution to the conflicts in the area; whatever solution one proposes, it must start from the assumption that this area of the world was "never" uniform.
It's also interesting the way in which these city-states governed themselves. There was a military leader, chosen by an assembly, in war time. He had to be strong and smart. But there was an alternative leadership, established by the gods (the priests), and conferred based on administrative capabilities. Here there is, if I decide to squint hard enough, a seed for what we now call democracy, or at least a separation of the civil and military authorities in a legitimate government. Of course, it's most likely that I am just projecting my own modern ideas on them, but it's still fun to wonder about it.
Over time, king dynasties appeared, with royal palaces and the whole thing. There was also an interesting religious move, when the centre of the religious cult was established in Nippur, a city that was around the centre of the Sumer area. So we have the gods of the different cities joining in a common pantheon, and at their head the god Enlil, god of the city of Nippur. Later on, when the king of a city-state wanted to claim power and influence over the others, he needed the favour of the priests at Nippur. Rings a bell with the way Christian kings had to be approved by the Pope in the Middle Ages.
The next step in the story is the centralization of political power into kingdoms. The starting point of this is the first real kingdom of the story: Akkad.
Akkad is the area north of Sumer. Just at the south of Akkad there is a city called Kish, where an usurper took the throne and called himself Sargon, which means, I kid you not, "legitimate king". I like to think that it was some cartoonish plot to make it impossible for the opposition to coordinate while trying to deal with incomprehensible statements like "The Legitimate King is not legitimate".
In any case, Sargon was quite successful, and started submitting other city-states under his control. He was the first guy ever to do this, so he improvised. A lot. His first idea was to leave a local governor from each city at the helm of the city, and to have that guy reporting to him. This had the surprising effect of having constant rebellions.
But the kingdom survived despite the rebellions, and by the time of Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, there had been an important centralization process going on. They had taxes on the submitted cities, a local bureaucracy on each of them, and they had standardised the measurement units.
Naram-Sin also gave each year a specific name (yes, a name, not a number), which had to be used when writing stuff all over the kingdom, thus earning the eternal thanks of historians everywhere.
Another of Sargon's innovations is to make a very imaginative use of religion. He gets his daughter appointed as priestess of the moon godess Nanna, in Ur. If you have not read your Bible, Abraham is supposed to have emigrated from the city of Ur. This is interesting because this woman, called Enheduanna (the name they gave her when she got the priestess job), is the first woman in history that wrote stuff down that we have, and which we can identify. She wrote typical Sumerian stuff, like hymns to temples and cities in Sumer. Anyway, everyone after this point tries to get their daughter as priestess of the goddess Nanna in Ur whenever they want to rule over the area.
Naram-Sin went further than Sargon on this path. He started, as expected, filling Sumerian temples with his daughters as priestesses. He also called himself things like "king of the four corners of the universe". He founded a capital city, called Akkad, and since the new city didn't have a god, he decided that he, personally, was the best guy for the job of "God of the city of Akkad". There was some rebellion where he successfully defended the city and... well, isn't protecting the city part of the job description of the god of the City? Yes it is, and I just did it. So he managed a meeting of all the Gods (priests and priestesses, his daughters) in Nippur, where the whole pantheon of Gods decided to deify Naram-Sin, who was really surprised by the whole affair, and humbly accepted the honour.
This is a fascinating story, or at least I find it fascinating. But the trick is that we know all this from a story written by the Assyrians in the 7th century, which is full of anachronistic details and embellishments. Like every other text from these times, of course. And since the story has quite a lot of fantasy, there are doubts about what portions are historic details, and what portions are fantasy.
Here we meet the 2 possible approaches to this, and any other ancient text: maximalist and minimalist. The terms are quite descriptive, so I like them. Maximalists believe that the writers of these texts had access to other historical sources that we don't have, so they tend to give more weight to the statements of the ancient sources. Minimalists are much more sceptical, and believe that, in the case of Akkad's story, we may have an invented story that was meant to justify some political interests, like in "Hey guys, we the Assyrians are restoring the priest at Nippur and the kingdom of the whole area, just like ancient Akkad. Aren't you glad?". These kind of debates happen with every old text, from the Odyssey to the Bible. I find it particularly interesting in the case of the Bible due to my religious upbringing.
Since Sargon was the first to occupy such a big area, I believe it may have happened a little like with the Roman Empire in Europe. When Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire was always supposed to be the real Roman Empire, until the fall of Constantinople 1000 years later. Charlemagne believed he was restoring the Roman Empire of the West. The Holy Roman Empire of Germany (obviously called that because it was not holy, not Roman, and not an empire) was also claiming to be the inheritor of the Roman Empire. When the Ottomans conquer Constantinople, they try to produce some continuity and claim to be the real Roman Empire, while at the same time some guy in Moscow declares himself Tsar, that is "C-sar", and calls Moscow the "Third Rome". It left a profound mark in the posterior generations, something like a model of ambition to which others could forever aspire to.
After the Akkadian kingdom, there were some centuries of political fragmentation, where no one had power over the whole Sumer area like the Akkadians.
There's an interesting phenomenon in these times, and that is the amorreans. Some may have heard of them because they are mentioned in the Bible. A long time ago I read a book by Isaac Asimov, I think it was "The Ancient Near East" or "The Land of Canaan", where he tells the theory that the amorreans were a people that emigrated form the Arabian desert, and switched from invaders to local ruling class over time. Well, history is actually more complicated, and there's also the idea that they were simply nomadic herdsmen that were just roaming the area since who knows when, and that got progressively integrated into the sedentary model of the cities, and ended dominating the regional politics in the years 2000 AC or so.
By the way, one of the main issues at the time was the constant conflicts between the sedentary mode of life of agricultural people, and the nomad life of herdsmen, and that also seems to be one of the historical aspects inspiring the myth of Cain and Abel, among other things. This bit is not from the book itself, but I find it fascinating.
In any case, either if they were migrants from a specific ethnicity or if "amorrean" referred mostly to a specific way of life, what is most important is that they defined these times. And the most famous of them all was, by far, Hammurabi.
After the Akkadian kingdom, the most powerful city was Ur, in what is called the period of the 3rd dynasty of Ur, or just Ur III. After some time, the most influential city is Babylon, in a new dynasty known as the First Babylonian Empire. The 6th guy in that dynasty is Hammurabi.
Most people, including me when I started reading this book, have the wrong impression about the Laws of Hammurabi, as some sort of legal code, in the way we understand the set of laws we have in our society. But this is not exactly like that, it is just a list of examples of "just" sentences ruled by Hammurabi. They were in a huge stone that had some propaganda effect, so everyone could remember that Hammurabi was the source of justice in which the society is founded. Either way, reading what they considered to be just decisions in court gives us a good window into the minds of the people from that time, and that is likely to be the greatest thing about the Laws of Hammurabi.
During this time, there are also some changes in religious matters. Marduk is established as god of the city of Babylon, and becomes boss of the pantheon of the region. The statue of Marduk in the temple of Babylon is an obsession for babylonians, and they are always fighting with their enemies for it. First with Elam, their neighbours to the East, and much later with Assyrian, their neighbours to the North. Basically, whenever they lost a war, the enemy took the statue as a trophy. So as soon as they could, they organized a vengeance war, and brought back the statue to the temple, and celebrated that Marduk was back home where he belonged.
Around 1700 AC, there is a century of what is called a "Dark Age", because it seems like the cities become almost totally unpopulated. Since no one writes anything, and there is almost no commerce, it's quite difficult to know what happened, or how, or why it happened.
After the Dark Age, there's a very distinctive period. Between 1500 and 1300 AC, the ANE is clearly divided between the sphere of influence of 5 empires: Egypt, the Hittites, Babylonia/Sumer, Elam, and Mitanni (Mitanni is at some point replaced by Assyria). If you look at the map from the beginning, these are the 5 main regions (Assyria was in the area the map calls Assur).
These empires treated each other as equals, constantly interchanging letters and gifts, calling each other "brothers". I suspect there was a bit of hypocrisy and subterfuge involved, of course. Around them, there were small and weak vassals, which were treated as "sons"; if the empires were ever at war, it was always a proxy war done through the vassals, or supposedly restoring the service of some rebel vassal which just happened to have money and weapons from the other empire. Something similar to the proxy wars between USA and URSS during the Cold War.
I find curious, or even funny, the relationship between these members of the ANE "G5". They were rumouring about each other constantly, like teenagers, about the amount of gifts they were sending to each other, and their value. And another curious thing is that an essential part of their relationship was to return among them the fugitives.
This fugitive issue is most illuminating, and it comes from the nature of the system. The constant interchange of luxury gifts depended on a strong exploitation of the workers, which many times decided to just run away when they couldn't pay their debts anymore, and hope for better luck somewhere else. Many did not run to other countries, they just joined small bands that lived in the mountains, away from civilization and free from debts and responsibilities. But, of course, the bosses could not afford to lose their workforce, so this was a big priority. This dynamic may be one of the main reasons for the collapse of the whole thing around 1200 AC.
These peoples that ran to mountains or inaccessible places were called "habiru" in the Canaan area. They are mentioned in some letters found in Amarna, Egypt, and they are described as problematic people. During some time, it was believed that "hebrew" and "habiru" could be the same thing, but eventually a consensus was reached that they are two different things. The habiru, not having social links to the cities, were useful as mercenaries for whoever needed them for... stuff, like "reestablishing and maintaining peace".
Around the year 1200 AC, the end of the world came. Or at least, the first end of the world that we have described in some detail. There were popular revolts all around the place, some earthquakes and volcanoes, and also flooding AND massive fires, because if you don't have both things the it's just a lesser kind of Apocalypse. On top of that, there was an invasion from some barbarians that, in Egyptian documents, are called "The Sea Peoples".
There is a moving story about this moment in history. In the city of Ugarit, they had sent ships and troops to help defend their Hittite neighbours, in modern-day Turkey. Now, it was the city of Ugarit itself that was under siege, and they were writing letters asking for immediate help from their neighbours. The letters were written in ceramic tablets, which had to be hardened in the oven before sending them. According to the guy who dig up the area, he found the letters in the oven, where they were being hardened so they could send a desperate call for help, when the city fell. Afterwards it was discovered that things were not quite like that, so it's one of those cases where reality messes up a perfectly nice and good story that's cool to tell. In any case, Ugarit was destroyed, as well as many other cities.
Whatever happened exactly, it's difficult to know for sure. Just like in the previous Dark Age, we arrive at a moment where very few people bother writing anything, so we don't get a precise explanation and have to deduce things. The cities were diminished, and it even seems that the big Euphrates river changed course, as it sometimes does, and left some cities in the dry. And in those times, no river no food, no food no city.
There are many competing explanations, and all of them have some fundaments in the historical record. Mark does a good job of navigating through them, I think, without necessarily marrying to any of them.
Egypt managed to win a battle against The Sea Peoples by the thinnest of margins, just barely surviving, but losing control of their sphere of influence in the Canaan area, and losing contact with the other members of the "G5". Since they all depended on each other, there was also some compounding effect as commerce disappeared and made the economy break somewhere else and that destroyed more commerce and so on.
It's quite possible that, for the average person, this was all good news. But of course, if you are a historian, it's not cool. And if you are part of the elite that knows how to write and read, it is not cool either, so the texts we have are quite sad, all about how the world is going to hell and the sun doesn't shine anymore, and the flowers have lost their colour, and she never loved me, and other depressing things. Here is a sample:
He who did not die in battle, will die in the epidemic; He who did not die in the epidemic, the enemy will rob him; He whom the enemy has not robbed, the thief will thrash him; He whom the thief did not thrash, the king's weapon will overcome him; He whom the king's weapon did not overcome, the prince will kill him; He whom the prince did not kill, the storm god will wash him away; He whom the storm god did not wash away, the sun god will carry him away; He who has left for the countryside, the wind will sweep him away; He who has entered his own house, a demon will strike him; He who climbed up a high place, will die of thirst; He who went down to a low place, will die in the waters; You have destroyed high and low place alike!
I am sometimes angry at the missed chances of historians giving names to things. This is called "The Late Bronze Age collapse". It could have been called "The First End of the World", or "The Bronzecalypse", but alas, the chance is missed. From here on, I will just call it The Collapse.
There are 3 fundamental changes that arrive around 1 century after the Collapse: iron, camels, and the alphabet.
So first, iron. It is not clear why people started using iron. Up to that point, people used bronze, in what is called, you guessed it, The Bronze Age. Now we enter into The Iron Age.
Bronze is made form copper and tin. So to have the 2 materials, you needed commerce, because it was very unlikely to have for yourself a source of both. How far? Well, according to other stuff I read, some of it was brought to the ANE from freaking England! So the first theory is that, with the Collapse, there was no commerce, so there were not enough materials to make bronze, and people are then incentivised to find alternatives, and that is when they start using iron.
The other perspective is totally opposite. They say that there was so much wealth of bronze everywhere in the last Century of the Final Bronze (I don't know what that is, but I really love the name), that the abundance made the value go down, and iron started being attractive like a status marker, and after that it became fashionable and they started using it.
What is essential is that, at some point, someone discovers how to make iron weapons in big quantities. Kings had always had some ceremonial dagger made out of iron, so it was indeed a symbol of status. But the innovation was in making a functional weapon out of iron.
Just to clarify, iron is in itself quite weak, and it's a terrible idea to make a sword out of pure iron. But if you heat up iron and mix it with just the right amount of carbon, you get STEEL. And steel seems to be superior to bronze in many senses (although there is some debate there too). So when we talk about iron weapons, we mean steel weapons, but historians are not necessarily chemists so they just call them iron weapons.
Up to that point, the best thing one could have was a bronze weapon, which sometimes just shattered when you hit a guy with it; it was far from ideal, but since there was nothing better, you just fought with it and tried to cut the other guy without hitting the weapon too hard, so it doesn't shatter.
The iron weapon, however, may not cut as well, but it will just not break. It is going to break the other guy's bronze sword, will break his shield, will break his armour, and will break the guy, and do the same thing 20 more times, and will still not break. Some people say it's like bringing a Star Wars lightsabre to a knife fight.
But, here is the catch, they were not easy to make. To make bronze you need to reach temperatures of 400 C, and to make steel you need to reach 1200 C. Then you need to add exactly the right tiny amount of carbon, or you get something quite worthless. So as soon as they figured that out, it became a state secret. This was the Project Manhattan of the times, and making sure that you had iron but the other guy didn't was maybe like bringing an atomic weapon to a knife fight.
In case the lightsabre and atomic weapon comparisons are not clear enough, there's an example that may leave it even clearer, even if Marc doesn't insist so much on this point nor does he give these examples. In the Bible, there's the book of Judges, that is supposed to happen in these times. There's a whole other discussion about whether it was written in these times or way later. One of the obsessions of that book is that Israel doesn't have iron weapons, but their enemies do. Specially the Philistines, some people who lived in the coast and were of Greek origin, but moved there during or after the Collapse, and made their home there. The obsession with iron is so strong, that we find the following verse:
The Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron. - Judges 1:19, NRSV
It's easy to read this quickly and not realize what it says. Iron weapons were so powerful, that not even God himself could do anything about it, according to the people who were writing a book where they try to explain that God is the most powerful being ever.
So iron creates a very clear-cut hierarchy between those who eat and those who are eaten, and that defines those times.
When one thinks of the East, one thinks immediately of camel caravans in the desert. This, however, was not always there. At some point after the Collapse, someone domesticated the camel. Up to that point, the donkey was the main means of transport, and that is obvious because of the archaeological proofs and the wait donkeys are constantly mentioned in letters that people wrote. It was always "send me a donkey with this and that", but never ever "send me a camel with whatever". There's also statues and stuff with people carrying stuff on donkeys, but never on a camel. Not until now.
I suspect this is not the most Biblically fundamentalist audience in the world, but I still find it worth mentioning that, if you read the book of Genesis, camels are all over the place, specially in the Abraham stories. However, fundamentalists will tell you that Abraham lived about 400 years before this point, so that's a bit anachronistic. Just the same as the expression that Abraham left his home in "Ur of the Chaldeans", where the Chaldeans arrived quite a bit later, so that expression makes about as much sense as discussing the role of the USA Supreme Court in the First Crusade for Jerusalem.
Shortly before the Collapse, in the 13th century, the first developments were made towards what would later be the Alphabet. The origin is in some hieroglyphs that were used to represent spare consonants, united to a vowel, which could be joined to reproduce foreign words. Somewhere in Canaan, the idea was developed and progressed towards writing more stuff, and later in Ugarit there was an alphabet of cuneiform signals that corresponded to letters, not to concepts.
An important clarification is that "cuneiform" is a system of writing, not a language. The Sumerians created the cuneiform script to write in Sumerian, but then the Akkadians adapted the same symbols to write in Akkadian. And during the constant letter exchange of the 5 empires period, the letters were all in cuneiform script, and Sumerian language, more or less the same way that stuff in the Middle Ages was in Latin, and stuff today is in English.
Finally, it was the Phoenicians who developed completely the alphabetic writing that we know. Later, Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to their language, making a few changes that suited them. And the Romans wrote Latin in an alphabet similar to the Greek one, because they were masters at copying stuff. And that is how we got our alphabet.
The alphabets of Hebrew and Aramaic also have their origin in the Phoenician one.
In this time, post-collapse, a new entity appears that we have all heard of: Israel. A big factor in my interest for ancient history is due to my religious education, where this is quite important, and studying history on my own and comparing with the literalist of maximalist readings of the Bible that I was used to is what allowed me to overcome that bubble.
Mark describes the issue in these terms:
In essence, the issue is the same as with the posterior traditions about the Akkad dynasty. There are maximalists that, radically, accept everything that is narrated on the Biblical text, unless it can be proven to be wrong, and there are minimalists that, radically, consider everything in the Biblical account as a fiction from the Persian of Hellenistic era, with no historical value. There are many intermediate points of view. Due to the fact that what is at stake is important - it includes a wide range of feelings and religious attitudes towards the political situation in the modern Near East - the debate can become unpleasant.
For the maximalists, as I understand them, Israel has its origin in the 12 or 13 tribes that emigrated from Egypt during the Collapse, or shortly before, and then conquer the land of Canaan. They use the destruction of cities during the Collapse as "proofs" of that violent conquest of the land of Canaan. These tribes are united in a single kingdom in 900 or 800 AC by Saul, then by David and Solomon. David establishes the capital in Jerusalem, and Solomon builds the Temple, and after Solomon the kingdom is split in 2: Judah in the South, and Israel in the North. In Judah we have Judah and Benjamin (Benjamin was a small tribe, so they don't get included in the name), and in Israel we have the other 10 tribes.
For the minimalists, Israel has his origin in some tribes natives from Canaan itself, that slowly adopt a common religious identity, from where they get first some henotheism (our God is the best god, we should worship only Him) , and posteriorly that evolves into monotheism (our God is the only god there is, the other ones don't really exist). Possible there was some tribe or group that emigrated form Egypt and join the loose coalition of tribes from Canaan, and that is how we get the stories about leaving Egypt. At some point in the 700s AC, Omri unifies the 10 tribes in the North in one kingdom and, as part of the national mythology, or just to justify some aims of expanding south into Judah, the story is created about some glorious ancestors, like David and Solomon, which ruled over the 12 tribes that occupied the whole of Canaan.
The maximalist and minimalist stories are more similar after 700 AC or so, when Assyria conquers Israel, and disperses the 10 tribes forever. In 600 AC approx, Nebucadnezzar from Babylon conquers Judah, destroys the Temple of Jerusalem, and the Jews live in exile in Babylon for a century or so. Then the Persians allow the Jews to come back to Jerusalem and build another Temple, which is destroyed by the Romans in 70 DC. A bit later, in 1947, the UN creates the new State of Israel in the area, and the decision was so good and well thought out and implemented that nothing bad ever happened again in the Near East.
(Quick disclaimer. I have very little idea about all the reasons the Middle East is as it is, and I don’t know if anyone actually knows how to fix it, so please don’t take that joke too seriously).
The Phoenicians were the ones that invented the alphabet, or at least the one that worked and was the basis for all the other ones. They lived in the north coast of the Canaan area, and other than inventing alphabets they were really good at 2 things: sailing and trading.
They were small city-states that lived from maritime trading, so they were good sailors and traders just because they practiced more than anyone else. Some cities you may have heard of, specially if you are familiar with the Bible, are Tyre and Sydon. Biblos is also quite important, because there they made lots of papirae, which was used for making books. So we have the name of the city of Biblos in BIBLe (collection of books), BIBLIography (lists of books), and in lots of countries where they call Libraries stuff like BIBLIOteca.
In the process of trading, they established lots of mercantile colonies all over the Mediterranean, up to what is now Spain and Morocco. They founded, for example, Cadiz, in the south of Spain. The most important of these colonies was Cartago, in the north of Africa, modern-day Tunis. This became eventually a main player in the Mediterranean, and only lost its power after a few big wars against Rome. Cartago, as a good Phoenician city, created colonies of its own, like Cartago Nova, which is the modern day town of Cartagena, in Spain.
One of the biggest accomplishments of the Phoenicians, which is not mentioned in this book but is worth mentioning, is that they travelled all around the southern tip of Africa, and then came back. Lots of people in their own time did not believe them, specially when they told about how after a certain point the stars well all different, which is what happens if they actually crossed the Equator.
After the Collapse, there was a generalized state of political fragmentation, with many small kingdoms. It was not some kind of peaceful coexistence of small nations that have mutual respect for each other, or anything like that, but it wasn't the same imperialistic situation from before the collapse, when a few empires dominated the area and established the conditions for the existence of their small vassals, that had to constantly pay up their tribute.
In this situation, Assyria was initially just one more small kingdom, fighting for keeping the territorial integrity of what was in better times the heart of their empire. Being in a plain area, without any natural defence, the only defence that made sense for Assyria was offense towards natural frontiers that were further away. Being a society geared towards the military and having iron, they had success in their military campaigns since the year 1000 AC or so, and by the year 900 AC they had restored the land they had before the Collapse. Starting from there, they found themselves in a situation where they were now the only big fish in a pond full of small fish, so they got hungry. That is how the Neo-Assyrian empire is born, the first hegemonic empire of the area; something like Sargon of Akkad, but bigger.
Initially, they were a very militarized society, where all men could be called to serve in the army. They went campaigning in summer, and came back in autumn to collect the cereals in the fields. Being summer, there was not much to do in summer, and it was easier to cross rivers and mountains with good weather. So they established their control over an ever bigger area, making the cities pay tribute as vassals.
The problem was that the cities could declare themselves in rebellion and not pay tribute. When, once a year, the tax collector came, some just did not wan to pay. This is where you can imagine the scene from the movies where some poor farmer explains to the tax collector that this year nothing grew, so there is nothing to pay.
If you decided not to pay, you had to get ready to defend yourself, because sooner or later the tax collector will come back with an army. And there, the defender usually had the advantage. For starters, the army had to arrive where the city is. That's can be like 1 month of walking 10 or 12 hours a day. They will also need 1 month to get back home in time for picking up the fields. So they have maybe a couple of months to deal with you. You have food and water in the city, and you have walls, so you just need to run down the clock, and you will live to not pay taxes at least one more year.
To make up for this, Assyrians seem to have implemented some elements of game theory, instinctively. So if you rebelled and things didn't work out for you, they made sure that the consequences were so extremely bad, that everyone stopped and thought thrice before following your example. We're talking real barbaric stuff here, like painful executions of most of the population, moving everyone to be slaves somewhere else, using the heads of the defeated people to adorn the walls in the palace in the capital, etc. The kind of stuff that people did back in the day, I guess. Our far away perspective can stop us from fully realizing how harsh this experience was for everyone involved. The stuff that the Assyrians did was, of course, genocide, by modern standards. And, just as we look with some indifference today towards them, or at least without an extremely emotional reaction, people 3000 years from now will probably read history books about the 20th century and say that "well, it's normal, it's just the kind of stuff that they did back in the day". I am not sure how I can express how harsh and cruel the Assyrians were to pierce through that psychological barrier of "well, it was a really long time ago".
Another strong characteristic of the Assyrians was organization. When they moved populations somewhere else, the logistics were really complex. Taking thousands of people somewhere that is 1000 km away, and making sure that they receive water and food during the whole trip, every day, is a technical challenge that requires expertise today, with Internet, computers, phones, paved roads, trucks, planes, etc. This was done in a time when the quickest way of moving stuff around was a donkey, and to get a message anywhere you needed some guy to physically make the trip, and then someone had to do the whole trip back to bring the answer. So to get a message to someone who is moving, you need a guy to travel for weeks in the direction where he estimates the receiver may be. It's one of those things that breaks my mind a little when I think about it, and it is easy to forget about accomplishments like that because they don't live some huge stone monument behind.
At some point, Assyrians created an innovation that no one else could afford. It was not something you could see at the beginning, if you were a city that decided to not pay taxes anymore. You had your plan, you stored water and food for half a year, just in case, and you reinforced the walls. With the summer, the Assyrians arrived with their army, and camped around the city. But when the autumn comes they just... don't... leave. Are they going to leave their fields with the food rotting? What are they doing? Welcome to the new reality of Assyrian power: permanent professional armies.
After some point, Assyria didn't just have an army of farmers that had to serve during the summer, and started having an army of professional soldiers that could serve all year-round. The advantages of this model are huge, but it is extremely expensive to maintain, because the soldiers eat food, but don't produce food. Furthermore, they have to receive food constantly, wherever they are. Again, this is one of those logistic marvels that you can miss if you don't pay attention.
This big reform was made by Tiglatpileser III, a guy with a pretty fascinating name. His first successor is Salmansar V, another name I love. And after that, we have Sargon II, in case anyone had any doubts about the influence of Sargon of Akkad in the mentality of these people.
The military juggernaut of Assyria only found small kingdoms in its way. The other old empire that had survived, although weakened, was Egypt, which was not in any condition to do anything besides financing revolts and coalitions of other small kingdoms. There was a point where a coalition of basically everyone else in the ANE almost beats Assyria, but once that failed, there was just nothing there to stop them.
Apart from their military success, the Assyrians also had cultural interests that are easy to miss. Asurbanipal (amazing name, really) was proud of his extensive library, and thanks to the Assyrians we have many older texts that they copied and stored.
After 3 centuries of absolute domination, Assyria disappeared almost from one day to the next. In 640 AC they were at the top of their power, and in less than 30 years the Medes and Babylonians had conquered everything.
The Medes were a people that lived north of Elam, and when Assyria defeated Elam, they created the space for the Medes to grow strong. And Babylonia had old memories of better times, and lots of desire for revenge. The war against Medes and Babylonians, together with constant revolt, made the empire crumble like a castle of cards.
The Medes were not an empire as such, they were not even an organized kingdom. They were peoples of the mountain, with some primitive tribal organization, that soon, in 550 AC, were under the control of Cyrus of Persia. So the Medes arrive and leave quite quickly. The reason why they are more remembered is because Herodotus, the first historian, wrote a few centuries after the fact a story about all of this. He had in mind a scheme of history where there is a sequence of world dominating empires, and since he did not know what to use to fill the space between Assyria and Persia, he filled it with the Medes.
Babylon had at its head Nabopolasar, who founds the Neo-Babylonian empire. His son, Nebucadnezzar, is famous because he conquers Jerusalem and is mentioned in the Bible a few times. After the fall of Assyria, Babylon takes most of the territory that was before Syria. So the people go from one hegemonic empire to another one, and in practice things probably didn't change much for common people.
After Nebucadnezzar, the succesion went wrong, so there were a few brief kings with lives that ended or were ended quickly, until an usurper takes charge, Nabonid. Nabonid has an obsession with the god of the moon, Sin. So he establishes his daughter as priestess of Sin in Ur, just as Naram-Sin of Akkad did back in the day. And, in general, he tried to prioritise the adoration of Sin over all other gods, including Marduk, and that made the clergy in the city of Babylon really furious.
In Babylon, they had some really important New Year festival, where the statue of Marduk made a parade around the city, marking the start of the year and re-creating symbolically the universe. It's a long story to tell, but it was absolutely necessary for the king to be present as the incarnation of Marduk on Earth, that had to defeat the monster Tiamat in a theatre scene, and he also had to make some kind of public declaration of sins, of the ways where he had not been a good model of Marduk the previous year, and to promise to be better in the next year. This is how we got the New Year good purposes that many people still do today, by the way.
Well, Nabonid decided to move his capital to a city in an oasis in the Arabian desert, where he worshipped Sin. Since he was not there, the New Year festival could not be done. He came back 10 years later and converted many temples, inlcuding the Marduk one, into Sin temples. It is difficult to express how big of an insult this was. The Babylonians had fought wars just for the purpose of recovering the statue of Marduk and putting it back into its temple, so this was a really serious issue. This means that the descriptions we have of Nabonid, written by the priests of Marduk, may be a little bit biased, so it's not the easiest thing to get an objective view of the guy.
At this point, it looks like history has been accelerating. This is a subjective impression we get just because we have more available documents, so we get more details. But there seems to be an additional factor: institutions.
In 550 AC, Cyrus is the leader of a small people in the territory of what once was the empire of Elam. Suddenly, he occupies the whole territory of what were until then the Medes. And after a quick war with Lydia (kingdom that had formed meanwhile in modern-day Turkey), he conquered the city of Babylon and started ruling the whole Neo-Babylonian empire.
What seems to happen is that administration gets standardised, or professionalised, in some degree, creating institutions that can stay there even if the upper management changes. So it becomes possible to have a quick transition in the control of the territory of Media and Babylon towards Persia. Cyrus of Persia benefited from the previous centralizations of power under the Medes, Lydians and Babylonians to create the Persian empire, the biggest up to that time.
Here starts Cyrus' genius, really. When there was a bureaucracy that worked, he just let it be, as long as it didn't rebel. When there was a culture or tradition already established somewhere, he respected it, for example painting himself as the chosen of Marduk to re-establish the rituals that had been interrupted by Nabonid. And what is more, he allows the different peoples exiled through the empire to return to their ancestral original places if they want. This gives him a huge opinion boost to everyone in the empire, and this kind of multi-cultural empire proves to be much more stable than the constantly rebelling model of Assyria one century before.
The Persians became the highest layer of aristocracy, inaccessible to everyone else, but overall their subjects had a better life. Assyria had ensured their dominion through threats and exemplary punishments, that had a deterrent role: "submit, or else you'll experience something worst than hell". Persia had a propaganda machine that promised rewards for collaborating: "get on with the program, collaborate with the projects of the empire, and you and your family will live a better life".
Persians had a peculiar religion, where they had only one god: Ahura Mazda. The prophet, Zarathustra, has a name that's now famous for the book by Nietzche, and by that overture written by Strauss that then is used as a soundtrack by the movie 2001: A Space Oddisey.
Apparently, there is way more debate that what I was aware of regarding when the different elements of the zoroastrian religion appear. I don't remember having those doubts back in the day when I read Mircea Eliade writing about the topic, so I may have to re-read those sections of this History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas with a bit more care, and to check also if it's the case that maybe Eliade had an excess of confidence in the date of his sources in this regard.
What is really important about Persia is that they established an area of "Pax Persa" that was very extended, with an organization and administration that were very well calibrated. A great innovation were, for example, the network of couriers. They had some good roads, with stations every N km, where the messenger could drop the horse and take another one that was not tired, and keep running towards the next station. This way, the messages could get from one corner to the other of the empire in just SEVEN DAYS. From Herodotus' description of this system we get the motto of the New York Postal Service: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
In 323, when the year ends, Alexander the Great defeats Persia, and assumes all the titles he can from the ones the previous emperor of Persia had. So the whole empire was then under the control of one Greek guy, and then of his generals, and went through a few centuries of Hellenization, but that is already another story for another book.
In very big traces, this story starts with small groups of hunter-gatherers, and ends with an empire that extends for thousands of km. So there seems to be a constant process of centralisation. Tribes, to villages, to cities, to city-states, to kingdoms, to empires, to one hegemonic empire.
It's tempting to look for patterns in history, and sometimes it is even useful. But it is risky to try to predict the future in base of these patterns. The centralisation process is "constant", but with big caveats. There's at least 2 "moments" in which the process goes in the opposite direction; and I say "moments", because they last about 2 or 3 centuries.
There is a story that I still have to figure out if is real or not, but it illustrates what I mean. It says that, at some point in the Middle Ages, someone in the British Isles looked at the Roman Aqueducts, and wondered what kind of giants had made them, because no man could possibly do that. In just a couple of centuries, Rome had left behind just ruins that no one in the area knew who had made anymore.
That was probably the way life was for someone who lived in the middle of one of those 2 dark ages. There must have been legends of a time in the past, when big kings built huge monuments. But now they only had the ruins, and for as long as they knew the world was fragmented into small kingdoms.
So perspective, when it comes to history, is difficult to have, specially if we try to look at the future. In our case, we have had a few centuries of unique economic and technological growth, so perhaps we have a narrative of things being that way forever. Or perhaps we are in just one interruption, and at some point we will go back to the "baseline" of history as it was forever (I really hope not). We can't bet and be sure of it one way or another, and taking constant economic and technological development for granted is like Scott's image of taking a look at the stone that says "There will always be economic and technological development".
Anyway, enough with my own ramblings. This is a book that is way more impartial and informative than me, and I really recommend it. Sometimes it looks like everything is an opinion on something, and it's refreshing to also read something that is just neutral and informative. This book will not fix your life or anything like that, but it is worth reading to understand the world better.
