Christian Leader’s Institute:

World History 101

The Beginnings of “Civilization” to
1500 A.D.
Rev. Richard Hamstra, B.A., M.Div,
M.A.
 Introductory Matters
• Why Study History?
• Assumptions
• What does one study when one studies
history?
• Sources
• When does history begin?
• Characteristics of early civilizations
Why Study History as a part of your CLI
education?

• To increase your awareness of CONTEXT

• To increase your awareness of PERSPECTIVE (our
own assumptions; limits of objectivity)
• To increase your knowledge of the HUMAN
CONDITION (It was the best of times. It was the
worst of times)
• To marvel at the variety of human SOLUTIONS
(human adaptability, human inventions—
creatures who make tools to make tools, multiple
ways to organize life)
 Assumptions
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for
it's not the same river and he's not the same
man.”
Heraclitus, 6th Cent. B.C. Greek Philosopher

21st. Cent. American, white, 60 plus, male,

Christian, pastor.
 What does one study when one
studies human history?
• The stories, values, organizations, cultures,
artifacts, of human groups and individuals of
the past. History is often the story of how
people order and make sense out of their
experience---it is often about control or
alignment with perceived greater forces in
their experience.
 What are the sources for studying
human history?
Generally three types of sources:
1. Primary
2. Secondary
3. Environmental
 1. Primary Sources
Primary Sources are those things directly left behind
by past people, e.g.
archeological artifacts (carefully
documented in the context in which the object
was discovered!)
writings (carefully understood in the
context in which they were written, edited,
or produced!)
 2. Secondary Sources
What someone has written or spoken about the
past, e.g.
textbooks
articles
lectures
online comments
biographies
stories
 3. Environmental/Genetic Source
Evidence
Environmental: This type of evidence is not
purposely produced by people of the past but
relates to the physical, creational, natural, world
in which people lived, e.g.
 Environment Matters!
• Environmental conditions such as mountains,
rivers, shorelines, forests, deserts, etc…
require different solutions/adaptations for a
culture to flourish. People always live in the
context of a particular environment.
• The various ice ages affected the environment
tremendously and led to significant migrations
of people.
 Genetics
• One way historians trace the various
migrations is by studying genetics.
• Cf. The National Geographic production: The
Human Family Tree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3D3KX0
l7M8
 So when does history begin?
1. “In the beginning……”
2. Traditionally, and for the purposes of this
course, “history” begins with groups that
began to use some form of writing or record
keeping, hence the recorded data for us is
generally more complete.
3. Often, cultures and eras without a writing
system, are understood as “pre-historic”.
 The written word
• 1. Most often writing arose as a form of record
keeping, without which a group with diverse
sub-groups, could not function, e.g.
– A. Owners, workers, and slaves
– B. Warriors and farmers
– C. Royalty and Priests
• 2. Writing began as a means to designate what
belonged to whom---bookkeeping, generally,
only the scribes knew how to write anything
complex.
• 3. The owner’s seal (stamp) is one of earliest
reasons to create systems of markings that could
be identified by others (i.e. read). Most of the
earliest written artifacts are seals or lists of
inventory of property and trade goods.
• 4. Implies an already existing diversified society
with ownership a high value.
A socially diversified, agriculturally
based settlement—is an “ancient
city”….i.e. a CIVILIZATION

Previously ancients were variously organized

for living according to clans, e.g.
1 Hunter/gatherers
2. nomads/pastoralists
3. Slash and burn harvesters
 Sustainable Agriculture
1. An essential condition for a settlement of larger
size was the sustainable (reliable) cultivation of
crops—often cereals.
2. Domestication of animals predates cultivation,
however, consistent animal populations (or
seafood) contributed greatly to a civilization’s
prosperity.
3. Often irrigation was a key element to the
sustainability of cultivation and hence the
establishment of a civilization.
 The Agricultural Revolution
Began around 10,000 B.C. (Neolithic Age)
Middle East—ca. 8000 B.C. (wheat/barley)
Greece —ca. 6000 B.C. (wheat/barley)
Egypt—ca. 5000 B.C. (wheat/barley)
S. China/N. India –ca. 5000 B.C. (rice)
Central Europe—ca. 4000 B.C.(wheat/barley)
Mesoamerica and Peru—ca. 3000 B.C.
(potatoes/maize)
 Bronze Age (ca. 3200 B.C.)
• Perhaps discovered in Caucasus Mountains
(between the Caspian and Black seas), the
mixture of refined tin and copper produced
bronze. Some civilizations arose during the
confluence of sustainable agriculture and the
early bronze age, e.g. Sumer, Egypt, and
Greece.
 Common Characteristics of many
early civilizations
• Sustainable agriculture
• Diversification of social/economic roles
• Use of new technologies (irrigation, bronze)
• Creation of record keeping (writing)
6 Centers of Early Civilization
 Between 5000 and 3500 B.C.
• Mesopotamia
• India
• China
• Egypt
• Peru
• Mesoamerica
http://geology.com/world/world-physical-
map.jpg
Indo/Europeans
 READING ASSIGNMENT about
Indo/Europeans
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-
Europeans
• Especially the introduction through section on
Culture
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm
ons/8/80/Indo-european_-_languages_-
_evolution_-_500_BC_-_map.jpg
 Indo/European influence
• A language group not ethnic/racial, includes
Sanskrit
• Likely originated in the Caucasus Mountain region
between the Black and the Caspian Seas—ca.
6000 B.C. Proto-Indo/European
• Around 3500 B.C. refugees, migrants, conquers???
Fanned out in every direction,—east to
India(Sanskrit) and China, south to Persia(Old
Persian), west to Europe (Greek, Albanian,
Germanic, Celtic, Anatolia) and north (parts of
southern Russia and Baltic).
 I/E influence cont.
• Likely domesticated the horse and invented
the wheel.
• Religion: sky-god, rather than mother earth
goddess as the chief deity
• Patriarchal rather than matriarchal in family
dynamics
• Oral heroic stories and poetry
 Christian Leader’s Institute:
World History 101
The Beginnings of “Civilization” to
1500 A.D.
Rev. Richard Hamstra, B.A., M.Div,
M.A.
Session Two
 Mesopotamia
• Sumer
• Reflections on “religion”
• Early Babylonia
• Assyrian Empire
 Mesopotamia

Map of Mesopotamia

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm
ons/0/0c/Near_East_1400_BCE.png
 Sumer: The Land Between the Rivers
• READING ASSIGNMENT; The History of Ancient
Sumeria http://history-world.org/sumeria.htm
 Early Sumer
Sumerian city states arise around 3500B.C.-
2335 B.C. Agriculturally based, but with
increasing centralized power in hands of
temple priests and leaders called “lugals”—
the leading civic leader—often a warrior.
Over time some city states became dominate
over others, with a “king” ruling more than
one city.
 The Early Sumerian Civilization
3000 B.C.-2300 B.C.
• Early Mesopotamia (the land between the
rivers) sometimes called the Cradle of
Civilization:
• Between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
beginning around 4000 B.C., “city-states” are
arise: by 3000 B.C. using canals to irrigate
fields: Capital is Uruk (3700 B.C.), others
include Eridu, Ur, Lagash, Nippur, and Kish.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm
ons/thumb/7/73/Ur_III.svg/2000px-
Ur_III.svg.png
 Temples/Religion
In many cultures, the center of life was the city
temple.
The Sumerians, chief gods were Anu, the sky
god; Enlil the storm god, and Ishtar, the
morning and evening star goddess. Each city
had its own patron god or goddess as well.
Temples are the local “house” of the god, and
used for worship and storage---grain or other
wealth.
 Reflections on Religion
• Every culture includes at least one religion---
often the driving force for that culture
 Most Ancient Religions develop as a
Means to an End
• The gods and goddess are ways to identify those
forces around us that are beyond human control-
--we name them as a means of understanding
and hopefully influencing them to be on our
side—to give us what we want.
• That “want” is usually associated with notions of
fertility, prosperity, blessing, security,
predictability, order over chaos, victory over
enemies----for 21st Century Westerners--Success
Religions are often the means to sway
these forces to be good to us.
• Sacrifices: are means of feeding the gods—also the priests.
• Some rituals are meant to entice or entertain the gods—e.g.
sexual rituals or burning incense
• Temples: provide the gods a local “home”– often a place to
interact with the god, sometimes a place of the god’s
protection over his/her people.
• Priests: experts in knowing which actions will work to sway
the god-technicians of religion. Often speaking on the
god’s behalf---mediatorial role.
• Worship: often means showing humility before the gods,
for most gods will not abide human pride—hubris.
 Worshippers’ attitudes to the god are
not significant as long as the proper
rites and rituals are performed.
• People may honor the gods, admire the gods,
trust the gods, or resent them, distrust them,
dread them---not relevant….as long as the god is
kept happy and on our side. (Who has god’s
ear?)
• Religion is generally a culture’s rituals, practices,
teachings and symbols used to influence or
manipulate the deities to give us what we want–
How do we get this god on our side---or at least
to give us what we want?
 Religion and Civic Organization
• Most of the time, a civic leader claimed to have a special
relationship with a god (or many), such that the god is
blessing him to be a successful administrator, warrior, ruler-
--often through violence.
• Often, such leaders claim to be the incarnation of the god,
or a descendant of the gods, or have a special relationship
with the god…hence ruled “by divine right”.
• Inevitable power struggles between priests and rulers
arise…who really can get the god on their side? Failures—
e.g. crops, lost battles—call into question the power of
either priests or rulers or both to keep the god on their side.
Did they practice the religion correctly?
 Religion as a means to an End
• Self or humanly interest driven….what must
I/we do to get the god or gods to favor me/us?
• In such religions the focus is on human action
dedicated to control the gods, or at least move
them to favor us.
 Is Christianity such a Religion?
• Certainly there are numerous, especially Old
Testament texts, that include religious practices that
are intended to win God’s favor. The Bible presents us
with the interactions of God in various historical
contexts---must be understood and respected!
• Yet the core of the Christian faith rests on the belief
that the God whom the Bible reveals, begins and
persists in establishing a gracious relationship with the
world.
• The Christian religion is “best” understood as our
response to God’s gracious, loving actions.
 In the Biblical Faith:
• The commanded human response to God’s grace
is love for God and neighbor. This is the essence
of the Christian faith---we love because God in
Jesus Christ first loved us.
• Focus on the rites, practices, actions, teachings,
organization, communities, that follow, proclaim
and promote both God’s gift of grace and our
response of love for God and for our neighbor.
• “Religious” practices are historically contextual;
the Love essence of the faith endures and adapts.
 Assignment:

• In light of such reflections, please read in the

Bible:
• Micah 6
• Jeremiah 7
• Acts 17:22-34
• I Corinthians 3:16-17; 6:19-20
 Notable Sumerian Achievements
• 1. Writing
• 2. Ziggurats
• 3. Mathmatics and civic organization
 Cuneiform
• Around 4000 B.C. Pictorial representations of
objects impressed into soft clay with
sharpened reeds, then baked—500,000
“bricks” found…evolved into symbols of
sounds for syllables. Not a language, but a
way to represent language. Used by various
languages for nearly 5000 years.
• Indicates diverse society, trade abounds,
controlled by priests/scribes.
 Temple Mounds
• Raised platforms
• Ziggurats---pyramid shaped towers built to
house the local god. (human made
mountains). Babylon’s most famous—Tower
of Babel
https://encrypted-
tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-
Wr9Ex7K8zdRBbduI1TF9qW1E6sbdG8RTXT_6o
VeCMhIBky1qd-NJGw
 Math and Organization
• Accounting system based on 60…we still use
360 degrees for a circle, 60 seconds for each
minute, 60 minutes for each hour.
• Systems of business.
• Understanding of the movement of the moon,
with a calendar based on its movements.
 Sumer—Akkadian Empire
• Invasion of Semitic speaking people from
north of Mesopotamia.
• Akad as major city. Akkadian Empire
• Sargon I, 2335-2279 B.C., one of the first
major “rulers” of Mesopotamia. Ruled the
entire land between the rivers as well as great
influence both east and west.
READING ASSIGNMENT on Sargon the
First
Sargon of Akkad: by Joshua J. Mark

http://www.ancient.eu/Sargon_of_Akk
ad/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm
ons/c/c8/Orientmitja2300aC.png
 EARLY Babylon
• Ca 1800 B.C.
Early Babylon became an international
empire
Early Babylon had political and economic power
over most of the Middle East---from Iran to
Egypt’s outpost in Palestine.
Main god…Marduk
 READING ASSIGNMENT
Article by Joshua J. Mark entitled Babylon.
Http://www.ancient.eu/babylon/
Please read the first two paragraphs: “Definition”
and “The Old City and Hammurabi”
• https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Hammurabi's_Babylonia_1.svg/2000px-Hammurabi's_Babylonia_1.svg.png
 Hammurabi
Hammurabi of Babylon defeated Rim-Sin of
Larsa (r. about 1823-1763 BC) and became
the sole ruler of Sumer and Akkad.
 Hammurabi’s Code ca 1754 B.C.
Over 280 laws regulating mostly personal and
business concerns…mostly dealing with
appropriate fines or punishments.
Engraved on basalt rock in Akkadian cuniform,
shaped like a index finger.
Asserts the ruler’s wisdom and authority as
given to him by the gods.
Many steles distributed throughout empire.
 Literary works published around this
time
• Creation Story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_
Eli%C5%A1
• Gilgalmish epic….
http://www.ancient.eu/gilgamesh/ Article by
Joshua J. Marks
• Flood Story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_floo
d_myth
 Christian Leader’s Institute:
World History 101
The Beginnings of “Civilization” to 1500 A.D.

Rev. Richard Hamstra

 Session Three
• Assyrian Empire
• Collapse of 1200 B.C.
• Treaty of Kadesh
• Early India
 Assyrian Empire
• READING ASSIGNMENT
• Article on Assyria Empire by Jan van der Crabben found at
http://www.ancient.eu/article/106/

AND Article by Joshua J. Mark entitled Babylon:

http://www.ancient.eu/babylon/
Please read the paragraphs: “The Assyrians, Chaldeans and
Nebuchadnezzer II” . You have previously read the
sections on “The Old City and Hammurabi”

AND In the Bible: II Kings 15:27-31; Chapters 17-20 and Isaiah

8:1-8 and Chapters 36-37
 Assyrian Empire

• https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Map_of_Assyria.p
ng
 The Assyrian Empire
• Cities of Ashur, Nimrod, and Nineveh
• Chief god--Ashur
• Lasted about 600 years; 1274-627 B.C.
• Ruthless in war, deportation of conquered
populations.
• Conflict with Egypt…major international conflict
of Middle East superpowers—lasted centuries.
• Late in empire, established administrative units
that were taken over by the Neo-Babylonians,
Persians, and eventually the Greeks
 Assyria and Israel/Judah
• In the Bible: II Kings 15:27-31; Chapters 17-20 and Isaiah 8:1-8 and Chapters 36-37
• II Chronicles 32:1-23
• II Kings 15:17-21 Israel (Northern Kingdom)becomes a tribute paying vassel to Tiglath-Pileser—733
B.C….about 11 years later, Tiglath-Pileser, (actual Tig. the III) deports large portion of North
Kingdom’s people---part of Empire wide tactic.
• Judah, Southern Kingdom, becomes a tribute paying vassel state with King Ahaz of Judah, in return
for Assyrian help against Syria/Israel (II Kings 16, Isaiah 7-8); Ahaz visits Tiglath-Pileser and is so
impressed with the altar in Damascus, has it copied and becomes main altar in Jerusalem Temple.
• II Kings 17: Final conquest and deportation of Israel comes around 717 B.C., when Hoshea (King of
Israel) tries to become a vassel of Egypt….in response Shalmaneser (Assyria) captures Samaria
(Israel’s capital) and has another final deportation of Israelites and resettlement of other captured
people in land of Israel.
• II Kings 18: About 706 B.C., Sennacherib of Assyria attacks Judah---Hezekiah , king--- takes most of
Judah—not Jerusalem, Hezekiah pays heavy tribute to Assyria…not enough, so Sennacherib lays
siege to Jerusalem (starve Jerusalem into submission).

Sennacherib, Assyrian King vs. Hezekiah, Judah’s King---contest of the gods.

Background for Jonah

 Assyria falls
• Middle of 600 ‘s B.C.---civil wars, and
depletion of resources, fall of Assyrian Empire
to leaders from Babylon…esp. Nabo-polassar.
• Rise of Babylon ---new Empire is born.
 1200 B.C. COLLAPSE
• Reading assignment;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Ag
e_collapse
And Article on the Sea Peoples at

• http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/
• Around 1200 B.C.—in eastern Mediterranean
region (Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt),
destruction of many well established cities
and cultures:
• 1. environmental
• 2. technological
• 3. refugees/vast migrations
• Sea Peoples—refugees/mercenaries—searching
for a homeland—invaders take control of Med.
Coastal areas from Greece to Egypt. Overwhelm
Hittite Empire of Anatolia.
• Only Egypt—late New Kingdom period, and
Assyria survive mostly intact after ca. 1000 B.C.
• 1200-1000 B.C. Roughly time of the Biblical
Exodus by Moses, the Conquest under Joshua
and the United Kingdom under David.
 Egypt and the Hittite Empire
• 1400-1200 B.C.
• https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Hitt_Egypt
_Perseus.png
 Treaty of Kadesh 1259 B.C.
• First Peace Treaty---Treaty of Kadesh:

• The Divine Witnesses to the Treaty

As for these words of the regulation which the Great Prince of Hatti made with Ramses Meri-Amon, the great ruler
of Egypt, in writing upon this tablet of silver-as for these words, a thousand gods of the male gods and of the
female gods of them of the land of Hatti, together with a thousand gods of the male gods and of the female gods
of them of the land of Egypt, are with me as witnesses hearing these words: the Re, the lord of the sky; the Re of
the town of Arinna; Seth, the lord of the sky; Seth of Hatti; Seth of the town of Arinna; Seth of the town of
Zippalanda; Seth of the town of Pe(tt)iyarik; Seth of the town of Hissas(ha)pa; Seth of the town of Sarissa; Seth of
the town of Aleppo; Seth of the town of Lihzina; Seth of the town . . .; . . .; Seth of the town of Sahpin; Antaret16 of
the land of Hatti; the god of Zithari(as); the god of Karzis; the god of Hapantaliyas; the goddess of the town of
Karahna; the goddess of . . . . . . . . .; the Queen of the Sky; the gods, the lords of oaths; this goddess, the Lady of
the Ground; the Lady of the Oath, Ishara; the Lady (of the) mountains and the rivers of the land of Hatti; the gods
of the land of Kizuwadna; Amon; the Re; Seth; the male gods; the female gods; the mountains; and the rivers of
the land of Egypt; the sky; the earth; the great sea; the winds; and the clouds.
Curses and Blessings for this Treaty
As for these words which are on this tablet of silver of the land of Hatti and of the land of Egypt--as for him who
shall not keep them, a thousand gods of the land of Hatti, together with a thousand gods of the land of Egypt, shall
destroy his house, his land, and his servants. But, as for him who shall keep these words which are this tablet of
silver, whether they are Hatti or whether they are Egyptians, and they are not neglectful of them, a thousand gods
of the land of Hatti, together with a thousand gods of the land of Egypt, shall cause that he be well, shall cause
that he live, together with his houses and his (land) and his servants.
 Treaties and Covenants
• Various forms used in the treaties, depending
on the relationship between the parties:
• Treaty of Kadesh, equals—
• Consistently invocation of gods/God, and
stipulations or terms, promises and threats,
blessings and curses if violated, all enforced by
the gods/God.
• OT covenants follow this pattern
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/KadeshTreaty.JPG/450px-KadeshTreaty.JPG
Proto-Indo-Europeans
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Part of a series on

Indo-European topics

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 v
 t
 e

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the prehistoric people of Eurasia who spoke

Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to
linguistic reconstruction.

Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that reconstruction, along with material
evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely
lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BC. Mainstream
scholarship places them in the Pontic–Caspian steppe zone in Eastern Europe (present
day Ukraine and Russia).[1] Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE
to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BC) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500
BC), and suggest alternative location hypotheses.

By the early second millennium BC, offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had

reached far and wide across Eurasia, including Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (the
ancestors of Mycenaean Greece), the north of Europe (Corded Ware culture), the
edges of Central Asia (Yamnaya culture), and southern Siberia (Afanasievo
culture).[2]
Contents
 1 Culture
 2 History of research
 3 Urheimat hypotheses

o 3.1 Steppe theory

o 3.2 Near-Eastern origins
 3.2.1 Armenian hypothesis
 3.2.2 Zagros mountains
o 3.3 Anatolian hypothesis

 4 Genetics
o 4.1 Kurgan hypothesis
 4.1.1 R1b and R1a
 4.1.2 R1a1a
 4.1.3 Yamnaya culture

 4.1.3.1 Eastern European hunter-gatherers

 4.1.3.2 Near East population

 4.1.4 Corded Ware

 4.1.5 Andronovo
o 4.2 Anatolian hypothesis
o 4.3 Armenian hypothesis/Caucasus
 5 See also
 6 Notes
 7 References
 8 Sources
 9 Further reading
 10 External links

Culture
Main articles: Proto-Indo-European religion and Proto-Indo-European
society

Using linguistic reconstruction, hypothetical features of the Proto-Indo-European

language are deduced. Assuming that these linguistic features reflect culture and
environment of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the following cultural and environmental
traits are widely proposed:

 pastoralism, including domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs[3]

 agriculture and cereal cultivation, including technology commonly ascribed to late-Neolithic
farming communities, e.g., the plow[4]
 a climate with winter snow[note 1]
 transportation by or across water[3]
 the solid wheel,[3] used for wagons, but not yet chariots with spoked wheels[5]
 worship of a sky god,[4] *Dyḗus Ph2tḗr (lit. "sky father"; > Vedic Sanskrit Dy u P㠋t 㠋, Ancient
Greek Ζεύς (πατήρ) / Zeus (patēr)), vocative *dyeu ph2ter (> Latin Iūp㠋ter, Illyrian
De㠋paturos)[note 2][6]
  oral heroic poetry or song lyrics that used stock phrases such as 㠋mper㠋shable fame[3] and
w㠋ne-dark sea[7]
 a patrilineal kinship-system based on relationships between men[note 3]

This section possibly contains original research. Please improve

it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations.
Statements consisting only of original research should be removed.
(November 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The Proto-Indo-Europeans had domesticated horses – *eḱwos (cf. Latin equus). The
cow (*gwous) played a central role, in religion and mythology as well as in daily life.
A man's wealth would have been measured by the number of his animals (small
livestock), *peḱu (cf. English fee, Latin pecunia).

As for technology, reconstruction indicates a culture of the late Neolithic bordering on

the early Bronze Age, with tools and weapons very likely composed of "natural
bronze" (i.e., made from copper ore naturally rich in silicon or arsenic). Silver and
gold were known, but not silver smelting (as PIE has no word for lead, a by-product
of silver smelting), thus suggesting that silver was imported. Sheep were kept for
wool, and textiles were woven.

Burials in barrows or tomb chambers apply to the Kurgan culture, in accordance with
the original version of the Kurgan hypothesis, but not to the previous Sredny Stog
culture, which is also generally associated with PIE. Important leaders would have
been buried with their belongings in kurgans.

Many Indo-European societies know a threefold division of priests, a warrior class,

and a class of peasants or husbandmen. Georges Dumézil has suggested such a
division for Proto-Indo-European society.

If there was a separate class of warriors, traces of initiation rites in several

Indo-European societies suggest that this group would have identified with wolves
(see also Berserker, werewolf).

History of research
Researchers have made many attempts to identify particular prehistoric cultures with
the Proto-Indo-European-speaking peoples, but all such theories remain speculative.
Any attempt to identify an actual people with an unattested language depends on a
sound reconstruction of that language that allows identification of cultural concepts
and environmental factors associated with particular cultures (such as the use of
metals, agriculture vs. pastoralism, geographically distinctive plants and animals,
etc.).[citation needed]

The scholars of the 19th century who first tackled the question of the Indo-Europeans'
original homeland (also called Urheimat, from German), had essentially only
linguistic evidence. They attempted a rough localization by reconstructing the names
of plants and animals (importantly the beech and the salmon) as well as the culture
and technology (a Bronze Age culture centered on animal husbandry and having
domesticated the horse). The scholarly opinions became basically divided between a
European hypothesis, positing migration from Europe to Asia, and an Asian
hypothesis, holding that the migration took place in the opposite direction.

In the early 20th century, the question became associated with the expansion of a
supposed "Aryan race," a fallacy promoted during the expansion of European empires
and the rise of "scientific racism." [8] The question remains contentious within some
flavours of ethnic nationalism (see also Indigenous Aryans).

A series of major advances occurred in the 1970s due to the convergence of several
factors. First, the radiocarbon dating method (invented in 1949) had become
sufficiently inexpensive to be applied on a mass scale. Through dendrochronology
(tree-ring dating), pre-historians could calibrate radiocarbon dates to a much higher
degree of accuracy. And finally, before the 1970s, parts of Eastern Europe and Central
Asia had been off limits to Western scholars, while non-Western archaeologists did
not have access to publication in Western peer-reviewed journals. The pioneering
work of Marija Gimbutas, assisted by Colin Renfrew, at least partly addressed this
problem by organizing expeditions and arranging for more academic collaboration
between Western and non-Western scholars.

The Kurgan hypothesis, as of 2017 the most widely held theory, depends on linguistic
and archaeological evidence, but is not universally accepted.[9][10] It suggests PIE
origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the Chalcolithic.[citation needed] A
minority of scholars prefer the Anatolian hypothesis, suggesting an origin in Anatolia
during the Neolithic. Other theories (Armenian hypothesis, Out of India theory,
Paleolithic Continuity Theory, Balkan hypothesis) have only marginal scholarly
support.[citation needed]

In regard to terminology, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the term Aryan was
used to refer to the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their descendants. However, Aryan
more properly applies to the Indo-Iranians, the Indo-European branch that settled
parts of the Middle East and South Asia, as only Indic and Iranian languages
explicitly affirm the term as a self-designation referring to the entirety of their people,
whereas the same Proto-Indo-European root (*aryo-) is the basis for Greek and
Germanic word forms which seem only to denote the ruling elite of
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) society. In fact, the most accessible evidence available
confirms only the existence of a common, but vague, socio-cultural designation of
"nobility" associated with PIE society, such that Greek socio-cultural lexicon and
Germanic proper names derived from this root remain insufficient to determine
whether the concept was limited to the designation of an exclusive, socio-political
elite, or whether it could possibly have been applied in the most inclusive sense to an
inherent and ancestral "noble" quality which allegedly characterized all ethnic
members of PIE society. Only the latter could have served as a true and universal
self-designation for the Proto-Indo-European people.

By the early twentieth century this term had come to be widely used in a racist context
referring to a hypothesized white, blonde and blue eyed master race, culminating with
the pogroms of the Nazis in Europe. Subsequently, the term Aryan as a general term
for Indo-Europeans has been largely abandoned by scholars (though the term
Indo-Aryan is still used to refer to the branch that settled in Southern Asia).[11]

Urheimat hypotheses
Main article: Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses
See also: Indo-European migrations

Scheme of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BC according to

the Kurgan hypothesis. The magenta area corresponds to the assumed
Urheimat (Samara culture, Sredny Stog culture). The red area corresponds
to the area which may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples
up to ca. 2500 BC; the orange area to 1000 BC.[12]

According to some archaeologists, PIE speakers cannot be assumed to have been a

single, identifiable people or tribe, but were a group of loosely related populations
ancestral to the later, still partially prehistoric, Bronze Age Indo-Europeans. This view
is held especially by those archaeologists who posit an original homeland of vast
extent and immense time depth. However, this view is not shared by linguists, as
proto-languages, like all languages before modern transport and communication,
occupied small geographical areas over a limited time span, and were spoken by a set
of close-knit communities—a tribe in the broad sense.[13]

Researchers have put forward a great variety of proposed locations for the first
speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Few of these hypotheses have survived scrutiny by
academic specialists in Indo-European studies sufficiently well to be included in
modern academic debate.[14]

Steppe theory

In 1956 Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) first proposed the Kurgan hypothesis. The
name originates from the kurgans (burial mounds) of the Eurasian steppes. The
hypothesis suggests that the Indo-Europeans, a nomadic culture of the Pontic-Caspian
steppe (now part of Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia), expanded in several waves
during the 3rd millennium BC. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the
horse. Leaving archaeological signs of their presence (see battle-axe people), they
subjugated the peaceful European neolithic farmers of Gimbutas' Old Europe. As
Gimbutas' beliefs evolved, she put increasing emphasis on the patriarchal, patrilinear
nature of the invading culture, sharply contrasting it with the supposedly egalitarian, if
not matrilinear culture of the invaded, to a point of formulating essentially feminist
archaeology. A modified form of this theory by JP Mallory (1945- ), dating the
migrations earlier (to around 3500 BC) and putting less insistence on their violent or
quasi-military nature, remains the most widely accepted view of the
Proto-Indo-European expansion.[note 4]

Near-Eastern origins

Armenian hypothesis

The Armenian hypothesis, based on the glottalic theory, suggests that the
Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 4th millennium BC in the
Armenian Highland. It is an Indo-Hittite model and does not include the Anatolian
languages in its scenario. The phonological peculiarities of PIE proposed in the
Glottalic theory would be best preserved in the Armenian language and the Germanic
languages, the former assuming the role of the dialect which remained in situ, implied
to be particularly archaic in spite of its late attestation. Proto-Greek would be
practically equivalent to Mycenean Greek and would date to the 17th century BC,
closely associating Greek migration to Greece with the Indo-Aryan migration to India
at about the same time (viz., Indo-European expansion at the transition to the Late
Bronze Age, including the possibility of Indo-European Kassites). The Armenian
hypothesis argues for the latest possible date of Proto-Indo-European (sans Anatolian),
a full millennium later than the mainstream Kurgan hypothesis. In this, it figures as an
opposite to the Anatolian hypothesis, in spite of the geographical proximity of the
respective Urheimaten suggested, diverging from the time-frame suggested there by a
full three millennia.[17]

Zagros mountains

Bernard Sergent associates the Indo-European language family with certain

archaeological cultures in Southern Russia, and he reconstructs an Indo-European
religion (relying on the method of Georges Dumézil). He writes that the lithic
assemblage of the first Kurgan culture in Ukraine (Sredni Stog II), originated from the
Volga and South Urals, recalls that of the Mesolithic-Neolithic sites to the east of the
Caspian sea, Dam Dam Chesme II and the cave of Djebel.[18] Thus, he places the
roots of the Gimbutas' Kurgan cradle of Indo-Europeans in a more southern cradle,
and adds that the Djebel material is related to a Paleolithic material of Northwestern
Iran, the Zarzian culture, dated 10,000-8,500 BC, and in the more ancient Kebarian of
the Near East. He concludes that more than 10,000 years ago the Indo-Europeans
were a small people grammatically, phonetically and lexically close to
Semitic-Hamitic populations of the Near East.[19]

Anatolian hypothesis

The Anatolian hypothesis proposes that the Indo-European languages spread

peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BC with the advance of
farming (wave of advance). The leading propagator of the theory is Colin Renfrew.
The culture of the Indo-Europeans as inferred by linguistic reconstruction raises
difficulties for this theory, since early neolithic cultures had neither the horse, nor the
wheel, nor metal, terms for all of which are securely reconstructed for
Proto-Indo-European. Renfrew dismisses this argument, comparing such
reconstructions to a theory that the presence of the word "café" in all modern
Romance languages implies that the ancient Romans had cafés too. The linguistic
counter-argument to this[original research?] might state that whereas there can be no
clear Proto-Romance reconstruction of the word "café" according to historical
linguistic methodology, words such as "wheel" in the Indo-European languages
clearly point to an archaic form of the protolanguage. Another argument[who?]
against Renfrew is the fact that ancient Anatolia is known to have been
inhabited[when?] by non-Indo-European Caucasian-speaking peoples, namely the
Hattians, the Chalybes, and the Hurrians.

Genetics
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Further information: Genetic history of Europe, Genetic history of South
Asia, and Genetic history of the Near East

The rise of archaeogenetic evidence which uses genetic analysis to trace migration
patterns also added new elements to the origins puzzle.

Kurgan hypothesis

R1b and R1a

According to three autosomal DNA studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most
common in Europe (R1a is also very common in South Asia) would have expanded
from the Russian steppes, along with the Indo European languages; they also detected
an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in
Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b
and R1a, as well as Indo European Languages.[20][21][22] Studies which analysed
ancient human remains in Ireland and Portugal suggest that R1b was introduced in
these places along with autosomal DNA from the Eastern European steppes.[23][24]

R1a1a

The subclade R1a1a (R-M17 or R-M198) is most commonly associated with

Indo-European speakers, although the subclade R1b1a (P-297) has also been linked to
the Centum branch of Indo-European. Data so far collected indicate that there are two
widely separated areas of high frequency, one in Eastern Europe, around Poland and
the Russian core, and the other in South Asia, around Indo-Gangetic Plain. The
historical and prehistoric possible reasons for this are the subject of on-going
discussion and attention amongst population geneticists and genetic genealogists, and
are considered to be of potential interest to linguists and archaeologists also.

A large, 2014 study by Underhill et al., using 16,244 individuals from over 126
populations from across Eurasia, concluded there was compelling evidence, that
R1a-M420 originated in the vicinity of Iran.[25] The mutations that characterize
haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years BP. Its defining mutation (M17) occurred
about 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.[25]

Ornella Semino et al. propose a postglacial (Holocene) spread of the R1a1 haplogroup
from north of the Black Sea during the time of the Late Glacial Maximum, which was
subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and
eastward.[26]

Yamnaya culture

According to Jones et al. (2015) and Haak et al. (2015), Yamnaya culture was
exclusively R1b, autosomic tests indicate that the Yamnaya-people were the result of
admixture between two different hunter-gatherer populations: distinctive "Eastern
European hunter-gatherers" with high affinity to the Mal'ta-Buret' culture or other,
closely related Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people from Siberia[27] and to
Western Hunter Gatherers(WHG) and a population of "Caucasus hunter-gatherers"
who probably arrived from somewhere in the Near East, probably the Caucasus or
Iran.[28][web 1] Each of those two populations contributed about half the Yamnaya
DNA.[29][web 1] According to co-author Dr. Andrea Manica of the University of
Cambridge:

The question of where the Yamnaya come from has been something of
a mystery up to now [...] we can now answer that, as we've found that
their genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers
and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who
weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation.[web 1]

Eastern European hunter-gatherers

According to Haak et al. (2015), "Eastern European hunter-gatherers" who inhabited

Russia were a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a
~24,000-year-old Siberian from Mal'ta-Buret' culture, or other, closely related
Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people from Siberia and to the Western Hunter
Gatherers (WHG).[27][web 1] Remains of the "Eastern European hunter-gatherers"
have been found in Mesolithic or early Neolithic sites in Karelia and Samara Oblast,
Russia, and put under analysis. Three such hunter-gathering individuals of the male
sex have had their DNA results published. Each was found to belong to a different
Y-DNA haplogroup: R1a, R1b, and J.[29] R1b is also the most common Y-DNA
haplogroup found among both the Yamnaya and modern-day Western
Europeans.[27][30]

Near East population

The Near East population were most likely hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus
(CHG)[28] c.q. Iran Chalcolithic related people with a CHG-component.[31]

Jones et al. (2015) analyzed genomes from males from western Georgia, in the
Caucasus, from the Late Upper Palaeolithic (13,300 years old) and the Mesolithic
(9,700 years old). These two males carried Y-DNA haplogroup: J* and J2a. The
researchers found that these Caucasus hunters were probably the source of the
farmer-like DNA in the Yamnaya, as the Caucasians were distantly related to the
Middle Eastern people who introduced farming in Europe.[web 1] Their genomes
showed that a continued mixture of the Caucasians with Middle Eastern took place up
to 25,000 years ago, when the coldest period in the last Ice Age started.[web 1]

According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), "a population related to the people of the Iran
Chalcolithic contributed ~43% of the ancestry of early Bronze Age populations of the
steppe."[31] According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), these Iranian Chalcolithic people
were a mixture of "the Neolithic people of western Iran, the Levant, and Caucasus
Hunter Gatherers."[31][note 5] Lazaridis et al. (2016) also note that farming spread at
two places in the Near East, namely the Levant and Iran, from where it spread, Iranian
people spreading to the steppe and south Asia.[32]

Corded Ware

Haak et al. (2015) studied DNA from 94 skeletons from Europe and Russia aged
between 3,000 and 8,000 years old.[33] They concluded that about 4,500 years ago
there was a major influx into Europe of Yamnaya culture people originating from the
Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea and that the DNA of copper-age
Europeans matched that of the Yamnaya. The genetic basis of a number of features of
the Yamnaya people were ascertained: they were genetically tall (phenotypic height is
determined by both genetics and environmental factors), overwhelmingly dark-eyed
(brown), dark-haired and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though
somewhat darker than that of the average modern European:[34][35]

The four Corded Ware people could trace an astonishing three-quarters

of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, according to the paper. That suggests
a massive migration of Yamnaya people from their steppe homeland
into eastern Europe about 4500 years ago when the Corded Ware
culture began, perhaps carrying an early form of Indo-European
language.

Andronovo

From the Corded Ware culture the Indo-Europeans spread eastward again, forming
the Andronovo culture. Most researchers associate the Andronovo horizon with early
Indo-Iranian languages, though it may have overlapped the early Uralic-speaking area
at its northern fringe.[36] According to Allentoft et al. (2015), the Sintashta culture
and Andronovo culture are derived from the Corded Ware culture.[37] According to
Keyser et al. (2009), out of 10 human male remains assigned to the Andronovo
horizon from the Krasnoyarsk region, nine possessed the R1a Y-chromosome
haplogroup and one had the C-M130 haplogroup (xC3). Furthermore, 90% of the
Bronze Age period mtDNA haplogroups were of west Eurasian origin, and the study
determined that at least 60% of the individuals overall (out of the 26 Bronze and Iron
Age human-remains samples from the study that could be tested) had dark hair and
brown or green eyes.[38][note 6][39]

A 2004 study also established that during the Bronze Age/Iron Age period, the
majority of the population of Kazakhstan (part of the Andronovo culture during
Bronze Age), was of west Eurasian origin (with mtDNA haplogroups such as U, H,
HV, T, I and W), and that prior to the 13th–7th centuries BC, all samples from
Kazakhstan belonged to European lineages.[40]

Anatolian hypothesis

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Alberto Piazza argue that Renfrew and Gimbutas
reinforce rather than contradict each other. Cavalli-Sforza (2000) states that "It is
clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in
part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from
Turkey." Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006) state that:

if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000
years ago from the Yamnaya culture region, then a 3,500-year period
elapsed during their migration to the Volga-Don region from Anatolia,
probably through the Balkans. There a completely new, mostly
pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment
unfavourable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive
possibilities. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European
languages derived from a secondary expansion from the Yamnaya
culture region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from
Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.

Spencer Wells suggests in a 2001 study that the origin, distribution and age of the
R1a1 haplotype points to an ancient migration, possibly corresponding to the spread
by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the Eurasian steppe around 3000
BC.[41]

About his old teacher Cavalli-Sforza's proposal, Wells (2002) states that "there is
nothing to contradict this model, although the genetic patterns do not provide clear
support either", and instead argues that the evidence is much stronger for Gimbutas'
model:

While we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an

Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes,
there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration
from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much
earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic
signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have
dispersed over the years. There is clearly some genetic evidence for
migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues
showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the
distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of
Indo-European-speaking Europe.
Armenian hypothesis/Caucasus

David Reich (2018) argues that the most likely location of the Proto-Indo-European
homeland is south of the Caucasus, because "ancient DNA from people who lived
there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya
and for ancient Anatolians". [42]

Reading: Mandatory Bible Readings

Micah 6 New International Version

(NIV)
The Lord’s Case Against Israel

6 Listen to what the Lord says:

“Stand up, plead my case before the mountains;

let the hills hear what you have to say.
2
“Hear, you mountains, the Lord’s accusation;
listen, you everlasting foundations of the earth.
For the Lord has a case against his people;
he is lodging a charge against Israel.
3
“My people, what have I done to you?
How have I burdened you? Answer me.
4
I brought you up out of Egypt
and redeemed you from the land of slavery.
I sent Moses to lead you,
also Aaron and Miriam.
5
My people, remember
what Balak king of Moab plotted
and what Balaam son of Beor answered.
Remember your journey from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord.”
6
With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
 the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly[a] with your God.

Israel’s Guilt and Punishment

9
Listen! The Lord is calling to the city—
and to fear your name is wisdom—
“Heed the rod and the One who appointed it.[b]
10
Am I still to forget your ill-gotten treasures, you wicked house,
and the short ephah,[c] which is accursed?
11
Shall I acquit someone with dishonest scales,
with a bag of false weights?
12
Your rich people are violent;
your inhabitants are liars
and their tongues speak deceitfully.
13
Therefore, I have begun to destroy you,
to ruin[d] you because of your sins.
14
You will eat but not be satisfied;
your stomach will still be empty.[e]
You will store up but save nothing,
because what you save[f] I will give to the sword.
15
You will plant but not harvest;
you will press olives but not use the oil,
you will crush grapes but not drink the wine.
16
You have observed the statutes of Omri
and all the practices of Ahab’s house;
you have followed their traditions.
Therefore I will give you over to ruin
and your people to derision;
you will bear the scorn of the nations.[g]”

Jeremiah 7 New International

Version (NIV)
False Religion Worthless

7 This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 “Stand at the gate of
the Lord’s house and there proclaim this message:

“‘Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah who come through these gates to
worship the Lord. 3 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform
your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. 4 Do not trust in
deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the
temple of the Lord!” 5 If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with
each other justly, 6 if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and
do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your
own harm, 7 then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for
ever and ever. 8 But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.
9
“‘Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury,[a] burn incense to Baaland
follow other gods you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before me in this
house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable
things? 11 Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But
I have been watching! declares the Lord.
12
“‘Go now to the place in Shiloh where I first made a dwelling for my Name, and see
what I did to it because of the wickedness of my people Israel. 13 While you were
doing all these things, declares the Lord, I spoke to you again and again, but you did
not listen; I called you, but you did not answer. 14 Therefore, what I did to Shiloh I
will now do to the house that bears my Name, the temple you trust in, the place I gave
to you and your ancestors. 15 I will thrust you from my presence, just as I did all your
fellow Israelites, the people of Ephraim.’
16
“So do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them; do not plead
with me, for I will not listen to you. 17 Do you not see what they are doing in the
towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? 18 The children gather wood, the
fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes to offer to the
Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to arouse my
anger. 19 But am I the one they are provoking? declares the Lord. Are they not rather
harming themselves, to their own shame?
20
“‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: My anger and my wrath will be
poured out on this place—on man and beast, on the trees of the field and on the crops
of your land—and it will burn and not be quenched.
21
“‘This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Go ahead, add your burnt
offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! 22 For when I brought
your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them
commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, 23 but I gave them this
command:Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in
obedience to all I command you, that it may go well with you. 24 But they did not
listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil
hearts. They went backward and not forward. 25 From the time your ancestors left
Egypt until now, day after day, again and again I sent you my servants the
prophets. 26 But they did not listen to me or pay attention. They were stiff-necked and
did more evil than their ancestors.’
27
“When you tell them all this, they will not listen to you; when you call to them, they
will not answer. 28 Therefore say to them, ‘This is the nation that has not obeyed
the Lord its God or responded to correction. Truth has perished; it has vanished from
their lips.
29
“‘Cut off your hair and throw it away; take up a lament on the barren heights, for
the Lord has rejected and abandoned this generation that is under his wrath.
The Valley of Slaughter
30
“‘The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declares the Lord. They have set
up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it.31 They
have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons
and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my
mind. 32 So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no
longer call it Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter, for
they will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room.33 Then the
carcasses of this people will become food for the birds and the wild animals, and there
will be no one to frighten them away. 34 I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and
gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah and the
streets of Jerusalem, for the land will become desolate.

Acts 17:22-34 New International

Version (NIV)
22
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I
see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked
carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an
unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I
am going to proclaim to you.
24
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and
earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by
human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and
breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should
inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the
boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps
reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him
we live and move and have our being.’[a] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We
are his offspring.’[b]
29
“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being
is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.30 In the past
God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to
repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he
has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
32
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but
others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” 33 At that, Paul left the
Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them
was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a
number of others.
1 Corinthians 3:16-17 New
International Version (NIV)
16
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells
in your midst? 17 If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for
God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 New

International Version (NIV)
19
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you,
whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a
price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

Reading: Sargon of Akkad

by Joshua J. Mark
published on 02 September 2009

Sargon of Akkad (also known as Sargon the Great,

Shar-Gani-Sharri, and Sarru-Kan, meaning "True King" or
"Legitimate King") reigned in Mesopotamia from 2334 to 2279
BCE. He is equally famous today as the father of the great
poet-priestess Enheduanna. He was born an illegitimate son of
a "changeling", which could refer to a temple priestess of the
goddess Innana (whose clergy were androgynous) and,
according to the Sargon Legend (a cuneiform clay tablet
purporting to be his biography) never knew his father. His
mother could not reveal her pregnancy or keep the child, and so
he was set adrift by her in a basket on the Euphrates River
where he was later found by a man named Akki who was a
gardener for Ur-Zababa, the King of the Sumerian city of Kish.
From this very humble beginning, Sargon would rise
to conquer all Mesopotamia and create the first
multi-national empire in history.

The Akkadian Empire was the first political entity to make

extensive and efficient use of bureaucracy and administration on
a large scale and set the standard for future rulers and kingdoms.
His story was long known throughout Mesopotamia where, in
time, he came to be considered the greatest man who had ever
lived, celebrated in glorious tales down through the Persian
Empire, along with his grand-son Naram-Sin. The
historian Paul Kriwaczek sums up the impact Sargon had on
later generations in Mesopotamia,writing, "for at least 1,500
years after his death, Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian
Empire, was regarded as a semi-sacred figure, the patron saint
of all subsequent empires in the Mesopotamian realm" (111).
Even so, where he came from and even his actual name are
unknown.

EARLY LIFE & RISE TO POWER

`Sargon' was not the name given him at birth but the throne
name he chose for himself. It is a Semitic, not Sumerian, name
and so it is generally accepted that he was a Semite. Nothing
certain is known of Sargon's birth or younger years. In fact,
although his name was among the most famous in antiquity, he
was unknown to the modern world until 1870 CE when the
archaeologist Sir Henry Rawlinson published the Legend of
Sargon which he had found in the library of Ashurbanipal while
excavating Nineveh in 1867 CE. The Legend of Sargon reads:

My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not,

The brother of my father loved the hills,
My home was in the highlands, where the herbs grow.
My mother conceived me in secret, she gave birth to me in
concealment.
She set me in a basket of rushes,
 She sealed the lid with tar.
She cast me into the river, but it did not rise over me,
The water carried me to Akki, the drawer of water.
He lifted me out as he dipped his jar into the river,
He took me as his son, he raised me,
He made me his gardener (Bauer, 95).

ALTHOUGH HIS NAME WAS AMONG THE

MOST FAMOUS IN ANTIQUITY, SARGON
WAS UNKNOWN TO THE MODERN WORLD
UNTIL 1870 CE.

Akki adopted the boy and raised him as his own son. Sargon rose
in stature at court to become the king's cup bearer. The historian
Susan Wise Bauer notes that, "ancient cupbearers were not
merely butlers. The Sumerian inscriptions do not describe the
cupbearer's duties, but in Assyria, not too long afterwards, the
cupbearer was second only to the king" (97). In his capacity as
cupbearer, Sargon had the king's trust but this was put to the
test when a neighboring king, Lugalzagesi or Umma, embarked
on a military campaign of conquest in the region. Ancient
Mesopotamia (like ancient Greece) was dotted with many small
city-states all of whom fought one another over fertile territory
and water.

Lugalzagesi of Umma marched his army through the region

of Sumer and conquered the city-states one by one, uniting all
of them under his authority. He would be the first Sumerian king
to accomplish this to any great extent; and the last Sumerian
king before the rise of Akkad. He seems to have earlier agreed
to leave Kish alone but, after conquering Uruk, he decided to
move on Kish. Bauer writes how, "Ur-Zababa, learning that the
army of the conqueror was approaching his city, grew so
frightened that he `sprinkled his legs'"(97). He had grown
suspicious of Sargon and, although there seems to be no
evidence that the cupbearer had given him cause, decided to
send him to Lugalzagesi ostensibly with an offer for peace.
Whether Ur-Zababa actually included in the message anything
about terms and conditions is not known; what is known is that
message asked Lugalzagesi to kill Sargon upon receiving it. For
whatever reason, Lugalzagesi refused to comply and instead
invited Sargon to join him. Together, they marched on Kish and
took the city easily. Ur-Zababa escaped and went into hiding.

Precisely what happened next is unclear owing to the many

legends which grew up around Sargon's life and reign over the
centuries. It is possible that he had an affair with Lugalzagesi's
wife at this point or that he was sent on a mission which he
turned into the first engagement of his own conquest of the
region. Whatever happened between him and Lugalzagesi, they
were as quickly antagonists as they had been allies. Sargon
marched on Uruk and took it. Lugalzagesi marched his army
from Kish to meet Sargon in battle and was defeated. Sargon
then put him in chains, tied a rope around his neck, and took him
to the city of Nippur, sacred to the god Enlil upon whom
Lugalzagesi had relied, and forced him to march in humiliation
through the Enlil's gate. Sargon chose for himself the
goddess Ishtar (Inanna) for his divine protector and, with
both Ur-Zababa and Lugalzagesi out of the way, proclaimed
himself king of Kish and swiftly subdued the region of Sumer.

Map of the Akkadian Empire

MILITARY CAMPAIGNS & EMPIRE BUILDING

When Sargon overthrew Lugalzagesi and seized power he
gained an already united kingdom which he could use to
advantage in military campaigns to establish the first empire
over all of Mesopotamia. He may have been helped in this by his
own legend which established his humble backgrounds. As in
later ages and other cultures, up to the present day, class
distinctions in the Sumerian cities had led to a growing
resentment by the lower class for the upper elite. The wealthiest
citizens were able to take as much land as they could hold and
the lower classes routinely felt disenfranchised. Sargon's tale of
his humble beginnings as a gardener would have appealed to the
large numbers of working-class Sumerians who may have seen
him as a liberator and reformer. Directly after his rise to power,
however, the city-states and their ruling elite hardly accepted
Sargon with grace and submission; they rebelled against their
new ruler, and forced him to prove his legitimacy as king
through military might.

After conquering Sumer, he either built a new city or renovated

an older one, Akkad (also known as Agade) on the banks of the
Euphrates River. This was a complete break with precedent in
that, previously, the king of an existing city conquered another
for the glory of the home city and the resources which would now
be available. Sargon, on the other hand, conquered for no city,
only for himself and, once he had control of the area, then built
his own city to enjoy the benefits of conquest. Not content with
what he had accomplished thus far, he set out again on
campaign. Bauer writes:

With the Mesopotamian plain under his control, Sargon set out
to build an empire that stretched beyond Mesopotamia. He led
these soldiers in campaign after campaign: `Sargon, the king of
Kish,' reads one of his tablets, `triumphed in thirty-four battles.'
He crossed the Tigris and seized land from the Elamites. He
fought his way north to the city of Mari, which he captured, and
then pushed even further into the land of another Semitic tribe,
wilder and more nomadic than his own Akkadians: the Amorites,
who ranged across the land west of the Caspian Sea.
Campaigning up the Tigris, he reached and conquered the little
northern city of Ashur... After this, he ranged even farther
north and asserted his rule over the equally small city of
Nineveh...Sargon may even have invaded Asia Minor (101).

He may also have taken Cyprus and claims to have marched to

the Mediterranean Sea and sent ships as far away as India for
trade. He marched throughout Mesopotamia conquering
one city-state after another and expanded his empire as far as
Lebanon and the Taurus mountains of Turkey and then went
even further. He instituted military practices of combining
different types of fighting forces in looser formations (to enable
greater mobility and adaptability on the field) which became
standard down through the time of Alexander the Great. He
swept across the land with his army until he had formed the
formed the first empire in the world. Kriwaczek writes:

There had been Mesopotamian heroes before of course. The

famous kings of early Uruk, like Gilgamesh and his father
Lugalbanda, were the protagonists of a series of fantastical
accounts and tales of outlandish deeds that became mainstays of
the Sumerian literary canon and were copied and recopied
inscribal schools and palace scriptoria for centuries, sometimes
millennia. But they belong to the age ofmythology rather than
heroic legend; they told of intimate intercourse with the gods,
battles with fearful monsters, the search for immortality and
extraordinary other-worldly adventures. With the advent of
Sargon, his sons and grandsons, the tales become, not
necessarily more believable, but at least centred on the
here-and-now of earthly life (Bauer, 113).
 INSCRIPTION OF THE BIRTH OF KING SARGON OF AKKAD

THE AKKADIAN EMPIRE

Forming an empire is one thing; but keeping it operating is quite
another. Still, in administration, Sargon proved himself as
capable as he was in military conquest. In order to maintain his
presence throughout his empire, Sargon strategically placed his
best and most trusted men in positions of power in the various
cities. The "Citizens of Akkad", as a later Babylonian text calls
them, were the governors and administrators in over 65
different cities. One of his inscriptions reads, "From the sea
above to the sea below, the sons of Akkad held the chiefdoms of
his cities" and Bauer notes how, "In this kingdom, the Sumerians
rapidly found themselves living as foreigners in their own
cities...When Sargon took over a city, it became an Akkadian
stronghold, staffed with Akkadian officials and garrisoned with
Akkadian troops" (99). Sargon also cleverly placed his daughter,
Enheduanna, as High Priestess of Inanna at Ur and, through her,
seems to have able to manipulate religious, political, and
cultural affairs from afar. Enheduanna is recognized today as the
world's first writer known by name and, from what is known of
her life, she seems to have been a very able and powerful
administrator in addition to her literary talents.

The stability provided by this empire gave rise to the

construction of roads, improved irrigation, a wider sphere of
influence in trade, as well as developments in arts and sciences.
The Akkadian Empire created the first postal system where clay
tablets inscribed in cuneiform Akkadian script were wrapped in
outer clay envelopes marked with the name and address of the
recipient and the seal of the sender. These letters could not be
opened except by the person they were intended for because
there was no way to open the clay envelope save by breaking it,
thus ensuring privacy in correspondence. Sargon also
standardized weights and measures for use in trade and daily
commerce, initiated a system of taxation which was fair to all
social classes, and engaged in numerous building projects such
as the restoration of Babylon (which, according to some
sources, he founded - though this is not generally accepted as
true). He also created, trained, and equipped a full-time army -
at least in the city of Akkad - where, as an inscription reads,
5400 soldiers "ate bread daily" with the king. While this does not
seem to be the kind of professional army later created by the
Assyrian king Tilgath Pileser III, (as it seems it was neither
year-round nor kept in a near-constant state of mobilization) it
was a great advance over the armies of the past.

Even with these improvements to the lives of the citizens of

Mesopotamia, the people still rebelled against Akkadian rule.
Throughout his life Sargon would continue to encounter
uprisings as city-states asserted their autonomy and rose
against the empire. As the centuries passed, however, whatever
difficulties they had with Sargon's rule were forgotten and all
that was remembered were his heroic feats and the `golden age'
of the Akkadians. For the next 3,000 years the Babylonians
would tell tales of the kings who rose against Sargon of Akkad
and of his glorious victories, citing Sargon's own words from his
purported autobiography,

In my old age of 55, all the lands revolted against me, and they
besieged me in Agade but the old lion still had teeth and claws, I
went forth to battle and defeated them: I knocked them over and
destroyed their vast army. Now, any king who wants to call
himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go!

According to the Sumerian king list, Sargon reigned for 56 years

and died in old age of natural causes. If he had seemed larger
than life to his people during his reign, he assumed an almost
god-like status in death. Kriwaczek writes:

Up until now, civilization based itself upon the belief that

humanity was created by gods for their own purposes. The cities,
the repositories of civilization, were divine foundations, having
started, we guess, as sacred pilgrimage centres. Each city was the
creation and home of a particular god. It is as if `real life' was
the one lived by the gods in the divine realm while what went on
down here on earth was a largely irrelevant sideshow. The age of
Sargon and Naram-Sin altered all that, switched the focus to the
human world, and introduced a new conception of the meaning
of the universe: one that made people rather than gods the
principal subjects of the Mesopotamian story. Humanity was
now in control. Men - and women - became rulers of their own
destiny. To be sure, people were still pious, still presented
sacrifices to the temples, offered the libations, performed the
 rites, invoked the gods' names at every opportunity. But the
piety of the age now had a quite different flavour (119).

BIRTH OF SARGON OF AKKAD

LEGEND & LEGACY

The legends which grew up around Sargon and his dynasty were
still being written, copied, and performed in the last days of the
Assyrian Empire (612 BCE) and the famous copper head of
Sargon (found at Nineveh in 1931 CE, making clear his
importance to the Assyrians) is one of the most instantly
recognizable works of Mesopotamian art. The story of the baby
set forth in a basket on the river, who is found by nobility and
grows up to be a great leader of his people, was used to great
effect by the Hebrew scribe who borrowed it to write the biblical
Book of Exodus and the story of the hero Moses. Sargon's story
is the tale of the hero who rises from obscure beginnings to save
his people. Whether he was seen as this kind of savior by those
who lived under his reign is doubtful considering the number of
rebellions he had to put down but to those who came after him,
those who lived under the occupation of the Gutians (described
by scholar Samuel Noah Kramer as demoralizing, destructive,
and "a ruthless, barbaric hoarde"), he and his dynasty
represented the glorious age of hero-kings which was now gone.
The tales of Sargon are thought to have inspired the Sumerians
to rise up and throw off the oppressive Gutian rule in c. 2046
BCE. Under the Sumerian kings Utu-Hegel and Ur-Nammu, the
Gutians were driven from Sumer which allowed for the
flourishing of the so-called Sumerian Renaissance (2047-1750
BCE). The great Sumerian kings of the Ur III Period, Ur-Nammu
(reigned 2047-2030 BCE) and Shulgi of Ur (reigned
2029-1982 BCE) both patterned their public images after those
of Sargon and Naram-Sin.

After Sargon's death, the empire passed to his son Rimush, who
was forced to endure what his father had and put down the
rebellions which contested his legitimacy. Rimush reigned for
nine years and, when he died, the kingship passed to Sargon's
other son, Manishtusu who ruled for the next fifteen years.
Though both sons ruled well, the height of the Akkadian Empire
was realized under Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin. During his
reign, the empire grew and flourished beyond the boundaries
even Sargon had attained. After his death, his son
Shar-Kali-Sharri became ruler and, at this time, the
empire began to unravel as city-states broke away to form their
own independent kingdoms.

Shar-Kali-Sarri waged almost continual war against the

Elamites, the Amorites and the invading Gutians while trying to
hold the empire together but, finally, it fell apart. The Gutian
Invasion has been most commonly credited with the collapse of
the Akkadian Empire and the Mesopotamian dark age which
ensued and this was certainly the view of later Mesopotamian
writers who portrayed the Gutians as destroyers of civilization.
Recent studies, however, suggest that it was most likely climate
change which caused a famine and, perhaps, disruption in trade,
weakening the empire to the point where the type of invasions
and rebellions which were easily met and put down in the past
could no longer be managed as effectively. Famine is alluded to
in a later work known as The Curse of Agade (written c.
2047-1750 BCE) which tells of the destruction of Akkad by the
will of the gods. Whether famine, invasion, the wrath of the gods,
or all three, the city of Akkad fell, the great kings were gone, and
the empire passed into the legends which would be told, re-told,
written, and copied until the stories of what once was became all
that was left of the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great.

Reading: Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh is the semi-mythic King of Uruk best known
from The Epic of Gilgamesh (written c. 2150-1400 BCE) the
great Sumerian/Babylonian poetic work which
pre-dates Homer's writing by 1500 years and, therefore,
stands as the oldest piece of epic western literature.
Gilgamesh's father was the Priest-King Lugalbanda (who is
featured in two poems concerning his magical abilities which
pre-date Gilgamesh) and his mother the goddess Ninsun (the
Holy Mother and Great Queen) and, accordingly, Gilgamesh was
a demi-god who was said to have lived an exceptionally long life
(The Sumerian King List records his reign as 126 years) and to
be possessed of super-human strength.

Known as 'Bilgames' in the Sumerian, 'Gilgamos' in Greek, and

associated closely with the figure of Dumuzi from the Sumerian
poem The Descent of Inanna, Gilgamesh is widely accepted as
the historical 5th king of Uruk whose influence was so profound
that myths of his divine status grew up around his deeds and
finally culminated in the tales found in The Epic of Gilgamesh. In
the Sumerian tale of Inanna and the Huluppu Tree, in which the
goddess Inanna plants a troublesome tree in her garden and
appeals to her family for help with it, Gilgamesh appears as her
loyal brother who comes to her aid. In this story, Inanna (the
goddess of love and war and one of the most powerful and
popular of Mesopotamian deities) plants a tree in her garden
with the hope of one day making a chair and bed from it. The
tree becomes infested, however, by a snake at its roots, a
female demon (lilitu) in its center, and an Anzu bird in its
branches. No matter what, Inanna cannot rid herself of the pests
and so appeals to her brother, Utu, god of the sun, for help. Utu
refuses but her plea is heard by Gilgamesh who comes, heavily
armed, and kills the snake. The demon and Anzu bird then flee
and Gilgamesh, after taking the branches for himself, presents
the trunk to Inanna to build her bed and chair from. This is
thought to be the first appearance of Gilgamesh in heroic poetry
and the fact that he rescues a powerful and potent goddess from
a difficult situation shows the high regard in which he was held
even early on.The historical king was eventually accorded
completely divine status as a god. He was seen as the brother of
Inanna, one of the most popular goddesses, if not the most
popular, in all of Mesopotamia. Prayers found inscribed on clay
tablets address Gilgamesh in the afterlife as a judge in the
Underworld comparable in wisdom to the famous Greek judges
of the Underworld, Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus.

GILGAMESH IS WIDELY ACCEPTED AS

THE HISTORICAL 5TH KING OF URUK
WHOSE INFLUENCE WAS SO PROFOUND
THAT MYTHS DEVELOPED OF HIS DIVINE
STATUS.

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the great king is thought to be too

proud and arrogant by the gods and so they decide to teach him
a lesson by sending the wild man, Enkidu, to humble him. Enkidu
and Gilgamesh, after a fierce battle in which neither are bested,
become friends and embark on adventures together. When
Enkidu is struck with death, Gilgamesh falls into a deep grief and,
recognizing his own mortality through the death of his friend,
questions the meaning of life and the value of human
accomplishment in the face of ultimate extinction. Casting away
all of his old vanity and pride, Gilgamesh sets out on a quest to
find the meaning of life and, finally, some way of defeating death.
In doing so, he becomes the first epic hero in world literature.
The grief of Gilgamesh, and the questions his friend's death
evoke, resonate with every human being who has wrestled with
the meaning of life in the face of death. Although Gilgamesh
ultimately fails to win immortality in the story, his deeds live on
through the written word and, so, does he.
 Part of Tablet V, the Epic of Gilgamesh

Since The Epic of Gilgamesh existed in oral form long before it

was written down, there has been much debate over whether
the extant tale is more early Sumerian or later Babylonian in
cultural influence. The best preserved version of the story comes
from the Babylonian writer Shin-Leqi-Unninni (wrote 1300-1000
BCE) who translated, edited, and may have embellised upon,
the original story. Regarding this, the Sumerian scholar Samuel
Noah Kramer writes:
Of the various episodes comprising The Epic of Gilgamesh,
several go back to Sumerian prototypes actually involving the
hero Gilgamesh. Even in those episodes which lack Sumerian
counterparts, most of the individual motifs reflect Sumerian
mythic and epic sources. In no case, however, did the
 Babylonian poets slavishly copy the Sumerian material. They so
modified its content and molded its form, in accordance with
their own temper and heritage, that only the bare nucleus of the
Sumerian original remains recognizable. As for the plot
structure of the epic as a whole - the forceful and fateful episodic
drama of the restless, adventurous hero and his inevitable
disillusionment - it is definitely a Babylonian, rather than a
Sumerian, development and achievement. (History Begins
at Sumer, 270).

Historical evidence for Gilgamesh's existence is found in

inscriptions crediting him with the building of the great walls of
Uruk (modern day Warka, Iraq) which, in the story, are the
tablets upon which he first records his great deeds and his quest
for the meaning of life. There are other references to him by
known historical figures of his time (26th century BCE) such as
King Enmebaragesi of Kish and, of course, the Sumerian King
List and the legends which grew up around his reign. In the
present day, Gilgamesh is still spoken of and written about. A
German team of Archaeologists claim to have discovered
the Tomb of Gilgamesh in April of 2003 CE. Archaeological
excavations, conducted through modern technology involving
magnetization in and around the old riverbed of the Euphrates,
have revealed garden enclosures, specific bulidings, and
structures described in The Epic of Gilgamesh including the
great king's tomb. According to legend, Gilgmesh was buried at
the bottom of the Euphrates when the waters parted upon his
death.

Reading: Babylon
Babylon is the most famous city from
ancientMesopotamia whose ruins lie in modern-day Iraq 59
miles (94 kilometres) southwest of Baghdad. The name is
thought to derive from bav-il or bav-ilim which, in the Akkadian
language of the time, meant 'Gate of God' or `Gate of the Gods'
and `Babylon' coming from Greek. The city owes its fame (or
infamy) to the many references the Bible makes to it; all of
which are unfavourable. In the Book of Genesis, chapter 11,
Babylon is featured in the story of The Tower of Babel and the
Hebrews claimed the city was named for the confusion which
ensued after God caused the people to begin speaking in
different languages so they would not be able to complete their
great tower to the heavens (the Hebrew word bavelmeans
`confusion').

Babylon also appears prominently in the biblical books of Daniel,

Jeremiah, and Isaiah, among others, and, most notably, The
Book of Revelation. It was these biblical references which
sparked interest in Mesopotamian archaeology and the
expedition by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey who
first excavated the ruins of Babylon in 1899 CE. Outside of the
sinful reputation given it by the Bible, the city is known for its
impressive walls and buildings, its reputation as a great seat of
learning and culture, the formation of a code of law which
pre-dates the Mosaic Law, and for the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon which were man-made terraces of flora and fauna,
watered by machinery, which were cited by Herodotus as one
of the Seven Wonders of the World.

THE OLD CITY & HAMMURABI

Babylon was founded at some point prior to the reign of Sargon
of Akkad (also known as Sargon the Great) who ruled from
2334-2279 BCE and claimed to have built temples at Babylon
(other ancient sources seem to indicate that Sargon himself
founded the city). At that time, Babylon seems to have been a
minor city or perhaps a large port town on the Euphrates River at
the point where it runs closest to the river Tigris. Whatever early
role the city played in the ancient world is lost to modern-day
scholars because the water level in the region has risen steadily
over the centuries and the ruins of Old Babylon have become
inaccessible. The ruins which were excavated by Koldewey, and
are visible today, date only to well over one thousand years after
the city was founded. The historian Paul Kriwaczek, among
other scholars, claims it was established by the Amorites
following the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur. This
information, and any other pertaining to Old Babylon, comes to
us today through artifacts which were carried away from the city
after the Persian invasion or those which were created
elsewhere.
 EVERY ANCIENT WRITER MENTIONS
BABYLON WITH A TONE OF AWE AND
REVERENCE.

The known history of Babylon, then, begins with its most famous
king: Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE). This
obscure Amorite prince ascended to the throne upon
the abdication of his father, King Sin-Muballit, and fairly quickly
transformed the city into one of the most powerful and
influential in all of Mesopotamia. Hammurabi's law codes are
well known but are only one example of the policies he
implemented to maintain peace and encourage prosperity. He
enlarged and heightened the walls of the city, engaged in great
public works which included opulent temples and canals, and
made diplomacy an integral part of his administration. So
successful was he in both diplomacy and war that, by 1755 BCE,
he had united all of Mesopotamia under the rule of Babylon
which, at this time, was the largest city in the world, and named
his realm Babylonia.

THE ASSYRIANS, CHALDEANS,

& NEBUCHADNEZZAR II
Following Hammurabi's death, his empire fell apart and
Babylonia dwindled in size and scope until Babylon was easily
sacked by the Hittites in 1595 BCE. The Kassites followed the
Hittites and re-named the city Karanduniash. The meaning of
this name is not clear. The Assyrians then followed the Kassites
in dominating the region and, under the reign of the Assyrian
ruler Sennacherib (reigned 705-681 BCE), Babylon revolted.
Sennacherib had the city sacked, razed, and the ruins scattered
as a lesson to others. His extreme measures were considered
impious by the people generally and Sennacherib's court
specifically and he was soon after assassinated by his sons. His
successor, Esarhaddon, re-built Babylon and returned it to its
former glory. The city later rose in revolt
against Ashurbanipal of Nineveh who besieged and defeated
the city but did not damage it to any great extent and, in fact,
personally purified Babylon of the evil spirits which were thought
to have led to the trouble. The reputation of the city as a center
of learning and culture was already well established by this time.

Babylon at the time of Hammurabi

After the fall of the Assyrian Empire, a Chaldean named

Nabopolassar took the throne of Babylon and, through careful
alliances, created the Neo-Babylonian Empire. His son,
Nebuchadnezzar II (604-561 BCE), renovated the city so that it
covered 900 hectares (2,200 acres) of land and boasted some
the most beautiful and impressive structures in all of
Mesopotamia. Every ancient writer to make mention of the city
of Babylon, outside of those responsible for the stories in the
Bible, does so with a tone of awe and reverence. Herodotus, for
example, writes:

The city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, a

hundred and twenty stadia in length each way, so that the entire
circuit is four hundred and eighty stadia. While such is its size,
in magnificence there is no other city that approaches to it. It is
surrounded, in the first place, by a broad and deep moat, full of
 water, behind which rises a wall fifty royal cubits in width and
two hundred in height.

Although it is generally believed that Herodotus greatly

exaggerated the dimensions of the city (and may never have
actually visited the place himself) his description echoes the
admiration of other writers of the time who recorded the
magnificence of Babylon, and especially the great walls, as a
wonder of the world. It was under Nebuchadnezzar II's reign
that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are said to have been
constructed and the famous Ishtar Gate built. The
Hanging gardens are most explicitly described in a passage from
Diodorus Siculus (90-30 BCE) in his work Bibliotheca
Historica Book II.10:

There was also, because the acropolis, the Hanging Garden, as

it is called, which was built, not by Semiramis, but by a later
Syrian king to please one of his concubines; for she, they say,
being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her
mountains, asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a
planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia. The park
extended four plethra on each side, and since the approach to
the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the
structure rose from one another tier on tier, the appearance of
the whole resembled that of a theatre. When the ascending
terraces had been built, there had been constructed beneath
them galleries which carried the entire weight of the planted
garden and rose little by little one above the other along the
approach; and the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high,
bore the highest surface of the park, which was made level with
the circuit wall of the battlements of the city. Furthermore, the
walls, which had been constructed at great expense, were
twenty-two feet thick, while the passage-way between each two
walls was ten feet wide. The roofs of the galleries were covered
over with beams of stone sixteen feet long, inclusive of the
overlap, and four feet wide. The roof above these beams had
first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen, over this
two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third
layer a covering of lead, to the end that the moisture from the
soil might not penetrate beneath. On all this again earth had
been piled to a depth sufficient for the roots of the largest trees;
and the ground, which was levelled off, was thickly planted with
trees of every kind that, by their great size or any other charm,
could give pleasure to beholder. And since the galleries, each
 projecting beyond another, all received the light, they contained
many royal lodgings of every description; and there was one
gallery which contained openings leading from the topmost
surface and machines for supplying the garden with water, the
machines raising the water in great abundance from the river,
although no one outside could see it being done. Now this park,
as I have said, was a later construction.

This part of Diodorus' work concerns the semi-mythical queen

Semiramis (most probably based on the actual Assyrian
queen Sammu-Ramat who reigned 811-806 BCE). His
reference to "a later Syrian king" follows Herodotus' tendency of
referring to Mesopotamia as `Assyria'. Recent scholarship on
the subject argues that the Hanging Gardens were never located
at Babylon but were instead the creation Sennacherib at his
capital of Nineveh. The historian Christopher Scarre writes:

Sennacherib's palace [at Nineveh] had all the usual

accoutrements of a major Assyrian residence: colossal guardian
figures and impressively carved stone reliefs (over 2,000
sculptured slabs in 71 rooms). Its gardens, too, were exceptional.
Recent research by British Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has
suggested that these were the famous Hanging Gardens, one of
the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Later writers placed
the Hanging Gardens at Babylon, but extensive research has
failed to find any trace of them. Sennacherib's proud account of
the palace gardens he created at Nineveh fits that of the Hanging
Gardens in several significant details (231).

This period in which the Hanging Gardens were allegedly

built was also the time of the Babylonian Exile of the Jews and
the period in which the Babylonian Talmud was written. The
Euphrates River divided the city in two between an `old' and a
`new' city with the Temple of Marduk and the great towering
ziggurat in the center. Streets and avenues were widened to
better accommodate the yearly processional of the statue of the
great god Marduk in the journey from his home temple in the city
to the New Year Festival Temple outside the Ishtar Gate.
 Lion of Babylon Statue, Babylonia

THE PERSIAN CONQUEST & BABYLON'S

DECLINE
The Neo-Babylonian Empire continued after the death of
Nebuchadnezzar II and Babylon continued to play an important
role in the region under the rule of Nabonidus and his successor
Belshazzar (featured in the biblical Book of Daniel). In 539 BCE
the empire fell to the Persians under Cyrus the Great at
the Battleof Opis. Babylon's walls were impregnable and so the
Persians cleverly devised a plan whereby they diverted the
course of the Euphrates River so that it fell to a manageable
depth. While the residents of the city were distracted by one of
their great religious feast days, the Persian army waded the river
and marched under the walls of Babylon unnoticed. It was
claimed the city was taken without a fight although documents
of the time indicate that repairs had to be made to the walls and
some sections of the city and so perhaps the action was not as
effortless as the Persian account maintained.

Under Persian rule, Babylon flourished as a center of art and

education. Cyrus and his successors held the city in great regard
and made it the administrative capital of their empire (although
at one point the Persian emperor Xerxes felt obliged to lay
siege to the city after another revolt). Babylonian mathematics,
cosmology, and astronomy were highly respected and it is
thought that Thales of Miletus (known as the first western
philosopher) may have studied there and
that Pythagoras developed his famous mathematical theorem
based upon a Babylonian model. When, after two hundred years,
the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, he
also gave great reverence to the city, ordering his men not to
damage the buildings nor molest the inhabitants. The historian
Stephen Bertman writes, "Before his death, Alexander the
Great ordered the superstructure of Babylon's ziggurat pulled
down in order that it might be rebuilt with greater splendor. But
he never lived to bring his project to completion. Over the
centuries, its scattered bricks have been cannibalized by
peasants to fulfill humbler dreams. All that is left of the fabled
Tower of Babel is the bed of a swampy pond.”

After Alexander's death at Babylon, his successors (known as

`The Diadochi', Greek for `successors') fought over his empire
generally and the city specifically to the point where the
residents fled for their safety (or, according to one ancient report,
were re-located). By the time the Parthian Empire ruled the
region in 141 BCE Babylon was deserted and forgotten. The city
steadily fell into ruin and, even during a brief revival under
the Sassanid Persians, never approached its former greatness.
In the Muslim conquest of the land in 650 CE whatever remained
of Babylon was swept away and, in time, was buried beneath the
sands. In the 17th and 18th centuries CE European travelers
began to explore the area and return home with various artifacts.
These cuneiform blocks and statues led to an increased
interest in the region and, by the 19th century CE, an interest in
biblical archaeology drew men like Robert Koldewey who
uncovered the ruins of the once great city of the Gate of the
Gods.

Reading: Mandatory Bible Readings

2 Kings 15:27-31 New International

Version (NIV)
Pekah King of Israel
27
In the fifty-second year of Azariah king of Judah, Pekah son of Remaliahbecame
king of Israel in Samaria, and he reigned twenty years. 28 He did evil in the eyes of
the Lord. He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he had
caused Israel to commit.
29
In the time of Pekah king of Israel, Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria came and took
Ijon, Abel Beth Maakah, Janoah, Kedesh and Hazor. He took Gilead and Galilee,
including all the land of Naphtali, and deported the people to Assyria. 30 Then
Hoshea son of Elah conspired against Pekah son of Remaliah. He attacked and
assassinated him, and then succeeded him as king in the twentieth year of Jotham son
of Uzziah.
31
As for the other events of Pekah’s reign, and all he did, are they not written in the
book of the annals of the kings of Israel?

2 Kings 17-20 New International

Version (NIV)
Hoshea Last King of Israel

17 In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hoshea son of Elah became king of
Israel in Samaria, and he reigned nine years. 2 He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, but
not like the kings of Israel who preceded him.
3
Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up to attack Hoshea, who had been
Shalmaneser’s vassal and had paid him tribute. 4 But the king of Assyria discovered
that Hoshea was a traitor, for he had sent envoys to So[a] king of Egypt,and he no
longer paid tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year. Therefore
Shalmaneser seized him and put him in prison. 5 The king of Assyria invaded the
entire land, marched against Samaria and laid siege to it for three years. 6 In the ninth
year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to
Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of
the Medes.

Israel Exiled Because of Sin

7
All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who
had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
They worshiped other gods 8 and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had
driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had
introduced. 9 The Israelites secretly did things against the Lord their God that were not
right. From watchtower to fortified city they built themselves high places in all their
towns. 10 They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under
every spreading tree. 11 At every high place they burned incense, as the nations whom
the Lord had driven out before them had done. They did wicked things that aroused
the Lord’s anger. 12 They worshiped idols, though the Lord had said, “You shall not
do this.”[b] 13 The Lord warned Israel and Judah through all his prophets and
seers: “Turn from your evil ways. Observe my commands and decrees, in accordance
with the entire Law that I commanded your ancestors to obey and that I delivered to
you through my servants the prophets.”
14
But they would not listen and were as stiff-necked as their ancestors, who did not
trust in the Lord their God. 15 They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made
with their ancestors and the statutes he had warned them to keep. They followed
worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They imitated the nations around
them although the Lord had ordered them, “Do not do as they do.”
16
They forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two
idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the
starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal. 17 They sacrificed their sons and daughters in
the fire. They practiced divination and sought omens and soldthemselves to do evil in
the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.
18
So the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence.Only
the tribe of Judah was left, 19 and even Judah did not keep the commands of
the Lord their God. They followed the practices Israel had introduced. 20 Therefore
the Lord rejected all the people of Israel; he afflicted them and gave them into the
hands of plunderers, until he thrust them from his presence.
21
When he tore Israel away from the house of David, they made Jeroboam son of
Nebat their king. Jeroboam enticed Israel away from following the Lord and caused
them to commit a great sin. 22 The Israelites persisted in all the sins of Jeroboam and
did not turn away from them 23 until the Lord removed them from his presence, as he
had warned through all his servants the prophets. So the people of Israel were taken
from their homeland into exile in Assyria, and they are still there.

Samaria Resettled
24
The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kuthah, Avva, Hamath and
Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They
took over Samaria and lived in its towns. 25 When they first lived there, they did not
worship the Lord; so he sent lions among them and they killed some of the
people. 26 It was reported to the king of Assyria: “The people you deported and
resettled in the towns of Samaria do not know what the god of that country requires.
He has sent lions among them, which are killing them off, because the people do not
know what he requires.”
27
Then the king of Assyria gave this order: “Have one of the priests you took captive
from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land
requires.” 28 So one of the priests who had been exiled from Samaria came to live in
Bethel and taught them how to worship the Lord.
29
Nevertheless, each national group made its own gods in the several townswhere
they settled, and set them up in the shrines the people of Samaria had made at the high
places. 30 The people from Babylon made Sukkoth Benoth, those from Kuthah made
Nergal, and those from Hamath made Ashima; 31 the Avvites made Nibhaz and Tartak,
and the Sepharvites burned their children in the fire as sacrifices to Adrammelek and
Anammelek, the gods of Sepharvaim. 32 They worshiped the Lord, but they also
appointed all sorts of their own people to officiate for them as priests in the shrines at
the high places. 33 They worshiped the Lord, but they also served their own gods in
accordance with the customs of the nations from which they had been brought.
34
To this day they persist in their former practices. They neither worship the Lordnor
adhere to the decrees and regulations, the laws and commands that the Lordgave the
descendants of Jacob, whom he named Israel. 35 When the Lord made a covenant with
the Israelites, he commanded them: “Do not worship any other gods or bow down to
them, serve them or sacrifice to them. 36 But the Lord, who brought you up out of
Egypt with mighty power and outstretched arm, is the one you must worship. To him
you shall bow down and to him offer sacrifices. 37 You must always be careful to keep
the decrees and regulations, the laws and commands he wrote for you. Do not worship
other gods. 38 Do not forget the covenant I have made with you, and do not worship
other gods. 39 Rather, worship the Lord your God; it is he who will deliver you from
the hand of all your enemies.”
40
They would not listen, however, but persisted in their former practices. 41 Even
while these people were worshiping the Lord, they were serving their idols. To this
day their children and grandchildren continue to do as their ancestors did.

Hezekiah King of Judah

18 In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son of Ahaz king
of Judah began to reign. 2 He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he
reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. His mother’s name was Abijah[c] daughter of
Zechariah. 3 He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had
done. 4 He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the
Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snakeMoses had made, for up to that
time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. (It was called Nehushtan.[d])
5
Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all
the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. 6 He held fast to the Lord and did
not stop following him; he kept the commands the Lord had given Moses.7 And
the Lord was with him; he was successful in whatever he undertook. He
rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him. 8 From watchtower to
fortified city, he defeated the Philistines, as far as Gaza and its territory.
9
In King Hezekiah’s fourth year, which was the seventh year of Hoshea son of Elah
king of Israel, Shalmaneser king of Assyria marched against Samaria and laid siege to
it. 10 At the end of three years the Assyrians took it. So Samaria was captured in
Hezekiah’s sixth year, which was the ninth year of Hoshea king of Israel. 11 The
king of Assyria deported Israel to Assyria and settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the
Habor River and in towns of the Medes. 12 This happened because they had not
obeyed the Lord their God, but had violated his covenant—all that Moses the servant
of the Lord commanded. They neither listened to the commands nor carried them out.
13
In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria
attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. 14 So Hezekiah king of
Judah sent this message to the king of Assyria at Lachish: “I have done
wrong.Withdraw from me, and I will pay whatever you demand of me.” The king of
Assyria exacted from Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents[e] of silver and
thirty talents[f] of gold. 15 So Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the
temple of the Lord and in the treasuries of the royal palace.
16
At this time Hezekiah king of Judah stripped off the gold with which he had
covered the doors and doorposts of the temple of the Lord, and gave it to the king of
Assyria.

Sennacherib Threatens Jerusalem

17
The king of Assyria sent his supreme commander, his chief officer and his field
commander with a large army, from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. They
came up to Jerusalem and stopped at the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to
the Washerman’s Field. 18 They called for the king; and Eliakim son of Hilkiah the
palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went
out to them.
19
The field commander said to them, “Tell Hezekiah:

“‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: On what are you basing this
confidence of yours? 20 You say you have the counsel and the might for war—but you
speak only empty words. On whom are you depending, that you rebel against
me? 21 Look, I know you are depending on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which
pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it! Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who
depend on him. 22 But if you say to me, “We are depending on the Lord our
God”—isn’t he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, saying to
Judah and Jerusalem, “You must worship before this altar in Jerusalem”?
23
“‘Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you
two thousand horses—if you can put riders on them! 24 How can you repulse one
officer of the least of my master’s officials, even though you are depending on Egypt
for chariots and horsemen[g]? 25 Furthermore, have I come to attack and destroy this
place without word from the Lord? The Lord himself told me to march against this
country and destroy it.’”
26
Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, and Shebna and Joah said to the field commander,
“Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us
in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall.”
27
But the commander replied, “Was it only to your master and you that my master
sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall—who, like you,
will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”
28
Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew, “Hear the word of the great
king, the king of Assyria! 29 This is what the king says: Do not let Hezekiah
deceive you. He cannot deliver you from my hand. 30 Do not let Hezekiah persuade
you to trust in the Lord when he says, ‘The Lord will surely deliver us; this city will
not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’
31
“Do not listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: Make peace with
me and come out to me. Then each of you will eat fruit from your own vine and fig
tree and drink water from your own cistern, 32 until I come and take you to a land like
your own—a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of
olive trees and honey. Choose life and not death!

“Do not listen to Hezekiah, for he is misleading you when he says, ‘The Lord will
deliver us.’ 33 Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the
king of Assyria? 34 Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of
Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand?35 Who of
all the gods of these countries has been able to save his land from me? How then can
the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?”
36
But the people remained silent and said nothing in reply, because the king had
commanded, “Do not answer him.”
37
Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and
Joah son of Asaph the recorder went to Hezekiah, with their clothes torn, and told him
what the field commander had said.

Jerusalem’s Deliverance Foretold

19 When King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went
into the temple of the Lord. 2 He sent Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the
secretary and the leading priests, all wearing sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah son of
Amoz. 3 They told him, “This is what Hezekiah says: This day is a day of distress and
rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the moment of birth and there is no
strength to deliver them. 4 It may be that the Lord your God will hear all the words of
the field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the
living God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has heard.
Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.”
5
When King Hezekiah’s officials came to Isaiah, 6 Isaiah said to them, “Tell your
master, ‘This is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—those
words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemedme. 7 Listen!
When he hears a certain report, I will make him want to return to his own country,
and there I will have him cut down with the sword.’”
8
When the field commander heard that the king of Assyria had left Lachish, he
withdrew and found the king fighting against Libnah.
9
Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah, the king of Cush,[h] was marching
out to fight against him. So he again sent messengers to Hezekiah with this
word: 10 “Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on
deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of
Assyria.’ 11 Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the
countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? 12 Did the gods of
the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them—the gods of
Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? 13 Where is
the king of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim,
Hena and Ivvah?”

Hezekiah’s Prayer
14
Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to
the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. 15 And Hezekiah prayed to
the Lord: “Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are
God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. 16 Give
ear, Lord, and hear; open your eyes, Lord, and see; listen to the words Sennacherib
has sent to ridicule the living God.
17
“It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations and their
lands. 18 They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were
not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands. 19 Now, Lordour God,
deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may knowthat you
alone, Lord, are God.”

Isaiah Prophesies Sennacherib’s Fall

Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent a message to Hezekiah: “This is what the Lord, the
20

God of Israel, says: I have heard your prayer concerning Sennacherib king of
Assyria. 21 This is the word that the Lord has spoken against him:

“‘Virgin Daughter Zion

despises you and mocks you.
Daughter Jerusalem
tosses her head as you flee.
22
Who is it you have ridiculed and blasphemed?
Against whom have you raised your voice
and lifted your eyes in pride?
Against the Holy One of Israel!
23
By your messengers
you have ridiculed the Lord.
And you have said,
“With my many chariots
I have ascended the heights of the mountains,
the utmost heights of Lebanon.
I have cut down its tallest cedars,
the choicest of its junipers.
I have reached its remotest parts,
the finest of its forests.
24
I have dug wells in foreign lands
and drunk the water there.
With the soles of my feet
I have dried up all the streams of Egypt.”
25
“‘Have you not heard?
Long ago I ordained it.
In days of old I planned it;
now I have brought it to pass,
that you have turned fortified cities
into piles of stone.
26
Their people, drained of power,
are dismayed and put to shame.
They are like plants in the field,
like tender green shoots,
like grass sprouting on the roof,
scorched before it grows up.
27
“‘But I know where you are
and when you come and go
and how you rage against me.
28
Because you rage against me
and because your insolence has reached my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
and my bit in your mouth,
and I will make you return
by the way you came.’
29
“This will be the sign for you, Hezekiah:

“This year you will eat what grows by itself,

and the second year what springs from that.
But in the third year sow and reap,
plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
30
Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judah
will take root below and bear fruit above.
31
For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant,
and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors.

“The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.

32
“Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria:

“‘He will not enter this city

or shoot an arrow here.
He will not come before it with shield
or build a siege ramp against it.
33
By the way that he came he will return;
he will not enter this city,
declares the Lord.
34
I will defend this city and save it,
for my sake and for the sake of David my servant.’”
35
That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five
thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there
were all the dead bodies! 36 So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and
withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.
 One day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons
37

Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of
Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.

Hezekiah’s Illness

20 In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet
Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, “This is what the Lord says: Put your house
in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”
2
Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, 3 “Remember, Lord,
how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have
done what is good in your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
4
Before Isaiah had left the middle court, the word of the Lord came to him: 5 “Go
back and tell Hezekiah, the ruler of my people, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of
your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you.
On the third day from now you will go up to the temple of the Lord. 6 I will add
fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the
king of Assyria. I will defend this city for my sake and for the sake of my servant
David.’”
7
Then Isaiah said, “Prepare a poultice of figs.” They did so and applied it to the
boil, and he recovered.
8
Hezekiah had asked Isaiah, “What will be the sign that the Lord will heal me and
that I will go up to the temple of the Lord on the third day from now?”
9
Isaiah answered, “This is the Lord’s sign to you that the Lord will do what he has
promised: Shall the shadow go forward ten steps, or shall it go back ten steps?”
10
“It is a simple matter for the shadow to go forward ten steps,” said Hezekiah.
“Rather, have it go back ten steps.”
11
Then the prophet Isaiah called on the Lord, and the Lord made the shadow go
back the ten steps it had gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.

Envoys From Babylon

12
At that time Marduk-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon sent Hezekiah letters
and a gift, because he had heard of Hezekiah’s illness. 13 Hezekiah received the
envoys and showed them all that was in his storehouses—the silver, the gold, the
spices and the fine olive oil—his armory and everything found among his treasures.
There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show
them.
14
Then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and asked, “What did those men say,
and where did they come from?”
“From a distant land,” Hezekiah replied. “They came from Babylon.”
15
The prophet asked, “What did they see in your palace?”

“They saw everything in my palace,” Hezekiah said. “There is nothing among my

treasures that I did not show them.”
16
Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord: 17 The time will surely
come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up
until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord.18 And
some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be
taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”

“The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,” Hezekiah replied. For he thought,
19

“Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?”

20
As for the other events of Hezekiah’s reign, all his achievements and how he made
the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city, are they not written in
the book of the annals of the kings of Judah? 21 Hezekiah rested with his ancestors.
And Manasseh his son succeeded him as king.

Isaiah 8:1-8 New International

Version (NIV)
Isaiah and His Children as Signs

8 The Lord said to me, “Take a large scroll and write on it with an ordinary pen:
Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”[a] 2 So I called in Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of
Jeberekiah as reliable witnesses for me. 3 Then I made love to the prophetess, and she
conceived and gave birth to a son. And the Lord said to me, “Name him
Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. 4 For before the boy knows how to say ‘My father’ or ‘My
mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the
king of Assyria.”
5
The Lord spoke to me again:
6
“Because this people has rejected
the gently flowing waters of Shiloah
and rejoices over Rezin
and the son of Remaliah,
7
therefore the Lord is about to bring against them
the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates—
the king of Assyria with all his pomp.
It will overflow all its channels,
run over all its banks
8
and sweep on into Judah, swirling over it,
passing through it and reaching up to the neck.
Its outspread wings will cover the breadth of your land,
Immanuel[b]!”

Isaiah 36-37 New International

Version (NIV)
Sennacherib Threatens Jerusalem

36 In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria

attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. 2 Then the king of Assyria
sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at
Jerusalem. When the commander stopped at the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the
road to the Launderer’s Field, 3 Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace
administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went out to
him.
4
The field commander said to them, “Tell Hezekiah:

“‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: On what are you basing this
confidence of yours? 5 You say you have counsel and might for war—but you speak
only empty words. On whom are you depending, that you rebelagainst me? 6 Look, I
know you are depending on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the
hand of anyone who leans on it! Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who depend on
him. 7 But if you say to me, “We are depending on the Lord our God”—isn’t he the
one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, saying to Judah and Jerusalem,
“You must worship before this altar”?
8
“‘Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you
two thousand horses—if you can put riders on them! 9 How then can you repulse one
officer of the least of my master’s officials, even though you are depending on
Egypt for chariots and horsemen[a]? 10 Furthermore, have I come to attack and destroy
this land without the Lord? The Lord himself told me to march against this country
and destroy it.’”
11
Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joah said to the field commander, “Please speak to your
servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew in the
hearing of the people on the wall.”
12
But the commander replied, “Was it only to your master and you that my master
sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall—who, like you,
will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”
13
Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew, “Hear the words of the great
king, the king of Assyria! 14 This is what the king says: Do not let Hezekiah
deceive you. He cannot deliver you! 15 Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to trust in
the Lord when he says, ‘The Lord will surely deliver us; this city will not be given
into the hand of the king of Assyria.’
16
“Do not listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: Make peace with
me and come out to me. Then each of you will eat fruit from your own vine and fig
tree and drink water from your own cistern, 17 until I come and take you to a land like
your own—a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.
18
“Do not let Hezekiah mislead you when he says, ‘The Lord will deliver us.’ Have
the gods of any nations ever delivered their lands from the hand of the king of
Assyria? 19 Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of
Sepharvaim? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? 20 Who of all the gods of
these countries have been able to save their lands from me? How then can
the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?”
21
But the people remained silent and said nothing in reply, because the king had
commanded, “Do not answer him.”
22
Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary and
Joah son of Asaph the recorder went to Hezekiah, with their clothes torn, and told him
what the field commander had said.

Jerusalem’s Deliverance Foretold

37 When King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went
into the temple of the Lord. 2 He sent Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the
secretary, and the leading priests, all wearing sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah son of
Amoz. 3 They told him, “This is what Hezekiah says: This day is a day of distress and
rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the moment of birth and there is no
strength to deliver them. 4 It may be that the Lordyour God will hear the words of the
field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the living
God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has
heard. Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.”
5
When King Hezekiah’s officials came to Isaiah, 6 Isaiah said to them, “Tell your
master, ‘This is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—those
words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemedme. 7 Listen!
When he hears a certain report, I will make him want to return to his own country,
and there I will have him cut down with the sword.’”
8
When the field commander heard that the king of Assyria had left Lachish, he
withdrew and found the king fighting against Libnah.
9
Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah, the king of Cush,[b] was marching
out to fight against him. When he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah with this
word: 10 “Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on
deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of
Assyria.’ 11 Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the
countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered?12 Did the gods of
the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them—the gods of Gozan,
Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? 13 Where is the king
of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena and
Ivvah?”
Hezekiah’s Prayer
14
Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to
the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. 15 And Hezekiah prayed to
the Lord: 16 “Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you
alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and
earth. 17 Give ear, Lord, and hear; open your eyes, Lord, and see;listen to all the words
Sennacherib has sent to ridicule the living God.
18
“It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste all these peoples and their
lands. 19 They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were
not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands. 20 Now, Lord our God,
deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that
you, Lord, are the only God.[c]”

Sennacherib’s Fall

Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent a message to Hezekiah: “This is what the Lord, the
21

God of Israel, says: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of
Assyria, 22 this is the word the Lord has spoken against him:

“Virgin Daughter Zion

despises and mocks you.
Daughter Jerusalem
tosses her head as you flee.
23
Who is it you have ridiculed and blasphemed?
Against whom have you raised your voice
and lifted your eyes in pride?
Against the Holy One of Israel!
24
By your messengers
you have ridiculed the Lord.
And you have said,
‘With my many chariots
I have ascended the heights of the mountains,
the utmost heights of Lebanon.
I have cut down its tallest cedars,
the choicest of its junipers.
I have reached its remotest heights,
the finest of its forests.
25
I have dug wells in foreign lands[d]
and drunk the water there.
With the soles of my feet
I have dried up all the streams of Egypt.’
26
“Have you not heard?
Long ago I ordained it.
In days of old I planned it;
now I have brought it to pass,
that you have turned fortified cities
 into piles of stone.
27
Their people, drained of power,
are dismayed and put to shame.
They are like plants in the field,
like tender green shoots,
like grass sprouting on the roof,
scorched[e] before it grows up.
28
“But I know where you are
and when you come and go
and how you rage against me.
29
Because you rage against me
and because your insolence has reached my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
and my bit in your mouth,
and I will make you return
by the way you came.
30
“This will be the sign for you, Hezekiah:

“This year you will eat what grows by itself,

and the second year what springs from that.
But in the third year sow and reap,
plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
31
Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judah
will take root below and bear fruit above.
32
For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant,
and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
will accomplish this.
33
“Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria:

“He will not enter this city

or shoot an arrow here.
He will not come before it with shield
or build a siege ramp against it.
34
By the way that he came he will return;
he will not enter this city,”
declares the Lord.
35
“I will defend this city and save it,
for my sake and for the sake of David my servant!”
36
Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five
thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there
were all the dead bodies! 37 So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew.
He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.
 One day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons
38

Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of
Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.

Late Bronze Age collapse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Invasions, destruction and possible population movements during the

collapse of the Bronze Age, c.  1200 BC.
Bronze Age

 v
 t
 e

↑ Chalcolithic

Near East (c. 3300–1200 BC)

Anatolia,
Caucasus, Elam,
Egypt, Levant,
Mesopotamia,
Sistan, Canaan
Late Bronze Age
collapse

Indian subcontinent (c.

3300–1200 BC)

Indus Valley
Civilization
Bronze Age India
 Ochre Coloured
Pottery
Cemetery H

Europe (c. 3200–600 BC)

Aegean (Cycladic,
Minoan,
Mycenaean),
Caucasus,
Catacomb culture,
Srubna culture,
Beaker culture,
Apennine culture,
Terramare
culture, Unetice
culture, Tumulus
culture, Urnfield
culture,
Proto-Villanovan
culture,
Hallstatt
culture, ,
Canegrate
culture,
Golasecca
culture,
Atlantic Bronze
Age, Bronze Age
Britain, Nordic
Bronze Age

East Asia (c. 2000–300 BC)

Erlitou,
Erligang,
Gojoseon, Jomon,
Majiayao, Mumun,
Qijia, Siwa,
Wucheng, Xindian,
Yueshi
 arsenical bronze
 writing
  literature
 sword
 chariot

↓Iron Age

Human history
↑ Prehistory

Recorded history

Ancient
 Earliest records

 Africa
 Mesoamerica
 Andes

 Oceania
 East Asia
 South Asia

 Southeast Asia
 Middle East

 Europe

Postclassical
 Africa
 Americas

 Oceania
 East Asia

 South Asia

 Southeast Asia
 Middle East

 Europe

Modern
  Early modern
 Late modern

See also
 Contemporary
 Modernity
 Futurology

↓ Future

 v
 t
 e

The Late Bronze Age collapse involved a Dark Age transition period in the Near
East, Asia Minor, the Aegean region, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the
Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, a transition
which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive. The palace
economy of the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterised the Late Bronze Age
disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark
Ages. The half-century between c. 1200 and 1150 BC saw the cultural collapse of the
Mycenaean kingdoms, of the Kassite dynasty of Babylonia, of the Hittite Empire in
Anatolia and the Levant, and of the Egyptian Empire;[1] the destruction of Ugarit and
the Amorite states in the Levant, the fragmentation of the Luwian states of western
Asia Minor, and a period of chaos in Canaan.[2] The deterioration of these
governments interrupted trade routes and severely reduced literacy in much of the
known world.[3] In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Pylos and
Gaza was violently destroyed, and many abandoned, including Hattusa, Mycenae, and
Ugarit.[4] According to Robert Drews:

Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the

thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost
every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was
destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.[5]

Only a few powerful states, particularly Assyria, Egypt (albeit badly weakened), and
Elam, survived the Bronze Age collapse – but by the end of the 12th century BC,
Elam waned after its defeat by Nebuchadnezzar I, who briefly revived Babylonian
fortunes before suffering a series of defeats by the Assyrians. Upon the death of
Ashur-bel-kala in 1056 BC, Assyria went into a comparative decline for the next 100
or so years, its empire shrinking significantly. By 1020 BC Assyria appears to have
controlled only the areas in its immediate vicinity; the well-defended Assyria itself
was not threatened during the collapse.
Gradually, by the end of the ensuing Dark Age, remnants of the Hittites coalesced into
small Syro-Hittite states in Cilicia and the Levant, the latter states being composed of
mixed Hittite and Aramean polities. Beginning in the mid-10th century BC, a series of
small Aramaean kingdoms formed in the Levant and the Philistines settled in southern
Canaan where the Canaanite-speaking Semites had coalesced into a number of
defined polities such as Israel, Moab, Edom and Ammon. From 935 BC Assyria
began to reorganise and once more expand outwards, leading to the Neo-Assyrian
Empire (911-605 BC), which came to control a vast area from the Caucasus to Egypt,
and from Greek Cyprus to Persia. Phrygians, Cimmerians and Lydians arrived in Asia
Minor, and a new Hurrian polity of Urartu formed in eastern Asia Minor and the
southern Caucasus, where the Colchians (Georgians) also emerged. Iranian peoples
such as the Persians, Medes, Parthians and Sargatians first appeared in Ancient Iran
soon after 1000 BC, displacing earlier non-Indo-European Kassites, Hurrians and
Gutians in the northwest of the region, although the indigenous language
isolate-speaking Elamites and Manneans continued to dominate the southwest and
Caspian Sea regions respectively. After the Orientalising period in the Aegean,
Classical Greece emerged.

A range of explanations for the collapse have been proposed, without any achieving
general consensus; several factors probably played a part. These include climatic
changes (including the results of volcanic eruptions), invasions by the Sea Peoples
and others, the effects of the spread of iron-based metallurgy, developments in
military weapons and tactics, and a variety of failures of political, social and
economic systems.

Contents
 1 Regional evidence

o 1.1 Evidence of destruction

 1.1.1 Anatolia
 1.1.2 Cyprus
 1.1.3 Syria
 1.1.4 Southern Levant
 1.1.5 Greece
o 1.2 Areas that survived

 1.2.1 Mesopotamia
 1.2.2 Egypt

o 1.3 Conclusion

 2 Possible causes

o 2.1 Environmental

 2.1.1 Climate change

 2.1.2 Volcanoes
 2.1.3 Drought
 o 2.2 Cultural

 2.2.1 Ironworking
 2.2.2 Changes in warfare

o 2.3 General systems collapse

 3 See also
 4 Notes
 5 References
 6 Further reading
 7 External links

Regional evidence
Evidence of destruction

Anatolia

Before the Bronze Age collapse, Anatolia (Asia Minor) was dominated by a number
of peoples of varying ethno-linguistic origins: including Semitic Assyrians and
Amorites, language isolate-speaking Hurrians, Kaskians and Hattians, and
later-arriving Indo-European peoples such as Luwians, Hittites, Mitanni, and
Mycenaean Greeks. From the 16th century BC, the Mitanni (a migratory minority
speaking an Indo-Aryan language) formed a ruling class over the Hurrians, an ancient
indigenous Caucasian people who spoke a Hurro-Urartian language, a language
isolate. Similarly, the Indo-Anatolian-speaking Hittites absorbed the Hattians,[6] a
people speaking a language that may have been of the non–Indo-European North
Caucasian language group or a language isolate.

Every Anatolian site, apart from integral Assyrian regions in the south east, and
regions in eastern, central and southern Anatolia under the control of the powerful
Middle Assyrian Empire (1392–1050 BC) that was important during the preceding
Late Bronze Age shows a destruction layer, and it appears that in these regions
civilization did not recover to the level of the Assyrians and Hittites for another
thousand years or so. The Hittites, already weakened by a series of military defeats
and annexations of their territory by the Middle Assyrian Empire (which had already
destroyed the Hurrian-Mitanni Empire) then suffered a coup de grâce when Hattusas,
the Hittite capital, was burned, probably by the language isolate-speaking Kaskians,
long indigenous to the southern shores of the Black Sea, and possibly aided by the
incoming Indo-European–speaking Phrygians. The city was abandoned and never
reoccupied.

Karaoğlan[a] (near present-day Ankara) was burned and the corpses left unburied.[8]
Many other sites that were not destroyed were abandoned.[9] The Luwian city of Troy
was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned until Roman times. (Trojan
War)

The Phrygians had arrived (probably over the Bosphorus or Caucasus) in the 13th
century BC,[10] before being first checked by the Assyrians and then conquered by
them in the Early Iron Age of the 12th century BC. Other groups of Indo-European
peoples followed the Phrygians into the region, most prominently the Doric Greeks
and Lydians, and in the centuries after the period of Bronze Age Collapse, the
Cimmerians, and Scythians also appeared. The Semitic Arameans,
Kartvelian-speaking Colchians (Georgians), and revived Hurrian polities, particularly
Urartu, Nairi and Shupria also emerged in parts of the region and southern Caucasus.
The Assyrians simply continued their already extant policies, by conquering any of
these new peoples and polities they came into contact with, as they had with the
preceding polities of the region. However Assyria gradually withdrew from much of
the region for a time in the second half of the 11th century BC, although they
continued to campaign militarily at times, in order to protect their borders and keep
trade routes open, until a renewed vigorous period of expansion in the late 10th
century BC.

These sites in Anatolia show evidence of the collapse:

 Troy
 Miletus
 Hattusas[11]
 Mersin
 Tarhuntassa

Cyprus

The catastrophe separates Late Cypriot II (LCII) from the LCIII period, with the
sacking and burning of Enkomi, Kition, and Sinda, which may have occurred twice
before those sites were abandoned.[12] During the reign of the Hittite king Tudhaliya
IV (reigned c. 1237–1209 BC), the island was briefly invaded by the Hittites,[13]
either to secure the copper resource or as a way of preventing piracy.

Shortly afterwards, the island was reconquered by his son around 1200 BC. Some
towns (Enkomi, Kition, Palaeokastro and Sinda) show traces of destruction at the end
of LCII. Whether or not this is really an indication of a Mycenean invasion is
contested. Originally, two waves of destruction in c. 1230 BC by the Sea Peoples and
c. 1190 BC by Aegean refugees have been proposed.[14][who?][clarification needed]

Alashiya was plundered by the Sea Peoples and ceased to exist in 1085.

The smaller settlements of Ayios Dhimitrios and Kokkinokremnos, as well as a

number of other sites, were abandoned but do not show traces of destruction.
Kokkinokremos was a short-lived settlement, where various caches concealed by
smiths have been found. That no one ever returned to reclaim the treasures suggests
that they were killed or enslaved. Recovery occurred only in the Early Iron Age with
Phoenician and Greek settlement.

These sites in Cyprus show evidence of the collapse:

 Palaeokastro
 Kition
 Sinda
 Enkomi
Syria

A map of the Bronze Age collapse

Ancient Syria had been initially dominated by a number of indigenous

Semitic-speaking peoples. The East Semitic-speaking Eblaites, Akkadians and
Assyrians and the Northwest Semitic-speaking Ugarites and Amorites prominent
among them.[15] Syria during this time was known as "The land of the Amurru".

Before and during the Bronze Age Collapse, Syria became a battle ground between
the empires of the Hittites, Assyrians, Mitanni and Egyptians between the 15th and
late 13th centuries BC, with the Assyrians destroying the Hurri-Mitanni empire and
annexing much of the Hittite empire. The Egyptian empire had withdrawn from the
region after failing to overcome the Hittites and being fearful of the ever-growing
Assyrian might, leaving much of the region under Assyrian control until the late 11th
century BC. Later the coastal regions came under attack from the Sea Peoples. During
this period, from the 12th century BC, the incoming Northwest Semitic-speaking
Arameans came to demographic prominence in Syria, the region outside of the
Canaanite-speaking Phoenician coastal areas eventually came to speak Aramaic and
the region came to be known as Aramea and Eber Nari. The Babylonians belatedly
attempted to gain a foothold in the region during their brief revival under
Nebuchadnezzar I in the 12th century BC, however they too were overcome by their
Assyrian neighbours. The modern term 'Syria' is a later Indo-European corruption of
'Assyria' which only became formally applied to the Levant during the Seleucid
Empire (323–150 BC) (see Etymology of Syria).

Levantine sites previously showed evidence of trade links with Mesopotamia (Sumer,
Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia), Anatolia (Hattia, Hurria, Luwia and later the Hittites),
Egypt and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age. Evidence at Ugarit shows that the
destruction there occurred after the reign of Merneptah (ruled 1213–1203 BC) and
even the fall of Chancellor Bay (died 1192 BC). The last Bronze Age king of the
Semitic state of Ugarit, Ammurapi, was a contemporary of the last known Hittite king,
Suppiluliuma II. The exact dates of his reign are unknown.
A letter by the king is preserved on one of the clay tablets found baked in the
conflagration of the destruction of the city. Ammurapi stresses the seriousness of the
crisis faced by many Levantine states due to attacks. In response to a plea for
assistance from the king of Alasiya, Ammurapi highlights the desperate situation
Ugarit faced in letter RS 18.147:

My father, behold, the enemy's ships came (here); my cities(?)

were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not
my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the
Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?...
Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know
it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much
damage upon us.[16]

Eshuwara, the senior governor of Cyprus, responded in letter RS 20.18:

As for the matter concerning those enemies: (it was) the

people from your country (and) your own ships (who) did this!
And (it was) the people from your country (who) committed
these transgression(s)...I am writing to inform you and
protect you. Be aware![17]

The ruler of Carchemish sent troops to assist Ugarit, but Ugarit was sacked. A letter
sent after the destruction said:

When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the
city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt
and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked.
May you know it! May you know it![18]

The destruction levels of Ugarit contained Late Helladic IIIB ware, but no LH IIIC
(see Mycenaean period). Therefore, the date of the destruction is important for the
dating of the LH IIIC phase. Since an Egyptian sword bearing the name of Pharaoh
Merneptah was found in the destruction levels, 1190 BC was taken as the date for the
beginning of the LH IIIC. A cuneiform tablet found in 1986 shows that Ugarit was
destroyed after the death of Merneptah. It is generally agreed that Ugarit had already
been destroyed by the 8th year of Ramesses III, 1178 BC. Letters on clay tablets that
were baked in the conflagration caused by the destruction of the city speak of attack
from the sea, and a letter from Alashiya (Cyprus) speaks of cities already being
destroyed by attackers who came by sea.

The West Semitic Arameans eventually superseded the earlier Semitic Amorites,
Canaanites and people of Ugarit. The Arameans, together with the Phoenician
Canaanites and Neo-Hittites came to dominate most of the region demographically,
however these people, and the Levant in general, were also conquered and dominated
politically and militarily by the Middle Assyrian Empire until Assyria's withdrawal in
the late 11th century BC, although the Assyrians continued to conduct military
campaigns in the region. However, with the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the
late 10th century BC, the entire region once again fell to Assyria.

These sites in Syria show evidence of the collapse:

 Ugarit
 Tell Sukas
 Kadesh
 Qatna
 Hamath
 Alalakh
 Aleppo
 Emar

Southern Levant

Egyptian evidence shows that from the reign of Horemheb (ruled either 1319 or 1306
to 1292 BC), wandering Shasu were more problematic than the earlier Apiru.
Ramesses II (ruled 1279–1213 BC) campaigned against them, pursuing them as far as
Moab, where he established a fortress, after a near defeat at the Battle of Kadesh.
During the reign of Merneptah, the Shasu threatened the "Way of Horus" north from
Gaza. Evidence shows that Deir Alla (Succoth) was destroyed after the reign of
Queen Twosret (ruled 1191–1189 BC).[19]

The destroyed site of Lachish was briefly reoccupied by squatters and an Egyptian
garrison, during the reign of Ramesses III (ruled 1186–1155 BC). All centres along a
coastal route from Gaza northward were destroyed, and evidence shows Gaza,
Ashdod, Ashkelon, Akko, and Jaffa were burned and not reoccupied for up to thirty
years. Inland Hazor, Bethel, Beit Shemesh, Eglon, Debir, and other sites were
destroyed. Refugees escaping the collapse of coastal centres may have fused with
incoming nomadic and Anatolian elements to begin the growth of terraced hillside
hamlets in the highlands region that was associated with the later development of the
Hebrews.[19]

During the reign of Rameses III, Philistines were allowed to resettle the coastal strip
from Gaza to Joppa, Denyen (possibly the tribe of Dan in the Bible, or more likely the
people of Adana, also known as Danuna, part of the Hittite Empire) settled from
Joppa to Acre, and Tjekker in Acre. The sites quickly achieved independence, as the
Tale of Wenamun shows.

These sites in the Southern Levant show evidence of the collapse:

 Hazor
 Akko
 Megiddo
 Deir 'Alla (Sukkot)
 Bethel
 Beth Shemesh
 Lachish
 Ashdod
 Ashkelon
Greece

Main article: Greek Dark Ages

None of the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age survived (with the possible
exception of the Cyclopean fortifications on the Acropolis of Athens), with
destruction being heaviest at palaces and fortified sites. Up to 90% of small sites in
the Peloponnese were abandoned, suggesting a major depopulation.[citation needed]

The Bronze Age collapse marked the start of what has been called the Greek Dark
Ages, which lasted roughly 400 years and ended with the establishment of Archaic
Greece. Other cities like Athens continued to be occupied, but with a more local
sphere of influence, limited evidence of trade and an impoverished culture, from
which it took centuries to recover.[citation needed]

These sites in Greece show evidence of the collapse:[citation needed]

 Teichos Dymaion (el)

 Pylos
 Nichoria
 The Menelaion
 Tiryns
 Mycenae
 Thebes
 Lefkandi
 Iolkos[20]
 Knossos
 Kydonia

Areas that survived

Mesopotamia

The Middle Assyrian Empire (1392–1056 BC) had destroyed the Hurrian-Mitanni
Empire, annexed much of the Hittite Empire and eclipsed the Egyptian Empire, and at
the beginning of the Late Bronze Age collapse controlled an empire stretching from
the Caucasus mountains in the north to the Arabian peninsula in the south, and from
Ancient Iran in the east to Cyprus in the west. However, in the 12th century BC,
Assyrian satrapies in Anatolia came under attack from the Mushki (Phrygians), and
those in the Levant from Arameans, but Tiglath-Pileser I (reigned 1114–1076 BC)
was able to defeat and repel these attacks, conquering the incomers. The Middle
Assyrian Empire survived intact throughout much of this period, with Assyria
dominating and often ruling Babylonia directly, controlling south east and south
western Anatolia, north western Iran and much of northern and central Syria and
Canaan, as far as the Mediterranean and Cyprus.[21]

The Arameans and Phrygians were subjected, and Assyria and its colonies were not
threatened by the Sea Peoples who had ravaged Egypt and much of the East
Mediterranean, and the Assyrians often conquered as far as Phoenicia and the East
Mediterranean. However, after the death of Ashur-bel-kala in 1056 BC, Assyria
withdrew to areas close to its natural borders, encompassing what is today northern
Iraq, north east Syria, the fringes of north west Iran, and south eastern Turkey.
Assyria still retained a stable monarchy, the best army in the world, and an efficient
civil administration, enabling it to survive the Bronze Age Collapse intact. Assyrian
written records remained numerous and the most consistent in the world during the
period, and the Assyrians were still able to mount long range military campaigns in all
directions when necessary. From the late 10th century BC, it once more began to
assert itself internationally, with the Neo-Assyrian Empire growing to be the largest
the world had yet seen.[21]

The situation in Babylonia was very different. After the Assyrian withdrawal, it was
still subject to periodic Assyrian (and Elamite) subjugation, and new groups of
Semites, such as the Aramaeans, Suteans (and in the period after the Bronze Age
Collapse, Chaldeans also), spread unchecked into Babylonia from the Levant, and the
power of its weak kings barely extended beyond the city limits of Babylon. Babylon
was sacked by the Elamites under Shutruk-Nahhunte (c. 1185–1155 BC), and lost
control of the Diyala River valley to Assyria.

Egypt

Main article: Third Intermediate Period of Egypt

After apparently surviving for a while, the Egyptian Empire collapsed in the
mid-twelfth century BC (during the reign of Ramesses VI, 1145 to 1137 BC).
Previously, the Merneptah Stele (c. 1200 BC) spoke of attacks (Libyan War) from
Putrians (from modern Libya), with associated people of Ekwesh, Shekelesh, Lukka,
Shardana and Teresh (possibly Troas), and a Canaanite revolt, in the cities of
Ashkelon, Yenoam and among the people of Israel. A second attack (Battle of the
Delta and Battle of Djahy) during the reign of Ramesses III (1186–1155 BC) involved
Peleset, Tjeker, Shardana and Denyen.

Conclusion

Robert Drews describes the collapse as "the worst disaster in ancient history, even
more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire."[22] Cultural
memories of the disaster told of a "lost golden age": for example, Hesiod spoke of
Ages of Gold, Silver, and Bronze, separated from the cruel modern Age of Iron by the
Age of Heroes. Rodney Castledon suggests that memories of the Bronze Age collapse
influenced Plato's story of Atlantis[23] in Timaeus and the Critias.

Possible causes
Various theories have been put forward as possible contributors to the collapse, many
of them mutually compatible.

Environmental

Climate change
Main article: Bond event

Changes in climate similar to the Younger Dryas period or the Little Ice Age
punctuate human history. The local effects of these changes may cause crop failures
in multiple consecutive years, leading to warfare as a last-ditch effort at survival. The
triggers for climate change are still debated, but ancient peoples could not have
predicted substantial climate changes.[clarification needed][citation needed]

Volcanoes

The Hekla 3 eruption approximately coincides with this period; and, while the exact
date is under considerable dispute, one group calculated the date to be specifically
1159 BC, implicating the eruption in the collapse in Egypt.[24]

Drought

Using the Palmer Drought Index for 35 Greek, Turkish and Middle Eastern weather
stations, it was shown that a drought of the kind that persisted from January 1972 AD
would have affected all of the sites associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse.[25]
Drought could have easily precipitated or hastened socioeconomic problems and led
to wars.

More recently, it has been claimed that the diversion of midwinter storms from the
Atlantic to north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, bringing wetter conditions to Central
Europe but drought to the Eastern Mediterranean, was associated with the Late
Bronze Age collapse.[26]

Pollen in sediment cores from the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee show that there
was a period of severe drought at the start of the collapse.[27][28]

Cultural

Ironworking

The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of a technological history that
saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of ironworking technology in the
region, beginning with precocious iron-working in the present Bulgaria and Romania
in the 13th and 12th centuries BC.[29]

Leonard R. Palmer suggested that iron, superior to bronze for weapons manufacture,
was in more plentiful supply and so allowed larger armies of iron users to overwhelm
the smaller bronze-equipped armies of maryannu chariotry.[30]

Changes in warfare

Robert Drews argues[31] for the appearance of massed infantry, using newly
developed weapons and armor, such as cast rather than forged spearheads and long
swords, a revolutionising cut-and-thrust weapon,[32] and javelins. The appearance of
bronze foundries suggests "that mass production of bronze artifacts was suddenly
important in the Aegean". For example, Homer uses "spears" as a virtual synonym for
"warriors".

Such new weaponry, in the hands of large numbers of "running skirmishers", who
could swarm and cut down a chariot army, would destabilize states that were based
upon the use of chariots by the ruling class. That would precipitate an abrupt social
collapse as raiders began to conquer, loot and burn cities.[33][34][35]

General systems collapse

A general systems collapse has been put forward as an explanation for the reversals in
culture that occurred between the Urnfield culture of the 12th and 13th centuries BC
and the rise of the Celtic Hallstatt culture in the 9th and 10th centuries BC.[36]
General systems collapse theory, pioneered by Joseph Tainter,[37] hypothesises how
social declines in response to complexity may lead to a collapse resulting in simpler
forms of society.

In the specific context of the Middle East, a variety of factors – including population
growth, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production
technologies – could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry (compared
to arable land) to a level unsustainable for traditional warrior aristocracies. In
complex societies that were increasingly fragile and less resilient, the combination of
factors may have contributed to the collapse.

The growing complexity and specialization of the Late Bronze Age political,
economic, and social organization in Carol Thomas and Craig Conant's phrase[38]
together made the organization of civilization too intricate to reestablish piecewise
when disrupted. That could explain why the collapse was so widespread and able to
render the Bronze Age civilizations incapable of recovery. The critical flaws of the
Late Bronze Age are its centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy
political structure. These flaws then were exposed by sociopolitical events (revolt of
peasantry and defection of mercenaries), fragility of all kingdoms (Mycenaean, Hittite,
Ugaritic, and Egyptian), demographic crises (overpopulation), and wars between
states. Other factors that could have placed increasing pressure on the fragile
kingdoms include piracy by the Sea Peoples interrupting maritime trade, as well as
drought, crop failure, famine, or the Dorian migration or invasion.[39]

Sea Peoples
Definition

by Joshua J. Mark
published on 02 September 2009
The Sea Peoples were a confederacy of naval raiders who harried the coastal towns
and cities of the Mediterranean region between c. 1276-1178 BCE, concentrating their
efforts especially on Egypt. The nationality of the Sea Peoples remains a mystery as
the existing records of their activities are mainly Egyptian sources who only describe
them in terms of battle such as the record from the Stele at Tanis which reads, in part,
“They came from the sea in their war ships and none could stand against them." This
description is typical of Egyptian references to these mysterious invaders.

Names of the tribes which comprised the Sea Peoples have been given in Egyptian
records as the Sherden, the Sheklesh, Lukka, Tursha and Akawasha. Outside Egypt,
they also assaulted the regions of the Hittite Empire, the Levant, and other areas
around the Mediterranean coast. Their origin and identity has been suggested (and
debated) to be Etruscan/Trojan to Italian, Philistine, Mycenaen and even Minoan but,
as no accounts discovered thus far shed any more light on the question than what is
presently known, any such claims must remain mere conjecture.

No ancient inscription names the coalition as "Sea Peoples" - this is a modern-day

designation first coined by the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero in c. 1881 CE.
Maspero came up with the term because the ancient reports claim that these tribes
came "from the sea" or from "the islands" but they never say which sea or which
islands and so the Sea Peoples' origin remains unknown.

The three great pharaohs who record their conflicts and victories over the Sea Peoples
are Ramesses II (The Great, 1279-1213 BCE), his son and successor Merenptah
(1213-1203 BCE), and Ramesses III (1186-1155 BCE). All three claimed great
victories over their adversaries and their inscriptions provide the most detailed
evidence of the Sea Peoples.

The Sea Peoples & Ramesses II

Ramesses the Great was one of the most effective rulers in the history of ancient
Egypt and among his many accomplishments was securing the borders against
invasion by nomadic tribes and securing the trade routes vital to the country's
economy. Early in his reign, the Hittites seized the important trade center of Kadesh
(in modern-day Syria) and in 1274 BCE Ramesses led his army to drive them out.
Ramesses claimed a great victory and had the story inscribed in detail and read to the
people.

In Ramesses the Great's account, the Sea Peoples are mentioned as allies
of the Hittites but also as serving in his own army as mercenaries.

His claim of total victory is disputed by the Hittite account claiming their own but the
inscription is important for many other reasons than Ramesses would have had in
mind and, among them, what it says about the Sea Peoples. In his account, the Sea
Peoples are mentioned as allies of the Hittites but also as serving in his own army as
mercenaries. No mention is made of where they came from or who they were which
suggests to scholars that the audience would have already had this information; the
Sea Peoples needed no introduction.

Ramesses also relates how, in the second year of his reign, he defeated these people in
a naval battle off the coast of Egypt. Ramesses allowed the Sea Peoples' war ships and
their supply and cargo vessels to approach the mouth of the Nile where he had a small
Egyptian fleet positioned in a defensive formation. He then waited in the wings for
the Sea Peoples to attack what seemed to be an insignificant force before launching
his full attack upon them from their flanks and sinking their ships. This battle seems
to have involved only the Sherdan Sea Peoples or, at least, they are the only ones
mentioned because, after the battle, many were pressed into Ramesses’ army and
some served as his elite body guard. Ramesses, always very confident in his
inscriptions, gives the impression that he had neutralized the threat of the Sea Peoples
but his successors' inscriptions tell another story.
 Ramesses II Seated
Statue, Thebes

Merenptah's Inscription

Merenptah continued to be troubled by the Sea Peoples who allied themselves with
the Libyans to invade the Nile Delta. Merenptah writes how, in the fifth year of his
reign (1209 BCE) Mereye, the chief of the Libyans, allied with the Sea Peoples to
invade Egypt. He refers to the Libyan allies as coming "from the seas to the north"
and names the territories as Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden, and Shekelesh. Scholars
have since tried to identify where these lands were and what names they came to be
known by but without success. There are as many theories surrounding who the Sea
Peoples were as there are scholars to refute them. Whoever they were, Merenptah
describes them as formidable adversaries and, in his inscription on the walls of the
Temple of Karnak and on the stele from his funerary temple, takes great pride in
defeating them.
At this point in their history it seems the Sea Peoples were seeking to establish
permanent settlements in Egypt as the invading force brought with them scores of
household goods and building tools. Merenptah, after praying, fasting, and consulting
the gods in the matter of strategy, met the Sea Peoples on the field at Pi-yer where the
combined Egyptian force of infantry, cavalry, and archers slew over 6,000 of their
opponents and took captive members of the royal Libyan family. Merenptah claimed
complete victory and Egypt's borders were again secure. To celebrate his
accomplishment, he had the story immortalized in the Karnak inscription and also on
the famous Merenptah Stele found in his funerary temple at Thebes. The Merenptah
Stele's conclusion reads, in part:

The princes prostrate themselves, saying, "Peace!" Not one

of Nine Bows dares raise his head; Tehenu is plundered while
Hatti is peaceful, Canaan is seized by every evil, Ashkelon
is carried off and Gezer is seized, Yenoam is made as that
which never existed, Israel is wasted without seed, Khor is
made a widow of Egypt, All the lands are at peace. Everyone
who travels has been subdued by the King of Upper and Lower
Egypt.

The "Nine Bows" mentioned is the customary term the Egyptians gave their enemies
and Tehenu is the name for Libya. The inscription is announcing how Merenptah has
defeated all the contentious regions who rose against Egypt and subdued them,
bringing peace. The Merenptah Stele is the first mention of Israel in recorded history
but, interestingly, refers not to a country or region but to a people. Scholars still do
not know what this reference means. Like the Sea Peoples, this reference to Israel
continues to intrigue historians and researchers in the present day. Merenptah himself
was not concerned with Israel or with any of the other countries he lists; he was
satisfied that the Sea Peoples had been defeated and Egypt secured for the future. Like
his predecessor, however, Merenptah would be wrong and the Sea Peoples would
return.
 Ramesses II at The Battle of
Kadesh

Ramesses III & The Battle of Xois

During the reign of the Pharaoh Ramesses III the Sea Peoples attacked and destroyed
the Egyptian trading center at Kadesh and then again attempted an invasion of Egypt.
They began their activities with quick raids along the coast (as they had done in the
time of Ramesses II) before driving for the Delta. Ramesses III defeated them in 1180
BCE but they returned in force. In his own victory inscription, Ramesses III describes
the invasion:

The foreign countries conspired in their islands. All at once

the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land
could resist their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa,
and Alashiya on - being cut off at one time. A camp was set
up in Amurru. They desolated its people and its land was like
that which had never existed. They were coming forward toward
Egypt, while the flame was prepared for them. Their
confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denen, and
Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands
as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts were
confident and trusting as they said "Our plans will succeed!"

The countries mentioned in the confederation of Sea Peoples might be the regions of
Palestine (Peleset) or Syria (Tjeker) but this is uncertain. It is clear, though, that these
are the same people - with some additions - who attacked Egypt with the Libyans in
the time of Merenptah. In this invasion, as in the earlier one, the Sea Peoples were
allied with Libyans and, as Ramesses III notes, they were confident of victory. They
had already destroyed the Hittite state (referred to in the inscription as Hatti) in c.
1200 BCE and when Ramesses III writes, "they were coming forward toward Egypt"
he would most likely be saying they were advancing steadily without opposition.

Ramesses III would have known of his predecessors' clashes with these people and
that they were to be taken very seriously. He decided against a field engagement and
chose guerilla tactics as a strategy instead. He set up ambushes along the coast and
down the Nile Delta and made especially effective use of his archers, positioning
them hidden along the shoreline to rain down arrows on the ships at his signal. Once
the ships' crew was dead or drowning the vessels were set on fire with flaming arrows.
The attack by sea had been crushed and Ramesses III then turned his attention to what
was left of the invading force on land. He employed the same tactics as before and the
Sea Peoples were finally defeated off the city of Xois in 1178 BCE. Egyptian records,
again, detail a glorious victory in which many of the Sea Peoples were slain and
others taken captive and pressed into the Egyptian army and navy or sold as slaves.

Although Ramesses III had saved Egypt from conquest, the war was so expensive it
drained the Royal Treasury and the tomb builders at the village of Set Maat (modern
Deir el-Medina) could not be paid. This led to the first labor strike in recorded history
where the workers walked off the job and refused to return until they were fully
compensated.

After their defeat by Ramesses III the Sea Peoples vanish from history, the survivors
of the battle perhaps being assimilated into Egyptian culture. No records indicate
where they came from and there are no accounts of them after 1178 BCE but, for
almost one hundred years, they were the most feared sea raiders in the Mediterranean
region and a constant challenge to the might and prosperity of Egypt.

The Enduring Mystery

As noted above, there is no agreement on who the Sea Peoples were even though one
will find plenty of scholars and would-be scholars arguing heatedly for their particular
claim. The Egyptian inscriptions discussed here provide almost all there is to know of
these people outside of references in letters from the Hittites and Assyrians which
shed no more light on the subject. That they were well known to the Egyptians is clear
from the fact that they are never introduced as a foreign people and the possibility
they were friends, or even allies, of Egypt is suggested by their presence in the army
of Ramesses the Great and the sense of surprise expressed at the invasions. Historian
Marc van de Mieroop writes:

Both Merenptah and Ramesses III present [the attacks] as

sudden events, unforeseen and with massive numbers of people
involved. Ramesses III's reliefs even show carts loaded with
women, children, and household goods, as if a population
movement was involved. His account of the Sea Peoples'
appearance in the north of the eastern Mediterranean suggests
that it was unexpected, very sudden, and highly destructive.
But Merenptah had reported occurrences of the same type
thirty years earlier. Nor were the names of the members of
 the Sea Peoples new in the Egyptian record. Several of them
appeared decades earlier (251-252).

The Sea Peoples are also mentioned in the literature of Egypt - in The Tale of
Wenamun most notably - where they appear as familiar figures in the Mediterranean
landscape. Why these people rose up so regularly against Egypt - if, in fact, they did -
continues to mystify historians and scholars. Historians such as Marc van de Mieroop
believe the question of the Sea Peoples' identity will never be known and there is no
longer a point in trying to discover it. He writes, "One can wonder why the Sea
Peoples have engendered so much passion" and states, "Why they still appear in every
textbook on world history remains to be explained" (259). The explanation is simple
though: the Sea Peoples' actual identity remains a mystery and human beings have
always been drawn to the mysterious - and always will be.

Editorial Review This Article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and
adherence to academic standards prior to publication.