The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Zimri-Lim’s fate is not recorded; nor that of Shiptu, his queen, nor that of his daughters. He had two young sons, but neither appears again in the annals either of Mari or of Babylon.

  THE YEAR AFTER THIS ATTACK, Hammurabi turned again towards Larsa. We can assume that Rim-Sin had thought better of his homage and mounted a resistance. After a six-month siege, Larsa fell.

  This time, Hammurabi took Rim-Sin prisoner, removing him from his throne. His sixty-year rule was over. Now all of the old Sumerian cities—not to mention a good many west and north of old Sumer—were part of the empire centered at Babylon. “May all men bow down in reverence to you,” Hammurabi’s scribes wrote. “May they celebrate your great glory; may they give their obedience to your supreme authority.”7

  This was no unruly empire; it was ruled by law. Hammurabi managed his growing conquests, in part, by enforcing the same code over the entire extent of it. The only surviving copy of this code was discovered centuries later in Susa, carved onto a black stone stele. Clearly the laws were intended to embody a divine code of justice (the top of the stele shows the god of justice, bestowing his authority on Hammurabi), but their showy presence in conquered cities also kept control over the conquered people. According to the stele itself, the laws were observed faithfully in Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Isin, Kish, Mari, and other cities.

  Hammurabi was not the first lawgiver—Ur-Nammu had scooped him in this regard—but his laws are certainly the most complete to survive from ancient times, and they show an amazingly wide range of concerns. Penalties for robbery (death), aiding in the escape of a slave (death), kidnapping (death), designing a house that collapses on someone else’s head (death), and the poor performance of an obligation to the king (death) are accompanied by regulations on marriage (a contract was required; husbands could obtain divorce from a judge, but so could a wife whose husband had disgraced her), injury (any man who puts out the eye of another free man will lose his own, but putting out a slave’s eye only costs a fine of silver), inheritance (widows can inherit land but can’t sell it; they must keep it for their sons), and firefighting (if a man goes to fight a fire at his neighbor’s house and pinches any of his neighbor’s goods under cover of smoke, he “shall be thrown into the fire”).8 All of these laws and codes of Hammurabi, handed down and reinforced from the center of the empire, were meant to convince conquered peoples of the justice and rightness of Babylonian rule. But they also served to keep a very tight rein on Hammurabi’s subjects.9

  22.1 Hammurabi’s Empire

  A tight rein characterized almost all of Hammurabi’s relations with his realm. Thanks to his wide conquests, he controlled all of the shipping routes from upstream downwards to the south; cedar and lapis lazuli, stone and silver, metal and bronze, all had to pass by his checkpoints, where only ships given a royal passport were allowed to continue on.10 Not only did this guarantee the full payment of taxes, but it allowed the king to keep a very close eye on the goods going down into the troublesome south. No city in Hammurabi’s empire would be able to arm itself in secret. Hammurabi liked to call himself the shepherd of his people; nevertheless, he seems to have been more worried that the sheep would grow wolf’s teeth and break out of the fold, than that wolves would approach from the outside.

  He knew perfectly well that his empire would only hang together as long as he appeared in complete control. In a letter written to one of his generals, we find him, after a run of bad luck in battle, trying to figure out a way to get the statues of those Elamite goddesses back to their homeland, so that they will bless his campaigns. He can’t quite see how this will be accomplished, though. He doesn’t want to fight his way in, and if he were to just hand them over, the Elamites might see the act as one of weakness.11

  Particularly in the north and east, Hammurabi’s rule was almost entirely one of subjection and coercion. Not ten years after claiming Eshnunna, he was again campaigning against the city, in a siege that lasted two full years and ended with Babylonian soldiers sacking, burning, and levelling it. He fought at the eastern border; he fought up near Nineveh, where more rebels were attempting to break away; he fought for almost the entire time that he ruled over his hard-won empire. By the end of the 1740s, he was an old man, ill from years of rough travel and in constant pain from partly healed battle wounds. He died only five years after the destruction of Eshnunna, and left his son Samsuiluna with a very big mess.

  FOR SOME YEARS, small bands of nomads—the Kassites—had been wandering over the Zagros Mountains, across the Tigris, and into the center of Mesopotamia. Babylonian accounts occasionally mention them as wandering workers, cheap immigrant laborers hiring themselves out.

  The ninth year of Samsuiluna’s reign was known as the year “in which the army of the Kassites came” the laborers had armed themselves and were raiding the northeastern borders. Eshnunna had served as a barrier against the invaders. With the city gone, they streamed over the edge of the empire in larger and larger numbers.

  At the same time, Samsuiluna was facing the rebellions that his father had spent his life putting down; Uruk, Isin, Larsa, and Ur all revolted in turn, requiring soldiers to go down and herd them back into the Babylonian fold. In the process, Ur was destroyed so thoroughly that it lay unoccupied for centuries afterwards; a little later, Nippur suffered the same fate.12

  Already fighting on multiple fronts, Samsuiluna then discovered a new threat on his east. The Elamites had a new king, the warlike Kutir-Nahhunte I; ten years after the Kassite attacks began, Kutir-Nahhunte came across the Tigris with an army. The thin Babylonian ranks retreated out of Elamite territory, well back into their own, and then finally back to Babylon itself. This defeat of the Babylonian soldiers was so resounding that a thousand years later, Babylon’s enemy Assyria was still taunting the Babylonians with it.

  Samsuiluna couldn’t keep his father’s tight hand on his empire while fighting off these threats. By 1712, the end of his reign, he had lost all of the south. Without a ceaselessly campaigning warrior behind it, Hammurabi’s code was helpless to hold the far reaches of the empire together.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Hyksos Seize Egypt

  Between 1782 and 1630 BC, Western Semites capture the throne of Egypt, and the Middle Kingdom ends

  THE PROSPERITY of the Middle Kingdom lasted for a relatively short time. The rule of Senusret III’s son, Amenemhet III, was its high point. When he died, the power of the pharaoh to hold the country safe against invaders, and united with itself, began to fade.

  Once again the Nile was lapping at the feet of the pharaoh. After reaching its highest point during the high noon of Amenemhet III’s reign, the flood began to decrease year by year.1 As always in Egypt, the dropping of the Nile and a diminishing of royal power went hand in hand.

  Troubles with the succession probably had something to do with the slump as well. Amenemhet III ruled for forty-five years; by the time he died, his heir apparent was not only quite old, but also childless. Amenemhet IV, who had waited his whole life to ascend the throne, died almost as soon as he was crowned, and his wife, Queen Sobeknefru, took his place. Few details from the queen’s reign have survived; but in ancient Egypt, a woman on the throne was a sign of serious palace trouble.

  Manetho begins a new dynasty after Queen Sobeknefru, since there was no male heir waiting in the wings. The king who does eventually ascend the throne to begin the Thirteenth Dynasty is a nonentity, a shadowy figure followed by a handful of even more obscure personalities.

  Down in Nubia, the governors who watched over the southern lands for the crown began to act with more and more independence; the Nubian lands that Senusret III had trampled on with such ferocity during the Twelfth Dynasty were easing out of the crown’s grip. There was trouble in the north as well. Ruins show that the border fortresses on the eastern border between the Delta and the “land of the Asiatics” were crumbling. The border had once been so well protected that the courtier Sinuhe had trouble getting out of Egypt. N
ow the “Asiatics,” those wandering Western Semitic nomads, came into the Delta in increasing numbers. Some of them settled down to live side by side with the Egyptians. Others were less domesticated; around 1720, sixty years or so after the Thirteenth Dynasty began its ineffectual rule, a particularly aggressive band of nomads invaded and burned parts of Memphis, the old Egyptian capital. Unlike the Egyptians, they fought with horse and chariot, an advantage that offset their relatively small numbers.

  Despite this humiliation, the Thirteenth Dynasty managed to keep temporary control of the country. But their hold on Egypt was so shaky that historians have traditionally considered the Thirteenth Dynasty the end of the Middle Kingdom and the beginning of the Second Intermediate Period. Near the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty, the pharaoh’s power had wilted so drastically that a second royal family appeared. We know almost nothing of this “Fourteenth Dynasty” except that it existed alongside the Thirteenth for some years. While the Thirteenth Dynasty pottered around in the Middle Kingdom capital Itj-taway, doing nothing useful, the so-called Fourteenth Dynasty claimed the right to rule the eastern reaches of the Nile Delta.

  Some thirty or forty years later, yet another dynasty appeared alongside the waning Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties. This Fifteenth Dynasty had its headquarters at the city of Avaris, which lay in the desert just east of the Delta. The first Fifteenth Dynasty king, a man named Sheshi, organized his followers into an army and began to spread his rule to the west and the south by force. Some twenty years later, around 1663, the Fifteenth Dynasty had managed to destroy both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth, and ruled supreme.

  According to Manetho, Sheshi was a foreigner; he and his followers belonged to a race called the “Desert Princes,” or Hikau-khoswet: the “Hyksos.”2 Manetho describes the Hyksos takeover as a violent and sudden overwhelming of Egyptians by savage invasion:64

  For what cause I know not, a blast of the gods smote us; and unexpectedly, from the regions of the East, invaders of obscure race marched in confidence of victory against our land. By main force, they easily overpowered the rulers of the land; they then burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of gods, and treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others, and appointing as king one of their number.3

  Manetho, an Egyptian, can perhaps be excused for believing that his great ancestors could only have been overcome by a sudden and vigorous attack. But the traces left behind by these Fifteenth Dynasty rulers suggest that most of the Hyksos had actually been in Egypt for quite a while. Semitic names begin to appear in Middle Kingdom inscriptions and lists well before the 1663 takeover. So many Western Semites settled at the town of Avaris (the name means something like “Desert Mansion”) that, over time, it became almost entirely Semitic. When the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties divided the already weakened leadership of Egypt between them, the inhabitants of Avaris took the opportunity to claim their own piece of the pie. The invasion of Egypt by foreigners was real, but it was primarily an invasion from within.

  Manetho’s hyperbole aside, the Hyksos—who, after all, had more likely been in Egypt for at least a generation or two—didn’t raze too many cities. Although their names are Semitic, they had already adopted Egyptian dress and Egyptian customs. Egyptian continued to be the official language of inscriptions and records; Egyptians served the Hyksos as administrators and priests.

  Despite the destruction of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties, the Hyksos were never in sole possession of the country. A vassal line of kings ruled, probably with Hyksos permission, in the northwest; few names survive, but Manetho calls them the Sixteenth Dynasty. More serious was the announcement of the Egyptian governors of Thebes, to the south, that they would not submit to Hyksos rule and that true Egyptian authority was now centered in Thebes. This is the “Seventeenth Dynasty” of Manetho: the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Dynasties all existed side by side.

  The Hyksos kings, aware of their own limitations, do not appear to have made a serious push to the south. The Egyptian rulers of Thebes controlled Egypt as far as Abydos; in this southern kingdom, the Middle Kingdom traditions carried on, free of foreign influence. But there was no peace between the two. Manetho writes, “The kings of Thebes and the other parts of Egypt made an insurrection against the foreign princes,65 and a terrible and long war was made between them.”4

  The long-distance hostility between the two dynasties is revealed by the determined attempt of the fifth Hyksos king, Apepi I, who probably ruled around 1630, to pick a fight with the king of Thebes. A papyrus in the British Museum preserves part of a letter sent by Apepi I all the way down to Thebes and addressed to Sequenere, the Seventeenth Dynasty king currently occupying the Theban palace. “Get rid of the hippopotami at Thebes,” the letter demands, imperiously. “They roar all night, I can hear them all the way up here at Avaris, and their noise is ruining my sleep.”5

  23.1 Three Simultaneous Dynasties

  Sequenere, five hundred miles away, took these as fighting words. His body, now in the Cairo Museum, suggests that he went and rounded up an army and started to march north. When he encountered the Hyksos border guard, he led his soldiers into battle. During the fight, Sequenere fell, his skull crushed by a mace. While he lay on the ground, he was stabbed and hacked with dagger, spear, and axe. His body was embalmed in a hurry, after a fair amount of decomposition had already set in; apparently the Theban pharaoh lay on the battlefield for several days before the Hyksos backed off enough for the southern soldiers to gather it up.6

  The skirmish did not, quite, turn into a war. The Hyksos and Theban armies apparently retreated back to their home ground. Sequenere’s older son Kahmose took the throne in Thebes, and began to lay plans to avenge his father’s death.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  King Minos of Crete

  On Crete, between 1720 and 1628 BC, the Minoans sacrifice to the god of the sea

  NORTH OF THE NILE DELTA, far up in the Mediterranean Sea, a long mountainous island lay southeast of the unnamed messy peninsula that jutted down from the European mainland. The inhabitants may have come over from Asia Minor long before; by the time of the Hyksos, they too had joined the ranks of countries with kings, and had built a palace for their unknown monarch.

  The palace stood at the center of Knossos, a settlement just inland from the very center of the northern coastline, and a strategic place from which to keep tabs on the east and west ends of the island. Not long after it was built, other, slightly smaller palaces went up at other key locations: at Mallia, east of Knossos on the northern coast itself, and Phaistos, just in from the southern coast.1

  Since these early people left no writing behind them, we don’t know exactly who lived in these palaces. But they stood at the centers of sprawling towns, networks of roads and houses. The people of these towns traded with the civilizations across the water. Their brightly painted pottery jars (possibly once holding wine or oil for trade) have been uncovered not only on the surrounding islands, but also along the Nile river and on the Mediterranean coast where the Western Semites lived.

  They also practiced human sacrifice. Earthquakes shook the mountainous island with regularity; one of them collapsed a temple, situated on the mountain now called Mount Juktas and facing the northern sea, onto the inhabitants inside. Their skeletons lay undisturbed for almost three thousand years, until archaeologists uncovered the scene: a young man bound and lying on his side on a stone-and-clay altar, a bronze blade dropped on top of his body, and in front of the altar, a man in his forties, wearing a ceremonial ring and seal. A woman lay on her face in the southwest corner.2

  Human sacrifice wasn’t carried out very often. Traces of sacrifice have been uncovered in only one other location: a house in the western part of the town of Knossos, where two children had apparently been not only sacrificed, but carved up and cooked along with snails in some sort of ritual feast.3 The ruins don’t tell
us what the sacrifice meant, or what horrible dilemma drove the priests and priestesses of Knossos to such an extreme act of worship.

  But we can make a good guess.

  SOMETIME AROUND 1720, an earthquake knocked down the early palace at Knossos. A new palace was built overtop of it and partially incorporating its ruins. This second palace was much more elaborate. The people of Knossos had progressed to the point where they needed a more royal king.

  The Greeks, who called the island Crete, believed that a powerful king named Minos lived in Knossos in the days of this “Second Palace.”66 According to Greek myth, Minos was the stepson of a Cretan nobleman. Wishing to rule over the country, he told the people of Crete that he could prove he was divinely chosen for the kingship; whatever he prayed for would be given to him by the gods. The people challenged him to prove his boast, so Minos asked Poseidon to send him a bull for sacrifice. Immediately a magnificent bull walked up out of the sea onto the Cretan shore. It was so magnificent, in fact, that Minos couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice it. He herded it into his own flock and sacrificed a lesser bull instead.

  The Cretans acclaimed Minos as king. But Poseidon was displeased by Minos’s greed, and cursed his wife Pasiphae with a lust for the bull. With the help of the legendary architect Daedalus, Pasiphae and the bull managed a rather odd coupling in which a wooden cow on wheels figured prominently; Pasiphae then gave birth to a horribly deformed child, a human figure with the face of a bull. Minos, seeing the baby, shut it up in a prison beneath the Knossos palace. The prison, which was designed by Daedalus as punishment for helping out Pasiphae, was made up of so many winding passages that the child—named Asterius by his mother, but known as the Minotaur—could never escape. In this prison, the Labyrinth, the Minotaur grew to adulthood. Minos fed it on human flesh; after a battle with the inhabitants of the Greek mainland, he ordered them to send seven young men and seven young women each year to be eaten by the Minotaur.4