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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  116 The smaller tribes were Bit-Sha’alli and Bit-Shilani. In the Chaldean language, which is not documented from this period, bit apparently meant “household of”; the rest of each tribal name referred to an ancestor from which the tribe was descended (see H. W. F. Saggs, Babylonians,). This shows a common heritage with the Western Semitic Israelites, both in tribal organization and in language; the Hebrew word for “household” was bet.

  117 The works of Ctesias, who was a physician and a learned man, come to us only secondhand; the manuscripts have disappeared into dust, but a later Greek historian, Diodorus, borrowed large chunks of Ctesias’s accounts and credits him with them. Diodorus is much given to fantastical tales, and it is difficult to know exactly how much of “Ctesias’s accounts” should actually be credited (or debited) to the earlier writer.

  118 Historians generally divide Greek history into the Dark Age (1150–750 BC), the Archaic Period (750–490), the Classical Period (490–323), and the Hellenistic Period (323–30). Archaeologists, who base their very ancient chronology on shifts in styles of art and pottery rather than on recorded events, use a slightly different division; the early years of the Dark Age are known as the Submycenaean Period (1125–1050) and the later years as the Protogeometric Period (1050–900), while the emergence from the Dark Age is called the Geometric Period (after a pottery style) and is divided into the Early (900–850), Middle (850–750), and Late Geometric (750–700). These chronologies can be found in a number of standard reference works, including Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History by Sarah B. Pomeroy et al.

  119 As this is a history rather than a literature survey, I am here resisting the urge to go deeper into the question of Homeric authorship, the structure of the epics, their language, their take on heroism, what they reveal about early Greek worship of the gods, and so on. These are subjects which could fill not one book, but many. Since they already have, I will refrain.

  120 Italy was not a country until 1861, so to call the peninsula “Italian” at this point in history is more than stretching a point. However, like China, the Italian peninsula has been identified with the same culture and its descendents since very ancient times, so I will use “Italian” for convenience. (In the nineteenth century, when the Italian states were governed by Austria, the Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich remarked that “Italy is merely a geographic expression”; he was immediately proved wrong, since Italian agitation for national identity erupted almost directly afterwards, but the comment applies much more accurately to the eighth century BC.)

  121 The archaeological division of the peninsula’s history labels 2000–900 BC as the Bronze Age, with the period of the Greek Dark Age (1200–900 BC) assigned to the Late Bronze Age. The Iron Age begins around 900 BC.

  122 The identification of these languages, many of which are known only from a fragment or two of an inscription, and their relationship to each other is one of the elements which has gone into identifying the differences between the Iron Age Italian cultures. But it is a highly specialized field with its own lingo, so beyond the scope of this particular book. T. J. Cornell has a very compressed but helpful introduction to the whole subject in The Beginnings of Rome.

  123 A study of the Greek pantheon is beyond the scope of this book; I will just note that although cultic activity in honor of the gods had been going on for centuries, the Iliad and Odyssey are the earliest Greek works which show us anything about the personality and motives of Zeus and company, demonstrating that by 800 BC or so the pantheon had undergone quite a bit of development, elaboration, and ritualization.

  124 Judith Swaddling, curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, laments that there is no contemporary parallel to Olympia. Americans are better off; simply imagine a pro football game opened with prayer and played for the glory of God, with an altar call at halftime. Add in a presidential candidate flipping the initial coin, and you’ve got all three elements of the ancient games: religion, sport, and politics.

  125 Classicist R. M. Ogilvie points out that the two sons of the Greek god Poseidon were put out onto the river Enipeus, and then were found and raised by animals; Remus’s vault over the walls of Rome resembles the legends of Oeneus and Toxeus or Poimander and Leucippus.

  126 See chapter 18, Chapter Fifteen.

  127 See chapter 41, Thirty Five.

  128 Tiglath-Pileser I reigned c.1115–1077. Tiglath-Pileser II probably reigned 966–935, during a time of chaos in Assyria’s records and just before Ashur-dan II began to push the Aramaeans back out of the country. See chapter 47, Forty-Five.

  129 The exact retelling of Tiglath-Pileser III’s conquests is complicated by the very poor state of his records, many of which were in the form of reliefs destroyed by later kings who used the stone slabs as building materials. “Extant records,” to quote H. W. F. Saggs, “are so fragmentary that different reconstructions are possible, and academic throat-cutting still continues…” ( The Might That Was Assyria, Chapter Eight). This is one possible reconstruction.

  130 The knot, as many readers will already know, was called the Gordian Knot; it seems to have received this name thanks to another tradition which held that Midas’s father Gordius, not Midas himself, was the wagon-rider. However, as Ernest Fredericksmeyer points out, the historian Arrian puts Midas in the wagon; in this he was followed by Plutarch and others, and Alexander himself believed this version of events (“Alexander, Midas, and the Oracle at Gordium,” Classical Philology 56:3 [1961], 160–168).

  131 Students of modern history will recollect that a not-so-charming and peculiarly British movement whose adherents called themselves “British Israelites” grew up during the nineteenth-century renewal of interest in national identity. With practically no historical or geographical support, British Israelites proposed that the ten tribes had travelled across the Caucasus Mountains and ended up in Britain, which made white Western Christians of British descent the “true Israel.” This served to act as a justification for anti-Semitism, weirdly enough, since the Jews of the present-day were labelled as pretenders. This is completely ridiculous simply from a political standpoint, given that Sargon II would never have allowed any sort of mass exodus of the Israelites; his whole goal was to destroy their identity as a nation. The ten tribes of Israel were not “lost,” as though they had been misplaced in toto and could be rediscovered. They were very efficiently destroyed.

  British Israelitism faded in the twentieth century, but has made a very ugly comeback in the so-called Christian Identity movement of the United States. I was startled to receive, only a few years ago, from a then-neighbor out in rural Virginia, a set of “teaching videos” from a Christian Identity “church” in the Midwest laying out, in great detail, how the Jews are actually “Edomites” cursed by God, and Caucasians are the true Jews, the chosen people of God. My attempt to explain that the supposed difference between cursed and non-cursed humans rested on a mistranslation of the Hebrew words for “man” was totally fruitless; it must have sounded like sophistry. This idiotic theology is alive and well.

  132 This is the most likely reconstruction, given Sargon’s own accounts and inscriptions, but the exact actions of Assyrian armies at any given time are speculative: “The diversity of geographical reconstructions inspired by the account of [this campaign],” writes Assyriologist Paul Zimansky, “is a tribute to Assyriological ingenuity and Assyrian obscurity” (“Urartian Geography and Sargon’s Eighth Campaign,” in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49:1[1990, frontmatter).

  133 The Semitic name Merodach-baladan is used in the biblical accounts; as king of Babylon, Merodach-baladan took on the name Marduk-apla-iddina II. He sometimes appears in histories of Babylonia as Merodach-baladan II, a composite name.

  134 This is Merodach-baladan’s royal Babylonian name.

  135 The campaign of 701 is recorded in Sennacherib’s own annals, in 2 Kings, and in Isa. 36–37; it is also reported by Herodotus and Josephus. Some non-Assyrian chroni
cles also mention a second campaign against Jerusalem at the end of Sennacherib’s reign (a campaign not recorded elsewhere). None of these sources gives a perfectly clear view of the order of events. What follows is a probable reconstruction of the sequence.

  136 The Eastern Zhou Period (771–221 BC) is further divided into two parts. The years 771–481 are known as the Spring and Autumn Period, after the account compiled by Confucius; it covered historical events from the beginning of the Eastern Zhou through Confucius’s own lifetime, and was called Spring and Autumn Annals ( Ch’un-ch’iu, or Pinyin Chun qiu). The second half of the Eastern Zhou, 403–221 BC, is known as the Warring States Period. The years 481–403 were occupied by complete chaos (see chapter 62, Chapter Sixty). These divisions are widely but not universally used by historians.

  137 There are multiple versions of the names of these states. In an attempt to reduce confusion, I have chosen to use distinct spellings for the major players rather than trying to hold to one system of transliteration. Other maps and histories most often use the following variants: Qi (Ch’i); Chu (Ch’u); Ch’in (Qin); Jin (Chin, Tsin); Yen (Yan); Lu (no variant); Wey (Wei, We); Cheng (Zheng); Sung (Song); Wu (no variant); Yueh (no variant); and Zhou (Chou).

  138 The Duke of Qi, who was a contemporary of King Hsi, shares the same first name as Hsi’s grandfather King Huan; I will simply call him the Duke of Qi to avoid confusion.

  139 The identity of the culprits remains a mystery. Isa. 37: 38 reads, “One day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer cut him down with the sword.” Adrammelech and Sharezer may possibly refer to Sennacherib’s sons Ardi-Ninlil and Nabu-shar-usur, but there is no way to know for certain. The Babylonian Chronicle reads, simply, “His son killed Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in a rebellion.” Esarhaddon never names the culprits who killed his father, and since Sennacherib’s inscriptions certainly do not name all of his sons, we are ultimately left in the dark.

  140 This is probably why fantasy writer Robert E. Howard borrowed their name, in the 1930 s, for the mythical warrior tribe that lived on a mythically distant past Earth, apparently, at some time between the drowning of Atlantis and the rise of the first pharaohs of Egypt. Their champion, Conan the Cimmerian, is better known as Conan the Barbarian, thanks to his movie incarnation. His most famous speech (in answer to the question “What is best in life?” he gets to intone, “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women”) reveals a slightly more bloodthirsty point of view than that held by the average historical Cimmerian. On the other hand, the real Cimmerians did in fact make their way in the world by driving away enemies before them. Their exact origin is unknown, although they most likely did not come from north of the Black Sea as Herodotus claims (see Anne Katrine Gade Kristensen, Who Were the Cimmerians, and Where Did They Come From?, frontmatter).

  141 The exact relationship between Nabopolassar and Merodach-baladan is unclear; great-nephew is the best possibility, but there is no direct proof.

  142 See chapter 41, Thirty-Five.

  143 Cyrene was an unremarkable city until the fourth century BC, when it blossomed into a center of scholarship; it also became the home to many exiled Jews and gained fame for medieval hagiographers as the home city of Simon of Cyrene, the bystander who was pressed into carrying Jesus’s cross and the father of Saint Rufus of Rome.

  144 The oldest son of the senior twin, Eurysthenes, was named Agis; so the line of kings descended from Eurysthenes were called the Agiads. The junior twin, Procles, was succeeded by his eldest son, Euryphon, and so the junior line of kings became known as the Eurypontids. The Agiads and the Eurypontids ruled Sparta together until 192 BC.

  145 Plutarch’s description of Spartan life comes in his study of the life of Lycurgus, a legendary Spartan prince (brother to one king and uncle to the next) who single-handedly put Sparta’s law code into place and then retired from public power and starved himself to death in order to show that he did not crave power. Plutarch himself says that there is absolutely no proof that Lycurgus ever existed, and he probably is entirely mythical; the scope of the laws he supposedly invented, the cultural institutions he was said to have put single-handedly into place, and his other accomplishments (he is credited with assembling the fragments of Homer’s epics into a single tale, a most unlikely event) are none of them possible for a single man. But it is intriguing that Spartan tradition found it necessary to put a human face on the origins of the Spartan law system; it suggests a certain discomfort with the severity of the laws, even as those laws were followed.

  146 This is a roundabout source, to say the least; Eusebius is quoting the Greek grammarian Castor, whose original accounts (probably dating from around 200 BC) have been lost; and the original chronicle of Eusebius itself has been lost, surviving only in a Latin translation made by the Roman churchman St. Jerome around AD 365, and in an Armenian translation from the sixth century (both of which preserve overlapping but different parts of the text). It is still the most direct account we have of the earliest Athenians.

  147 Draco’s law on homicide is the only one which directly survives, and even it is in fragments. However, the other laws in his code are mentioned frequently by Greek writers, and enough can be reconstructed from these references to give us a good idea of their content.

  148 Etruscan history is generally divided into five periods: the Villanovan (900–700 BC); the Orientalizing (700–600), so named because Etruscan culture was borrowing heavily from the Greeks to the east; the Archaic (600–480), the height of Etruscan political power; the Classical (480–300), which saw the beginning of a decline in Etruscan might; and the Roman (300–100), during which the Romans became entirely dominant both politically and culturally.

  149 See map on Chapter Fourteen.

  150 The pharaohs of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty are known by both Greek and Egyptian names. I have used the Greek names since these are more familiar. The Egyptian names are Psamtik I (Psammetichus I), Nekau (Necho II), Psamtik II (Psammetichus II), Wahibre (Apries), Ahmose II (Amasis), and Psamtik III (Psammetichus III).

  151 See chapter 41, Thirty-Six.

  152 The book of Jeremiah, which is one of our main sources for the Egyptian-Judean-Babylonian confrontation, groups Jeremiah’s predictions of doom thematically rather than chronologically; this prophecy comes after his account of Jehoiakim’s death and Hezekiah’s succession, but comparison with the events in2 Kings and2 Chronicles seems to place it before Hezekiah’s accession. Cf. Jeremiah 37,2 Kings 24: 7 (which says that the king of Egypt did not come back out of Egypt again after Jehoiakim’s reign), and2 Chron. 36:5–7. (The relationship between the chronologies of Kings, Chronicles, and Jeremiah remains an unsolved problem.)

  153 Herodotus also says that Necho gave up digging the canal because of an evil oracle, and that it was completed by Darius; this is unlikely, as he also adds that Necho built a fleet of seagoing ships, which hardly seems to match up to his abandoning the canal. Darius probably repaired the canal and then took credit for it, which was one of the strategies which made him a Great King not only in deed but in reputation. Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, and other classical historians all mention the canal, although they differ on who dug it, who completed it, and where exactly it ran; apparently the canal was prone to silting (or sanding) up and required constant re-digging. A survey of the evidence for the canal is found in Carol A. Redmount’s “The Wadi Tumulat and the ‘Canal of the Pharaohs,’” in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 54:2 (1995), Chapter Thirteen-Chapter Fourteen.

  154 The Great Pyramid of Giza (chapter 11) and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are the first two of the Seven Wonders of the World, a list which was compiled by (among others) the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, in his 1721 work Entwurf einer historischen Architektur; in this, Fischer was following the lead of the North African librarian Callimachus, who sometime around 260 BC wrote out a list of
great wonders round the world (we don’t know what was on it, since the list was destroyed when the Library of Alexandria burned; see chapter 78, Seventy-Six). As the gardens were long gone by von Erlach’s day, he was clearly working from the descriptions in Berossus and Diodorus.

  155 See chapter 18, Chapter Fifteen.

  156 The Hebrew accounts call Apries “Hophra”; the passages which may refer to him are found in Jer. 44:30, Jer. 46:25, Jer. 47:26, Ezekie l29, and Ezek. 30:21–26.

  157 The Hebrew name Evil-Merodach is the same as the Babylonian Amel-Marduk (which reveals that old Merodach-baladan was a worshipper of Marduk of Babylon).