The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  The light chariot spread rapidly across the steppes and had a long career in the Middle East, where this costly and aristocratic instrument of warfare was a status symbol. Egypt, as ever lagging behind, did not adopt it until the second half of the sixteenth century; it appeared in Crete a little earlier than in Egypt and probably it had arrived even sooner in Mycenae (in the first quarter of the century). At the battle of Qadesh in the thirteenth century, several thousand Hittite chariots were pitted against those of the Egyptians.

  One final step had still to be taken, the use of riders on horseback, who are glimpsed as early as the fourteenth century. But it was only in about the tenth century that this strange cultural phenomenon, soinexplicably late in developing, became established on the confines of the Caucasus and Iran. When it did, it completely changed the basis of social and economic life in the steppes: a herdsman on horseback could watch over huge flocks of animals. The soldier on horseback did not have to be a wealthy patrician like the charioteer of the past. Migrations of population from east to west were hastened, heralding the dramatic events to come. The first signs were the disturbances provoked by the Cimmerians, the semi-nomadic, semi-settled people north of the Black Sea, who had encamped in what was later southern Russia (now Ukraine). They were driven out in the eighth century following violent attacks by the Scythians, who seem to me, as they have to other writers, to have been the first ‘truly’ nomadic people.

  So in the bronze age, down to 12.00 BC, we are still far from the time of the great nomadic invasions. The Indo-European migrations of the period did not take place without violence of course, but they lacked the powerful weapon of cavalry. These were invaders who triumphed by dint of audacity and warlike determination, whether in the west of Europe, in Iran or India (fifteenth century) or in Greece and the Middle East. Their invasions were often, in fact, long-term infiltration across sparsely populated regions. The newcomers mingled with the resident populations and sometimes even joined forces with them to march on. This is perhaps how one should view the raid by the Hyksos on the Nile Delta, which they controlled for about a century. They were probably Indo-Europeans but seem to have been associated with other peoples too: the new weapons of horse and chariot helped them accomplish their famously rapid victory.

  As for the theory that the Indo-European invaders were rich incomers who dominated a vanquished peasant population, like most generalizations it seems to be only very broadly applicable. The Hittites who settled in Asia Minor after the Luvians, their brothers in arms, arrived there early enough to have adopted the ancient cuneiform script. Their written language, which is well-attested, would soon only have twenty per cent of Indo-European words, the rest being borrowed from peoples on the spot who were non-Indo-European. The same thing happened to the Hittites as to the Achaeans in Greece: they became sucked into a cultural inheritance which was originally not their own and which outclassed them.

  The Hittites become Hittite

  Just as the Greeks had to become Greek, so the Hittites, on arrival in Asia Minor, turned into Hittites. They probably embarked upon their historical destiny before the beginning of the second millennium. It was about then that they arrived, possibly from the shores of the Caspian, or from Thrace, and settled in the high mountainous regions of Anatolia, freezing in winter, baking hot in summer. Sturdy and vigorous people, these Indo-Europeans who mingled with the local population were recognizable by their light-coloured hair, blond or auburn, and their characteristic ‘Greek’ profile, which so struck the Egyptians, those connoisseurs of ethnic types. They were undoubtedly a farming people from the continental interior, and for a long time deliberately avoided the sea, establishing their capital Hattusha (Bogaskoy) inland in the valley of the Kizil Irmak, known to the Greeks as the Halys. It was here that their good fortune took root.

  Thereafter, their energetic population, their rulers’ ambition, their thriving metal production and the massive use of chariots enabled them to extend their domination to limits which cannot be accurately charted in retrospect, particularly since their empire was based on a kind of feudal system, granting estates, manors, principalities and so on – a source of weakness which was to have serious consequences. For a brief moment in 159 5 b c they surprised themselves by capturing Babylon, but were so disconcerted by their extraordinary victory that they abandoned it immediately. But they pressed on through Carchemish, Aleppo and Ugarit, sometimes by force, sometimes peacefully, towards the sea and the Fertile Crescent. This long period of expansion provided them with strength and fuelled their ambitions. Mesopotamia to the south, divided between Babylonia and Assyria, could hardly hold them up for long; they also overcome the Mittanians on the key sites on the bend in the Euphrates, and stood up to the formidable power of Egypt. The battle of Qadesh in 1285 b c, a sort of monstrous stand-off between the Hittites and Egyptians, marked the end of these exhausting wars. Each side could claim victory and would not budge thereafter.

  There followed a period of prudence, leading to the signature in 1280 of the oldest peace treaty of which the text has survived. Itwas the result of lengthy diplomatic negotiations and exchanges of messages. These tablets, written in Akkadian, the international lingua franca of the time, have been found in Amarna, Bogaskoy and Ugarit. A postal service was maintained by the larger states from Anatolia to Egypt. An entire book could be written about this early version of diplomacy, about the exchanges of doctors, sculptors and craftsmen, about the policy of dynastic marriages between princely families so typical of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, and the Babylonian, Mittanian or Hittite princesses who became the guarantees for alliances and reconciliations of varying sincerity. These contacts between Egypt and the outside world were in fact linked to Egypt’s determination to expand towards Syria, beginning in military terms in the sixteenth century with the Syrian campaigns waged by the pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The aim was to get rid of the Hyksos, who had been driven out of the Delta but were now entrenched in the Palestinian cities. Victorious and determined to remain so, Egypt was to exert a sort of protectorate, always needing reinforcement, over Mittani and the city-states of the Syrian coast.

  When Hittites and Egyptians confronted each other in these territories which were foreign to both sides, it was therefore a matter of imperial rivalry, but within a context of self-conscious international relations which had never previously existed. Wars and diplomacy succeeded each other until a semblance of balance of power finally became established, shortly before the catastrophic twelfth century BC.

  Hittite civilization was itself a good example of the cosmopolitanism of the second millennium. Everything seems to have been borrowed from elsewhere. The very name Hatti was borrowed from the local Anatolian population, as were traditional Hittite building techniques, their red glazed pottery with multi-coloured decoration, their libation vases in the shape of animals, their shoes with turned-up pointed toes, their gods with conical headdresses and so on. From the Mesopotamians they borrowed many items of the legal code, cuneiform script and the practice of representing people on horizontal friezes. From the international style of the sixteenth century BC they borrowed the Aegean spiral, the drawings of galloping animals and plants using spiral motifs. From Egypt, via Ugarit no doubt, they borrowed certain details such as the representation of the sun as a winged disc, which is found in connection with images of the king in the sanctuary at Yazilikaya and elsewhere. Lastly, the Hittite pantheon with its ‘thousand gods’ accepted all the local deities without missing a beat. Greatest of all were the god of weather and storms, possibly to be identified with Adad, the Mesopotamian god of thunder, and Reshef or Baal, the Syrian god. The latter usually appears riding a bull in Hittite sculptures. At his side was the great sun goddess, none other than the indestructible stone-age Earth Mother of Anatolia, whom the Hittites had decked out with some of the attributes of the Hurrian goddess Hepat.

  The fascination here lies in being able to look back many centuries to discover the first
Indo-European people to be recorded from the inside, thanks to the ample documentation found at Bogaskoy (so ample indeed that it will take a long time to record and translate it all) and thanks too to the examples of Hittite art, still recognizable despite all the borrowings, and very expressive in spite of its conventions.

  Is it fanciful of me to think of the Hittites as a straightforward and brave people, down to earth, life-loving, fond of dancing and music, and kind to children and animals? Several engaging sculptures show the young prince playing as he stands up in the queen’s lap, or bringing her samples of his writing exercises. This was a still-naive people, basking in the glow of nearby civilizations and gradually constructing its own imperial conventions. But the Hittite king never claimed to be a living god as the pharaohs did. Although ruling over a people of warriors, he was nevertheless one of those who chose to use diplomatic channels rather than make war to achieve their ends. Observers have noticed among the Hittites the absence of that warlike ruthlessness so typical of the age, even in Egypt, and which would later become truly terrifying under the Assyrians. There is one last significant feature worth mentioning: the attitude towards the status of women – rather surprisingly among this soldier-tribe – seems to have been as liberal as in Crete.

  The southern deserts: the Semitic peoples

  In the second millennium BC, the Syrian desert and the more archaic Arabian desert had not yet been disturbed by the aggressive way of life of the Beduin. The horse and dromedary were both present from earlyon, but neither was being used to full capacity. According to the experts, the domestication of the dromedary may even have taken place as far back as the third millennium, possibly in eastern Arabia, nearer the Gulf. But they do not detect it being used as a major pack animal for caravans until about 1300 BC (and this important step used to be dated even later, in the tenth century BC).

  Until then, caravans consisted of donkeys with their drivers, the hapiru of the Mesopotamian texts. This word – if it really does mean donkey-master and not simply man of the desert, Beduin, as was once thought – would provide valuable and precise evidence: it first appears in the twenty-third century BC, then disappears in the thirteenth. An Egyptian painting from about 1890 BC shows the Semites of the ‘Asiatic’ desert, wearing long multi-coloured robes as they travel to Beni Hassan in Egypt with their donkeys, bringing gifts for prince Knumhotep: kohl (eye make-up) and desert gazelles. Did they take the route which is thought to have linked Mesopotamia and Egypt and which might explain the prosperity in very ancient times of a settled population in Sinai and the Negev, something which seems odd at first sight? The ultimate development of sea-borne trade would have spelled the end of this ancient overland route across the stony surface of the desert. Dromedaries would have been able to use the tracks nearer the sea, where the sand was too deep for the small hooves of donkeys.

  But why was the valuable dromedary not used earlier? Possibly because of the problem of harness: it was not until the ninth century b c that a new type of saddle for the dromedary appeared. ‘About the time that the first horseback riders appeared somewhere in the northern Arabian desert, the dromedary drivers gradually acquired the new elements of the revolutionary saddle perched up on the beast’s hump.’ Previously they had ridden with a cushion on the crupper. The new saddle was improved by a complicated system of girths in the eighth and seventh centuries and then by the high pommels which came into general use in the third and second centuries BC (see Xavier de Planhol). Only then did the southern deserts witness the ‘second wave’ of nomadism, which came into historical focus many hundreds of years later (in the seventh and eighth centuries ad) with the wave of Arab conquests. We might note once again how very long these processes took.

  So the Syrian desert bordering Mesopotamia remained undisturbed for a long time. What normally happened was that the nomad came cap in hand, needing to rent grazing land, to sell livestock, or to hire himself out as a carrier or heavy labourer. This is the unchanging story, recorded in the documents of Mari. Large-scale invasion, capable of taking the form of a ‘conquest’, could happen only if the settled population allowed it; if, for example, they needed labour to work their land or help in fighting a neighbouring city, or if internal dissension had undermined the authority of their leaders. In short, between these two worlds, which operated like communicating vessels, one rather full, the other rather empty, compensatory movements hardly ever took a violent form.

  The peoples of the Syrian desert were Semites, divided among many small tribes. They were moving north into Syria and Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium. The first people to settle there – known conventionally and probably inaccurately as the Akkadians – moved into the areas round the rivers near Assur, Kish and Mari. Fortune favoured them: under Sargon they founded the so-called Empire of Akkad (2340-2200). The second Semitic wave consisted of Canaanites and Amorites who decisively occupied the Syrian-Palestinian area, the former to the south around Byblos, the latter to the north and east around Ugarit, Mari, etc. Small groups of Amorites also infiltrated the cities of Mesopotamia, eventually seizing power after having contributed to the destruction of the third dynasty of Ur: Hammurabi was an Amorite. But by this period the Amorites had, like the Akkadians before them, become assimilated into the thriving civilization of Mesopotamia, though it is true that in Akkad, Mari or Byblos, some art works show Semitic influence.

  Over the course of the centuries, many other Semitic tribes were to cross the frontier leading to zones of stable settlement, among them the Haneans, the Benjaminites and the Suteans. The invasion of the Aramaeans was on a larger scale, becoming noticeable by the thirteenth and twelfth centuries as they eventually forced their way through the frontiers of the Middle Euphrates, despite the fortifications put up on the bend of the river by Tiglath Pileser I (1117-1077 BC). The role they played in the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia is well known: their language replaced Akkadian there as a lingua franca. It is a curious feature of these Semitic migrations that while they adopted virtually wholesale the culture, technology and art of Mesopotamia,they preserved their languages (Akkadian, Aramaic) and even imposed them on others, first in the zone they occupied in Mesopotamia, then, thanks no doubt to the spread of their civilization from Mesopotamia to the rest of the Middle East, as international languages. The Hittites, the pharaohs, Ugarit and Cyprus all used Akkadian for their diplomatic correspondence, long after the dynasty of Akkad had disappeared.

  It was the upheavals caused by the twelfth-century crisis which ensured the success of the Aramaeans. Similarly it was in the midst of these disturbances that the Hebrews settled, apparently before 1230 BC, in the semi-populated mountains of Palestine: the Canaanites and Philistines stopped them reaching the plains. Bringing up the rear came the Arabs, noted for the first time in Babylonian records in the ninth century BC. It would be some time before their deeds reached centre stage in history.

  The story is a repetitious one, as we see. It reflects a basic set of human relations which remained unchanged across the centuries. If nomads frequently came swooping down to seize the wealth of Mesopotamia (wide open to invasion, unfortunately for its inhabitants), Mesopotamia in turn was nourished by the mass of hungry humanity outside its gates: desert and mountain were basically reservoirs of exploited people who in their turn exploited others.

  The Peoples of the Sea: a catastrophe to be compared with the fall of the Roman Empire?

  The twelfth century BC brought such catastrophes that the preceding centuries seem benign by comparison. Cataclysmic changes had not spared them, it is true, but there was generally some compensation: the fragile Cretan palaces were rebuilt; and when destroyed again, they were rebuilt again; Egypt was invaded and attacked both from outside and from within, but recovered under first the Middle and then the New Kingdom; Mesopotamia had to contend with more numerous and even more serious difficulties, but nevertheless emerged and survived. And through everything, progress continued its forward march. But after the upheava
ls of the twelfth century, only the most robust of political units survived, if at all, and then in a piteous condition. The experience was devastating and universal. So an age of history was brought to a close, as things generally are in history: sometimes very abruptly, with a bang, and sometimes hardly noticed, with a whimper.

  At first sight, the dramatic historical events are the first to capture our attention. But what a strange history this is! Nothing about it is immediately comprehensible, and on reflection the picture becomes even less clear. The collapse of the Hittite Empire in about 12.00 happened quietly, with less disturbance than a sandcastle softly subsiding. And we cannot work out who was responsible. About thirty years earlier, in about 1230, the Mycenaean palaces were almost all destroyed, and many cities on the Greek mainland and islands were abandoned. Here again, there is no obvious culprit: those who used to be held responsible, the Dorians, the last Indo-European invaders of ancient Greece, did not arrive until the end of the twelfth century, some hundred years later at least, or so archaeology now tells us. Indeed, as one serious historian has asked, somewhat tongue in cheek, was there ever a Dorian invasion at all?7 As for the Peoples of the Sea, the key figures in these apocalyptic times, we glimpse them only on the two occasions when the Egyptians crushed them in battle. We may not be surprised to find that they survived these bloody defeats. But who were they exactly? They remain a puzzle to historians: when confronted by a dramatic disaster which knocked out several civilizations, and by the almost total shipwreck of the bronze age itself r, they would like some clear explanations – but these are hard to come by.

  There are four separate groups of events to deal with: