1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (17 page)

S
INARANU OF
U
GARIT

About forty years after the Uluburun ship went down, a text was composed that recorded some of the contents of a similar ship, sent by a merchant named Sinaranu from Ugarit in northern Syria to the island of Crete. It was actually an official proclamation written on a clay tablet in Akkadian, using the cuneiform writing system, which stated that when the ship belonging to Sinaranu returned from Crete, he would not have to pay taxes to the king. The relevant part of the Sinaranu Text, as it is known, reads as follows: “From the present day Ammistamru, son of Niqmepa, King of Ugarit, exempts Sinaranu, son of Siginu … His [grain], his beer, his (olive)-oil to the palace he shall not deliver. His ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete.”
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We know, from other sources, that Sinaranu was a wealthy Ugaritic merchant (the specific term for such a merchant in Akkadian was
tamkār
), who lived and seems to have flourished during the time when Ammistamru II was king of Ugarit. Sinaranu had apparently sent his ship from Ugarit to Crete, and back again, in about 1260 BC, according to our most recent understanding for the dates when Ammistamru II was king (ca. 1260–1235 BC). We do not know the actual content of the cargo brought back from Crete, apart from the seeming likelihood that grain, beer, and olive oil were included. At the very least, this is confirmation that there were direct mercantile connections between northern Syria and Crete during the mid-thirteenth century BC. We also have the name of someone directly involved in international economic and mercantile transactions more than thirty-two hundred years ago. It seems
quite likely that the Uluburun ship and the one owned by Sinaranu were not all that different, either in construction or in the cargo being carried.

We also know that Sinaranu was not alone in sending and receiving ships and cargoes during this time period, nor was he the only merchant to be granted exemption from the palace on his taxes. Ammistamru II issued a similar proclamation for other entrepreneurs whose ships sailed to Egypt, Anatolia, and elsewhere: “From this day forth, Ammistamru, son of Niqmepa, King of Ugarit, … [text broken] … Bin-yasuba and Bin-? … and his sons forever, from trips to Egypt and trips to Hatti and in Z-land (?), to the palace and to the palace overseer they need not make any report.”
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T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
Q
ADESH AND
I
TS
A
FTERMATH

At the time that Sinaranu and other merchants were active, Ugarit was under the control of, and a vassal kingdom to, the Hittites in Anatolia. It had been so ever since the time of Suppiluliuma I in the mid-fourteenth century BC, when a treaty was signed detailing Ugarit’s obligations as a Hittite vassal.
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Hittite control had extended as far south as the area of Qadesh, farther to the south in Syria, but went no farther. The Egyptians prevented Hittite efforts at further expansion. A major battle between the Hittites and the Egyptians was fought at the site of Qadesh in the year 1274 BC, some fifteen or twenty years before Sinaranu sent his ship to Crete. This battle resonates as one of the great battles of antiquity and as one of the first instances from the ancient world in which misinformation designed to confuse the enemy was deliberately employed.

The Battle of Qadesh was fought between Muwattalli II of Hatti, who was attempting to expand the Hittite Empire farther south into Canaan, and Ramses II of Egypt, who was determined to keep the border at Qadesh, where it had been located for several decades by that point. Despite not having the Hittites’ side of the story, we know virtually every detail of the battle and its outcome, for the Egyptian version is recorded in two different ways at five different temples in Egypt: the Ramesseum (Ramses II’s mortuary temple near the Valley of the Kings) and the temples at Karnak, Luxor, Abydos, and Abu Simbel. The shorter version, found in association with a relief depicting the battle, is known as the
“Report” or “Bulletin.” The longer version is called the “Poem” or “Literary Record.”
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We know that the battle was particularly vicious, and that both sides could have won it at one point or another. We also know that it ended in a stalemate, and that the dispute between the two powers was eventually resolved by the signing of a peace treaty.
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The most dramatic part of the engagement came after the Hittites sent out two men—Shoshu Bedouin, as we are told in the Egyptian account—to spy on the Egyptian forces, but deliberately in such a way that the men were almost immediately captured by the Egyptians. Under torture, presumably, the spies yielded their contrived disinformation (perhaps one of the first documented instances in human history) and told the Egyptians that the Hittite forces were not yet in the vicinity of Qadesh but were still farther to the north, in the area of Amurru in northern Syria. Upon hearing the news, and without attempting to independently confirm it, Ramses II rode at full speed with the first of his four divisions, the Amun division, aiming to reach Qadesh ahead of the Hittites.
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In fact, the Hittites were already at Qadesh, and had gathered their troops together into a tight clump just to the north and east of the city, hiding in the shadow of the city walls where they could not be seen by the Egyptian forces approaching from the south. As the leading regiment of Egyptian troops set up camp just north of the city, Ramses’s men caught two more Hittite spies and this time learned the truth, but it was too late. The Hittite forces sped clockwise around almost the entire circumference of the city walls and charged straight into the second Egyptian division, the one known as Re, completely surprising and essentially annihilating them. The remnants of the shattered Re division fled to the north, chased by the entire Hittite army, and joined Ramses and the men in the Amun division at their camp before making a stand.
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The battle went back and forth between the two sides. We are told that at one point the Egyptian army was near defeat and Ramses himself was almost killed, but that he had single-handedly saved himself and his men. The account inscribed upon the Egyptian temple walls states:

Then His Majesty started forth at a gallop, and entered into the host of the fallen ones of Hatti, being alone by himself and none other with him …
And he found 2,500 chariots hemming him in on his outer side, consisting of all the fallen ones of Hatti with the many foreign countries which were with them.

It then switches to the first person, related by the pharaoh himself:

I called to you, My Father Amun, when I was in the midst of multitudes I knew not…. I found Amun come when I called him; he gave me his hand and I rejoiced … All that I did came to pass…. I shot on my right and captured with my left … I found the 2,500 chariots, in whose midst I was, sprawling before my horse. Not one of them found his hand to fight … I caused them to plunge into the water even as crocodiles plunge, fallen upon their faces one upon the other. I killed among them according as I willed.
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Although the account of his single-handed prowess is surely exaggerated, for the pharaoh undoubtedly had some help, the numbers involved may not be far from the truth, for elsewhere in the inscription the size of the Hittite forces is given as 3,500 chariots, 37,000 infantry, and a total of 47,500 troops in all.
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Despite the potential exaggeration, it is clear from the accompanying images and the outcome of the battle that Ramses II and the first two Egyptian divisions were able to hold on until the final two Egyptian divisions caught up and routed the Hittite forces.
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In the end, the battle’s outcome was a stalemate, and the border between the two powers remained at Qadesh, not to be moved or challenged again. Fifteen years later, in November/December 1259 BC, at about the same time that Sinaranu was sending his ship to Crete from Ugarit, a peace treaty—one of the best preserved and best known from the ancient world—was signed by Ramses II and the current Hittite king Hattusili III, for Muwattalli II had died just two years after the battle. Known as the “Silver Treaty,” this agreement survives in several copies, since two versions were created, one by the Hittites and one by the Egyptians. The Hittite version, originally written in Akkadian and inscribed on a tablet of solid silver, was sent to Egypt, where it was translated into Egyptian and copied onto the walls of the Ramesseum and the temple of Amun at Karnak. Similarly, the Egyptian version was translated into Akkadian and inscribed on a tablet of solid silver, then sent to Hattusa, where archaeologists discovered it just a few decades ago.
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The Hittite version inscribed on the walls of the temples in Egypt begins:

There came the (three royal envoys of Egypt . . .) together with the first and second royal envoys of Hatti, Tili-Teshub, and Ramose, and the envoy of Carchemish, Yapusili, bearing the silver tablet which the Great King of Hatti, Hattusili, had caused to be brought to Pharaoh, by the hand of his envoy Tili-Teshub and his envoy Ramose, to request peace from the Majesty of the King of Southern and Northern Egypt, Usimare Setepenre, son of Re, Ramses II.
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Thirteen years later, and possibly after Hattusili had personally visited Egypt, Ramses II married a daughter of Hattusili in a royal wedding ceremony, thereby cementing the treaty and their relationship:
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Then he (Hattusili) caused his eldest daughter to be brought, with magnificent tribute (going) before her, of gold, silver, and copper in abundance, slaves, spans of horses without limit, cattle, goats, and sheep by ten-thousands—limitless were the products which they brought to the King of Southern and Northern Egypt, Usimare Setepenre, Son of Re, Ramses II, given life. Then one came to inform His Majesty, saying: ‘See, the Great Ruler of Hatti has sent his eldest daughter, with tribute of every kind … the Princess of Hatti, together with all the grandees of the Land of Hatti.’
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It was probably just as well that the Hittites and Egyptians declared peace and ceased to fight each other, for they likely needed to turn their attention to two other events that may have taken place at about 1250 BC. Although both events are legendary, and although it has yet to be proven that either actually took place, both still resonate in the modern world today: in Anatolia, the Hittites may have had to contend with the Trojan War, while the Egyptians may have had to deal with the Hebrew Exodus. Before we discuss each of these, however, we must set the scene.

T
HE
T
ROJAN
W
AR

About the same time as the run-up to the Battle of Qadesh, the Hittites were also busy on a second front, in western Anatolia, where they were trying to contain rebellious subjects whose activities were apparently being underwritten by the Mycenaeans.
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This may be one of the earliest examples that we have of one government deliberately engaging
in activities designed to undermine another (think Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, thirty-two hundred years after the Battle of Qadesh).

It is during the reign of the Hittite king Muwattalli II, in the early- to mid-thirteenth century BC, that we first learn from texts kept in the state archives at the capital city of Hattusa of a renegade Hittite subject named Piyamaradu who was attempting to destabilize the situation in the region of Miletus in western Anatolia. He had already successfully defeated a vassal king of the Hittites in the same region, a man named Manapa-Tarhunta. It is thought that Piyamaradu was probably acting on behalf of, or in collusion with, the Ahhiyawans (i.e., the Bronze Age Mycenaeans).
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Piyamaradu’s rebellious activities continued during the reign of the next Hittite king, Hattusili III, in the mid-thirteenth century BC, as we know from correspondence called by scholars the “Tawagalawa Letter.” The Hittite king sent the letter to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa, whom he addresses as “Great King” and “brother,” implying a level of equality between the two of them. We have already seen that similar terms were employed when the Egyptian pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten were writing to the kings of Babylonia, Mitanni, and Assyria a century or so earlier. The interpretation of these texts has provided important insights into the status of the Aegean world and Near Eastern affairs at this time.
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The Tawagalawa Letter is concerned with the activities of Piyamaradu, who continued to raid Hittite territory in western Anatolia, and who, we are now told, had just been granted asylum and traveled by ship to Ahhiyawan territory—probably an island off the western coast of Anatolia.
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We are also introduced, on what was once the third page/tablet of the letter (the first two are missing), to Tawagalawa himself, who is identified as the brother of the Ahhiyawan king, and who was present in western Anatolia at that moment, recruiting individuals hostile to the Hittites. Intriguingly, in an indication that relations between the Hittites and the Mycenaeans had previously been better than they were at this point, we are told that Tawagalawa had earlier ridden (“mounted the chariot”) with the personal charioteer of the Hittite king himself.
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The letter also refers to a dispute between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites over an area known as Wilusa, located in northwestern Anatolia.
This region came up in our discussion of the Assuwan Rebellion that took place nearly two hundred years earlier, and it seems that the Hittites and the Mycenaeans were once again at odds over the territory, which is identified by most scholars with Troy and/or the Troad region. Given the date of the letter, in the mid-thirteenth century BC, it is certainly reasonable to wonder whether there is a link to the later Greek legends regarding the Trojan War.
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