A Short History of the World (3 page)

The Invasion of the Sea Peoples (1200 BC)

A turning point in the history of the old Mediterranean world came around 1200 BC, when a confederacy of predominantly sea-faring raiders from the north and the west emigrated eastwards, taking over Crete, attempting to invade Egypt and eventually settling in Canaan – an area corresponding roughly to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and southern Syria. Egyptian texts refer to them as the ‘Sea Peoples’.
 

The northern group of invaders settled on the coast of present-day Lebanon, an area that the Greeks later referred to as ‘Phoenicia’. The southern group of invaders, the Peleste, subsequently known as the Philistines, was prevented from entering Egypt and ended up in Canaan. Like other peoples in the region, the Philistines suffered the pressures of the great powers around them and disappeared from history in the 7th century BC, leaving only their name, Philistia (or Palestine), to designate the territory they had occupied.

Today it remains unclear who the Sea Peoples were, from where they originally came
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or even why they came. They may have migrated due to dramatic climate change, earthquakes, or famine, or may have been pushed out by invasions of other tribes from the north. Equally, they may simply have been one of successive waves of invaders looking for land. What we do know is that they wreaked havoc and destruction all the way down the east coast of the Mediterranean and that following violent conquests, they generally burnt cities to the ground.
 

The Hittites were one of a number of civilisations in the area that came to an abrupt end during this time and never again threatened their neighbours. From this time onwards, the history of ancient Egypt is also marked by gradual decline.

The Hebrews

It was in Canaan that the Hebrews, who had recently settled there after escaping slavery in Egypt, looked to build their own kingdom. Under attack from the Philistines, the Hebrews put aside their quarrels and at some point in the 10th century BC appointed Saul as the first king of their territory, Israel. The biblical stories of Samson, Samuel, Saul, and David and Goliath are all concerned with Philistine-Hebrew conflicts.
 

Finding themselves in a state of permanent war, and fearing that their culture might be lost, the Hebrews began to record their history, and continued to do so over the following centuries in writings that came to be known as the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Christians and Muslims base many of their religious beliefs on what is written in the Tanakh, with the Christians even taking the collection of the books therein – albeit in a slightly different order – as their Old Testament.

We read in the Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh, that Abraham and his people had been driven out of southern Mesopotamia by invading tribes a thousand years prior to that, some four thousand years ago. At some point, possibly to escape a famine, they had taken refuge in Egypt, only to be enslaved by the Egyptians. In the 1200s BC – at roughly the same time as the Sea Peoples and as recalled in the book of Exodus – the Hebrew leader, Moses, rallied his people and led them out of Egypt. It was then, according to the Torah, that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, with the promise that as long as the Hebrews obeyed them, God would favour the Hebrews as his chosen people and bring them into the promised land of Canaan.
 

The period during which the Hebrews were led by Saul
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and the reigns of his son-in-law, David, and David’s youngest son, Solomon, in the 10th century BC, were a high point for the Hebrew state, during which Israel became rich and prospered. Following the death of Solomon, however, the Hebrews fell back into quarrelling and the land was divided into two kingdoms: the northern and more wealthy kingdom of Israel, with its capital in Samaria, and the smaller southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem. Too weak to resist invaders, Israel was eventually overrun by the Assyrians from the east.

The Phoenicians Explore the Mediterranean (1000–500 BC)

The eastern Mediterranean area was not very rich in metals, which meant that the local inhabitants were required to move westwards in search of a new supply. Between the turn of the millennium and 500 BC, the Phoenicians, who descended from the northern group of Sea Peoples that had settled in present-day Lebanon, and the sea-faring Greeks established settlements at strategic points along trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. One of the Phoenician settlements, Carthage, would end up playing an important role in Roman history.

The Great Assyrian Empire

As the Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia slowly died around the turn of the second millennium BC, the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria, together with a number of tribes from present-day Iran and the Hittites from present-day Turkey, battled it out for predominance. The kingdom of Babylonia generally predominated under various guises for much of the second millennium BC until power moved to the Assyrians in around 910 BC. From this point until around 625 BC, the Assyrian Empire, with an army known for efficient ruthlessness, became the strongest and greatest empire in south-west Asia.

Waging a war of conquest, the Assyrians conquered Babylon, destroyed Israel and the Phoenician cities and attacked Egypt. However, like all over-extended empires, their luck finally ran out. A dynastic squabble around 630 BC opened the empire to attack by a tribe called the Medes (from present-day Iran) in the east, who were aided by other tribes from the north and the south. Between them they succeeded in conquering much of the Assyrian Empire, completely defeating it in 605 BC and burning its capital, Nineveh, to the ground.
 

During this war Jerusalem was destroyed and many of its inhabitants taken into captivity in the city of Babylon. Yet the Babylonian civilisation managed only a brief resurgence under its king, Nabopolassar and under that of his son Nebuchadnezzar II (of Hanging Gardens of Babylon fame), before being conquered by the Persians in the 6th century BC and then disappearing from history.

The Empire of Ancient Persia (550–330 BC)

The Parsa, or Persians, were a people who were initially vassals of the Medes until Cyrus II became their king in 559 BC. It was Cyrus who rebelled against the Medes, captured their king and built the Achaemenid Persian Empire into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Spanning from Egypt to present-day Afghanistan, the empire was built at a speed and on a scale as had never been seen. When Cyrus and his army occupied Babylon in 539 BC, he freed the Hebrews from slavery and permitted them to return to their ancestral homeland, an action for which he was hailed as a liberator in the Book of Isaiah. Known as being benevolent and tolerant, Cyrus also declared the first Charter of Human Rights known to mankind. The ‘Cyrus Cylinder’, a baked clay cylinder on which the charter is written, is now kept in the British Museum in London.

After Cyrus and his son died, a nobleman named Darius claimed descent from an ancestor of Cyrus and stepped into the resulting power vacuum in a bloodless coup. With due modesty, he named himself ‘King of Kings’ and founded the city at Persepolis, which became the Persian capital. He is important because his campaigns and those of his son, Xerxes, which sought to bring the rebellious Greeks into submission, are some of the most written-about episodes of the time and lead us into the history of Ancient Greece.

Ancient Greece and the Greek City States (1000–330 BC)

No real history book existed until Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote one in circa 450 BC, which means that we know very little about early Greece before it. The ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’, a collection of writings from c. the 8th century BC allegedly written by the Greek poet Homer, have provided us with much of what we do know about early Greece. However, a large part of these writings include what are clearly myths and therefore cannot be read as historical text. The Iliad tells of the Mycenaean
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attack on Troy (in today’s west Turkey) led by Agamemnon. The Odyssey describes the ten-year journey home of the hero Odysseus - or Ulysses in Latin - after the fall of Troy and includes the story of how he helped the Greeks to victory over the Trojans by sneaking a small army into the city in the belly of a wooden horse. The Iliad and the Odyssey remain two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told.

We do know that the 8th century BC was generally an era of peace and prosperity for the Greeks. In their search for arable land, a search driven by living in a mountainous area surrounded by islands, they created settlements on all the islands in the Aegean Sea and along the coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) and the Black Sea.

At this time there was no united Greece, but Aeolian, Dorian and Ionian Greeks, and small fiercely patriotic city-states such as Athens were the norm. Generally trading with each other, but often at war, they came together for defensive purposes against non-Greeks, whom they referred to as ‘barbarians’ due to the unintelligible ‘bar-bar’ sounds they made when speaking.