Chapter 16
The mood across the Near East shifted a little in the mid-thirteenth century BCE. The generally peaceful stability of the Amarna period lived on in some places but faltered in others. With Mittani gone, old allies growled at one another across contested borders, or wrote anxious letters, worrying about aggression from unnamed enemies.
In Egypt, pharaoh Ramses II (1279–1213 BCE) dominated almost the whole thirteenth century BCE. He was probably born around 1303 BCE and lived for a remarkable ninety years; his twelve eldest sons predeceased him. He brought Egypt back to a pinnacle of wealth and power and took credit for more monuments than any king before him. Many of these he had indeed commissioned, but he also appropriated buildings of earlier kings by replacing their inscribed names with his own. He set up colossal stone statues of himself across Egypt, which were venerated by the population as intermediaries between the people and the gods.1 Egyptian kings had always been considered at least somewhat divine, but Ramses II’s cult was more visible than most. He must have come to seem almost immortal. By the time of his death almost no one alive in Egypt would have remembered a world in which he was not pharaoh.
But at the beginning of his reign, when no one had any idea that his reign would be so long and so dominant, his relationship with the Hittites was strained, as each empire tried to expand its control in the Levant. They went into battle against one another over their border, clashing at the contested city of Kadesh in Canaan in 1274 BCE. For what was apparently the first time, the great kings of both Egypt and Hatti were finally in the same place, but they were there facing one another as enemies, their chariots and infantry arrayed to kill. Ramses II claimed a great victory, but the border didn’t move. The result was a stalemate.
Meanwhile, in Elam, kings became increasingly antagonistic to Babylonia, continuing to believe that the long line of Babylonian queens in their ancestry gave them the right to intervene there, and even to rule. In Assyria, imperialistic kings expanded the borders of their empire. The Assyrians conquered what was left of Mittani—already a shadow of its former self—around 1250 BCE. They created a new vassal kingdom there, ruled by the son of the king of Assyria and centered on a city called Dur-Katlimmu on the Habur River. During this era, known as the Middle Assyrian period, the government began deporting thousands of conquered people from one part of the empire to another. Military campaigns became ever more common, and the other great powers began to worry; Assyria was not playing by the old rules.
From its heartland in Anatolia, Hatti had extended its direct control south and east to the Euphrates, with a viceroy at the city of Carchemish controlling the region in Syria, creating a contested border between Hatti and Assyria that sometimes ran right along the Euphrates.
With the benefit of hindsight, we tend to view this era as careening toward catastrophe, with each of the great kingdoms heading for the collapse that occurred at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE. But the people alive at the time were blissfully ignorant of the future. They lived each day as it came. They were probably unaware that life had been more peaceful a century before. They were born into an uncertain and edgy world, and it was the only one they knew. In that era, some people were able to live full and pleasant lives, while others suffered deprivations and lived in fear.
Hattusili III and Puduhepa: A Hittite Royal Couple Continuing Diplomatic Traditions
In spite of these simmering hostilities of the mid-thirteenth century BCE, envoys kept on traveling between the capital cities, peace treaties continued to be forged, diplomatic marriages continued to be arranged, and luxury gifts exchanged. The international habits that had started in the Amarna period were deeply rooted by now, and they helped to keep the peace in some regions, even when battles were being fought elsewhere.
Letters were now being dictated and dispatched by new generations of kings and queens, almost 200 years after the first diplomatic overtures had taken place between the great kings of Egypt, Mittani, Hatti, and Babylonia. The leaders followed many of the old patterns of diplomatic address.2 A collection of these letters was uncovered during the excavations in the Hittite capital city of Hattusa, and some of them reveal the worries of a thirteenth-century BCE Hittite king named Hattusili III (1267–1237 BCE).
Hattusili III had come to power in an unscrupulous way, not unlike his predecessor Suppiluliuma I, by usurping the throne from a relative who was the legitimate—if young and inexperienced—king.3 In the case of Hattusili III, this was his nephew, not his brother-in-law, and the young man fled into exile, rather than being assassinated. But, more than had been true for Suppiluliuma, Hattusili III seems to have worried about his legitimacy and about possible usurpers, so he needed all the support he could muster from any allies among the other great kings.
To judge from the letters, his wife Queen Puduhepa took the lead in much of the international diplomatic work. Hattusili III was often ill, and Puduhepa apparently had boundless energy and a keen interest in running the empire.4 Unlike so many queens, she was not a princess by birth. She had been a priestess of the goddess Ishtar and had lived in the region around Kizzuwatna when Hattusili met and married her. Their match, unlike most, seems to have been for love rather than for political advantage. Hattusili wrote that “we joined (in matrimony), and the goddess (Ishtar) gave us the love of husband and wife.”5
After overthrowing his nephew, Hattusili III was not able to convince the Assyrian king to support his shaky claim to the throne, but eventually the Babylonian king did so, as did the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II. This marked a dramatic improvement in relations between the two lands after their violent clash at Kadesh. In 1258 BCE, Hattusili and Ramses followed up by negotiating and confirming a peace treaty, which survives in both a Hittite and an Egyptian version.6 Hattusili must have been very relieved to have such a powerful ally on his side, not just to secure his right to the Hittite throne, but also because both kings seem to have feared the growing power of Assyria.
The document they drew up is often referred to as the “world’s first peace treaty,” but that is a little misleading. Many other peace treaties had existed between ancient Near Eastern states before this, and some of them have survived—from the treaty between Ebla and Abarsal more than a thousand years earlier, to the treaty between Alalakh and Tunip in the fifteenth century BCE. It’s also clear that peace treaties existed between all the major powers in the Amarna period, they just haven’t been found.
So, just by chance, this one between Ramses II and Hattusili III is the earliest surviving peace treaty between major powers who recognized one another as equals (see Fig. 16.1). The fact that it wasn’t actually the first doesn’t diminish its importance, though. It’s a powerful and inspiring document that clearly states that a lasting peace was the goal of both lands. The kings pledged to “establish good peace and good brotherhood in [the relations] of Egypt with Hatti forever. . . . From the beginnings of time and forever [by means of a treaty] the god has not allowed the making of war between them.”7 This commitment to eschewing warfare catches your breath—they presented it as absolute and eternal, and it was what the gods commanded.
Fig. 16.1 Peace treaty between King Ramses II of Egypt and King Hattusili III of Hatti, 1259 bce. (Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo)
The specific clauses of the treaty included the kings’ commitment to a continuing peaceful brotherhood, their agreement not to attack one another militarily, their pledges to support one another if either were to be attacked by an enemy or to face internal rebellions, and their support for one another’s appointed successor if his position were to be threatened. The latter is a little disingenuous; when Hattusili III himself had usurped the throne, he had treated his nephew, the appointed successor of his brother the king, in just the way that the treaty condemned. That may, of course, be why he feared for his own son. Peaceful succession to the throne had been an ongoing problem in Hatti.
About half of the treaty was taken up with provisions for the treatment of fugitives and commitments to extradite them back to their homelands. This must have been a particularly vexing issue, to judge from the level of detail in the many clauses.
The peace treaty was to be followed, as always, by a diplomatic marriage. The Hittite queen Puduhepa took over these negotiations. A draft of a remarkable letter written by Puduhepa to Ramses II was found during the excavations at Hattusa.8 Puduhepa, speaking in Hittite, had dictated her ideas for the letter to a scribe, and this is the draft that survives; the final version of the letter that was sent to Egypt would have been translated into Akkadian. It’s clear that, at the time when the draft was written, the basic terms of the marriage between Ramses and the Hittite princess had been agreed upon. Several letters between Puduhepa and Ramses had clearly preceded this one. However, the Egyptian pharaoh and the Hittite queen had reached a sticking point.
Puduhepa was trying to sort things out. She noted that in an earlier letter she had written to Ramses, “I will give a daughter to you.”9 When, after some time, no princess appeared, Ramses must have written something abrupt in response, perhaps to try to speed up the process, but this upset Queen Puduhepa, who had clearly responded to him in some annoyance. So Ramses II tried again: “You have withheld her from me. And now you are even angry with me! Why have you not now given her to me?”10
The pharaoh was used to getting what he wanted, and I doubt that many people in his own court would have ventured to disagree with him in any way, let alone to get angry. This was the king who had built so many monuments to himself all over Egypt. He was, at that time, in the process of constructing the Abu Simbel temple on the Nile, the entrance of which was to be decorated with four colossal sculptures of himself carved out of the living rock. Each statue was 20 meters (66 feet) tall, so that carving the front of the temple represented a feat on the scale of the Mount Rushmore monument in the United States, but dedicated only to him. Ramses always got what he demanded—so why was Puduhepa delaying the arrival of his new queen?
He seems to have been thoroughly exasperated, noting, “I write to my sister (Puduhepa) that withholding the daughter is not right.”11 She in turn replied that she would be willing to make things move faster (“May I hurry!”), but she was not happy with the tone of Ramses’ letters: “But my brother (Ramses) has not accepted in his own mind my status as a sister and my dignity.” Pause for a moment to consider this; it’s a remarkable statement. Rarely did any woman demand respect and equal status with men (at least in writing), but Puduhepa had no such qualms. She wanted Ramses to treat her as his “sister”—his equal—just as Hattusili III was his “brother,” so she came right out and said so.
Puduhepa finally explained the reason for the delay in sending the princess. It was due to the fact that, although she was putting together an appropriate dowry for her daughter, times were tough. “What civilian captives, cattle and sheep should I give (as a dowry) to my daughter? In my lands I do not even have barley.”12 The barley she was missing was presumably the fodder needed for the cattle and sheep. This was a change from the old Amarna-era habit of never admitting weakness. It seems that goods were harder to come by than before. The shortage of barley that Puduhepa mentioned foreshadowed a famine that was to cripple much of the Near East by the end of the thirteenth century BCE.
Puduhepa promised that she would come up with a dowry for her daughter and that the pharaoh would approve. It would have been a mistake, she said, had she sent her daughter before everything was organized: “If I had sent the daughter to my brother precipitously, or if I had not given you (the gifts appropriate) for my brother his sister, what would my brother even have said?” She imagined (probably correctly) that Ramses would have viewed an inadequate dowry as a worse snub than a late-arriving bride.
Toward the end of the letter, Puduhepa assured Ramses II that the usual benefits would derive from the marriage: “And now I know that Egypt and Hatti will become a single country.” This would happen because Ramses II had no choice; the gods had willed it. In a commanding tone she wrote that “The Queen knows thereby how you will conclude it (the marriage) out of consideration for my dignity. The deity who installed me in this place does not deny me anything. . . . (The deity) has not denied me happiness. You, as son-in-law, will take my daughter in marriage.”13 One can’t help but admire her self-confidence. The great Ramses II would do as she directed.
Eventually the dowry was ready, at which point Ramses II sent envoys to anoint the princess with oil (and thereby to formalize the marriage). In 1246 BCE, the princess set off with her entourage, guards, and dowry, just as so many princesses had done for so many centuries, each one following the command of her father or, in this case, her mother. Ramses wrote to both Puduhepa and Hattusili III that “The Sun God, the Storm God, the Gods of the Land of Egypt, the Gods of the Land of Hatti have granted that our two great countries will be united forever!”14
Once he met her, the pharaoh was thoroughly enamored of the Hittite princess, and she took the Egyptian name Maat-Hor-Neferure. The marriage was a success, and the alliance between Egypt and Hatti was back on firm ground.15
That drought in Hatti was worrying, though, and Hattusili III was also concerned about the threat from Assyria and the hostility of a group of people called the Arameans. At one point, he wrote to his “brother” king in Babylonia, complaining about the problems that the Babylonian king was having in getting his messengers through to Hatti. Without naming the enemy, he encouraged him to “Go to an enemy country and strike the enemy!”16 No king in the earlier Amarna period had promoted armed aggression so transparently. Their world was changing.
The enemy to which Hattusili III referred might well have been the Assyrians, and in particular, the Middle Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243–1207 BCE). This king proved to be a real threat to his neighbors; Tukulti-Ninurta I was even able to seize control in Babylon and to take the Babylonian king captive. Ever since the time of the Assyrian king Ashur-uballit I, Babylonia had been a target of Assyrian interest and aggression, and it continued to be for hundreds of years. Tukulti-Ninurta’s conquest set off a series of conflicts in Babylon, including attacks by the Elamites, Babylonian rebellions against the vassal king installed by the Assyrians, and a second attack by Tukulti-Ninurta I. This time he copied the strategy that the Hittites had used 400 years before: he kidnapped the statue of the city god Marduk and took it to Assyria. Another rebellion later freed southern Babylonia (the region that had once been Sumer), while the Assyrians still controlled northern Babylonia.17
The Kingdom of Ugarit
After the death of Hattusili III, his son took the Hittite throne, but Puduhepa still served as the queen of Hatti, and she maintained the same unflappable style in her correspondence. Like all Hittite queens, Puduhepa’s title was unaffected by the death of her husband,18 and she continued to be in charge of many aspects of the foreign relations of the Hittite government. The new king’s wife would have to wait to become queen until Puduhepa passed away.
In the late 1220s BCE, Puduhepa was dealing with a problem in the vassal kingdom of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast. In spite of the peace treaties of the Amarna period, Ugarit had been wrenched away from Egypt by the Hittites sometime around 1350 BCE, and it had been a jewel of a prize. The capital city extended over 30 hectares (74 acres),19 was home to around 8,000 people,20 and sat in an ideal spot for trade. It was right where the road from the Euphrates reached the Mediterranean, directly on a coastal road from Hatti to Egypt, and at the perfect spot for boats from Egypt, Alashiya (Cyprus), and the Aegean to dock in the Levant. In fact, the wider kingdom of Ugarit, stretching beyond the city, boasted eight ports.21 To the north, Ugarit’s green valley was dominated by the sacred mountain now known as Jebel al-Aqra. To the west was the blue horizon line of the Mediterranean. From a vantage point near the temples to Baal and Dagan on the city’s high acropolis, one could watch the comings and goings of trading ships in the port.
Ugarit had already been prosperous for millennia—people had first settled there around 6000 BCE.22 Like Alalakh, Ugarit was an attractive place to live, in a valley of olive trees, vines, and barley fields, and it had proved to be a magnet for people from many lands. From the fourteenth to the twelfth centuries BCE, Ugarit’s diverse, multilingual population produced documents in five scripts (including the Cypro-Minoan script, which was used on the island of Cyprus and is still undeciphered).23 These scripts recorded a host of different languages—the local Ugaritic (a west Semitic language), Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Hurrian, Egyptian, and even Mycenaean Greek. The innovative people of Ugarit developed one of the world’s first alphabets to record their language. The signs were made up of the wedge shapes familiar from cuneiform, but each sign stood for a consonant or vowel rather than for a whole syllable. This made the Ugaritic script much easier to master than conventional cuneiform, having just thirty signs, rather than hundreds. The modern Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew alphabets have a different ancestor, a script created in Canaan around the same time, but the alphabetic principle was similar for both.
Like Ashur in the Old Assyrian period, the economy of Ugarit was dominated by merchants engaging in extensive trade. But, unlike Ashur, the local king was a powerful man. As the ostensible owner of all real estate, he awarded grants of fields, orchards, and houses to his civil servants and favorites, impressing his seal each time on the tablet that recorded the deed, as in Alalakh and many other kingdoms in the Late Bronze Age.24 The system worked well and the town prospered. There was something that seemed very solid and permanent about Ugarit. The walls of the houses were constructed of finely cut stone and of rough stones that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, with roofs made of wooden beams. Many of these walls still stood to a considerable height when they were excavated, even though the town had ultimately been conquered and burned by invaders.25 After excavation of a neighborhood, visitors to the archaeological site could walk through the streets, noting the well-constructed stone sewer channels and narrow, neatly planned streets; they could even climb the stone staircases of the houses (though of course these no longer led to second floors).
The king and queen of Ugarit lived in a palace that extended over a whole hectare (3 acres)26 and was built around six courtyards and a walled garden. It had ninety rooms on the ground floor alone and was famous among the local princes for its magnificence. The city had become rich as the middleman in trade between many lands, and from exploiting murex shells found in the sea in that area, which produced a vivid and valuable blue-to-purple dye. Ugarit’s royal family, as you might imagine, lived in style.
During the Amarna period, the king of Ugarit had written to the Egyptian pharaoh almost as though they were equals; he was much more assertive in his tone than other Canaanite princes. It seems that this attitude hadn’t changed among the later kings of Ugarit, and—to return to Queen Puduhepa—this was the problem she faced in Ugarit. She wanted King Niqmaddu III of Ugarit (c. 1225–1215 BCE) to behave more like a vassal. After all, he was one.
Puduhepa (who must now have been quite elderly) deeply disapproved of the Ugaritic king’s behavior and didn’t hesitate to tell him so in a letter.27 Vassals were supposed to visit the Hittite king and queen regularly but, she wrote, “to me you have not come [. . . and] your messenger-party you have not sent to me.”28 She didn’t mention whether Niqmaddu had visited her son, the Hittite king. What troubled Puduhepa was that Niqmaddu was required specifically to see her, and he had not done so. Niqmaddu also was obliged by a treaty to send gold to his overlords, but only the king had received gold from him. Where was Puduhepa’s gold? She wrote that “[you] have [not] remitted it (the gold) to me; (only) to the Sun (the king of Hatti) have [you] remitted [gold].” This may have become something of a diplomatic incident; one of Niqmaddu’s officials was captured and put in fetters by Hittite authorities when traveling through Kizzuwatna, “because of the presents.”29 These, presumably, were the presents that the king of Ugarit had failed to send.
The rest of Puduhepa’s letter pertained to caravans from Egypt that passed through Ugarit, with details about the routes that they took. Luxury gifts were still passing regularly between the great powers—many letters attest to this.
To judge from the letters exchanged between the kings of Ugarit and the kings and queen of Hatti, the kings of Ugarit made quite a habit of snubbing their overlords.30 Niqmaddu III did not just make the one mistake that annoyed Puduhepa so much and provoked her letter. He did all kinds of things that annoyed the Hittite leaders. He prevented Hittite officials from returning home from Ugarit, sent paltry gifts to the king and queen of Hatti, missed his appointments to visit them, and on one occasion failed to send 200 men to Alalakh to assist with a building project, as he had been directed to do. Niqmaddu III seems to have willfully ignored the normal protocols. He acted more like a disenchanted great king than a subservient vassal. His successors did the same, and ever more blatantly.31 The Hittite rulers constantly threatened these vassal kings of Ugarit with punishments. In the end, though, nothing happened; they seem to have decided not to bother. At least the kings of Ugarit were not actively rebelling, and the kingdom was an economic engine that benefited Hatti.
Urtenu: A Sea Trader
Surprisingly, some of the letters sent and received by the kings and queens of Ugarit showed up not in the royal palace but in a big private house in Ugarit. The house was excavated from 1986 to the 1990s and proved to belong to a man with the Hurrian name of Urtenu.32 It’s unclear why the king trusted him to store his correspondence. His archive included some letters from the queen of Ugarit to Urtenu, but it also included letters between the rulers of Ugarit and the kings of Hatti, Egypt, and Alashiya.33 Why were they in Urtenu’s house? He wasn’t even a mayor, commander, or governor; he was a merchant.
His house was impressive in size: more than 250 square meters (2,691 square feet) in extent on the ground floor,34 with stairs leading to more rooms on a second story. Urtenu’s ancestors had been buried in a well-built, paved tomb beneath a room on the ground floor.35 Unfortunately, the tomb was robbed at some point in antiquity, but the debris left by the robbers attested to the wealth of the family: fragments of imported pots from Greece and vases made of alabaster and serpentine lay scattered about. Elsewhere in the house, archaeologists found more pieces of imported ceramics and stone vases, along with metal objects,36 and an impression of a scarab of Ramses II.37 Urtenu even owned a chariot, which had been dismantled for storage in his house. As in Alalakh, ownership of a chariot was a sign of high social status.38 And then there were the cuneiform tablets, more than 650 of them, including accounts, a few literary and scholarly works (including a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh),39 and a great many letters. Eighty percent of them were written in Akkadian, but many others are in the local Ugaritic language.40 They show that Urtenu was active in the late thirteenth and early twelfth century, a time of increasing difficulties in Syria and throughout the Near East.41
The tablets reveal that Urtenu was a powerful merchant, who was an associate of an equally powerful businessman named Shipti-Ba’al, son-in-law and agent for the queen of Ugarit.42 Perhaps this connection accounts for how the royal correspondence somehow wound up in Urtenu’s house. Indeed, Urtenu himself might have been a descendant of the daughter of a king; either way, he was closely associated with the royal family.43
At one point a queen of Ugarit wrote to Urtenu in strictest confidence. She was, for some reason, writing from a boat to let him know where she would be traveling next. One can imagine her dictating the letter from her cabin, or on the deck, as the scribe steadied himself to keep his handwriting legible. “I was on the sea when I gave this document (to be delivered) to you,” she said.44 She then told him where she had lodged the previous night, and where she would be staying for the next three nights. “You are now informed,” she wrote. The rest of the letter is a little hard to follow, but it had something to do with a house, and with a woman who was to serve as a guarantee for Urtenu, and who was then to travel to the queen. Perhaps this was why the queen had included her itinerary—so that the woman could find her. This matter was of utmost secrecy. The queen warned Urtenu, “As for you, not a word must escape your mouth.” And if the unnamed woman failed to come to the queen? Well, “she (the woman) will send a message to the king and you can kiss your head good-bye.”
A second message had been added to the same tablet, from a man named Ilimilku; perhaps he had inscribed both letters on the tablet. He certainly was trusted by the queen, and he called Urtenu “my brother.” He explained what Urtenu needed to do next: “What you must do is to seize the house for me. Moreover, you must recognize that the queen also has left.” Then he reiterated the queen’s message: “you must keep absolutely quiet (about all of this) at Ugarit.”45 What was going on here? Was the queen escaping? She clearly did not want the king to know of her plan.
A Hittite princess was, around this same time, married to a king of Ugarit and later divorced by him.46 Perhaps the divorced Hittite princess was the queen who wrote the letter, and she was trusting Urtenu to get her affairs in order in Ugarit after she had fled.47
The queen of Ugarit (perhaps the same one, or an earlier or later queen) was actively involved in trade; she wrote and received many letters found in Urtenu’s house. Unfortunately, she is only identified in the correspondence as “the queen,” so her name is unknown. One letter from a governor to “the queen” included a report of goods that he had shipped to her, including barley, lamp-oil, vinegar, olives, and oil perfumed with myrrh.48
Urtenu and Shipti-Ba’al traded, often on behalf of the queen, all over the eastern Mediterranean, from the city of Emar on the Euphrates, to the island of Alashiya (Cyprus), to the provincial capital of Carchemish northeast of Ugarit, and even to Egypt.49 Their connections and deals benefited the state, but also resulted in a nice profit for themselves. This doesn’t seem to have been considered to be a conflict of interest.
A third man, named Dagan-belu, did a great deal of the actual traveling and trading for the firm, keeping Urtenu and Shipti-Ba’al apprised of his activities by letter. Dagan-belu often worked in the town of Emar, about 280 kilometers (174 miles) inland on the Euphrates. He had close ties there and may even originally have been a native of the region.50 The sons of Dagan-belu, along with both Urtenu’s son and sister, were also involved in their trading ventures.51 Just as in Ashur centuries before, Urtenu’s business was a family affair, though in this case it was also closely tied to the royal family.
The goods they exported ranged from purple-dyed wool, to alum, to oil. Olive oil was an important product in Ugarit; excavations there uncovered an oil workshop that could have produced large quantities, possibly for export.52 One particular area of their expertise was in breeding and trading horses and also providing them for luxury gift exchanges instigated by the royal family. Urtenu’s house adjoined a stable, where he may have housed the animals, and documents show that he helped manage horses for the palace.53 In addition, the letters show that the men were in the business of exporting and importing copper and tin ingots, wood,54 wine, beer, and barley.55 Urtenu’s house must have been a busy place, and during times when Ugarit was at peace, messengers and traders speaking any number of native languages must have passed through, perhaps checking on the foals in the stable, dropping off letters, or arranging to pick up purple cloth from a storehouse.
Several letters in Urtenu’s archive pertain to men and goods that had traveled by ship. Seaborne traffic had been busy in the peaceful and stable era between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-thirteenth centuries BCE, dominated by ships carrying all the goods mentioned in Urtenu’s archive, along with other materials such as glass. These ships sailed around a network of Mediterranean ports on a regular basis, with Ugarit serving as a crucial hub in the network.56
Earlier Old Babylonian traders in Ashur had stuck to land routes and goods carried on donkeys, but the merchants of the Late Bronze Age had taken to the Mediterranean. The crews of their ships played a vital (if anonymous) role in maintaining trade and diplomatic relationships among the great powers and among their vassals.
The queen of Ugarit was not, apparently, unusual in having a trading agent like Shipti-Ba’al working directly for her. The ships seem to have often been the property of royal families, and long-distance transactions fell under their purview.57
Boats in this era were sturdily built for sea travel. Even though the crews and captains could not avoid unexpected hazards such as bad weather and rough seas, sailors were adept at dealing with crises and could figure out their location even in the open sea; they didn’t have to hug the coast.58
Not all the ships made it to their destinations, however. A shipwreck could represent the loss of a vast amount of wealth. Near a place called Ulu Burun, off the coast of Turkey, underwater archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s discovered the wreck of a forty-five-foot-long ship that had been traveling from Cyprus, probably en route to the Aegean, around 1300 BCE.59 Its hold was crammed with riches. Lying on the sea floor, still lined up on the ancient wooden boards of the hull, were more than 9,000 kilograms (10 tons) of copper ingots, more than 900 kilograms (one ton) of tin ingots, more than 300 kilograms (700 pounds) of glass ingots, and dozens of jars that had contained oils and other substances, along with many smaller luxury items.60 To judge from their possessions, the crewmembers seem to have been Canaanite (though there’s no way to know from which city-state), and two Mycenaean diplomats were on board as well. Many people must have been devastated at the news of the shipwreck: the Canaanite merchant firm and royal household who sponsored the ship, along with the king of Alashiya whose copper ingots were lost before being delivered, and the many prospective recipients of the goods in the cargo. If lives were lost as well, the tragedy represented by the disaster would have had a lifelong impact on the families of the victims.
Another shipwreck had a happier outcome. A number of ships had set off from Ugarit for Egypt, loaded with grain. This may seem like a case of carrying coals to Newcastle—Egypt was richer in grain than almost any other land—but, be that as it may, the ships “were wrecked near Tyre when they found themselves caught in a bad storm.”61 The port of Tyre was about 270 kilometers (168 miles) south of Ugarit. This message came from the king of Tyre in a letter to the king of Ugarit, his “brother” and ally. No doubt boats from Tyre had suffered similar crises in the past. Fortunately, the port of Tyre had experts on hand who were ready to help. The king of Tyre wrote that “The salvage master, however, was able to remove the ent[ire] (cargo of) grain in their possession.” The grain, “as well as all the people and their food,” had been recovered, and the boats “have been able to moor at Acco.” Acco was a few more miles south. This must have been a great relief to the king of Ugarit. His boats could probably even be restored back to seaworthiness. “My brother should not worry” was the final, comforting message of the king of Tyre.
A century later, at the end of the thirteenth century bce, those ships carrying grain would not have been sent off from Ugarit to Egypt. Grain was suddenly in short supply; any food produced would have been used to feed the local population. A letter found in Urtenu’s house was written to the king of Ugarit by someone in dire need of help: “grain staples from you are not to be had! (The people of) the household of your servant will die of hunger!”62 But the king of Ugarit was in no position to help. In desperation, he wrote to the Hittite king, but the Hittite king was not forthcoming, writing back, “Now, concerning the fact that you have sent a tablet to your Sun, your master”—this was the term used for the Hittite king, who referred to himself in the third person—“regarding food, to the effect that there is no food in your land: (know that) the Sun himself is perishing.”63 So the king of Ugarit tried asking for help from the king of Egypt instead: “[In] the land of Ugarit there is a severe hunger: May my Lord save [the land of Ugarit], and may the king give grain to save my life . . . and to save the citizens of the land of Ugarit.”64 Egypt did have a more reliable supply of grain than its neighbors, because it didn’t depend on Mediterranean-area rainfall. The Nile flooded every year as a result of the rains in central Africa, so the fields there were almost always productive. But the Egyptian king didn’t send grain. His letter arrived with gold objects, textiles, and dried fish.65
Outside of Egypt, though, it seems that everyone in the region was suffering. The Hittite king and queen stopped badgering the king of Ugarit to visit their palace, send gold, and act more like an obedient vassal. They had too many other worries, as they struggled to cope with a growing famine.66 Modern climate scientists doing research on the ancient Mediterranean region confirm the sense one gets from the ancient texts: “The whole of the east Mediterranean experienced arid conditions at 3000 ± 300 bp [before present], which may have been the driest time of the whole Holocene in this area.”67 This drought was devastating to areas dependent on rainfall to water their crops—areas like Greece, Anatolia, and coastal Syria. The place was a tinderbox ready to explode.
The Kingdom of Emar
More evidence for the mood of crisis in this era comes from the city of Emar, where Urtenu’s business partner Dagan-belu seems to have been based. As we have seen, Emar was about a week’s journey inland from Ugarit, on the Euphrates. It had already been a city of note a thousand years earlier, when it lay within the realm of the Early Dynastic kingdom of Ebla. The excavations at Emar have exposed levels dating from the fourteenth to the early twelfth centuries BCE, in which were found about 800 cuneiform tablets and fragments.68 Many of these tablets reveal something of the uncertainty and fear that marked the end of the Late Bronze Age.
In the thirteenth century BCE, Emar was home to a dynasty of local kings, but they were not particularly powerful. A relatively small building that has been identified as their palace hardly seems palatial.69 Either the actual palace was not found, or the kings lived very modestly. The tablets often mention a council of elders who held significant power. Sometimes the elders seem to have performed roles that were more important than those of the king, and the king often appeared as a witness to documents in which the main role was played by these town elders.
One of the most remarkable discoveries among the tablets at Emar was an account of a religious festival that was vital to the lives of the local people. Detailed descriptions of religious festivals are rare in the ancient Near East, but this one gives us a sense of how the townspeople sometimes had the chance to interact with the great gods. The festival was known as the zukru, and it took place once a year, with a longer and more elaborate version every seven years. At the center of the celebration was the great god of the region, Dagan, the god of grain.70
On the first day of the long version of the festival, people of Emar would have gathered in the streets in anticipation. The moment of Dagan’s appearance must have been electric—there he was, among his people, probably as a life-size male statue made of polished stone or gold inlaid with gems, and clothed in colorful garments. The tablet notes that “his face (was) uncovered”; the god could look at his people, just as they looked at him. The people of Emar were invited to follow him to a place outside the city “in procession . . . at the gate of the upright stones.”71 These upright stones formed some kind of a shrine.
Once there, the priests performed rituals and offered sacrifices to Dagan and to other gods who (as statues) had joined the celebration. The temple provided food and drink for the people; this was a public occasion, a party of gods and citizens. It was nothing like the gods’ day-to-day existence, which was private and hidden inside the walls of the temple. “After they sacrifice, eat, and drink, they cover his (the god’s) face,”72 the author notes. “Just before evening,” when the light was dimming in the sky, the god returned to the city in “the wagon of Dagan,” which “passes between the upright stones.”73 The term “wagon” probably doesn’t do justice to what must have been an impressive carriage.
This passage in and out of the city for rituals and sacrifices took place four times over seven days, during which time the face of the statue was sometimes covered with a veil, but occasionally again uncovered for all to see, notably on his last return to the city on the seventh day of the festival.74 The face of the statue was emphasized over and over in this ritual. To the people, as we have seen so often, the statue was the god and his ties to his people were reinforced when they could see his face directly.75
Religious rituals like this one strengthened the idea that life had a pattern, a predictability, and that the gods and humans worked together to keep the world in order. The zukru also symbolically emphasized Dagan’s power over both the countryside (as he left to visit the shrine of stones) and the city.76 Festivals at other cities no doubt had similar features. But, notwithstanding the regular performance of the zukru festival, by 1200 bce life in Emar was becoming increasingly unpredictable.
During the late thirteenth century, Emar, like Ugarit, was a province within the Hittite Empire. A first intimation that their world was changing came when the local dynasty there collapsed, perhaps because of a revolt among the townspeople of Emar against their king. This crisis doesn’t seem to have been caused by the Hittites, and Emar wasn’t a particularly important place in the Hittite Empire, but as it was now lacking a local authority, the imperial administration stepped in.
In place of the old king of Emar and the council of elders, a man who held the title Overseer of the Land took charge.77 He represented the king of the land of Carchemish, who was, in turn, a viceroy of the Hittite king himself. The Hittite officials’ oversight in local affairs became much more obvious at this time, with their seals and names showing up on many documents.78
From what historians can tell from the documents, Emar struggled through something of a blur of political and economic crises. The words of the people of Emar let us know that they lived through difficult times. A great many documents were written during years that the writers referred to as “the year of distress” or “the year of distress and war.”79 The stories they tell reflect a chaotic time, in the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BCE, when not only were they suffering from the same region-wide famine that affected Ugarit and Hatti, but the town was also repeatedly under attack, and some of the people of Emar struggled just to survive.80 Back in the fourteenth century BCE, Emar had been safely ensconced in the heart of the kingdom of Mittani but, by the late thirteenth century, with Mittani gone, the Euphrates marked the boundary between the Hittite Empire and the land of Assyria, and Emar was right on the Euphrates—right on that boundary. Those “years of distress and war” happened again and again, and the distress was very real.
A lot about the bigger picture of life at Emar is uncertain, but the tablets can take us very intimately into the lives of some people who lived there. In the midst of all the uncertainties, seven tablets provide a clear story, capturing vividly the hardships and impossible choices faced by one particular young family in this very difficult moment.
Ku’e, Zadamma, and Their Children: A Family Facing Starvation
The family’s story started in a happier time, when a man named Zadamma and a woman named Ku’e got married. They were not among the elite of Emar—we don’t know their professions, but they were far from rich. Zadamma’s father was from a place called Shatappa, but the young couple didn’t live there; they had settled in Emar.81
In time, Ku’e gave birth to a baby girl. The parents named her Ba’la-bia.82 She presumably went through all the normal stages of babyhood, learning to crawl and then walk, smiling and babbling at her parents, and beginning to speak. Very soon after her birth, her mother was pregnant again. It must have been a difficult pregnancy this time, because she was carrying twins. The baby boys, named Ba’la-belu and Ishma’-Dagan, were born healthy and seem to have been little more than a year younger than their sister. But at that point, their mother Ku’e’s life began to fall apart.83
We don’t know why, but her husband left the family, and Ku’e had no way to support herself and her children. It was one of “the years of distress,” and the distress was affecting everyone in Emar. One can imagine Ku’e’s misery, nursing her baby boys, taking care of her barely toddler daughter, without enough money for food. Had this been a situation in which Ku’e was in debt and little Ba’la-bia was older, she might have given her daughter to her creditor to work for him until the debt was paid off. Had she been able to support two of her children but not all three, she might have given one of them up for adoption. But Ba’la-bia was far too young to work, and Ku’e needed money simply to live. She made what must have been a heartbreaking decision: she would sell her daughter. We’ve encountered this phenomenon before, in the Ur III period, when a family had to sell a child into slavery because that was the only way that the child would be able to be fed and to live, and that the parents could survive. But in Emar at this moment, almost everyone was suffering.
A woman named Anat-ummi agreed to buy little Ba’la-bia.84 A contract was drawn up, and in it the scribe quoted the words of the mother, Ku’e: “My husband went away; [our children] (were all) babies [and I did not have (anyone)] who could feed (them). Therefore I have sold my daughter Ba’la-bia to be a daughter of Anat-ummi . . . and (thus) I could feed the (other) small children (of mine) during the year of the famine.”85
The price of the baby was 30 shekels, which would have been enough for Ku’e to support herself and her twin boys for quite some time. For Anat-ummi, buying a baby was a risky proposition, given that at least 40 percent of children died in childhood (this was not just true in ancient Mesopotamia, it was true worldwide until the mid-eighteenth century of our own era).86 But, as the contract specifies, Anat-ummi planned for Ba’la-bia to be her daughter. Perhaps the payment represented a kindness to Ku’e; Anat-ummi could have adopted the baby without paying for her. Unfortunately, though, Anat-ummi never came up with the money, and so Ku’e took Ba’la-bia back.87
The next we hear of Ku’e was written a year later. Her husband Zadamma had returned home. The financial situation had not improved for Ku’e’s young family, however. She had given birth to yet another baby, a girl named Ba’la-ummi, and they were just as poor as before. The whole family may well have been starving.88 Ku’e and her husband Zadamma came to the desperate decision to sell all four of their children. The contract for the sale lays it all out dispassionately:
Zadamma and Ku’e, his wife, have sold their two sons and their two daughters–Ba’la-bia, Ba’la-belu, Ishma’-Dagan, and Ba’la-ummi, a daughter at the breast—into slavery for 60 shekels of silver, the entire price, to Ba’lu-malik, the diviner. If anyone sues to reclaim the four children of Zadamma, they must give ten other persons as compensation to Ba’lu-malik. And now Zadamma, their father, and Ku’e, their mother, have pressed their feet into clay.89
This time, the transaction did go through. The price of 60 shekels was not much, though, considering that the toddler Ba’la-bia alone was to have been sold for 30 shekels. By including a redemption clause, the buyer implicitly admitted that this was a low price. When people were purchased for what was considered to be a fair price, the scribe did not list a way for someone to “sue to reclaim” them.90
Then there is that clause that the parents have “pressed their (children’s) feet into clay.” That was not a metaphor—they had literally done so. The tiny clay footprints of the three oldest children were found by the archaeologists (see Fig. 16.2).91
Fig. 16.2 Footprints of two of the children of Ku’e pressed into clay and sealed and inscribed by witnesses, from Emar, early twelfth century bce (based on National Museum Aleppo M10561, M8649 in Fortin 1999, 286).
Two-year-old Ba’la-bia and one-year-olds Ba’la-belu and Ishma’-Dagan must have been held by their mother Ku’e as each child in turn placed his or her right foot on a lump of clay and stepped down hard. Baby Ba’la-ummi was too small at this point; she made no footprint in clay. The lumps of clay bearing the footprints were then handed around to the scribe and to the gathered witnesses and treated as though they were documents. The children’s names were written on them. One reads, “The foot of Ba’la-belu, son of Zadamma, son of Karbu, the man from Shatappa,” and the equivalent inscriptions were added for the other two children on their respective footprints.92 Witnesses who were present for the transaction then rolled their seals on the clay around the footprints.93
One of these men was the Hittite Overseer,94 which seems surprising. Why would such an important man as the Hittite Overseer have been present for the purchase of four impoverished children, the oldest of them no more than two years of age?95 Perhaps it was because Ba’lu-malik, who was buying the children, was an important man in Emar. His family, known as the Zu-Ba’la family, from the name of an ancestor, lived and worked in a grand building called M-1 by the archaeologists.96 One man in each generation of the family took the title “Diviner of the gods of Emar,”97 but they seem to have served primarily as administrators.98 Ba’lu-malik was a teacher and he was important enough to be of interest to the court in Carchemish.99 Apparently even an intimate transaction like this adoption warranted the involvement of the Overseer.
Since the baby Ba’la-ummi was not yet weaned, she was presumably allowed to stay with her mother for a few more months; her footprint would not have been taken until she was delivered to Ba’lu-malik’s household.100 But the older children must have left their home for good once the contract was complete.
Who brought them up? Did Ba’lu-malik intend to raise them in his household as family (as Anat-ummi apparently had intended to do when proposing to buy the oldest girl), or was he going to put them to work as slaves? It’s striking that no clause in the contract states what work the children would do. In adoption contracts the adoptive parents often pledged to teach their children a profession, thereby preparing them to live independently. Did Ba’lu-malik intend for the boys to become diviners like himself anyway? If not, were they put to work as soon as they could help in the household?
We don’t know. We also don’t know whether the children ever saw their parents Ku’e and Zadamma again. They had no hope of being manumitted. Reclaiming them would have cost their parents more than they could ever have accumulated—according to the contract, they would have been required to provide ten (enslaved) persons in exchange for their children. The sale of children was hardly considered normal at Emar; it was, in fact, condemned101 and had to be justified as having been caused by extraordinarily difficult conditions.102 But times were extremely hard at the end of the Bronze Age.
The End of the Late Bronze Age
The Hittite rulers seem to have lost control of Emar during the early years of the twelfth century; the last Overseer there was a man with the local name of Ahi-malik who seems not to have answered to Hittite officials.103 The “years of distress and war” mentioned in the tablets culminated in the violent destruction of the city around 1180 BCE,104 and evidently no Hittite forces arrived to fight off the invaders. Ultimately, the city was devastated. The population fled. It probably made little difference to the people of Emar themselves who attacked them. The tragedy was simply that it happened. Emar was not reoccupied.
Ugarit suffered the same fate at around the same time, between 1190 and 1185 BCE. There, too, the whole town burned. Although, as we have seen, plenty of texts had mentioned hunger and grain shortages in the final years before the attack, the inhabitants of Ugarit seem to have been able to continue to trade and to live, if in straitened circumstances. Then a few mentions of enemy ships suggest that something was amiss, followed by an urgent message. The king of Ugarit wrote to his overlord at Carchemish: “May my lord know that now the enemy forces are stationed at Ra’shu (one of the ports of Ugarit) and their avant-guard forces were sent to Ugarit.”105 It seems the letter was never sent. The enemies, who had come by sea, gave him no time. Suddenly the city of Ugarit was under attack.
Archaeologists found numerous arrowheads in the destruction level, but the people of the town had abandoned their homes before the end.106 Like Emar, the city lay uninhabited for centuries. People like Urtenu never ventured back to their devastated community, even to retrieve important documents from their houses. One hopes that Urtenu and his family, along with the royal family of Ugarit and other citizens, moved elsewhere and managed to rebuild their lives. The people of Ugarit were not alone. A number of cities along the coast of the Mediterranean were attacked and destroyed, all within a few years of the destruction of Ugarit. Many people must have been on the move, searching for a safe place to live.
I have made it this far in this chapter without mentioning the Sea Peoples, and I hesitate to do so even now. For decades they provided a tidy explanation for the crises of the end of the Late Bronze Age. More recently their influence, and even their very existence, has been debated extensively.
The “Sea Peoples” is the modern name for a group of invaders and settlers who showed up in Egypt during the reign of Ramses III (1186–1155 bce); they arrived in the mid-twelfth century BCE. The Egyptians didn’t call them Sea Peoples, they simply named the constituent groups individually; they were known as Denyen, Ekwesh, Shekelesh, Sherden, and Weshesh. All these peoples were described as “of the sea” or “in their isles.” Others, the Lukka, Peleset, and Tjeker, though not specifically from “the sea,” were lumped in with them and have been included in the appellation “Sea Peoples.” After Egypt experienced initial entanglements with the Sea Peoples in the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BCE, in the reigns of Ramses II and his successor Merneptah, Ramses III claimed a great victory against seven of these groups. He commemorated this victory in detail in relief sculptures on the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. The invaders are shown fighting (and dramatically losing to) the Egyptians during the course of a wild and claustrophobic sea battle. An inscription at Medinet Habu credits the Sea Peoples with having destroyed many other lands during the eighth year of Ramses III’s reign: “No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. . . . They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!’ ”107
So it seems likely that it was some contingent of the Sea Peoples who attacked Ugarit,108 and also Alashiya (Cyprus), but Emar and Hatti faced different foes. The capital city of Hattusa was, indeed, attacked and destroyed around 1200 BCE, though it’s unclear who was responsible. Hattusa was much too far inland to have fallen victim to the Sea Peoples. It was probably attacked by people situated to its north, though the city may have been largely abandoned before the attackers arrived.
Even some Mycenaean cities, far to the west, collapsed, and the Greeks may have recalled a distant folk memory of the disruptions of this chaotic time in the works of Homer. According to Homer in his epic poem the Iliad, the Trojan War was fought (in what was for them the distant past) between heroic Greeks and people of Troy, who lived on the coast of Anatolia. As in the Epic of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, Homer included interactions between humans and gods, and plenty of mythical elements in his tale (if Homer was a real person at all, but that’s another issue). But there may be a kernel of historical truth in the story, because if ever there was a time when Greeks and Trojans might have been fighting in coastal Anatolia, it was during the disruptions at the end of the Late Bronze Age, when Greeks probably were swept up in the events.
Scholars have put forward numerous theories identifying who the Sea Peoples were and why they were on the move,109 while some others have posited that no one was actually on the move at all. Recent theories suggest that what the Egyptians described as an invasion in the time of Ramses III actually was a migration of many peoples to many places on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean that took place over as many as fifty years.110 For our purposes, what is important is that, in the context of a devastating drought and famine, the international system that had characterized two and half centuries of the Late Bronze Age came to a dramatic and messy end.
This was not just true in the eastern Mediterranean region. All the former great powers suffered. In Assyria, King Tukulti-Ninurta I’s luck didn’t last. After building the Middle Assyrian Empire to its largest extent, taking over Syria and conquering Babylon, he decided that he needed a new capital city. In this, he was emulating the earlier Late Bronze Age kings Kurigalzu of Babylon, Akhenaten of Egypt, and Untash-napirisha of Elam. He named the city for himself, Kar Tukulti-Ninurta, and, like Untash-napirisha’s capital, it was intended to be “a dwelling place for the gods.”111 But before he could enjoy his city for long, the king was assassinated there, as a result of a conspiracy by his own sons. His death in 1207 BCE gave rise to a period of chaos and marked the beginning of an era of decline for Assyria; later kings proved to be unable to hold on to the empire.
Babylonia and Elam were affected by the instability of this era as well, as the Elamite kings continued their attacks on Babylonia, particularly dramatically in 1158 BCE, when the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte brought some of Mesopotamia’s most important statues and stelas back with him to Susa.112 He proudly displayed his plunder across the citadel: statues of Akkadian kings, the law stela of Hammurabi, the victory stela of Naram-Sin, many kudurru stones and other stelas. On some of them he had masons chisel out the original inscription and replace it with one of his own.113 The sculptures were still in Susa when they were discovered during excavations there in the early twentieth century of our era; the Babylonians never got them back. The Kassite dynasty lost power in Babylon soon after, replaced by a dynasty based in the city of Isin.
Even worse destruction was meted out in Babylonia by Elam under its next king, Kutir-Nahhunte, who plundered and burned temples across the land. To the horror of the Babylonians, he even stole the statue of Marduk, greatest of all the gods, and took it back to Susa with him.114 The statue had not been home for long, since its return from Assyria where it had been taken by Tukulti-Ninurta I, and now the god was gone once again. It was only reclaimed when a Babylonian king named Nebuchadnezzar I in turn raided Susa in 1110 BCE and brought Marduk home.
Many cities in Babylonia were abandoned during the late twelfth and eleventh centuries. This may have been because the Euphrates seems to have shifted its course away from the cities. The plain was so flat in the south that, after a flood, there was always the chance that the river might not return to its original bed. Legions of flood mitigation workers had, in past centuries, worked to prevent this, maintaining levees, cutting flood channels, and maintaining reservoirs. But perhaps in this period the workforce simply didn’t exist to keep the river in its normal course, leaving ancient cities deprived of water and fields impossible to irrigate.
Soon after the death of Tukulti-Ninurta I, not only did Assyria lose control of Babylon, but regions in central and northern Syria gained independence, and many of them became home to Aramean states. But, in all of this disarray, the Assyrian heartland benefited from a great advantage in comparison with the rest of the Near East. The same dynasty stayed on the throne, generation after generation through this era. The Assyrian kings continued to maintain a disciplined military force that had no equal. This ultimately gave Assyria an incomparable benefit, and even through the following century, when all of the great powers had collapsed, Assyria’s kings never gave up on their goal to rule the whole world.