‘Confusion’ is a matter of perspective. For about 800 years from, say, the end of Knossos, the history of the Near East is indeed very confused if our standpoint is that of world history. What was essentially going on were disputes about control of the slowly growing wealth of the best-defined agricultural region of the ancient world (the empires which came and went could not find resources in the desert and steppe area on the borders of the Near East which could justify their conquest) and in that story it is hard to find any continuing thread. Invaders came and went rapidly, some of them leaving new communities behind them, some setting up new institutions to replace those they overthrew. This could hardly have been grasped by those to whom these events would only have come home occasionally, and suddenly, when (for instance) their homes were burned, their wives and daughters raped, their sons carried off to slavery - or, less dramatically, when they discovered that a new governor was going to levy higher taxes. Such events would be upsetting enough - if a stronger word is not required. On the other hand, millions of people must also have lived out their lives unaware of any change more dramatic than the arrival in their village one day of the first iron sword or sickle; hundreds of communities lived within a pattern of ideas and institutions unchanged for many generations. This is an important reservation. It must not be forgotten when we stress the dynamism and violence of the Near East’s history during the transition from the Bronze to Iron Ages, an era already considered from the standpoint of the peoples of the Aegean.
On the mainland, wandering peoples moved about in a zone where there were long-established centres of government and population, powerful and long-lasting political structures, and numerous hierarchies of specialists in administration, religion and learning. These partly explain why the coming of new peoples obliterates less of what had already been achieved than in the Aegean. Another conservative force was the contact many of the barbarians had already had with civilization in this region. It left them wanting not to destroy it but to enjoy its fruits themselves. These two forces helped in the long run to diffuse civilization further and to produce the increasing cosmopolitanism of a large and confused, but civilized and interconnected, Near East.
The story begins very early, somewhere back towards the beginning of the second millennium BC, with the arrival in Asia Minor of the Hittites. Perhaps they belonged to the same group of peoples as those of Minoan Crete; at any rate they were established in Anatolia at about the same time that Minoan civilization was rising to its greatest triumphs. They were far from being primitive barbarians. They had a legal system of their own and absorbed much of what Babylon could teach. They had enjoyed a virtual monopoly of iron in Asia; this not only had great agricultural importance but, together with their mastery of fortification and the chariot, gave the Hittites a military superiority which was the scourge of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The raid which cut down Babylon in about 1590 BC was something like the high-water mark of the first Hittite ‘empire’. A period of eclipse and obscurity followed. Then, in the first half of the fourteenth century, came a renaissance of power. This second and even more splendid era saw a Hittite hegemony which stretched at one brief moment from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. It dominated all of the Fertile Crescent except Egypt and successfully challenged even that great military power while being almost ceaselessly at war with the Mycenaeans. But, like other empires, it crumbled after a century or so, the end coming in about 1200 BC.
The culmination and collapse of this great organizing effort at the beginning of ‘dark ages’ for Greece and the Aegean has two interesting features. The first is that the Hittites by this time no longer enjoyed a monopoly of iron; by about 1000 BC it is to be found in use all over the Near East and its diffusion must surely be part of the story of the swing of power against the Hittites. The other interesting feature is a coincidence with the rhythm of migrations, for it seems that the great diffusers of iron technology were the Indo-European peoples who from about 1200 BC were throwing so much into turmoil. The disappearance of Troy, which never recovered from the Achaean destruction, has been thought of great strategic importance in this respect; the city seems to have played until this time a leading role in an alliance of powers of Asia Minor, who had held the line against the barbarians from the north. After its overthrow, no other focus for resistance appeared. There is a closeness of timing which some have thought too pronounced to be merely coincidental between the collapse of the last Hittite power and the attacks of ‘sea peoples’ recorded in the Egyptian records. The particular conquerors of the Hittites were a people from Thrace called the Phrygians.
The ‘sea peoples’ were yet another indicator of the great folk movements of the era. Armed with iron, from the beginning of the twelfth century BC they were raiding the mainland of the East Mediterranean basin, ravaging Syrian and Levantine cities. Some of them may have been ‘refugees’ from the Mycenaean cities who moved first to the Dodecanese and then to Cyprus. One group among them, the Philistines, settled in Canaan in about 1175 BC and are commemorated still by a modern name derived from their own: Palestine. But Egyptians were the major victims of the sea peoples. Like the Vikings of the northern seas 2000 years later, sea-borne invaders and raiders plunged down on the delta again and again, undeterred by occasional defeat, at one time even wresting it from Pharaoh’s control. Egypt was under great strain. In the early eleventh century, she broke apart and was disputed between two kingdoms. Nor were the sea peoples Egypt’s only enemies. At one point, a Libyan fleet appears to have raided the delta, though it was driven off. In the south, the Nubian frontier did not yet present a problem, but around 1000 BC an independent kingdom emerged in the Sudan which would later be troublesome. The tidal surge of barbarian peoples was wearing away the old structures of the Near East just as it had worn away Mycenaean Greece.
This is far enough into the welter of events to make it clear that we have entered an age both too complex and too obscure for straightforward narration. Mercifully, there soon appear two threads through the turmoil. One is an old theme renewed, that of the continuing Mesopotamian tradition about to enter its last phase. The other is quite new. It begins with an event we cannot date and know only through tradition recorded centuries later, but which probably occurred during the testing time imposed on Egypt by the sea peoples. Whenever and however it happened, a turning-point had been reached in world history when there went out of Egypt people whom the Egyptians called Hebrews and the world later called Jews.
For many people over many centuries, mankind’s history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, the sacred writings of the Jewish people, subsequently diffused worldwide in many languages by the Christian missionary impulse and the invention of printing. They were to be the first people to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources, origins so insignificant indeed that it is still difficult to be sure of very much about them.
The origins lie among the Semitic, nomadic peoples of Arabia, whose prehistoric and historic tendency was to press into the richer lands of the Fertile Crescent nearest to their original homes. The first stage of their story of which history must take notice is the age of the patriarchs, whose traditions are embodied in the biblical accounts of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There do not seem to be good grounds for denying that men who were the origins of these gigantic and legendary figures actually existed. If they did, it was in about 1800 BC and their story is a part of the confusion following the end of Ur. The Bible states that Abraham came from Ur to Canaan; this is quite plausible and would not conflict with what we know of the dispersal of Amorite and other tribes in the next 400 years. Those among them who were to be remembered as the descendants of Abraham became known in the end as ‘Hebrews’, a word meaning ‘wanderer’, which does not appear before Egyptian writings and inscriptions of the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC, long after their first settlement in Canaan. Although this word is not wholly satisfactory, it is probably the best name to give the tribes with which we are concerned at this time. It is a better term to identify this group than ‘Jews’, and for all the traditional associations gathered around that word by centuries of popular usage it is best to reserve it (as scholars usually do) for a much later era than that of the patriarchs.
It is in Canaan that Abraham’s people are first distinguishable in the Bible. They are depicted as pastoralists, organized tribally, quarrelling with neighbours and kinsmen over wells and grazing, still liable to be pushed about the Near East by the pressures of drought and hunger. One group among them went down into Egypt, we are told, perhaps in the early seventeenth century BC; it was to appear in the Bible as the family of Jacob. As the story unfolds in the Old Testament, we learn of Joseph, the great son of Jacob, rising high in Pharaoh’s service. At this point we might hope for help from Egyptian records. It has been suggested that this happened during the Hyksos ascendancy, since only a period of large-scale disturbance could explain the improbable pre-eminence of a foreigner in the Egyptian bureaucracy. It may be so, but there is no evidence to confirm or disprove it. There is only tradition, as there is only tradition for all Hebrew history until about 1200 BC. This tradition is embodied in the Old Testament; its texts only took their present form in the seventh century BC, perhaps 800 years after the story of Joseph, though older elements can be and have been distinguished in them. As evidence, it stands in something like the relation to Jewish origins in which Homer stands to those of Greece.
None of this would matter very much, and certainly would not interest anyone except professional scholars, were it not for events which occurred from one to three thousand years later. Then, the destinies of the whole world were swayed by the Christian and Islamic civilizations whose roots lay in the religious tradition of a tiny, not very easily identifiable Semitic people, for centuries hardly distinguishable from many similar wanderers by the rulers of the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This was because the Hebrews somehow arrived at a unique religious vision.
Throughout the world of the ancient Near East it is possible to see at work forces which were likely to make monotheistic religious views more appealing. The power of local deities was likely to be questioned after contemplation of the great upheavals and disasters which time and time again swept across the region after the first Babylonian empire. The religious innovations of Akhnaton and the growing assertiveness of the cult of Marduk have both been seen as responses to such a challenge. Yet only the Hebrews and those who came to share their beliefs were able to push the process home, transcending polytheism and localism to arrive at a coherent and uncompromising monotheism.
The timing of this process is very difficult to establish but its essential steps were not complete before the eighth century BC. In the earliest times at which Hebrew religion could be distinguished it was probably polytheistic, but also monolatrous - that is to say, that like other Semitic peoples the tribes who were the forerunners of the Jews believed that there were many gods, but worshipped only one, their own. The first stage of refinement was the idea that the people of Israel (as the descendants of Jacob came to be called) owed exclusive allegiance to Yahweh, the tribal deity, a jealous God, who had made a covenant with his people to bring them again to the promised land, the Canaan to which Yahweh had already brought Abraham out of Ur, and which remains a focus of racial passion right down to the present day. The covenant was a master idea. Israel was assured that if it did something, then something desirable would follow. This was very unlike the religious atmosphere of Mesopotamia or Egypt.
The exclusive demands of Yahweh opened the way to monotheism, for when the time came for this the Israelites felt no respect for other gods which might be an obstacle for such evolution. Nor was this all. At an early date Yahweh’s nature was already different from that of other tribal gods. That no graven image was to be made of him was the most distinctive feature of his cult. At times, he appears as other gods, in an immanent dwelling place, such as a temple made with hands, or even in manifestations of nature, but, as the Israelite religion developed, he could be seen as transcendent deity:
‘the lord is in his holy temple, the lord’s throne is in heaven’ Psalm xi: 4
says a psalm. He had created everything, but existed independently of his creation, a universal being.
‘ Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ asked the Psalmist.
Psalm cxxxix: 7
The creative power of Yahweh was something else differentiating the Jewish from the Mesopotamian tradition. Both saw Man’s origins in a watery chaos; ‘the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep’, says the book of Genesis. For the Mesopotamian, no pure creation was involved; somehow, matter of some sort had always been there and the gods only arranged it. It was different for the Hebrew; Yahweh had already created the chaos itself. He was for Israel what was later described in the Christian creed, ‘maker of all things, by whom all things are made’. Moreover, he made Man in his own image, as a companion, not as a slave; Man was the culmination and supreme revelation of His creative power, a creature able to know good from evil, as did Yahweh Himself. Finally, Man moved in a moral world set by Yahweh’s own nature. Only He was just; man-made laws might or might not reflect His will, but He was the sole author of right and justice.
The implications of such ideas were to take centuries to clarify and millennia to demonstrate their full weight. At first, they were well wrapped up in the assumptions of a tribal society looking for a god’s favour in war. Much in them reflected the special experience of a desert-dwelling people. Later Jewish tradition placed great emphasis on its origins in the exodus from Egypt, a story dominated by the gigantic and mysterious figure of Moses. Clearly, when the Hebrews came to Canaan, they were already consciously a people, grouped around the cult of Yahweh. The biblical account of the wanderings in Sinai probably reports the crucial time when this national consciousness was forged. But the biblical tradition is again all that there is to depend upon and it was only recorded much later. It is certainly credible that the Hebrews should at last have fled from harsh oppression in a foreign land - an oppression which could, for example, reflect burdens imposed by the mobilizing of labour for huge building operations. Moses is an Egyptian name and there may well have existed a historical original of the great legendary leader who dominates the biblical story by managing the exodus and holding the Hebrews together in the wilderness. In the traditional account, he founded the Law by bringing down the Ten Commandments from his encounter with Yahweh. This was the occasion of the renewal of the covenant by Yahweh and his people at Mount Sinai, and it may be seen as a formal return to its traditions by a nomadic people whose cult had been eroded by long sojourn in the Nile delta. Unfortunately, the exact role of the great religious reformer and national leader remains impossible to define and the Commandments themselves cannot be convincingly dated until much later than the time when he lived.
Yet though the biblical account cannot be accepted as it stands, it should be treated with respect as our only evidence for much of Jewish history. It contains much that can be related to what is known or inferred from other sources. Archaeology comes to the historians’ help only with the arrival of the Hebrews in Canaan. The story of conquest told in the book of Joshua fits evidence of destruction in the Canaanite cities in the thirteenth century BC. What we know of Canaanite culture and religion also fits the Bible’s account of Hebrew struggles against local cult practice and a pervasive polytheism. Palestine was disputed between two religious traditions and two peoples throughout the twelfth century and this, of course, again illustrates the collapse of Egyptian power, since this crucial area could not have been left to be the prey of minor Semitic peoples had the monarchy’s power still been effective. It now seems likely that the Hebrews attracted to their support other nomadic tribes, the touchstone of alliance being adherence to Yahweh. After settlement, although the tribes quarrelled with one another, they continued to worship Yahweh and this was for some time the only uniting force among them, for tribal divisions formed Israel’s only political institution.
The Hebrews took as well as destroyed. They were clearly in many ways less advanced culturally than the Canaanites and they took over their script. They borrowed their building practice, too, though without always achieving the same level of town life as their predecessors. Jerusalem was for a long time a little place of filth and confusion, not within striking distance of the level reached by the town life of the Minoans long before. Yet in Israel lay the seeds of much of the future history of the human race.
Settlement in Palestine had been essentially a military operation and military necessity provoked the next stage in the consolidation of a nation. It seems to have been the challenge from the Philistines (who were obviously more formidable opponents than the Canaanites) which stimulated the emergence of the Hebrew kingship at some time about 1000 BC. With it appears another institution, that of the special distinction of the prophets, for it was the prophet Samuel who anointed (and thus, in effect, designated) both Saul, the first king, and his successor, David. When Saul reigned, the Bible tells us, Israel had no iron weapons, for the Philistines took care not to endanger their supremacy by permitting them. None the less, the Jews learnt the management of iron from their enemies; the Hebrew words for ‘knife’ and ‘helmet’ both have Philistine roots. Ploughshares did not exist, but if they had they could have been beaten into swords.
Saul won victories, but died at last by his own hand and his work was completed by David. Of all Old Testament individuals, David is outstandingly credible both for his strengths and weaknesses. Although there is no archaeological evidence that he existed, he lives still as one of the great figures of world literature and was a model for kings for 2000 years. The literary account, confused though it is, is irresistibly convincing. It tells of a noble-hearted but flawed and all-too-human hero who ended the Philistine peril and reunited the kingdom which had split at Saul’s death. Jerusalem became Israel’s capital and David then imposed himself upon the neighbouring peoples. Among them were the Phoenicians who had helped him against the Philistines, and this was the end of Tyre as an important independent state.
Yet it was David’s son and successor, Solomon, who was the first king of Israel to achieve major international standing. He gave his army a chariot arm, launched expeditions to the south against the Edomites, allied with Phoenicia and built a navy. Conquest and prosperity followed.
‘And, Solomon reigned over all kingdoms from the river [Euphrates] unto the land of the Philistines, and unto the border of Egypt . . . and Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon.’
I Kings 4: 21, 25
Again, this sounds like the exploitation of possibilities available to the weak when the great are in decline; the success of Israel under Solomon is further evidence of the eclipse of the older empires and it was matched by the successes of other now-forgotten peoples of Syria and the Levant who constituted the political world depicted in the obscure struggles recorded in the Old Testament. Most of them were descendants of the old Amorite expansion. Solomon was a king of great energy and drive and the economic and technical advances of the period were also notable. He was an entrepreneur ruler of the first rank. The legendary ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ have been said to reflect the activity of the first copper refinery of which there is evidence in the Near East, but this is disputed. Certainly the building of the Temple (after Phoenician models) was only one of many public works, though perhaps the most important. David had given Israel a capital, thus increasing the tendency to political centralization. He had planned a temple and when Solomon built it the worship of Yahweh was given a more splendid form than ever before and an enduring focus.
A tribal religion had successfully resisted the early dangers of contamination by the fertility rites and polytheism of the agriculturists among whom the Hebrews had settled in Canaan. But there was always a threat of backsliding which would compromise the covenant. With success came other dangers, too. A kingdom meant a court, foreign contacts and - in Solomon’s day - foreign wives who cherished the cults of their own gods. Denunciation of the evils of departing from the law by going a-whoring after the fertility gods of the Philistines had been the first role of the prophets; a new luxury gave them a social theme as well.
The prophets brought to its height the Israelite idea of God. They were not soothsayers such as the Near East already knew (though this is probably the tradition which formed the first two great prophets, Samuel and Elijah), but preachers, poets, political and moral critics. Their status depended essentially on the conviction they could generate in themselves and others, that God spoke through them. Few preachers have had such success. In the end Israel would be remembered not for the great deeds of her kings but for the ethical standards announced by her prophets. They shaped the connections of religion with morality which were to dominate not only Judaism but Christianity and Islam.
The prophets evolved the cult of Yahweh into the worship of a universal God, just and merciful, stern to punish sin but ready to welcome the sinner who repented. This was the climax of religious culture in the Near East, a point after which religion could be separated from locality and tribe. The prophets also bitterly attacked social injustice. Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah went behind the privileged priestly caste to do so, denouncing religious officialdom directly to the people. They announced that all men were equal in the sight of God, that kings might not simply do what they would; they proclaimed a moral code which was a given fact, independent of human authority. Thus the preaching of adherence to a moral law which Israel believed was god-given became also a basis for a criticism of existing political power. Since the law was not made by man it did not ostensibly emerge from that power; the prophets could always appeal to it as well as to their divine inspiration against king or priest. It is not too much to say that, if the heart of political liberalism is the belief that power must be used within a moral framework independent of it, then its tap-root is the teaching of the prophets.
Most of the prophets after Samuel spoke against a troubled background, which they called in evidence as signs of backsliding and corruption. Israel had prospered in the eclipse of paramount powers, when kingdoms came and went with great rapidity. After Solomon’s death in 935 BC Hebrew history had ups as well as downs, but broadly took a turn for the worse. There had already been revolts; soon the kingdom split. Israel became a northern kingdom, built on ten tribes gathered together around a capital at Samaria; in the south the tribes of Benjamin and Judah still held Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom of Judah. The Assyrians obliterated Israel in 722 BC and the ten tribes disappeared from history in mass deportations. Judah lasted longer. It was more compact and somewhat less in the path of great states; it survived until 587 BC, when Jerusalem’s walls and Temple were razed by a Babylonian army. The Judaeans, too, then suffered deportations, many of them being carried away to Babylon, to the great experience of the Exile, a period so important and formative that after it we may properly speak of ‘the Jews’, the inheritors and transmitters of a tradition still alive and easily traced. Once more great empires had established their grip in Mesopotamia and gave its civilization its last flowering. The circumstances which had favoured the appearance of a Jewish state had disappeared. Fortunately for the Jews, the religion of Judah now ensured that this did not mean that their national identity was doomed too.
Since the days of Hammurabi, the peoples of the Mesopotamian valley had been squeezed in a vice of migratory peoples. For a long time its opposing jaws had been the Hittites and the Mitanni, but from time to time others had ruled in Assur and Babylon. When, in due course, the Hittites also crumbled, ancient Mesopotamia was the seat of no great military power until the ninth century BC, though such a sentence conceals much. One Assyrian king briefly conquered Syria and Babylon early in the eleventh century; he was soon swept away by a cluster of pushful Semitic tribes whom scholars call Aramaeans, followers of the old tradition of expansion into the fertile lands from the desert. Together with a new line of Kassite kings in Babylon they were the awkward and touchy neighbours of the reduced kings of Assyria for 200 years or so - for about as long as the United States has existed. Though one of these Semitic peoples was called the Chaldees and therefore subsequently gave its name somewhat misleadingly to Babylonia, there is not much to be remarked in this story except further evidence of the fragility of the political constructions of the ancient world.
Shape only begins to reappear in the turmoil of events in the ninth century BC when Mesopotamia recovered. Then, the Old Testament tells us, Assyrian armies were once more on the move against the Syrian and Jewish kingdoms. After some successful resistance the Assyrians came back again and again, and they conquered. This was the beginning of a new, important and unpleasant phase of Near Eastern history. A new Assyrian empire was in the making. In the eighth century it was moving to its apogee, and Nineveh, the capital high up the Tigris, which had replaced the ancient centre of Assur, became the focus of Mesopotamian history as Babylon had once been. Assyrian empire was unified in a way that other great empires were not; it did not rely on the vassalization of kings and the creation of tributaries. Instead, it swept native rulers away and installed Assyrian governors. Often, too, it swept away peoples. One of its characteristic techniques was mass deportation; the Ten Tribes of Israel are the best-remembered victims.
Assyrian expansion was carried forward by repeated and crushing victory. Its greatest successes followed 729 BC, when Babylon was seized. Soon after, Assyrian armies destroyed Israel, Egypt was invaded, its kings were confined to Upper Egypt and the delta was annexed. By then Cyprus had submitted, Cilicia and Syria had been conquered. Finally, in 646 BC, Assyria made its last important conquest, part of the land of Elam, whose kings dragged the Assyrian conqueror’s chariot through the streets of Nineveh. The consequences were of great importance for the whole Near East. A standardized system of government and law spanned the whole area. Conscript soldiers and deported populations were moved about within it, sapping its provincialism. Aramaic spread widely as a common language. A new cosmopolitanism was possible after the Assyrian age.
This great formative power is commemorated in monuments of undeniable impressiveness. Sargon II (721-705 bc) built a great palace at Khorsabad, near Nineveh, which covered half a square mile of land and was embellished with more than a mile of sculpted reliefs. The profits of conquest financed a rich and splendid court. Ashurbanipal (668-626 bc) also left his monuments (including obelisks carried off to Nineveh from Thebes), but he was a man with a taste for learning and antiquities and his finest relic is what survives of the great collection of tablets he made for his library. In it he accumulated copies of all that he could discover of the records and literature of ancient Mesopotamia. It is to these copies that we owe much of our knowledge of Mesopotamian literature, among them the Epic of Gilgamesh in its fullest edition, a translation made from Sumerian. The ideas that moved this civilization are thus fairly accessible from literature as well as from other sources. The frequent representation of Assyrian kings as hunters may be a part of the image of the warrior-king, but may also form part of a conscious identification of the king with legendary conquerors of nature who had been the heroes of a remote Sumerian past.
The stone reliefs which commemorate the great deeds of Assyrian kings also repeat, monotonously, another tale - that of sacking, enslavement, impalement, torture and the final solution of mass deportation. Assyrian empire had a brutal foundation of conquest and intimidation. It was made possible by the creation of the best army up to this time. Fed by conscription of all males and armed with iron weapons, it also had siege artillery able to breach walls until this time impregnable, and even some mailed cavalry. It was a coordinated force of all arms. Perhaps, too, it had a special religious fervour. The god Assur is shown hovering over the armies as they go to battle and to him kings reported their victories over unbelievers.
Whatever the fundamental explanation of Assyrian success, it quickly waned. Possibly, empire put too great a strain on Assyrian numbers. The year after Ashurbanipal died, the empire began to crumble, the first sign being a revolt in Babylon. The rebels were supported by the Chaldeans and also by a great new neighbour, the kingdom of the Medes, now the leading Iranian people. Their entrance as a major power on the stage of history marks an important change. The Medes had hitherto been distracted by having to deal with yet another wave of barbarian invaders from the north, the Scythians, who poured down into Iran from the Caucasus (and at the same time down the Black Sea coast towards Europe). These were light cavalrymen, fighting with the bow from horseback, and the first major eruption into western Asia of a new force in world history, nomadic peoples straight from Central Asia. It took time to come to terms with them in the seventh century. Like all other great invasions, the Scythian advance pushed other peoples before them (the kingdom of Phrygia was overrun by one of these). Meanwhile, the last of the political units of the Near East based on the original Caucasian inhabitants was gobbled up by Scyths, Medes or Assyrians. All this took a century and more, but amounted to a great clearing of the stage. The instability and fragmentation of the periphery of the Fertile Crescent had long favoured Assyria; it ceased to do so when Scyths and Medes joined forces. This pushed Assyria over the edge and gave the Babylonians independence again; Assyria passes from history with the sack of Nineveh by the Medes in 612 BC.
This thunderbolt was not quite the end of the Mesopotamian tradition. Assyria’s collapse left the Fertile Crescent open to new masters. The north was seized by the Medes, who pushed across Anatolia until halted at the borders of Lydia and at last drove the Scyths back into Russia. An Egyptian pharaoh made a grab at the south and the Levant, but was defeated by a Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, who gave Mesopotamian civilization an Indian summer of grandeur and a last Babylonian empire, which more than any other captured the imagination of posterity. It ran from Suez, the Red Sea and Syria across the border of Mesopotamia and the old kingdom of Elam (by then ruled by a minor Iranian dynasty called the Achaemenids). If for nothing else, Nebuchadnezzar would be remembered as the great conqueror who destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC after a Jewish revolt and carried off the tribes of Judah into captivity, using them as he used other captives, to carry out the embellishment of his capital, whose ‘hanging gardens’ or terraces were to be remembered as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He was the greatest king of his time, perhaps of any time until his own.
The glory of the empire came to a focus in the cult of Marduk, which was now at its zenith. At a great New Year festival held each year all the Mesopotamian gods - the idols and statues of provincial shrines - came down the rivers and canals to take counsel with Marduk at his temple and acknowledge his supremacy. Borne down a processional way three-quarters of a mile long (which was, we are told, probably the most magnificent street of antiquity) or landed from the Euphrates nearer to the temple, they were taken into the presence of a statue of the god which, Herodotus reported two centuries later, was made of two and a quarter tons of gold. No doubt he exaggerated, but it was indisputably magnificent. The destinies of the whole world, whose centre was this temple, were then debated by the gods and determined for another year. Thus theology reflected political reality. The re-enacting of the drama of creation was the endorsement of Marduk’s eternal authority, and this was an endorsement of the absolute monarchy of Babylon. The king had responsibility for assuring the order of the world and therefore the authority to do so.
It was the last flowering of the Mesopotamian tradition and was soon to end. More and more provinces were lost under Nebuchadnezzar’s successors. Then came an invasion in 539 BC by new conquerors from the east, the Persians, led by the Achaemenids. The passage from worldly pomp and splendour to destruction had been swift. The book of Daniel telescopes it in a magnificent closing scene, Belshazzar’s feast. ‘In that night,’ we read, ‘was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom’ (Daniel 5: 30-31). Unfortunately, this account was only written 300 years later and it was not quite like that. Belshazzar was neither Nebuchadnezzar’s son nor his successor as the book of Daniel says, and the king who took Babylon was called Cyrus. None the less, the emphasis of the Jewish tradition has a dramatic and psychological truth. In so far as the story of antiquity has a turning-point, this is it. An independent Mesopotamian tradition going back to Sumer was over. We are at the edge of a new world. A Jewish poet summed it up exultantly in the book of Isaiah, where Cyrus appears as a deliverer to the Jews:
‘Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms.’
Isaiah 47: 5