Egypt and Hatti fought back. Hattusili’s son, Tudaliya IV, attacked the raiders in Alishiya (Cyprus), but he was soon struggling to hold back the horses of the apocalypse. ‘If nobody is left to yoke the horses,’ Tudaliya wrote forlornly, ‘you must show even more support. If the charioteer jumps from the chariot and the valet flees the chamber, and not even a dog is left, your support for your king must be all the greater.’ In Egypt Rameses III claimed to have defeated these invaders in the Nile delta, a triumph celebrated by his gigantist temple-palace – the Mansion of a Million Years of King Rameses – in which enemy penises are depicted, heaped at his feet. But his gravebuilders, living with their families in their special village at Deir el-Medina, were no longer paid: they refused to work and launched a sit-in at the temples – the first strike.
‘Barbarians conspired in their islands,’ wrote Rameses III, ‘no land could withstand their weaponry.’ The Rameses family disintegrated; Egypt fell to Libyan chieftains; Hatti was broken; in Europe, Celts advanced into the west; in the Mediterranean, Greek-speaking peoples settled Aegean coasts. In western Asia, Semitic peoples, many speaking Aramaic, founded new kingdoms: in Canaan, they built thriving trading cities on the coast; in the interior, they formed a kingdom around Damascus, while further south one Semitic tribe, speaking an early version of Hebrew, settled and coalesced into a people who called themselves ‘Israel’. They may already have worshipped a peculiar notion – one deity – who did not reside in a single temple but travelled with them in a mobile shrine.* Yet these were all tiny peoples. The mayhem was also the opportunity for a northern Iraqi city to build the first empire to dominate all of western Asia: the city was Ashur and the spectacular cruelties of Assyria would terrify the known world.
* These Habiru could be the first mention of ‘Hebrews’, who would emerge later as the Jews.
* The capital’s centrepiece was the House of Aten next to the Pharaoh’s House and the state department, the House of Pharaoh’s Correspondence, guarded by colossi of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Every day the royal family rode in ceremonial chariots from palace to temple, accompanied by priests and protected by baton-wielding bodyguards. The royal artist, ‘The King’s Favourite and Master of Works, the Sculptor Thutmose’, set up a studio, specializing in Nefertitis, sculpting both his famously beautiful teen-queen, her eyes of black painted quartz held in place by beeswax, wearing her blue crown, and the naked adult woman and mother.
* The brash grandiloquent gigantism of his vision endures today in all five – above all his spectacular masterpiece, the Temple of Rameses United with Thebes, eleven acres in size, crowned with a colossus of Rameses. These works expressed not just the plenitude of his power but his apotheosis as a living god.
* Just at this time, a court scribe, Any, wrote advice to his son on how to live, giving a glimpse of Egyptian conservative family values: ‘Truth is sent by God,’ ‘Keep away from rebels’ and ‘Scorn the woman of ill repute, don’t try to sleep with her,’ alongside ‘Give back in abundance the bread your mother gave you: support her as she supported you.’ But the soul and eternity are always on an Egyptian’s mind: ‘Don’t lose yourself in the exterior world to the extent that you neglect the place of your eternal rest.’
* We know much less about Europe, but it was a violent world: Celtic peoples migrated from the east and settled in central Europe. Around this time, 1,400 people including women and children were killed in the Tollense Valley (German–Polish border) in what appears to have been the ambush of a merchant caravan, executed by having their skulls smashed.
* Their bones were placed around her lacquered coffin along with an array of bronze vessels, some engraved with her name, 560 hairpins, 700 pieces of jade, opal and ivory carved into figurines of dragons, phoenixes and elephants, and among 130 weapons her favourite battleaxes. She was not the only female commander of Wuding’s armies, and women commanded Chinese armies at least until the Tang in the seventh century.
* Mycenaeans traded tin from Afghanistan, amber from the Baltic, plying the seas from Greece to Italy and Spain. One of the earliest shipwrecks dated around 1300 BC – studied by the historical science that we might call naufragiology – contains goods from as far away as Babylon and Italy, showing that a Eurasian network already existed.
* The son, Merneptah, dealt with rebellions in Libya, Nubia and Canaan where, among the vanquished Canaanite tribes listed on his inscription, he cites ‘Israel’, the first definite mention of the Jewish people.
* The division of early history into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages was devised in 1825 by the Danish historian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. Sub-Saharan Africa did not experience a prehistoric Bronze Age: tools were made of stone. Then they were made from iron. For some, the sudden influx of iron-working technology supports the argument that the technology reached Africa from outside the continent. But more recently it has been argued that iron-working technology developed independently in one or more centres, possibly Nok (Nigeria) or Kush (Sudan).
* The Israelites immigrated to Canaan from servitude in Egypt many centuries earlier – according to the Bible. Contrary to the biblical story of conquest, it is likely they conquered some local peoples and intermarried with others.
The Nubian Pharaohs and Great Kings of Ashur: House Alara versus House Tiglath-Pileser
THREE QUEENS: JEZEBEL, SEMIRAMIS AND ATHALIAH
In 853 BC, at Qarqar in northern Syria, the kings of Israel and ten other kingdoms prepared to fight the most powerful monarch of his day, Shalmaneser III of Assyria, who was advancing to destroy them.
Ashur was an old city founded around 2600, home of the god Ashur, worshipped in his ziggurat tower and temple, where Assyrian kings were crowned. For a long time, Assyria was just a minor city state in a region dominated by Akkad and Babylon, but around 1300 its kings, descended from the semi-mythical Adasi, started to conquer northern Iraq. After its expansion had been checked by Hatti and Babylon, Assyria – Assurayu in Assyrian (a dialect of Akkadian) – exploited the predations of the Sea Peoples to shatter both powers: Shalmaneser routed the king of Hatti, whose empire was fatally undermined by the attacks of Kassite nomads; Hattusa was abandoned. The Assyrian king captured the Babylonian king, on whom he ‘trod with my feet upon his lordly neck as a footstool’, and then struck at the kingdom of Elam (Iran), invading Arabia, seizing entrepôts in Dilmun (Bahrain) and Meluhha (India), calling himself King of the Upper and Lower Seas and King of Kings. After seizing power in 1114, Tiglath-Pileser I, tempted by the riches of Canaan, plundered the kingdoms of Damascus and Tyre, Sidon and Beirut, celebrating, he claimed, by harpooning a ‘seahorse’ – surely a whale – in the Mediterranean. When Assyria was crippled by the strife among his heirs, a small people in southern Canaan took the opportunity to expand their own kingdom.