The ancient history of the Near East, from the earliest times to the battle of Salamis

Front matter

1^

PRINCIPAL

W. R. TAYLOR

Preface

IN this book I have endeavoured to tell the story of the ancient history of the Near East within the limits of a single volume. Those who know the great works of Maspero and of Meyer will realize that in order to effect this great compression has been necessary, and will guess that many matters of great interest have had to be treated more cursorily than I would have wished. But, while writing as succinctly as possible, I have of set purpose refused to sacrifice too much on the altar of brevity, and have aspired to make the book readable as well as moderate in size.

Of all regions of the earth probably the Near East has had and will have the greatest interest for us Europeans, for from it sprang our civilization and our religion.

There took place the mingling of the Indo-European from the North with the Mediterranean of the South, which produced the culture, art, and law of the Greeks and Romans ; and there, on the Semitic verge of Asia, the home of religious enthusiasms from the beginning, arose the Christian Faith. And if the Near East has from the first seen the mingling of the ideas of the East and West, it has also seen their secular struggle for mastery, the first phase of which ended at Salamis, when the Aryan invader made good his footing in the Mediterranean world, and threw back the Asiatics from Greece, now become the most eastern of western lands instead of the most westerly of the eastern. The second phase ended with Arbela and the complete triumph of the West. At the end of the third, Kossovopolje and Constantinople registered the return of the pendulum, which swung its weight from east to west as far as Vienna. Then it swung back, and the end of the fourth phase seems viii THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE NEAR EAST

to be approaching as I write, when Bulgars and Greeks are hammering at the gates of Constantinople.

It is with the history of the first phase of the great drama that this book deals, from the beginning of things to the grand climacteric of Salamis. The story begins with prehistoric Greece. Of the Bronze Age civilization of Greece which has been revealed to us by the discoveries of Schliemann, Halbherr, and Evans we cannot yet write the history : we can only guess at the probable course of events from the relics of antiquity which archaeology has revealed to us. It is otherwise with Egypt, with Babylonia, and Assyria. Of them we have intelligible records upon which we can base history. Therefore it seems best to treat the *' pre-history " of Greece separately, and before we pass to real history with Egypt and Babylonia. We pass then from Greece to the Nilotic and Mesopotamian communities, treating them separately till in the second millennium B.C. they came into connexion with each other and with the Anatolian culture of Asia Minor. It then becomes impossible to treat them separately any longer. At different periods one or the other more or less dominated the rest and took the most prominent part in the history of the time. I have therefore told the story of each period more or less from the standpoint of the chief actor in it. During the First Egyptian Empire, from about 1550 to 1350 B.C., one regards the world from the standpoint of imperial Thebes ; during the ensuing period, till about 1 100, one looks down upon it from the bleak heights of Asia Minor; till about 850 the rise of the Israelitish kingdom centres our attention upon Palestine; from 850 to 650 we watch from Nineveh the marching forth of the hosts of Ashur and the smoke of their holocausts spreading over all the lands. Then, with dramatic swiftness of overthrow, comes the Destruction of Nineveh. The destroyers, the Scyths of the Northern Steppes and the Medes and Persians of Iran, found their kingdoms on the ruins of the Semitic empires, while Egypt and even Babylonia spring once more into life. And the great event was contemporaneous with the expansion of the young Greece of the Iron Age, young with the new Indo-European blood from

PREFACE ix

the north which had begun to invade the Aegean lands towards the end of the Egyptian imperial period. Persia took the place of Assyria in the world, and all the lands of the Near East but Greece coalesced in her Empire. Greece alone, possessed of a stronger rjdog and with a brain many times more intelligent than those of the Easterns, resisted successfully. The barbarian recoiled : Greece had saved the West, and with it the future civilization of the world.

I have intended the book mainly for the use of students in the school of Litter ae Hujnaniores at Oxford, whose work necessitates a competent general knowledge of the early history of the west-oriental world, without which the history of Greece cannot be understood fully. Greece was never, as the older historians seemed to think, a land by itself, fully Western in spirit, supremely civilized in a world of foolish Scythians and gibbering black men. Originally she seems to have been as much or as little oriental as originally was Egypt, with whose culture hers may have had, at the beginning, direct affinity. Later she was westernized, but in the fifth century she was not more distinct from the more oriental nations of the Near East than she is now. She called them " barbarian " : that only meant that they did not talk Greek. Greece respected Persia while she fought her, Aeschylos knew better than to make Darius a savage. In fact, the Greeks hardly realized as yet how much more intelligent they were than the other nations. Herodotus has no feeling of great superiority to his Median and P2gyptian friends. And when he set himself to write the history of the great struggle which the preceding generation had seen, it was in no spirit of contempt and aloofness that he gathered his information as to the early history of the peoples of the Near East who had marched against Greece under the Persian banner. He did not separate Greece absolutely from the rest of mankind, though no doubt he felt that she was better than the rest.

I hope, therefore, that this book may serve as a very general "companion" to Herodotus for university students. But at the same time I have endeavoured to make it no less useful to the general reader whose interest is keen on the history of these

X THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE NEAR EAST

ancient civilizations, the relics of which have been and are being discovered day by day by the archaeologists. In the case of Egypt and prehistoric Greece, new material of the utmost importance may turn up at any moment. I have tried to make the book as up-to-date as possible, and in order to do so, during the work of writing it, which has occupied several years, several chapters have been re-cast, even wholly re-written, as the work of discovery necessitated. Owing to the indulgence of the publishers I have had unlimited time in which to complete the work, and I hope that the present moment, when there seems to be a lull in the work of discovery, may be a favourable one for its publication, and that I shall not have to wish that I had delayed a little longer in order to register this or that new fact of importance. I have recounted the facts of the history so far as they are known without, I hope, undue generalization or theorizing, except, of course, in the case of prehistoric Greece, where the whole is theory, based however upon the evidence of material things. For an acute generalization of the history of the early peoples of the world I may refer the reader to Prof. J. L. Myres'S little book, The Dawn of History, published last year, and for a suggestive study on certain natural causes which have influenced the history of the East to Mr. ELLSWORTH Huntington's most interesting Pulse of Asia.

In dealing with the early history of "classical" Greece I have simply endeavoured to present an impression or sketch of the development of Greek culture and its relations with the Eastern nations. I have not considered it necessary or desirable to treat the history in any detail. So much more is known of it than of the early history of the other lands concerned that to do so would be to make the latter part of the book (and the Greek section especially) totally disproportionate in size. This part too is written rather from the Persian- Egyptian than from the Greek standpoint. And Greece when she became Hellenic ceased to belong wholly to the Near East. It is only her " foreign relations," her connexions with the East, that interest us now. Her internal affairs we leave to the historians of Greece. They call for our attention only in so

PREFACE xi

far as they bear directly upon the general progress of Hellenic culture, especially towards the east and south, or affect directly the approach of the conflict with Persia.

I have myself specially translated for this book all the Egyptian inscriptions from which I quote at length, with the exception of that containing the hymn of King Akhenaten to the sun-disk (p. 306), which is quoted, with his very kind permission, from Prof. Breasted's translation in his History of Egypt.

I have tried not to weary the reader by too rigid an insistence on the use of diacritical marks on my transliterations of Egyptian and Semitic names, giving the fully-marked forms usually only on the first appearance of a name in the book, and dispensing with them afterwards unless it would seem better to retain them in order to mark the pronunciation.

I have to thank various friends who have assisted me in the reading of portions of my proofs. To them I owe many corrections and suggestions. Chapters I., V., IX. and X., in which Babylonian and Assyrian matters are chiefly dealt with, have been read by my colleague Mr. L. W. King, author of The History of Sumer and Akkad. Chapters IX. and X. have also been read by the Rev. C. F. BURNEY, D.D., of St. John's College, Oxford, to whom I am specially indebted for my preservation from the many pitfalls that beset the path of a general historian in dealing with early Jewish history. My friend Prof. M. A. Canney, of Manchester University, has also read Chapter IX., and has made several very useful suggestions. Chapter II. has been read by Mr. E. J. FORSDYKE, of the Greek and Roman Department of the British Museum ; and Mr. G. F, HiLL, the Keeper of Coins and Medals, and Mr. F. J. MARSHALL, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, have most kindly read Chapters XI. and XII., with results valuable both to myself and to the reader. Only in those chapters of the book which are written more or less from the Egyptian point of view, namely. Chapters III., IV., VI., VII. and VIII., have I not submitted my work to the judgment and criticism of another. But in those chapters which any friends have read I alone am responsible for the xii THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE NEAR EAST

opinions ultimately expressed. Dr. BuRNEY, for instance, must not be taken to agree with everything I have said in Chapter IX. ; as, for example, with my revival, for which I only am responsible, of Josephus's idea that the Biblical account of the Exodus is possibly a reminiscence of the Expulsion of the Hyksos. I have recorded divergences of view when necessary ; and have also, when I am indebted to one of my friends for a new view, indicated the fact in a footnote.

I must express my thanks to the DEUTSCHE ORIENT Gesell- SCHAFT of Berlin, to Messrs. DIETRICH Reimer, also of Berlin, and also Mr. EDWARD STANFORD, of London, for permission to base plans on other maps and plans published by them, of which details are given in the List of Maps. For the sketch-map of Knossos and its surroundings I wish to acknowledge my obligation to the plans published in the Annua/ of the British School at Athens, on which the small inset-plan of the palace is based. Finally, as regards photographs, I must thank Prof. Garstang for permission to publish the first picture of his Minoan discovery at Abydos (Plate III. i); Mr. A. H. Smith, the Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum, for permission to reproduce the photograph, Plate XXX. 2; and Dr. Schafer and the Administration of the Royal Museums of Berlin for their gift of the photograph, Plate XIX. I. I have also, thanks to the kindness of Dr.- Reisner, been able to use as frontispiece a painting, by Mr. F. F. Ogilvie, of one of the splendid sculpture groups of the Fourth Dynasty recently found by the Harvard expedition at the Pyramids of Gizeh. The photographs of Plates XXVI. and XXII. were taken respectively by Mr. L. W. King and by Mr. R. C. Ti-IOMPSON, who have kindly lent me their negatives. Those of six of the plates are of my own taking; most of the rest have either been taken for me by Mr. Donald Macbeth or have been selected by me from the stock of Messrs. Mansell & Co.

H. R. HALL

November 191 2

Contents

I. PROLEGOMENA ......

II. THE OLDER CIVILIZATION OF GREECE III. ARCHAIC EGYPT ......

IV. EGYPT UNDER THE OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOMS V. THE EARLY HISTORY OF BABYLONIA

Chapter I

I. Herodotus and Modern Knowledge

SOME thirty years after the defeat of Xerxes, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who had travelled much in the lands of the barbarians as well as in Greece, set himself to write down for the men of his own time and for posterity the events of the great struggle and also to describe, as completely as he could, the long series of events, cause upon cause, effect after effect, which had led up to the final catastrophe.^ And he began from the beginning of ancient story, from the TrOJan War and before that from the rape of lo. For he rightly saw that the Great Event had indeed had its ultimate origin in the furthest recesses of time, when the ancient civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean first evolved themselves out of chaos, and the peoples of the Nile-land, of Western Asia, and of the Aegean first came into contact with each other. So he told first all he knew of the peoples of Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and also Scythia, and of their history, and intended, we know, to tell the story of Assyria also. Everywhere h^ tried to trace back the first contact of his own people with these barbarians, and to identify this or that element of culture which his Greeks, whom he knew to be far younger as a nation than the Orientals, owed

I to the East which they had defeated. And then he gathered all the threads of his various tales together, as Xerxes gathered the peoples themselves together, for the final story of the collision of East and West, and his history marches straight without digression now, to Salamis, Plataeae, and Mykale.

In dealing with the early history of Greece he groped darkly, because, though he had all the varied store of Hellenic legend to his hand, he had no knowledge of what we know now in some degree, the real story of the first development of Greek civilization. We know that Egyptian priests could tell him the history of Cheops and of Rhampsinitos, but that no Greek could tell him that of the strong men who lived before Agamemnon. Nor do we know the true facts of their history as we do that of Cheops or Rhampsinitos, but we may do so one day, when we read the Minoan writing as we can that of ancient Egypt. Till then, we also must grope, but not so darkly as Herodotus, for modern archaeological discovery has told us the development of the heroic culture of Greece, which we can now trace back to its origins, contemporary with those of Egypt itself. So much further beyond the Trojan War and the Phoenician rape of lo can the modern Xoyioi trace the causes of the quarrel of East and West.^ But until eighty years ago we were as ignorant as Herodotus, and he, with the Biblical history of the Jews beside him, was our sole good authority for the ancient history of the Near East: the Sacred Record and the "profane" hroptTjg 'Tfpvrocvtg told us all that mattered of what we knew.

2. The Increased Modern Knowledge of Ancient History

But now our knowledge of the early history of mankind is increasing apace. Nowhere is this vast accession of knowledge more noticeable than in the domain of the historian of the ancient peoples of the Nearer East, the portion of the world of which Greece marks the western and Persia the eastern boundary, of which the southern border marches with the lands of the Blacks and the northern is formed by the steppes and deserts of the Scythians and Cimmerians. Now, within the short space of eighty years, the whole history, as distinct from untrustworthy legends of Greek or Jewish origin, of the mighty monarchies of Egypt and of Mesopotamia, of Media and of

Persia, has been recovered from oblivion for us, and, what is still more interesting, we are now just beginning to realize that Greece itself was, long before the classical culture of the Hellenes was ever heard or thought of, the seat of a civilization at least the equal of that of Egypt or Chaldaea and possibly as ancient. Nor is it in Mesopotamia, in the Nile Valley, and in Greece alone that man's knowledge of the earliest history of his race has been so vastly increased during the last eighty years : yet another system of culture, exhibiting in different points resemblances to the three foregoing, while in others perfectly distinct from them, has been shown to have existed at least as early as 1500 B.C. in Central Asia Minor; this extended its sway on the west to Sipylus, on the east to the borders of the Canaanites and to Carchemish on the Euphrates.

Furthermore, on the northern and eastern confines of the Babylonian culture-system, new nations pass within our ken ; Vannic men of Armenia, ruled by powerful kings ; Kassites of the Zagros, whose language seems to contain elements which if really Aryan are probably the oldest-known monuments of Indo-European speech {c. 1600 B.C.); strange-tongued Elamites, also, akin neither to Iranian nor Semite. Nor does it seem to us remarkable that we should read the trilingual proclamations of Darius Hystaspis to his peoples in their original tongues, although an eighteenth-century philosopher would have regarded the prospect of our ever being able to do so as the wildest of chimeras !

And when we read the story of Egypt, of Babylon, and Persia as it really happened, and not through the mouths of Greek or Jewish interpreters, we wonder not so much at the misinterpretations and mistakes of our former guides, but at the fact that they were able to get so close to the truth as they actually did.

In the cases of Egypt and Greece the new knowledge has taken us back to the beginning of things, to the days before history, but this is not the case with Babylonia. Even as far back as we can go, to about the middle of the fourth millennium B.C., we are still within the age of knowable history, and the inscriptions still contain the names of kings and temples which we can decipher. So far are we from reaching any *' prehistoric " period that instead of attaining the beginning of Chaldaean civilization we have apparently dug only as far as the latter end of its early period ; we have reached and passed the beginnings of Semitic rule in Mesopotamia only to find ourselves witnessing in this, the most ancient stratum of the known history of the world, the latter end of the pre-Semitic culture to which the civilization of Babylonia owed its inspiration. These evidences of human barbarism which elsewhere in the world precede the traces of civilization are in Babylonia absent ; hardly a single weapon of flint or chert testifies to the existence there of a Stone Age ; when we first meet with them the Babylonians were already metal-users and already wrote inscriptions which we can read.

In dealing with Mesopotamia, therefore, we never get beyond the domain of true history ; we are from the beginning arranging and sifting written contemporary records in order to collect from them the history of the country. In the case of Egypt, however, we go right back to the period before writing began, and have to reconstitute the story of the earliest ages from the evidence which archaeological discovery has recovered as to the earliest development of civilization. And in Greece and Anatolia we depend largely upon the evidence of archaeology alone, for there, though we possess the inscriptions of Greeks and Anatolians who lived in a high state of civilization contemporaneously with Egyptians and Babylonians whose records we read almost as well as our own, they remain a sealed book to us. We cannot yet read a word of them, and so have to guess at the probable course of the history of their authors, with the help of archaeological discovery and the few hints which the Egyptian and Mesopotamian records afford us.

Yet archaeological discovery alone suffices to give us the main outlines of the history of early Greek civilization, though we know nothing of the actual events which moulded its development, and have never heard the names of the authors of these events. Archaeology alone has revealed to us in Greece the monuments of a civilization, " prehistoric " because we cannot yet read its history, which was as highly developed and as important in the annals of the world as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And from the study of these monuments and remains we have been enabled to arrive at a knowledge of the cultural relations of early Greece which are nothing less than revolutionary. "VVe see that, instead of belonging originally to the central and North-European " Aryan " race, the group of peoples speaking Indo-European languages to which we ourselves belong, and being in its origins radically distinct from the civilization of Egypt and of Asia, the oldest culture of Greece really belongs to the Mediterranean basin, where it originated, and so is from the beginning part of the culture of the other Mediterranean peoples, to which the civilization of Egypt also attaches itself to some extent. We know now that the Mediterranean peoples have always been and are to this day more or less allied to each other racially.^ In reality the brunet Italian and Greek of to-day are racially far more closely related to the Palestinian and the Egyptian than to the Celt, the Slav, or the Teuton, although now they speak, and for three thousand years past they have spoken, languages akin to those of their northern neighbours. These languages were imposed upon them by Aryan conquerors, and the period at which this conquest took place is approximately fixed, in Greece at least, by the dark age which intervened between the " prehistoric " and the classical civilizations of Hellas. The Greek civilization which we have always known is the product of the mingling of the invading northern culture of the Aryan-speakers, with the remains of the ancient " Mediterranean " civilization not distantly related to that of Egypt, which had grown up from its earliest beginnings in the Aegean basin, as that of Egypt had grown up in the Nile Valley. That the Aegean " Mediterraneans " were from the first Aryan-speakers is not in the slightest degree probable.^ We can trace their

^ The conception of a " Mediterranean" race to which the typical brunet peoples of the Mediterranean basin (and outside it as far as Britain) belonged and belong, was first crystallized in logical form by an Italian, Sergi {La Stirpe Mediterranean 1895 ; Englished as The Mediterranean Race, London, 1901). To his views, based on the study of craniology, and (if one may use the phrase) "ethnic chromatology," the philological work of Kretschmer (see below) forms a complement.

■-* It has been argued from the purely philological standpoint by Kretschmer in his brilliant Einleitting in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache (Gottingen, 1896) that a non- Aryan language or group of languages, akin to the non-Aryan Lycian of Asia Minor, was spoken in Greece before Aryan G'reek. And presumably this language was spoken by the civilized predecessors of the Aryan-speaking Greeks, whom we call " Aegeans," " Mycenaeans," or " Minoans." And since the culture of these pre-Greeks is directly descended from that of the Neolithic Aegeans (see p. 31, below), their language was presumably descended from that of the Neolithic Aegeans. This is not certain, of course, but the presumption is justified. And it is at any rate not probable that, if the Neolithic Aegeans did speak a language radically distinct from that of their culture descendants, this language was Aryan ! No one could claim that the Neolithic peoples of the Western Mediterranean probably spoke Aryan culture from its Neolithic beginnings, and can even discern a possibility that these beginnings may have been derived from Neolithic Egypt: nobody has yet supposed that the Mediterranean, far less the Nile Valley, was the original home of the Aryans. Yet that seems the necessary corollary of a supposition that the prehistoric Greeks were Indo-Europeans. And we know that almost to the last there survived on the north Mediterranean shores isolated patches of non-Aryan speech (the Basque still survives) which are naturally to be regarded as the survivors of a general pre-Aryan language-stratum.

Archaeology alone has thus assigned the early culture of Greece rather to the Near East, or at any rate to the Mediterranean, than to Europe, to the non-Aryan races than to the Aryan.

The entry of Greece into the ranks of the ancient civilizations of the Near East as the fellow of Egypt and Babylon is one of the most striking results of modern archaeological discovery.

It cannot be denied that the increase of knowledge thus roughly sketched is very considerable, nor can it be doubted that the names of the first discoverers of the New World of ancient history, Champollion and his peers, are full worthy to rank with those of Columbus, of Galileo, of Newton, or of any other discoverer of new worlds of human science.

3. Archaeology and History

There is no need now to recapitulate the steps by which these discoverers arrived at their knowledge, which is now accepted science.^ The ' languages of ancient Egypt, of

tongues : why then should those of the East have done so ? The thesis that the Bronze Age people of Crete and the islands and probably of the Peloponnese also were non-Aryan-speakers, and that "Greek" first came with the northern invaders at the end of the Bronze Age into Greece, is now generally accepted in England and Italy, but elsewhere many writers still cling, in defiance of the philological and ethnological evidence, to the old-fashioned view that the Greeks were all and from the beginning "Aryans." But one is glad to see that one of the latest Slav historians of Greece, M. Peroutka, fully accepts the new view {Dejiny reckd [History of Greece], i., doba pHdhistoricka ; Prague, 1908).

^ For an account of the beginnings of Egyptology, see BuDGE, The Munimy, pp. 108 ff. ; for the beginnings of cuneiform study, see King, The Assyrian Language (London, 1901), and Booth, The Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions {hon^on, 1902), passim.

Assyria, of Elam, even of pre-Semitic Babylonia, are now sufficiently known to enable us to translate their ancient inscriptions with an accuracy sufficient for all practical purposes, and from these, the ancient records, combined with the critical analysis of such traditions as have been handed down to us by classical authors, we derive our knowledge of the actual events of the ancient history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Although the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Anatolia are not yet translated with certainty, the use by the ancient Anatolians of the cuneiform (Babylonian) script side by side with their own hieroglyphs has enabled us lately to obtain glimpses of their history. Only in the case of prehistoric Greece are we denied first-hand knowledge of events, and are forced to content ourselves with a knowledge of the development of culture, derived solely from archaeological discoveries and comparisons. Greek legends no doubt would tell us much, had we any firm standpoint of known history from which to criticize them. As it is, they can but give us doubtful and uncertain hints of the events which they shadow forth.^ In the case of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia, more especially in the case of Egypt, the archaeologist is the chief auxiliary of the historian, for he makes it possible, by means of his excavation of the actual remains of ancient civilization, to supplement the record of events with the story of the development of culture. In the case of early Greece we have this story, though it is as yet far from complete, without any framework, any skeleton of known events which it would clothe; with the exception of a few facts supplied us by the Egyptian records. In Greece and in Anatolia the archaeologists go on discovering, besides the actual remains of the culture and art of the "Minoans" and " Hittites," tablet after tablet, inscription after inscription, which we cannot read. But in Egypt and in Mesopotamia they are every day bringing to light new documents which we can read, and from which we are every day learning new facts of history. If most of the larger monuments of Egypt have always been above ground, and needed but the skill of the copyist and the knowledge of the decipherer to make them yield up their secrets, this was by no means the case with Assyria, where the famous excava-