HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
No. 92
_Editors_:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
THE ANCIENT EAST
BY
D. G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.B.A., F.S.A.
KEEPER OF THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD;
AUTHOR OF "IONIA AND THE EAST,"
"THE NEARER EAST," ETC.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
I THE EAST IN 1000 B.C.
II THE EAST IN 800 B.C.
III THE EAST IN 600 B.C.
IV THE EAST IN 400 B.C.
V THE VICTORY OF THE WEST
VI EPILOGUE
NOTE ON BOOKS
LIST OF MAPS
1. THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND ITS MAIN DIVISIONS
2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMENHETEP III
3. HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY 13TH CENTURY B.C.
4. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY YEARS OF ASHURBANIPAL
5. PERSIAN EMPIRE (WEST) AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. TEMP. DARIUS HYSTASPIS
6. HELLENISM IN ASIA. ABOUT 150 B.C.
THE ANCIENT EAST
INTRODUCTORY
The title of this book needs a word of explanation, since each of its
terms can legitimately be used to denote more than one conception both
of time and place. "The East" is understood widely and vaguely nowadays
to include all the continent and islands of Asia, some part of
Africa - the northern part where society and conditions of life are most
like the Asiatic - and some regions also of South-Eastern and Eastern
Europe. Therefore it may appear arbitrary to restrict it in the present
book to Western Asia. But the qualifying term in my title must be
invoked in justification. It is the East not of to-day but of antiquity
with which I have to deal, and, therefore, I plead that it is not
unreasonable to understand by "The East" what in antiquity European
historians understood by that term. To Herodotus and his contemporary
Greeks Egypt, Arabia and India were the South; Thrace and Scythia were
the North; and Hither Asia was the East: for they conceived nothing
beyond except the fabled stream of Ocean. It can be pleaded also that my
restriction, while not in itself arbitrary, does, in fact, obviate an
otherwise inevitable obligation to fix arbitrary bounds to the East. For
the term, as used in modern times, implies a geographical area
characterized by society of a certain general type, and according to his
opinion of this type, each person, who thinks or writes of the East,
expands or contracts its geographical area.
It is more difficult to justify the restriction which will be imposed in
the following chapters on the word Ancient. This term is used even more
vaguely and variously than the other. If generally it connotes the
converse of "Modern," in some connections and particularly in the study
of history the Modern is not usually understood to begin where the
Ancient ended but to stand only for the comparatively Recent. For
example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark
Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of
retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least)
we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish
commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the
Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which
human memory, as communicated by surviving literature, ran not, or, at
least, not consciously, consistently and credibly. At the same time it
is not implied that we can have no knowledge at all of the Prehistoric
province. It may even be better known to us than parts of the Historic,
through sure deduction from archaeological evidence. But what we learn
from archaeological records is annalistic not historic, since such
records have not passed through the transforming crucible of a human
intelligence which reasons on events as effects of causes. The boundary
between Prehistoric and Historic, however, depends too much on the
subjectivity of individual historians and is too apt to vary with the
progress of research to be a fixed moment. Nor can it be the same for
all civilizations. As regards Egypt, for example, we have a body of
literary tradition which can reasonably be called Historic, relating to
a time much earlier than is reached by respectable literary tradition of
Elam and Babylonia, though their civilizations were probably older than
the Egyptian.
For the Ancient East as here understood, we possess two bodies of
historic literary tradition and two only, the Greek and the Hebrew; and
as it happens, both (though each is independent of the other) lose
consistency and credibility when they deal with history before 1000 B.C.
Moreover, Prof. Myres has covered the prehistoric period in the East in
his brilliant _Dawn of History_. Therefore, on all accounts, in treating
of the historic period, I am absolved from looking back more than a
thousand years before our era.
It is not so obvious where I may stop. The overthrow of Persia by
Alexander, consummating a long stage in a secular contest, which it is
my main business to describe, marks an epoch more sharply than any other
single event in the history of the Ancient East. But there are grave
objections to breaking off abruptly at that date. The reader can hardly
close a book which ends then, with any other impression than that since
the Greek has put the East under his feet, the history of the centuries,
which have still to elapse before Rome shall take over Asia, will simply
be Greek history writ large - the history of a Greater Greece which has
expanded over the ancient East and caused it to lose its distinction
from the ancient West. Yet this impression does not by any means
coincide with historical truth. The Macedonian conquest of Hither Asia
was a victory won by men of Greek civilization, but only to a very
partial extent a victory of that civilization. The West did not
assimilate the East except in very small measure then, and has not
assimilated it in any very large measure to this day. For certain
reasons, among which some geographical facts - the large proportion of
steppe-desert and of the human type which such country breeds - are
perhaps the most powerful, the East is obstinately unreceptive of
western influences, and more than once it has taken its captors captive.
Therefore, while, for the sake of convenience and to avoid entanglement
in the very ill-known maze of what is called "Hellenistic" history, I
shall not attempt to follow the consecutive course of events after 330
B.C., I propose to add an epilogue which may prepare readers for what
was destined to come out of Western Asia after the Christian era, and
enable them to understand in particular the religious conquest of the
West by the East. This has been a more momentous fact in the history of
the world than any political conquest of the East by the West.
* * * * *
In the further hope of enabling readers to retain a clear idea of the
evolution of the history, I have adopted the plan of looking out over
the area which is here called the East, at certain intervals, rather
than the alternative and more usual plan of considering events
consecutively in each several part of that area. Thus, without
repetition and overlapping, one may expect to convey a sense of the
history of the whole East as the sum of the histories of particular
parts. The occasions on which the surveys will be taken are purely
arbitrary chronological points two centuries apart. The years 1000, 800,
600, 400 B.C. are not, any of them, distinguished by known events of the
kind that is called epoch-making; nor have round numbers been chosen for
any peculiar historic significance. They might just as well have been
1001, 801 and so forth, or any other dates divided by equal intervals.
Least of all is any mysterious virtue to be attached to the millenary
date with which I begin. But it is a convenient starting-point, not only
for the reason already stated, that Greek literary memory - the only
literary memory of antiquity worth anything for early history - goes back
to about that date; but also because the year 1000 B.C. falls within a
period of disturbance during which certain racial elements and groups,
destined to exert predominant influence on subsequent history, were
settling down into their historic homes.
A westward and southward movement of peoples, caused by some obscure
pressure from the north-west and north-east, which had been disturbing
eastern and central Asia Minor for more than a century and apparently
had brought to an end the supremacy of the Cappadocian Hatti, was
quieting down, leaving the western peninsula broken up into small
principalities. Indirectly the same movement had brought about a like
result in northern Syria. A still more important movement of Iranian
peoples from the farther East had ended in the coalescence of two
considerable social groups, each containing the germs of higher
development, on the north-eastern and eastern fringes of the old
Mesopotamian sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian.
A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts,
marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western
fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all
parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from
Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there
is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic
East much behind 1000 B.C. - that nothing like a sure chronological basis
of it exists before that date. Precision in the dating of events in West
Asia begins near the end of the tenth century with the Assyrian Eponym
lists, that is, lists of annual chief officials; while for Babylonia
there is no certain chronology till nearly two hundred years later. In
Hebrew history sure chronological ground is not reached till the
Assyrian records themselves begin to touch upon it during the reign of
Ahab over Israel. For all the other social groups and states of Western
Asia we have to depend on more or less loose and inferential
synchronisms with Assyrian, Babylonian or Hebrew chronology, except for
some rare events whose dates may be inferred from the alien histories of
Egypt and Greece.
* * * * *
The area, whose social state we shall survey in 1000 B.C. and re-survey
at intervals, contains Western Asia bounded eastwards by an imaginary
line drawn from the head of the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. This
line, however, is not to be drawn rigidly straight, but rather should
describe a shallow outward curve, so as to include in the Ancient East
all Asia situated on this side of the salt deserts of central Persia.
This area is marked off by seas on three sides and by desert on the
fourth side. Internally it is distinguished into some six divisions
either by unusually strong geographical boundaries or by large
differences of geographical character. These divisions are as follows -
(1) A western peninsular projection, bounded by seas on three sides and
divided from the rest of the continent by high and very broad mountain
masses, which has been named, not inappropriately, _Asia Minor_, since
it displays, in many respects, an epitome of the general characteristics
of the continent. (2) A tangled mountainous region filling almost all
the rest of the northern part of the area and sharply distinct in
character not only from the plateau land of Asia Minor to the west but
also from the great plain lands of steppe character lying to the south,
north and east. This has perhaps never had a single name, though the
bulk of it has been included in "Urartu" (Ararat), "Armenia" or
"Kurdistan" at various epochs; but for convenience we shall call it
_Armenia_. (3) A narrow belt running south from both the former
divisions and distinguished from them by much lower general elevation.
Bounded on the west by the sea and on the south and east by broad tracts
of desert, it has, since Greek times at least, been generally known as
_Syria_. (4) A great southern peninsula largely desert, lying high and
fringed by sands on the land side, which has been called, ever since
antiquity, _Arabia_. (5) A broad tract stretching into the continent
between Armenia and Arabia and containing the middle and lower basins of
the twin rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, which, rising in Armenia, drain
the greater part of the whole area. It is of diversified surface,
ranging from sheer desert in the west and centre, to great fertility in
its eastern parts; but, until it begins to rise northward towards the
frontier of "Armenia" and eastward towards that of the sixth division,
about to be described, it maintains a generally low elevation. No common
name has ever included all its parts, both the interfluvial region and
the districts beyond Tigris; but since the term _Mesopotamia_, though
obviously incorrect, is generally understood nowadays to designate it,
this name may be used for want of a better. (6) A high plateau, walled
off from Mesopotamia and Armenia by high mountain chains, and extending
back to the desert limits of the Ancient East. To this region, although
it comprises only the western part of what should be understood by
_Iran_, this name may be appropriated "without prejudice."
[Plate 1: THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND ITS MAIN DIVISIONS]
CHAPTER I
THE EAST IN 1000 B.C.
In 1000 B.C. West Asia was a mosaic of small states and contained, so
far as we know, no imperial power holding wide dominion over aliens.
Seldom in its history could it so be described. Since it became
predominantly Semitic, over a thousand years before our survey, it had
fallen under simultaneous or successive dominations, exercised from at
least three regions within itself and from one without.
SECTION 1. BABYLONIAN EMPIRE
The earliest of these centres of power to develop foreign empire was
also that destined, after many vicissitudes, to hold it latest, because
it was the best endowed by nature to repair the waste which empire
entails. This was the region which would be known later as Babylonia
from the name of the city which in historic times dominated it, but, as
we now know, was neither an early seat of power nor the parent of its
distinctive local civilization. This honour, if due to any one city,
should be credited to Ur, whose also was the first and the only truly
"Babylonian" empire. The primacy of Babylonia had not been the work of
its aboriginal Sumerian population, the authors of what was highest in
the local culture, but of Semitic intruders from a comparatively
barbarous region; nor again, had it been the work of the earliest of
these intruders (if we follow those who now deny that the dominion of
Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-sin ever extended beyond the lower
basins of the Twin Rivers), but of peoples who entered with a second
series of Semitic waves. These surged out of Arabia, eternal motherland
of vigorous migrants, in the middle centuries of the third millennium
B.C. While this migration swamped South Syria with "Canaanites," it
ultimately gave to Egypt the Hyksos or "Shepherd Kings," to Assyria its
permanent Semitic population, and to Sumer and Akkad what later
chroniclers called the First Babylonian Dynasty. Since, however, those
Semitic interlopers had no civilization of their own comparable with
either the contemporary Egyptian or the Sumerian (long ago adopted by
earlier Semitic immigrants), they inevitably and quickly assimilated
both these civilizations as they settled down.
At the same time they did not lose, at least not in Mesopotamia, which
was already half Semitized, certain Bedawi ideas and instincts, which
would profoundly affect their later history. Of these the most important
historically was a religious idea which, for want of a better term, may
be called Super-Monotheism. Often found rooted in wandering peoples and
apt long to survive their nomadic phase, it consists in a belief that,
however many tribal and local gods there may be, one paramount deity
exists who is not only singular and indivisible but dwells in one spot,
alone on earth. His dwelling may be changed by a movement of his people
_en masse_, but by nothing less; and he can have no real rival in
supreme power. The fact that the paramount Father-God of the Semites
came through that migration _en masse_ to take up his residence in
Babylon and in no other city of the wide lands newly occupied, caused
this city to retain for many centuries, despite social and political
changes, a predominant position not unlike that to be held by Holy Rome
from the Dark Ages to modern times.
Secondly the Arabs brought with them their immemorial instinct of
restlessness. This habit also is apt to persist in a settled society,
finding satisfaction in annual recourse to tent or hut life and in
annual predatory excursions. The custom of the razzia or summer raid,
which is still obligatory in Arabia on all men of vigour and spirit, was
held in equal honour by the ancient Semitic world. Undertaken as a
matter of course, whether on provocation or not, it was the origin and
constant spring of those annual marches to the frontiers, of which royal
Assyrian monuments vaingloriously tell us, to the exclusion of almost
all other information. Chederlaomer, Amraphel and the other three kings
were fulfilling their annual obligation in the Jordan valley when Hebrew
tradition believed that they met with Abraham; and if, as seems agreed,
Amraphel was Hammurabi himself, that tradition proves the custom of the
razzia well established under the First Babylonian Dynasty.
Moreover, the fact that these annual campaigns of Babylonian and
Assyrian kings were simply Bedawi razzias highly organized and on a
great scale should be borne in mind when we speak of Semitic "empires,"
lest we think too territorially. No permanent organization of
territorial dominion in foreign parts was established by Semitic rulers
till late in Assyrian history. The earlier Semitic overlords, that is,
all who preceded Ashurnatsirpal of Assyria, went a-raiding to plunder,
assault, destroy, or receive submissive payments, and their ends
achieved, returned, without imposing permanent garrisons of their own
followers, permanent viceroys, or even a permanent tributary burden, to
hinder the stricken foe from returning to his own way till his turn
should come to be raided again. The imperial blackmailer had possibly
left a record of his presence and prowess on alien rocks, to be defaced
at peril when his back was turned; but for the rest only a sinister
memory. Early Babylonian and Early Assyrian "empire," therefore, meant,
territorially, no more than a geographical area throughout which an
emperor could, and did, raid without encountering effective opposition.
Nevertheless, such constant raiding on a great scale was bound to
produce some of the fruits of empire, and by its fruits, not its
records, we know most surely how far Babylonian Empire had made itself
felt. The best witnesses to its far-reaching influence are first, the
Babylonian element in the Hittite art of distant Asia Minor, which shows
from the very first (so far as we know it, i.e. from at least 1500 B.C.)
that native artists were hardly able to realize any native ideas without
help from Semitic models; and secondly, the use of Babylonian writing
and language and even Babylonian books by the ruling classes in Asia
Minor and Syria at a little later time. That governors of Syrian cities
should have written their official communications to Pharaohs of the
Eighteenth Dynasty in Babylonian cuneiform (as the archives found at
Amarna in Upper Egypt twenty years ago show us they did) had already
afforded such conclusive proof of early and long maintained Babylonian
influence, that the more recent discovery that Hittite lords of
Cappadocia used the same script and language for diplomatic purposes has
hardly surprised us.
It has been said already that Babylonia was a region so rich and
otherwise fortunate that empire both came to it earlier and stayed later
than in the other West Asian lands which ever enjoyed it at all. When we
come to take our survey of Western Asia in 400 B.C. we shall see an
emperor still ruling it from a throne set in the lower Tigris basin,
though not actually in Babylon. But for certain reasons Babylonian
empire never endured for any long period continuously. The aboriginal
Akkadian and Sumerian inhabitants were settled, cultivated and home
keeping folk, while the establishment of Babylonian empire had been the
work of more vigorous intruders. These, however, had to fear not only
the imperfect sympathy of their own aboriginal subjects, who again and
again gathered their sullen forces in the "Sea Land" at the head of the
Persian Gulf and attacked the dominant Semites in the rear, but also
incursions of fresh strangers; for Babylonia is singularly open on all
sides. Accordingly, revolts of the "Sea Land" folk, inrushing hordes
from Arabia, descents of mountain warriors from the border hills of Elam
on the south-eastern edge of the twin river basin, pressure from the
peoples of more invigorating lands on the higher Euphrates and
Tigris - one, or more than one such danger ever waited on imperial
Babylon and brought her low again and again. A great descent of Hatti
raiders from the north about 1800 B.C. seems to have ended the imperial
dominion of the First Dynasty. On their retirement Babylonia, falling
into weak native hands, was a prey to a succession of inroads from the
Kassite mountains beyond Elam, from Elam itself, from the growing
Semitic power of Asshur, Babylon's former vassal, from the Hittite
Empire founded in Cappadocia about 1500 B.C., from the fresh wave of
Arabian overflow which is distinguished as the Aramaean, and from yet
another following it, which is usually called Chaldaean; and it was not
till almost the close of the twelfth century that one of these intruding
elements attained sufficient independence and security of tenure to
begin to exalt Babylonia again into a mistress of foreign empire. At
that date the first Nebuchadnezzar, a part of whose own annals has been
recovered, seems to have established overlordship in some part of
Mediterranean Asia - _Martu_, the West Land; but this empire perished
again with its author. By 1000 B.C. Babylon was once more a small state
divided against itself and threatened by rivals in the east and the
north.
SECTION 2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT
During the long interval since the fall of the First Babylonian Dynasty,
however, Western Asia had not been left masterless. Three other imperial
powers had waxed and waned in her borders, of which one was destined to
a second expansion later on. The earliest of these to appear on the
scene established an imperial dominion of a kind which we shall not
observe again till Asia falls to the Greeks; for it was established in
Asia by a non-Asiatic power. In the earlier years of the fifteenth
century a Pharaoh of the strong Eighteenth Dynasty, Thothmes III, having
overrun almost all Syria up to Carchemish on the Euphrates, established
in the southern part of that country an imperial organization which
converted his conquests for a time into provincial dependencies of
Egypt. Of the fact we have full evidence in the archives of Thothmes'
dynastic successors, found by Flinders Petrie at Amarna; for they
include many reports from officials and client princes in Palestine and
Phoenicia.
If, however, the word empire is to be applied (as in fact we have
applied it in respect of early Babylonia) to a sphere of habitual
raiding, where the exclusive right of one power to plunder is
acknowledged implicitly or explicitly by the raided and by surrounding
peoples, this "Empire" of Egypt must both be set back nearly a hundred
years before Thothmes III and also be credited with wider limits than
those of south Syria. Invasions of Semitic Syria right up to the
Euphrates were first conducted by Pharaohs in the early part of the
sixteenth century as a sequel to the collapse of the power of the
Semitic "Hyksos" in Egypt. They were wars partly of revenge, partly of
natural Egyptian expansion into a neighbouring fertile territory, which
at last lay open, and was claimed by no other imperial power, while the
weak Kassites ruled Babylon, and the independence of Assyria was in
embryo. But the earlier Egyptian armies seem to have gone forth to Syria
simply to ravage and levy blackmail. They avoided all fenced places, and
returned to the Nile leaving no one to hold the ravaged territory. No
Pharaoh before the successor of Queen Hatshepsut made Palestine and
Phoenicia his own. It was Thothmes III who first reduced such
strongholds as Megiddo, and occupied the Syrian towns up to Arvad on the
shore and almost to Kadesh inland - he who by means of a few forts,
garrisoned perhaps by Egyptian or Nubian troops and certainly in some
instances by mercenaries drawn from Mediterranean islands and coasts, so
kept the fear of himself in the minds of native chiefs that they paid
regular tribute to his collectors and enforced the peace of Egypt on all
and sundry Hebrews and Amorites who might try to raid from east or
north.
In upper Syria, however, he and his successors appear to have attempted
little more than Thothmes I had done, that is to say, they made
periodical armed progresses through the fertile parts, here and there
taking a town, but for the most part taking only blackmail. Some strong
places, such as Kadesh, it is probable they never entered at all. Their
raids, however, were frequent and effective enough for all Syria to come
to be regarded by surrounding kings and kinglets as an Egyptian sphere
of influence within which it was best to acknowledge Pharaoh's rights
and to placate him by timely presents. So thought and acted the kings of
Mitanni across Euphrates, the kings of Hatti beyond Taurus, and the
distant Iranians of the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia.
Until the latter years of Thothmes' third successor, Amenhetep III, who
ruled in the end of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the
fourteenth, the Egyptian peace was observed and Pharaoh's claim to Syria
was respected. Moreover, an interesting experiment appears to have been
made to tighten Egypt's hold on her foreign province. Young Syrian
princes were brought for education to the Nile, in the hope that when
sent back to their homes they would be loyal viceroys of Pharaoh: but
the experiment seems to have produced no better ultimate effect than
similar experiments tried subsequently by imperial nations from the
Romans to ourselves.
[Plate 2: ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMENHETEP III]
Beyond this conception of imperial organization the Egyptians never
advanced. Neither effective military occupation nor effective
administration of Syria by an Egyptian military or civil staff was so
much as thought of. Traces of the cultural influence of Egypt on the
Syrian civilization of the time (so far as excavation has revealed its
remains) are few and far between; and we must conclude that the number
of genuine Egyptians who resided in, or even passed through, the Asiatic
province was very small. Unadventurous by nature, and disinclined to
embark on foreign trade, the Nilots were content to leave Syria in
vicarious hands, so they derived some profit from it. It needed,
therefore, only the appearance of some vigorous and numerous tribe in
the province itself, or of some covetous power on its borders, to end
such an empire. Both had appeared before Amenhetep's death - the Amorites
in mid Syria, and a newly consolidated Hatti power on the confines of
the north. The inevitable crisis was met with no new measures by his
son, the famous Akhenaten, and before the middle of the fourteenth
century the foreign empire of Egypt had crumbled to nothing but a sphere
of influence in southernmost Palestine, having lasted, for better or
worse, something less than two hundred years. It was revived, indeed, by
the kings of the Dynasty succeeding, but had even less chance of
duration than of old. Rameses II, in dividing it to his own great
disadvantage with the Hatti king by a Treaty whose provisions are known
to us from surviving documents of both parties, confessed Egyptian
impotence to make good any contested claim; and by the end of the
thirteenth century the hand of Pharaoh was withdrawn from Asia, even
from that ancient appanage of Egypt, the peninsula of Sinai. Some
subsequent Egyptian kings would make raids into Syria, but none was
able, or very desirous, to establish there a permanent Empire.
SECTION 3. EMPIRE OF THE HATTI
[Plate 3: HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY 13TH CENTURY B.C.]
The empire which pressed back the Egyptians is the last but one which we
have to consider before 1000 B.C. It has long been known that the
Hittites, variously called _Kheta_ by Egyptians and _Heth_ or _Hatti_ by
Semites and by themselves, developed into a power in westernmost Asia at
least as early as the fifteenth century; but it was not until their
cuneiform archives were discovered in 1907 at Boghazkeui in northern
Cappadocia that the imperial nature of their power, the centre from
which it was exerted, and the succession of the rulers who wielded it
became clear. It will be remembered that a great Hatti raid broke the
imperial sway of the First Babylonian Dynasty about 1800 B.C. Whence
those raiders came we have still to learn. But, since a Hatti people,
well enough organized to invade, conquer and impose its garrisons, and
(much more significant) its own peculiar civilization, on distant
territories, was seated at Boghazkeui (it is best to use this modern
name till better assured of an ancient one) in the fifteenth century, we
may reasonably believe Eastern Asia Minor to have been the homeland of
the Hatti three centuries before. As an imperial power they enter
history with a king whom his own archives name Subbiluliuma (but
Egyptian records, Sapararu), and they vanish something less than two
centuries later. The northern half of Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and
probably almost all Asia Minor were conquered by the Hatti before 1350
B.C. and rendered tributary; Egypt was forced out of Asia; the Semitic
settlements on the twin rivers and the tribes in the desert were
constrained to deference or defence. A century and a half later the
Hatti had returned into a darkness even deeper than that from which they
emerged. The last king of Boghazkeui, of whose archives any part has
come to light, is one Arnaunta, reigning in the end of the thirteenth
century. He may well have had successors whose documents may yet be
found; but on the other hand, we know from Assyrian annals, dated only a
little later, that a people, possibly kin to the Hatti and certainly
civilized by them, but called by another name, Mushkaya or Mushki (we
shall say more of them presently), overran most, if not all, the Hatti
realm by the middle of the twelfth century. And since, moreover, the
excavated ruins at both Boghazkeui, the capital of the Hatti, and
Carchemish, their chief southern dependency, show unmistakable signs of
destruction and of a subsequent general reconstruction, which on
archaeological grounds must be dated not much later than Arnaunta's
time, it seems probable that the history of Hatti empire closed with
that king. What happened subsequently to surviving detachments of this
once imperial people and to other communities so near akin by blood or
civilization, that the Assyrians, when speaking generally of western
foes or subjects, long continued to call them Hatti, we shall consider
presently.
SECTION 4. EARLY ASSYRIAN EMPIRE
Remains Assyria, which before 1000 B.C. had twice conquered an empire of
the same kind as that credited to the First Babylonian Dynasty and twice
recoiled. The early Assyrian expansions are, historically, the most
noteworthy of the early West Asian Empires because, unlike the rest,
they were preludes to an ultimate territorial overlordship which would
come nearer to anticipating Macedonian and Roman imperial systems than
any others precedent. Assyria, rather than Babylon or Egypt, heads the
list of aspirants to the Mastership of the World.
There will be so much to say of the third and subsequent expansion of
Assyria, that her earlier empires may be passed over briefly. The middle
Tigris basin seems to have received a large influx of Semites of the
Canaanitic wave at least as early as Babylonia, and thanks to various
causes - to the absence of a prior local civilization as advanced as the
Sumerian, to greater distance from such enterprising fomenters of
disturbance as Elam and Arabia, and to a more invigorating
climate - these Semites settled down more quickly and thoroughly into an
agricultural society than the Babylonians and developed it in greater
purity. Their earliest social centre was Asshur in the southern part of
their territory. There, in proximity to Babylonia, they fell inevitably
under the domination of the latter; but after the fall of the First
Dynasty of Babylon and the subsequent decline of southern Semitic
vigour, a tendency manifested itself among the northern Semites to
develop their nationality about more central points. Calah, higher up
the river, replaced Asshur in the thirteenth century B.C., only to be
replaced in turn by Nineveh, a little further still upstream; and
ultimately Assyria, though it had taken its name from the southern city,
came to be consolidated round a north Mesopotamian capital into a power
able to impose vassalage on Babylon and to send imperial raiders to the
Mediterranean, and to the Great Lakes of Armenia. The first of her kings
to attain this sort of imperial position was Shalmaneser I, who early in
the thirteenth century B.C. appears to have crushed the last strength of
the north Mesopotamian powers of Mitanni and Khani and laid the way open
to the west lands. The Hatti power, however, tried hard to close the
passages and it was not until its catastrophe and the retirement of
those who brought it about - the Mushki and their allies - that about 1100
Tiglath Pileser I could lead his Assyrian raiders into Syria, and even,
perhaps, a short distance across Taurus. Why his empire died with him we
do not know precisely. A new invasion of Arabian Semites, the Aramaeans,
whom he attacked at Mt. Bishri (Tell Basher), may have been the cause.
But, in any case, the fact is certain. The sons of the great king, who
had reached Phoenician Aradus and there embarked vaingloriously on
shipboard to claim mastery of the Western Sea, were reduced to little
better than vassals of their father's former vassal, Babylon; and up to
the close of the eleventh century Assyria had not revived.
SECTION 5. NEW FORCES IN 1000 B.C.
Thus in 1000 B.C., we look round the East, and, so far as our vision can
penetrate the clouds, see no one dominant power. Territories which
formerly were overridden by the greater states, Babylonia, Egypt,
Cappadocia and Assyria, seem to be not only self-governing but free from
interference, although the vanished empires and a recent great movement
of peoples have left them with altered political boundaries and
sometimes with new dynasties. None of the political units has a much
larger area than another, and it would not have been easy at the moment
to prophesy which, or if any one, would grow at the expense of the rest.
The great movement of peoples, to which allusion has just been made, had
been disturbing West Asia for two centuries. On the east, where the well
organized and well armed societies of Babylonia and Assyria offered a
serious obstacle to nomadic immigrants, the inflow had been pent back
beyond frontier mountains. But in the west the tide seems to have flowed
too strongly to be resisted by such force as the Hatti empire of
Cappadocia could oppose, and to have swept through Asia Minor even to
Syria and Mesopotamia. Records of Rameses III tell how a great host of
federated peoples appeared on the Asian frontier of Egypt very early in
the twelfth century. Among them marched men of the "Kheta" or Hatti, but
not as leaders. These strong foes and allies of Seti I and Rameses II,
not a century before, had now fallen from their imperial estate to
follow in the wake of newcomers, who had lately humbled them in their
Cappadocian home. The geographical order in which the scribes of Rameses
enumerated their conquests shows clearly the direction from which the
federals had come and the path they followed. In succession they had
devastated Hatti (i.e. Cappadocia), Kedi (i.e. Cilicia), Carchemish and
central Syria. Their victorious progress began, therefore, in northern
Asia Minor, and followed the great roads through the Cilician passes to
end at last on the very frontiers of Egypt. The list of these newcomers
has long interested historians; for outlandish as their names were to
Egyptians, they seem to our eyes not unfamiliar, and are possibly
travesties of some which are writ large on pages of later history. Such
are the Pulesti or Philistines, and a group hailing apparently from Asia
Minor and the Isles, Tjakaray, Shakalsha, Danaau and Washasha,
successors of Pisidian and other Anatolian allies of the Hittites in the
time of Rameses II, and of the Lycian, Achaean and Sardinian pirates
whom Egypt used sometimes to beat from her borders, sometimes to enlist
in her service. Some of these peoples, from whatever quarters they had
come, settled presently into new homes as the tide receded. The Pulesti,
if they were indeed the historic Philistines, stranded and stayed on the
confines of Egypt, retaining certain memories of an earlier state, which
had been theirs in some Minoan land. Since the Tjakaray and the Washasha
seem to have sprung from lands now reckoned in Europe, we may count this
occasion the first in history on which the west broke in force into the
east.
Turn to the annals of Assyria and you will learn, from records of
Tiglath Pileser I, that this northern wave was followed up in the same
century by a second, which bore on its crest another bold horde from
Asia Minor. Its name, Mushki, we now hear for the first time, but shall
hear again in time to come. A remnant of this race would survive far
into historic times as the Moschi of Greek geographers, an obscure
people on the borders of Cappadocia and Armenia. But who precisely the
first Mushki were, whence they had originally come, and whither they
went when pushed back out of Mesopotamia, are questions still debated.
Two significant facts are known about their subsequent history; first,
that two centuries later than our date they, or some part of them, were
settled in Cappadocia, apparently rather in the centre and north of that
country than in the south: second, that at that same epoch and later
they had kings of the name Mita, which is thought to be identical with
the name Midas, known to early Greek historians as borne by kings of
Phrygia.
Because of this last fact, the Mushki have been put down as
proto-Phrygians, risen to power after the fall of the Cappadocian Hatti.
This contention will be considered hereafter, when we reach the date of
the first known contact between Assyria and any people settled in
western Asia Minor. But meanwhile, let it be borne in mind that their
royal name Mita does not necessarily imply a connection between the