Talk:Bronze Age (for deletion, kept for Palestinian details)

Additional content for after 1200-1150 B.C.

Egypt

The half-hearted Assyrian occupation of Egypt (671-663 B.C.) was terminated by a revival of Egyptian nationalism somewhat like that which had accompanied the expulsion of the Hyksos, although it lacked the intensity of the earlier movement. The new leader of the Egyptians was Psammeticus (or Psametik) of Sais, in the western Delta, who had been appointed governor by the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. After the Assyrian yoke had been cast off, Psammeticus unified Egypt once more and became the first ruler of the XXVI, or Saite Dynasty. The Saite period of Egyptian history (663-525 B.C.) represents a temporary revival of Egypt as a world power, a role which she was to share with the Neo-Babylonians, Medes and Lydians. Although the Saite culture is often criticized for its sterile archaism—an attempt to recreate the glories of the Empire—it is nevertheless interesting, especially in its literary aspects. The greatest prosperity of the Saites was during the reign of Ahmoses II (569-525 B.C.), when Egypt traded not only with the Near East but also with the rising Greek states of Asia Minor, the Aegean islands and European Greece. Many professional Greek soldiers found employment in the Egyptian armies of this period.

In the end, however, Egypt, like Media, Lydia and Babylonia, was incorporated into the expanding Persian Empire. In 525 B.C. Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, fought his way past Pelusium and into the Nile Valley. Egypt was organized as a Persian satrapy and had to submit to the indignity of having a Persian governor and Persian garrisons stationed throughout the land. Despite several revolts in which the Egyptians temporarily expelled the Persians, Egypt remained a Persian province until the coming of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.

When Alexander died in 323 B.C., the rich prize of Egypt was taken by one of his generals, Ptolemy, son of Lagus. Successfully holding Egypt against his rivals, Ptolemy eventually took the title of King about 306 B.C., and his descendants ruled Egypt as the successors of the Pharaohs until the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. Under the Ptolemies, Egypt was once more an imperial state controlling Cyrene, Cyprus and southern Syria. In the Ptolemiac period all Egypt was turned into a vast plantation, which was operated for the benefit of its Macedonian rulers. The land, the chief source of wealth, was considered the property of the king. Some land he retained and rented out for cultivation by the royal serfs (the Egyptian peasantry); other land, given to the nobles or to military (mostly Greek and Macedonian) colonists, was subject to taxation. The external trade of the country was a state monopoly, while all internal trade was taxed. There were also numerous lucrative state monopolies: salt, papyrus, linens, oils, mines and banks. For the administration of this great business enterprise, an extensive bureaucracy was built up. While foreign affairs, the armed forces, and the administration of justice were handled by ministers with great authority, the financial affairs were under the supervision of an official called the dioecetes, whose bureau directed the activieits of the royal officials in the provinces (nomes) and their territorial subdivisions. Agricultural production was carefully planned in advance of each growing season, and it was possible to estimate the revenues long before they were received.

Alexandria, the great city in the Delta founded by Alexander, was made the capital of Egypt as well as the center of literary and scientific activity in the Hellenistic world. In the Library and the Museum at Alexandria famous scholars and scientists—Euclid, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus and many more—lived and worked under Ptolemaic patronage.

In Ptolemaic times, Greek was the official language of Egypt, and although the natives retained their own language, they acquired a veneer of Greek culture and began to assume Greek names in addition to their Egyptian ones.

Under the Romans after 30 B.C., Egypt was the private possession of the Roman emperor and was governed by a special equestrian prefect appointed by him. The bureaucracy of the Ptolemaic period was retained and amplified by the Romans, who exploited Egypt more thoroughly than the Ptolemies had done. As a matter of fact, the tribute exacted by the Romans was four times that received by the Ptolemies. In addition to duties on imports and exports, taxes and assessments paid in coin, there were fifty varieties of taxes paid in kind, and two hundred miscellaneous taxes. Thus, Egypt sent to Rome a revenue equivalent to twenty million dollars a year, in addition to five million bushels of wheat, as an annual tribute.

Alexandria, organized as a municipality on the Greek order, was a large city with a population of perhaps 300,000 in the Roman period. Cosmopolitan, with a large foreign population, the city was the scene of numerous riots and disorders; the Jewish colony was large and cordially hated by the pagans; anti-Jewish riots were common.

In the 3rd century of the Christian Era, Egypt began to show definite effects of the Roman exploitation; productivity declined, and the peasants often fled from their holdings. In the time of Zenobia of Palmyra, Egypt was temporarily attached to that state. In the reign of Diocletian a serious Egyptian revolt was quelled with great difficulty. Independence was declared by Achilleus (L. Domitius Domitianus) in A.D. 296, and Diocletian was forced to punish the Egyptians severely when he retook the country in 297. After this, Egypt was divided into three provinces, a number which later was increased to five.

In the 3rd century also, the new Christian faith gained many converts in Egypt. As a result, widespread Roman persecutions of the Christians, especially those instigated by Decius and Diocletian, caused much suffering in Egypt. After Christianity was graned equality with the other religions in the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, Egypt, and especially Alexandria, became an important Christian centre. It was in Egypt in the 4th century that there originated the famous controversy between the orthodox Christians and the Arians which was to divide the Christian world for many centuries. On the orthodox side was the young Alexandrian deacon, Athanasius, later Bishop of Alexandria, and on the other side was the Alexandrian presbyter, Arius. As time passed, the native Egyptian church, the Coptic, became more and more a nationalist organization which was hostile to Greek influences.

During the Byzantine period, Egypt was governed by Constantinople, but the hold of the Eastern Roman Empire over the country was gradually weakened. Early in the 7th century, the Persians penetrated as far as Egypt and had to be expelled by the Emperor Heraclius. Then, with the rise of Islam, Egypt was lost.

In December 639, the Ommiad commander, Amr-ibn-al-As, led an army from Palestine into Egypt. By September 642, conquest was complete, the Byzantine government having agreed to a fixed payment of tribute in return for the Moslem promise to leave the Christians in possession of their churches and not to interfere in the administration of their communal affairs. From this time, Egypt was a province of the Eastern caliphate and was ruled by governors. However, in 868 Egypt was given in fief to a Turkish general Bayikbeg who entrusted Egypt to his stepson Ahmad ibn Tulun. The latter founded a quasi-independent dynasty known as the Tulunid. The period of Tulunid power ended in 935 when Muhammed ibn Tughj conquered Fostat and established the rule of the Ikshidite Dynasty.

In 969, Egypt was invaded from the west by Jauhar el-Kaid, a Fatimid general, and Cairo was made the capital of the Fatimid caliph Mo’izz. Under the first two Fatimid caliphs, Egypt enjoyed a sound administration, but with the third, al-Hakim (985-1021), there began a period of repressive government and an increasingly bad economic situation. Although during the reign of al-Hakim’s grandson, al-Mustansir (1036-1094), his general, Badr al-Jamali, restored order within Egypt, he was unable to prevent the Seljuks from usurping Fatimid power in Syria and Palestine. Jerusalem was recovered from the Turks, but it was lost again in 1099 to the Crusaders, who also obtained other Fatimid territory in Palestine. The Fatimid rulers were by this time too weak to cope with the combined problems of the Seljuk Turks, the Crusaders, and the internal strife in Egypt, and the last of the Fatimid caliphs, Adid, was forced to ask for help from Nureddin (1118-1174), Seljuk ruler of Syria. In 1169, Adid appointed a powerful Seljuk general, Shirguh, as vizier of Egypt.

Shirguh was succeeded, on his death two months later, by his nephew Saladin (1138-1193), who still professed to be only a deputy of Nureddin. Saladin, with the help of Nureddin, kept the Franks out of Egypt, deposed the caliph Adid, and gradually substituted the Sunnite form of Islam for the previously dominant Shiite form. After the death of the ex-caliph, he was given the prefecture of Egypt as deputy of Nureddin, and after the latter’s death in 1174, he took the title of Sultan, which officially started the Ayyubid Dynasty, in Egypt. By 1183, he had extended his rule to include North Syria. The rest of his life is notable primarily for his wars with the Crusaders. He died in 1193, only a few months after a temporary peace between the Franks and the Moslems had been established.

The heirs of Saladin ruled Egypt and varying parts of his empire, until they were supplanted in 1250 by the Mamelukes, the name given to the enfranchised slaves who, under the Ayyubids, had made up the court and officered the army. The period of the Mamelukes lasted until 1517, and was marked by a succession of wars, internal struggles for power, and general tumult. The first period of Mameluke rule was under the Bahri Mamelukes (to 1382), the second under the Burji Mamelukes.

A long struggle between the Egyptian and Ottoman sultanates ended in the defeat of the Egyptians in 1517. After that time, Egypt has been nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire. However, even after the conquest the Mamelukes retained their power, and Egypt’s importance to the Ottoman Empire, apart form the tribute which it paid, was mainly that it served as a base of operations for the maintenance of Ottoman power over Syria and Arabia.

Hittites

The Hittites sacked Babylon in 1595. Hittite power declined in the 12th century B.C.

Mesopotamia

Middle Babylonian Kingdom

After 1200 B.C., the Semites of the plain had thrown off the yoke of the Kassite peoples, resulting in the ensuing Middle Babylonian period. During this time, the Babylonians fought with the Assyrians, the mountaineers of Elam. After a long struggle, the southern desert tribes would fall victims to Assyrian imperialism. Babylon was plundered by Sennacherib in 689, and except for brief periods of revolt, Babylonia remained a province of Assyria until the last quarter of the 7th century.

Assyrian Empire

Assyria lay north of Babylon along the upper Tigris and the waters of the Great and Little Zab rivers. The history of Assyria after its first rise to national greatness falls into three main periods:

Period I. (1300-1100 B.C.) The first problem of the Assyrians was to secure their frontiers. On the west were the once-powerful Mitannians, to the north the Urartu around Lake Van, to the east the Elamite tribes, and to the south the Kassites. During the first part of this period there was continuous fighting with the Mitannians and Urartu led by the great Assyrian king, Shalmaneser I, and his successors. By the end of the period, when defensible frontiers had been secured on the east, north, and west, the Assyrians were able, under Tiglath-pileser I, to turn their attention to the south in Babylonia, where the Kassite dynasty had recently fallen (1169 B.C.). At the end of the 12th century B.C., Tiglath-pileser captured Babylon, but the Assyrians were unable to retain it after his death, when the pressure from the Hittites in Syria forced them to turn their attention once more to the west.

Period II. (885-763 B.C.) After two centuries of confusion following the death of Tiglath-pileser I, the Assyrians emerged at the beginning of the 9th century B.C. as a completely militarized state. Under three great warrior-kings—Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser II, and Adadnirari III—whose reigns cover the period 885-783 B.C., the Assyrians once more secured their frontiers to the north and east, reached the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and penetrated Babylonia. Ashurnasirpal II, who boasted that he had “no rival among the princes of the Four Quarters of the World,” campaigned against one or another enemy of Assyria almost every year of his long reign, and his successors followed his example. Nevertheless, a century of such sustained effort had its necessary price, and the Assyrian state collapsed into a temporary anarchy after an eclipse of the sun in 763 B.C.

Period III. (745-612 B.C.) By 745 B.C., order in Assyria had been restored by Tiglath-pileser III, who also accomplished the reconquest of Babylonia and was crowned king in the ancient city of Hammurabi in 728 B.C. Under Sargon II, who established a new Assyrian dynasty in 722 B.C., the Assyrians began a truly imperial age. It was Sargon II who captured and deported the Isrealites, destroyed the Hittite fortress of Carchemish, and extended his realm to the borders of Egypt. Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.) carried the Assyrian standards into Elam and also destroyed the city of Babylon after it had revolted in 689. Esarhaddon (681-669 B.C.) in 671 carried out the conquest of Egypt; and between 669 and 626 B.C., during the reign of his son Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian Empire attained its greatest limits.

This period saw the imperial throne occupied by rulers whose names were familiar through the part they played in the Old Testament: Sargon II, who carried off the Isrealites; Sennacherib, to whom the Jews paid tribute; Esarhaddon, who conquered Egypt; and Ashurbanipal, whose great library preserved the treasures of Babylonian literature. Under the Assyrians, Mesopotamia was only part of an extensive empire which included Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

Thereafter, Assyria began to disintegrate very rapidly. The Babylonians revolted in 625 and then allied themselves with the Medes from the Iranian plateau. New invasions of the Near East by the Cimmerians and Scythians, and the rise of nationalism in Medea and Babylonia saddened the last years of Ashurbanipal and sapped the military and financial reserves of Assyria. A combined force of Medes, Babylonias, and Scythians captured the Assyrian capital of Ninevah in 612 B.C., and thus brought the independence of Assyria to an end.

Assyrian Civilization. Patterned after the Babylonian, the Assyrian culture was responsible for a number of important innovations. The formation of their empire has been called the first real attempt at political organization in the ancient world. Conquered territories were divided into provinces, and all paid tribute to the king. In remote areas the provinces retained their own local governments, with officials who were vassals of the Assyrian ruler; other areas maintained native governments with Assyrian governors and garrisons, while still others were kept in complete subjection. Many cities enjoyed municipal autonomy under charters granted by the king. The Assyrian army was better organized and more versatile than any which had preceeded it. War chariots were employed; there were both heavy and light armed infantrymen, as well as bowmen and slingers. The Assyrian engineers developed efficient siege machinery which the best fortified cities could not withstand.

In chemistry and medicine the Assyrians made considerable progress beyond the points attained by the Babylonians. They were expert at working leather and making dyes. In medicine the Assyrians employed almost four hundred vegetable and mineral drugs. Medical texts reveal the use of charms and incantations in the treatment of disease, although in many cases more efficacious remedies were employed; for example, physicians used cold baths to reduce fever, and recognized that dental infections were responsible for some illnesses. There are also examples of psychiatry and mental healing.

The Assyrians were masters of psychological warfare. They deliberately encouraged stories of their ferocity in combat and their implacable punishment for those who dared to oppose them. As a result, their enemies often fled before them without striking a blow, and their subjects hesitated to raise the standard of revolt. The official Assyrian inscriptions are full of bloodthirsty accounts of battle and the punishments meted out to the enemy.

Neo-Babylonian Kingdom

With the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom (612 B.C.) under Nabopolassar and his successor, Nebuchadnezzar, the plain once more dominated the highlands, and the territory of the new Babylonian rulers extended beyond the confines of Mesopotamia to include Palestine and Syria. Nebuchadnezzar was responsible for the attack on Jerusalem and the subsequent Babylonian captivity of the Jews, which began in 597 B.C.. Nebuchadnezzar is remembered as the builder of the Hanging Gardens and the king who carried off the Jews into the Babylonian captivity (587-586 B.C.). A contemporary Babylonian relief supports the Biblical tradition that some Jews were thrown into "fiery furnaces."

Defeated by the Persians under Cyrus the Great, the last of the Neo-Babylonian monarchs, Nabonidus and his son Belshazzar, also figure prominently in the Old Testament. Nabonidus was an elderly scholar and antiquarian who seems to have lacked the energy or competance to direct his kingdom in a critical period when other states, Lydia and Medea, were crumbling before the advance of Persia under Cyrus the Great. In 539 B.C., when Cyrus finally turned his attention to Babylonia, he encountered little resistance. In fact, there is ground for suspicion that the Babylonians, particularly the priests, were willing to exchange Nabonidus for Cyrus.

After 539 B.C., Babylonia and Assyria ceased to be independent and passed successively under the rule of the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Parthians, and the other later conquerors of the Near East. The city of Babylon itself remained an important administrative center for many centuries, but the old cities of Assyria were abandoned. When Xenophon passed by the Assyrian capital of Nineveh at the end of the 5th century B.C., only a huge mound of earth remained to mark the site of a once thriving urban center.

The Neo-Babylonian period was the final one in which the Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia were their own masters. Many centuries of domination by one foreign group after another followed the capture of Babylon by the Persians in 539 B.C. On the other hand, until the Mongol invasion of the 13th century A.D., the economic and cultural importance of the area was not diminished. No matter what group was in power, and no matter how far-flung the political entity of which Mesopotamia happened to be a part at the moment, the vicinity of Babylon continued to be a site of an administrative center. That is to say, the captial was in this area, for the sites of Babylon, Seleucia, Ctesiphon and Baghdad are close neighbours. Because of its possibilities for agricultural production and its favourable position for trade, the plain constituted a rich and populous province. The economic wealth of other regions might rise and fall, but Babylonia possessed a stability in this respect, which kept it on a fairly even keel. Further, as a major contributor to Near Eastern, Greek and Roman civilisations, Babylonia remained a primary center of cultural diffusion throughout antiquity.

Persian Mesopotamia

The coming of the Persians under Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. marked the first of a series of instances in which the inhabitants of Persia were to extend their political control over Mesopotamia. In the Persian period, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley was divided into two satrapies known as Chaldea and Assyria, with the former including the plain and the latter the highlands. The importance of Babylon was recognized in the fact that it was one of the four major administrative centers of the Persian Empire, a vast political unit which stretched from the Indus to the Nile. During the period, the population of Mesopotamia remained largely Semitic. A triumph may be seen in that the conquerors adopted a system of writing based on a modification of the Babylonian cuneiform script.

Alexander the Great

The Persian Empire endured until it was crushed by the onslaught of Greeks and Macedonians led by Alexander the Great. Alexander's campaigns began in Asia Minor in 335 B.C. and carried him to Babylon late in 331. When he returned from his eastern conquests in 325, he established his headquarters at Babylon, where he died in 323. With the disintegration of Alexander's empire, Mesopotamia and most of the old Persian holdings — except Egypt — fell into the hands of Seleucus, one of Alexander's Macedonian generals.

Selucid Mesopotamia

Seleucus established a dynasty which dominated the Near East for the next two centuries. The capital, a new city called Seleucia, was located on the Tigris about twenty miles south of Baghdad. At its greatest extend the empire stretched eastward to the Indus and included the old Persian homeland. It was here, just south of the Caspian Sea, that a new movement of Persian nationalism appeared about the middle of the 3rd century B.C..

Parthian Kingdom

A group known as the Parthians began to represent themselves as the successors of the Persians and to call upon the Iranian tribes to unite against the Greeks and Macedonian foreigners. Gathering momentum, the anti-Seleucid revolt restored the independence of Persia before the 3rd century ended. Then the Parthian monarchs looked westward toward Mesopotamia. Under the famoous Mithradates I, the first major Parthian king, the hordes from Iran expelled the Seleucids from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and the Parthians became the rulers of Mesopotamia.

The Parthians are best remembered as the formidable opponents of the Romans in the Near East. They were the victors over Crassus at Carrhae (modern Haran) in the 1st century B.C. and the victims of the Roman emperor Trajan when his campaigns of A.D. 114-116 carried the Roman standards all the way to the Persian Gulf. Just as in the case of the Persian Empire, so under the Parthians, Mesopotamia was a vital region and a center of administration. During the 1st century B.C., however, the capital city of Seleucia on the Tigris was replaced as capital by the rival city of Ctesiphon, just across the river.

The Parthian Kingdom survived the campaigns of Trajan and regained territory temporarily surrendered during the brief Roman occupation, but there were later Roman attacks. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, a new penetration — which might have been more serious than that of Trajan — was nullified by the great plague which the legions carried back home with them. Subsequently, the Parthians were weakened by the campaigns of Septimus Severus and Caracalla, with the result that they ultimately collapsed before new pressure emanating from Persia.

Sassanian Kingdom

The Sassanian Persians, whose kings claimed descent form the Achaemenids (the founders of the First Persian Empire), revolted against the Parthians in A.D. 224. By 227 Mesopotamia had fallen to the Sassanians and the Parthian Kingdom had ceased to exist. The Sassanian Kingdom now came into being, with the Persians replacing the Parthians as the opponents of the Romans. During the Sassanian period the conflict between East and West continued, with first one side and then the other gaining the upper hand. The Persian defeat and capture of the Roman emperor Valerian in the middle of the 3rd century has often been compared to the Parthian victory over Crassus. But the Romans, too, had their share of glory with the victories of Diocletian and the preliminary successes of John the Apostate. In Byzantine times the Eastern emperors at Constantinople carried on the warfare against the Sassanians with little or no permanent achievement.

The Islamic Caliphates

At length, the Sassanians were destroyed and the ancient period came to an end with the rise of a new group, the Arabs. After the death of the Prophet, Mohammed, in 632, the Arabs began to expand outside their homeland. Under the inspiration of Islam they were irresistable. Syria and Palestine were conquered; then Mesopotamia fell in 637.

Under the Orthodox, Ommiad and Abbasside caliphs, Mesopotamia continued its old administrative, economic and cultural importance. Kufa on the Euphrates replaced Ctesiphon as the capital, until the foundation of Baghdad by the Abbasside caliph, al-Mansur, in 762. Baghdad, home of Harun al-Rashid and scene of the stories of the Arabian Knights, is still capital of Mesopotamia. In the 8th century, Baghdad was not merely a provincial capital, as Kufa had been under the Ommiads, it was also the imperial seat of the new Abbasside Dynasty, replacing Damascus as the political center of the Moslem world. The change from Damascus to Baghdad is said to have had the further effect of promoting the Persianification of the Arab rulers, whose political ideas and social habits were now modified by lingering Sassanian influences.

After reaching its peak in the 8th and 9th centuries, the vigour of the Abbassides was gradually lost. By the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks had extended their sway southward into Mesopotamia. Between 1055 and 1194, a Seljuk sultan wielded temporal power in Baghdad, while by his side Abbasside caliphs sat as mere puppets clutching about them the tattered remnants of spiritual authority as successors of the Prophet.

Mongolian Mesopotamia

Although the Mongols under Genghis Khan swept across Persia and into Mesopotamia between 1218 and 1222, it was Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan and brother of Kublai Khan, who effectively subdued Mesopotamia. In 1258, Baghdad surrendered to Hulagu after a siege in which 800,000 non-combatants were slaughtered. For the next eighty years, Mesopotamia was a province of the Mongol empire; for another seventy years it was the possession of one or another of the smaller Mongolian states. A second Mongolian sack of Baghdad occurred in 1393, when the ferocious Tamerlane descended upon the city. During the 15th century, Mesopotamia knew further suffering under the rule of two Turkomen dynasties known as the Black Sheep and the White Sheep.

At the very end of the middle period, a revived Persia once more conquered and for a few years held the Tigris-Euphrates valley (1509-1534). By the 16th century, however, Mesopotamia was ruined. Under the Mongols, the irrigation system so necessary to agricultural prosperity had been completely destroyed; and much of the cultivated area had become barren and arid. There was undoubtedly a serious decline in population, with very little recovery having taken place since that time.

Ottoman Mesopotamia

In 1534, the Persians were expelled from Mesopotamia by the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent, the great Ottoman sultan. From then until the present, Mesopotamia has been a Turkish possession.