preventive drainage measures,26the theory putting the blame on the people of Sumer prevailed.
Issar, after reaching the conclusion that there was a global rise in the tem- perature during this period has suggested a hydrological conceptual model to explain the Sumerian textual evidence. He argued that the climate change decreased the flow of the rivers and thus less water was available for irrigation and for flushing out the salts.27As southern Mesopotamia is very low lying, any small rise in the sea level would have been accompanied by a rise in the groundwater table bringing it close to the land surface, and thus evaporation and salt accumulation would increase due to capillary action. The results of field investigations show that soil salinity is not only a function of excessive irrigation but also of ill-drainage and that the latter could have been the effect of a rise in the groundwater table during a global warm period.28
As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the time series of the paleo- climate of the Near East show that although there was a general trend of desiccation starting around 2200 B.C.E. there were periods of more humid spells lasting for a century or more, during which (albeit still relatively dry), most of the deserted urban centers in the more humid part of Syria-Palestine were resettled. In addition, all along the northern part of the coastal plain as well in the valleys of southern Lebanon and Palestine many new sites were established.
6.2
The Archaeological and Historical Evidence
Byblos and Ras Shamra/Ugarit on the coast of Lebanon and Syria, Homs, Hama in the Orontes Valley, Ebla, Aleppo and the ‘Amuq sites in Syria, all bearing overwhelming witness to a wave of violent destruction and general upheaval ending all settled life. In Anatolia, this wave reached from Karatas-Semayuk and dozen of other contemporaneous settlements in the south-east to Tarsus and Mersin in Cilicia, Beycesultan in the west and Troy in the north-west – and even beyond.
Whereas the cities of Palestine and southern Syria lay deserted for several centuries, those of northern Syria, Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia were immediately rebuilt and resettled, albeit within the framework of a new and quite different culture, known as the Syrian Early Bronze Age IV. The new culture began simultaneously at sites such as Tell Nebi Mend (ancient Qadesh), Tell Mishrife (ancient Qatna), Hama, etc. The ongoing excavations of Ebla, with its archive, inform us about the economic background of this development, in particular about the trade network, which linked the Levantine coast, and eventually Egypt, with Anatolia and Mesopotamia. This new Syrian civilization continued without any major interruption into the Middle and Late Bronze Age and was largely responsible for the re-introduction of the urban system into Palestine. Many sites show a scattering of destructions and rebuilding, such as at Ebla, where the fire luckily (for us) baked the royal archive, as well as most other sites which appear to have been the result of local wars and invasions. These wars continued into the Middle and Late Bronze Age and can be contributed to the growing influence of Amorite warlords, as we shall see.
That a regional phase of desiccation may have been a prime factor can be deduced from the observation that not all settlements were abandoned in the same time, but that desertion moved slowly from the more arid parts to the more humid parts. It was ushered at the end of the Early Bronze II, with the destruction and desertion of the city of Arad located on the border of the desert, as well as many other small settlements in the Sinai and Negev Deserts.
The towns and cities in the more humid parts diminished in their population, impoverished but staying alive, at least for a while.
As we have seen the collapse of the cities in Cis-Jordan was followed by the ap- pearance of many small settlements in areas bordering the desert due to a shift from a sedentary agriculture to a pastoral based economy. From an ecological point of view this shift may well be due not only to reduced annual average pre- cipitation, but also to a negative change in the statistical distribution of drought and normal years – i.e. the number of drought years became more frequent.
Such a distribution does not enable food or capital produced in the agricultural areas surrounding the cities during more humid years to be stored for later use in years of drought. The only solution is to extend the area providing the food and commodities and vast areas that yielded a low and sporadic income were used most beneficially as grazing lands for animals adapted to semi-arid conditions, sheep and goats. Thus, instead of the granaries typical of the Early Bronze Age cities, livestock ‘on the hoof ’ became the assets of food and capital on a seasonal and multi-annual basis throughout the Fertile Crescent.
We have seen already that transitional periods were, and still are, the sub- ject of lively debates among archaeologists working in Syria-Palestine. Whereas
there seems to exist a broad consensus about the chronology and general time frame with regard to the end of the urban phase of the final Early Bronze Age around 2400 B.C.E. and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Ages around 1800 B.C.E., the subdivision and meaningful nomenclature remained controversial.
The differences in opinion concern the disappearance and emergence of this or that type of pottery and other forms of objects, which typify the material cultures of the various time intervals.29 W.F. Albright hadsuggested the term
‘Middle Bronze Age I’ for the entire period, which implies that the material culture of this period foreshadowed the ensuing Middle Bronze Age. Other ar- chaeologists thought that the links with the preceding period are much closer and called this period Early Bronze Age IV. This line of thought seem to have been confirmed by more modern excavations and was followed by a growing number of scholars. For K. Kenyon, the remains in the tombs of Jericho ap- peared so strikingly different from those of both, the preceding as well as the following period, that she regarded this culture as intrusive and labeled it with the rather cumbersome ‘Early Bronze-Middle Bronze Transitional Period’. P.
Lapp simplified this term to ‘Transitional Bronze Age’. We follow a recent term,
‘Intermediate Bronze Age’ (IBA) which best describes the evidence at hand and has gained wide acceptance. Whatever its label, there is unanimity that Pales- tine went through a period of decline and revivals, extensive movements of people over nearly half a millennium.30
Thus, there exists a consensus among all scholars that, indeed, a crucial phase of decline has afflicted the centers of population all over the Fertile Crescent during this period. This is clearly seen not only in the physical evidence of desertion and devastation of the many cities in the central part of the region but also from the historical documents from Mesopotamia and Egypt.
These texts depict a continuous exertion to push back the marauding tribes encroaching on the green lands from the desert as well as period of famine and strife demarcating the end of the Old Kingdom and ushering a period of disorder.31
Following the collapse of the cities in Palestine, many small settlements ap- peared in the areas bordering the desert, for instance, Transjordan, the Jordan Valley, the Negev and Sinai. This can be explained as a shift from an economy based on sedentary agriculture to a system primarily based on animal hus- bandry with less emphasis on agriculture. Such an economy has the advantage
29W.F. Albright, op. cit., pp. 36–42 (1926).
W.F. Albright, “Some remarks on the archaeological chronology of Palestine before about 1500 B.C.”
in:Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, R.W. Ehrich (ed.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 47–60 (1965).
W.G. Dever, “The EB IV–MB I horizon in Trans-Jordan and southern Palestine”BASOR210:37–63 (1973).
K.M. Kenyon,Archaeology in the Holy Land. Norton, New York (1979).
30P. Lapp, inNear Eastern Archaeology.
31The precise simultanity of droughts in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent is still a matter, which has to be verified. If it will be found out that they were simultaneous then it can only be explained by a global climatic anomaly, such as the sudden melt of the Laurentian glacier, an event, which had cooled the surface water of the ocean and negatively influenced the westerlies and monsoon systems at the same time.
of a higher degree of mobility and can adjust itself to seasonal availability of pasture and water for the animals that became the most important base of the economy.32Such a shift indicates that certain cultural, political and social interrelations had already existed earlier between the urban centers and the less sedentary population living around the centers, i.e. that both economies were not totally independent. The collapse of the urban system encouraged and amplified a shift from sedentary agricultural herding to more mobile nomadic pastoralism.
An interesting illustration of the socio-economic system of the Levant is found in the story of Sinuhe, an Egyptian courtier who fled to Canaan when the Pharaoh Amen-em-het I was murdered in a rebellion at around 1960 B.C.E.33 During his exile he lived with the tribes in the land of theRetenu, i.e. in Canaan.
These people, on one hand, enjoyed the products of typical Mediterranean type of fruit orchards, like figs, grapes and olives, whether owned by them or harvested by their neighbors, the sedentary farmers. On the other hand, they were organized as relatively mobile tribes thriving on their cattle and also on those of their neighbors’. Intertribal warfare over pasturage and wells and cattle raids always were the most favored past-time activity of a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life.
The traditional archaeological evidence for this period in Palestine consisted nearly exclusively of tombs, occasionally grouped in large cemeteries and rarely adjoining settlements. This picture is changing as more and more sometimes large permanent settlements are discovered, particularly on the east bank of the Jordan. Abu en-Nias, Iktanu and Khirbet Iskander are some of the best-known quasi-urban sites of this otherwise non-urban period.
The proliferation of burial sites is a sign of the growing importance of a mo- bile life-style and changes in the social order. Whereas the Early Bronze Age populations buried their dead in caves often containing a large number of bodies, which had accumulated over the generations, the emphasis is now on the individual grave. This is a clear indication of nomadic and tribal way of life in many parts of the ancient Near East. It also shows the growing social importance of the warrior within society34as is confirmed by contemporane- ous historical descriptions we shall discus below. The large variety in tomb typology, tumuli in the desert, megalithic dolmens along the Rift Valley and subterranean rock-cut or built shaft tombs, often in close proximity, was ex-
32W.G. Dever, op. cit. p. 237 (1973).
W.G. Dever, “From the End of the Early Bronze Age to the Beginning of the Middle Bronze” in:
Biblical Archaeology Today, J. Aviram (ed.), Israel Exploration Society, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, and the American Schools of Oriental Research, pp. 113–135 (1985).
33J.A. Wilson, “The Story of Sinuhe” pp. 5–11 in:The Ancient Near East,. J.B. Pritchard (ed.) Princeton University Press (1973).
D.B. Redford op. cit. pp. 83–86 (1993).
34Interesting parallel and contemporaneous developments can be observed in Mediterranean and Western European societies where, at the same time, ancestor-worshipping and megalith-building agriculturist way of life was replaced by new societies dominated by warrior ethics, individual burial and the proliferation of metal weapons: “The ancestors were pushed aside by the warrior”:
J.P. Mohen,The World of Megaliths. Facts on File, New York, p. 276 (1990).
plained by K. Kenyon as “tribal characteristics”.35 Grave goods were simple and consist of some pots and a few personal items, a copper dagger was stan- dard in most male burials and indicate the growing importance of the warrior within the context of aggressive nomadic societies.
The socioeconomic picture described seems to fit two important literary sources, the Egyptian story of Sinuhe’s wandering, mentioned above, as well as the Biblical stories of the wandering of the patriarchs. In spite of the obvious shortcomings of early oral traditions being transformed, telescoped, simplified and fixed into written traditions centuries after the actual events, it is possible that the core of these stories could have been derived from historical events which might have taken place during this, or any other subsequent period.
The authors are divided in their opinion on this subject. Issar tends to adopt the conclusion arrived by many Israeli and American Biblical scholars and archaeologists based primarily on the theories of Albright that the ori- gin of the patriarchal stories is in the socioeconomic situation of the Near East during the first half of the second millennium B.C.E.36 Zohar, in con- trast, accepts Thompson’s conclusions, and those reached by most European scholars. They are convinced that, if there does exist a historic core of these stories, the majority of theirSitz im Leben(life-setting) should preferably be dated to the end of the second millennium B.C.E.37 As a matter of fact, most situations described in the relevant portions of the Biblical narrative reflect a life-style and social conduct which could be dated to any time frame as the basic socio-economic situation of pastoral nomads and their environment has hardly changed over the last few millennia until the modern period (see Appendix III).
After a violent but short crisis, the north Syrian and southeast Anatolian cities began to flourish in a rather unprecedented development. Their rather northwesterly position in the Fertile Crescent procured enough precipitation in addition to the water, which descended as streams and springs from the Taurus Mountains into the plains to the south. This supply of water enabled to continue a flourishing economy based on agriculture as well as on husbandry. The Italian excavations at Ebla have yielded remains of a for its time prosperous and highly sophisticated civilization.38 The archives of several thousand of clay tablets, written in Sumerian cuneiform but using an Old Semitic idiom closely related
35K.M. Kenyon,Amorites and Canaanites, Schweich Lectures, London (1966). Another important factor would be the local geology and the availability of building materials which, together with Kenyon’s ‘tribal characteristics’, could be important indicators for ethnic groupings during this period.
36Summarized in theEncyclopedia Hebraica, Vol 1,. 111–124; and theEncyclopaedia Biblica, Vol. 1, 4–13 (Hebrew).
37T.L. Thompson,The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham.
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 123. De Gruyter, Berlin (1974).
See also J.J. Scullion inABDvol. 2, 949–956, includes recent bibliography (1992).
38The emphasis on ‘Semitic’ stresses the fact that the majority of the sedentary and urban Early Bronze Age population of Syria-Palestine, with its different material culture, was probably not Semitic and belonged to an unknown linguistic entity. Based on some, admittedly rather flimsy, evidence of river names and other toponyms, Zohar suggests a population speaking some form of “Asianic”
which might have included Sumerian in its widest sense.
to Old Akkadian, give us profound insights into the working of a centralized economy and extensive trade relations. Artifacts imported from Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt indicate the integration of Ebla into a trade and exchange network with the rest of the known world at that time.
And Ebla was not unique – dozens of similar and as yet unexcavated sites bear testimony to the prosperity of northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia during the last centuries of the third and the early parts of the second mil- lennium B.C.E. The pressure of a growing population and the menace of the by now ever present nomads made it sure that internecine war was always at hand. We hear not only about trade but also about war, for instance when the kings of Ebla conquered another great and competing city, Mari on the Euphrates, about which we will hear later. The wealth aroused the greed of the less fortunate kingdoms further south and Ebla was finally destroyed in the 24th century B.C.E., probably by Naram-Sin, king of Akkad. He burned the royal palace to the ground and, luckily for us, baked and preserved the archive.
Another treasure of archives coming to light in central Anatolia and dated several centuries later were the archives of Old Assyrian merchants at the karumof Kanes, now known as Kultepe. As we have seen, the warmer climate spelled prosperity for the inhabitants of the highlands of central and eastern Anatolia and Trans-Caucasia. City-states mushroomed and their newly affluent elite craved luxury goods and weapons of a new kind, true tin bronzes.39The archives consist of letters between the head of the company in the city of Assur on the Tigris and their representatives, mostly their own sons, in the
’colonies’ over some four to six generations between the 21st and 19th century B.C.E. We learn not only about their business and how the trade was organized but, even more precious for us, their personal affairs and their fortunes and adventures.
The larger trading colony, known askarum, was outside the walls of the native city whereas smaller ones, called wabartum, were found inside the cities. The traders had married into local families and had adopted local customs. Without the letters, we would have had no inkling about this far- reaching overland trade network, as the material culture was entirely local.
The caravans consisted of several hundreds of a special strong breed of black donkeys led by well-known and trusted personnel who knew the routes and were well acquainted with the territories of the various city states which – they had to cross – naturally paying healthy sums of tolls and other ‘protection money’ which made the merchandise quite expensive for the final customer.
We hear about insurance and even scams to cheat, so what is new under the sun? The bulk of the merchandise imported to Anatolia consisted of a variety of finely woven and often embroidered cloth from Babylon, sometimes metal or some finished objects, but above allannaku, i.e. tin.40In return, silver, called kaspum(in ancient and modern Hebrewkesef means silver and money) and
39The situation has some similarities with the “barbarian” rulers of the Celts, Dacians or Thracians and their appetite for Mediterranean luxury goods during the Hellenistic and Roman period.
40See entry “annaku” inCAD, vol. A, part II, pp. 127–130.
a variety of produce ranging from honey and wax to precious stones, wood and finished metal artifacts were sent to Assur.41
We have seen that the new economy and the adoption of more mobile and often semi-nomadic ways of life by the local inhabitants swelled the numbers of the traditionally herders in the desert whose larger numbers allowed the penetration of these nomadic and semi-nomadic people into the fertile val- leys of the big rivers. They often seized power after their settling down and became the ruling class. In Mesopotamia, these people were predominantly Semitic-speaking tribes originating from the arid and semi-arid plains and mountains of northeast Syria. They were called by the Sumerians MAR-TU, i.e.
“westerners” and by the AkkadiansAmurru, a name most probably derived from the western pronunciation of the Old Semitic word for pasture,aburru, which can be pronounced /awurru/ and /amurru/ and is probably related with the nameHabiru.42 The Biblical term for this group of people is Amorites, which can have also other connotations. Their traditional stronghold was in the mountainous area of the Basar Mountains known to the Sumerians as the
“Mountain of the Amorites”, today’s Jebel Bishri, and spreading out over the entire semi-arid area west of the Euphrates. In documents from Ur III dating from ca. 2100 to 2000 B.C.E. they are described as warlike ‘tent dwellers of the mountains’ and a wall was built in order to keep them out, and, like all the other walls, to no avail.
The worsening climate and the continuous pressure by the Amorites from the west and north caused the weakening of the neo-Sumerian kingdom of Ur which exercised the hegemony over the southern part of this region. Other neighboring tribes such as the Guti joined the fray and descended from the semi-arid foothills of the Zagros on the eastern side of the valley in order to strike a devastating blow: the conquest and devastation of the capital Ur echoed over the ages as we have seen in those lines above from the “Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur”.43
These Guti were later expelled and replaced by the Amorites who, despite of the wall built earlier by the Sumerians in defense of their land against their encroachment, assumed control over the northern part of Sumer and all of central and northern Mesopotamia. A century later, kings of Amorite origin also replaced the Sumerian dynasties ruling the city-states of the south.44
In order to illustrate the turbulence of this period, let us look at the history of three of these kingdoms in former Sumer. We shall begin with the kingdom of Larsa, which was established by an Amorite chieftain, Nablanum in 2025 B.C.E.
After four generations, his descendant Gungunum overpowered Lipit-Ishtar, the Amorite king of Isin, in 1924 B.C.E. and annexed his city-state leading to the establishment of a new kingdom that extended over most of ancient Sumer.
During the reign of this dynasty new irrigation projects were built. This can be learnt from the archives of the irrigation bureau of Larsa, written in
41M.T. Larsen.The Old Assyrian City State and its Colonies, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen (1976).
42cf.CADvol. 1/II.
43See footnote 1 in this chapter.
44W.W. Hallo and W.K. Simpson,op. cit. p. 71 (1998).