cases, there is more and more evidence that, in all probability, they could originally be attributed to the Middle Bronze Age (see Appendix I).60
In Syria the flourishing Mature Bronze Age with its center now at Yamhad/
Aleppo continued unabated. The cooler and wetter conditions did not have such a positive effect on Anatolia and the other northern highlands of Caucasia and northern Iran where we hear about troubled times: trails of devastations show the path the Luwians took from the Balkans, with Hurrians and Hittites as well as other Indo-European speaking groups pressing in from the east, apparently trying to evade the grim cold weather further north and east.
Around 1780 B.C.E. Kanes and itskarumwere burned to the ground never to be rebuilt and the trade with Assyria came to a halt. In the destruction layer of Kanes, a bronze dagger with the cuneiform inscription “belonging to Anitta, son of Pithana, king of Kussara” was found and baffled the historians:
Was Anitta the inhabitant of the palace which was burned down, or was he the attacker? This question is of great importance because in the later annals of the Hittites, Anitta is mentioned as one of their first kings and with him we can begin the story of the Old Kingdom of the Hittites, which lasted until 1600 B.C.E.
6.4
beauty, their eyes gazing into eternity and existing only to be adored and ad- mired, the kings of the Middle Kingdom are shown with pensive, severe and often grim expressions as if to impart the idea of rulers burdened by the re- sponsibilities of taking care of the land and its people – the veritable ‘Father of the Nation’. It was an undoubtedly effective propaganda and enabled the 12th Dynasty to stay in power for two centuries. Literature flourished and besides the already mentioned story of Sinuhe, the ‘Prophecy of Neferti’ and the ‘In- structions of Amenemhet’ are only some of the best-known works of ancient Egyptian literature.61The legacy of Middle Kingdom literature is still traceable in the Biblical story of Josef in Egypt, which represents a later version and elabo- ration of a well-known Middle Kingdom theme, the “Tale of the Two Brothers”.
Important information about Nubia, Libya and Syria-Palestine can be gath- ered from the so-called Execration Texts generally dated to the end of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. These are short formulas and curses against foreign rulers written in hieratic (i.e. a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing) on small clay figurines, which were then broken in a magic ritual in order to transfer the curse on that particular foreign ruler. The enemies in Canaan and Syria have, for the most part, typical Amorite names and are generally referred to as ‘wretched Asiatics’. The reference to chieftains and tribal areas in the older texts and to kings and cities speaks for a trend towards a sedentary way of life, which Canaan went through during the Intermediate and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age.62
Alas, the curses did not help much. Around 1800 B.C.E. the Middle Kingdom began to crumble. Rival warloords, known as the 13th to 17th Dynasties of lo- cal and foreign provenance represent the ‘Second Intermediate Period’, a time which was called by the Egyptologist J.A. Wilson ‘the Great Humiliation’.63 For him, like for other scholars, the abrupt disintegration of a powerful struc- ture was a mystery. A variety of reasons were advanced, ranging from social weakness rooted in a feudal system, internal dissent, and, naturally, foreign invasions. They were all true, with the last scourge arriving late, except that it was actually again the failing of the Nile, which was the underlying cause of what happened next.
The relationship between Palestine and Egypt, which were severed in the late part of the Early and Intermediate Bronze Age, had seen a revival during the Middle Kingdom, in particular during the 12th Dynasty. Archaeological finds and Egyptian annals prove trade connections and the Egyptian cultural and political influence grew all over the region. Towards the end of the period this strong relationship deteriorated and when Egypt began to decline around 1800 B.C.E. a vacuum was created which attracted the newly established warrior class in Syria-Palestine. They came with their horses and chariots and superior
61”The Tale of the Two Brothers” translated by John A. Wilson in J.B. Pritchard op. cit. pp. 12–16 (1973).
62“Hymn of Victory of Mer-ne-ptah. The “Israel” stela of Merneptah in the Cairo Museum”ANETpp.
376–378.
63J.A. Wilson,The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1951).
tin bronze weapons for which those of the Egyptian armies were no match, and around 1780 B.C.E. they poured into the Delta.
The invasion and the settling of Asiatic war lords with their mixed hordes of fighters was in fact similar to the earlier exploits described in the documents of Mari. The Egyptian perspective was described by Manetho and retold by Josephus Flavius in his work “Against Apion”, book 1, chapter 14, which is among our most vivid record of this invasion:
“There was a king of ours, whose name was Timaus. Under him it came to pass, I do not know how, that God was averse to us, and there came, after a surprising manner, men of ignoble birth out of the eastern parts, and had boldness enough to make an expedition into our country, and with ease subdued it by force, yet without our hazarding a battle with them. So when they had gotten those that governed us under their power, they afterwards burnt down our cities, and demolished the temples of the gods, and used all the inhabitants after a most barbarous manner: nay, some they slew, and let their children and their wives into slavery. At length they made one of themselves king, whose name was Salatis; he also lived at Memphis, and made both the upper and lower regions pay tribute, and left garrisons in places that were the most proper for them. . .”
This whole nation was styled Hycsos, that is, Shepherd-kings.64
The Egyptian archaeological evidence for the Hyksos period, which corre- sponds to the Syrian-Palestinian Middle Bronze Age 1800 to 1500 B.C.E. is mentioned only shortly. Its principal sites are found in the eastern Delta, such as Tell el-Dab’a, ancient Avaris and Pi-Ramses where a cemetery has yielded important results. The majority of personal names can be classified as West Semitic Amorite. The Egyptian name normally given to this people, ’3mw, probably pronounced /’amu/, went back to the 3rd millennium B.C.E. and was an archaic survival. A sizable portion of the inhabitants of the Delta already were immigrants from Asia as the ongoing excavations in the western part of the Delta have shown. These people maintained a similar way of life to that of their brothers in the Levant and were often semi-nomadic. It is tempting to see a reflection of this situation in the Biblical story of the sojourning of Israel in the land of Goshen but, as usual, hard evidence is lacking.
It is questionable whether the Hyksos actually conquered the Nile valley itself but they certainly represented a menace demanding tribute from the native ruler further upstream. Small objects, such as rather carelessly executed scarabs with royal names of the 15th Dynasty were found all over the eastern Mediterranean and represent gifts or exotic souvenirs of traders. This was different in the Levant where Egyptian artifacts abound – in a sense one could claim that the eastern delta had become the southernmost province of Canaan during the Middle Bronze Age with a mixture of Canaanite and Egyptian cul- tural assemblage representing a mixed population. The high variety of tombs and burial customs, often accompanied by donkeys or other sacrificial animals,
64Jospheus Flavius,Against Apionbook 1, chapter 14, translated by W. Whiston, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Mich. (1960).
are an Asiatic and even northern Syrian-Mesopotamian hallmark, but without typical Levantine pottery. Instead, we find a large amount of imported Cypriote pottery. The early temples at Avaris were built according to a Levantine, not Egyptian ground plan and the gods initially venerated were probably closer to Astarte, El and Ba’al than to the Egyptian pantheon but soon identified with the Egyptian god Seth, the symbol of strength and the wilderness.65As time passes, however, the Egyptian gods were increasingly worshipped as manyper- sonal names with Ra’, for instance, are attested. Towards the end of their rule, the Hyksos upper classes were largely “Egyptianized”. Some important liter- ary works such as the famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus were composed during this time. Apophis, one of the last Hyksos rulers of the 15th Dynasty, calls himself ‘a scribe of Ra’.
6.5
The Late Bronze Age, ca. 1500 to 1200 B.C.E. (Table 4)
The mid part of the second millennium B.C.E. started with the warming up of the climate and thus may have initiated another turning point in the cultural and political development of the ancient Near East. As expected it brought a high Nile and prosperity for Egypt but dryness and declining fortunes in various degrees to the Levant, especially the southern border region where the cities of the Hyksos were situated, the central hills, and the Jordan Valley.66
In later historiography and on their victory stelae, a family of soldiers un- der Kamose and Ahmose serving in Thebes in upper Egypt and known as the 17th Dynasty claimed to have started a ‘war of liberation’ against the foreigners around 1550 B.C.E. They were followed by the illustrious 18th Dy- nasty, also from Thebes, who were able not only to evict the Asiatics from Egypt but also could carry the war into Asia and establish the Egyptian New Kingdom or the ‘Empire’, Egypt’s most glorious period. The officer Ahmose, son of Abana, boasts in his tomb at el-Kab that he not only conquered and de- stroyed Avaris but many other fortified cities in southern Palestine, particularly S(h)aruhen/Tell el-Farah (South) and Tell el-’Ajjul. In any event, Canaan was reduced to a province under Egyptian rule and even when admitting that the basic local culture did not change, a new era has dawned over Syria-Palestine, the Late Bronze Age.
The campaigns of Thutmose I around 1500 B.C.E., which coincided withthe peak time of the warm climate changed the political face of the ancient Near East. Pursuing the hated Hyksos into their own homeland, in one of his raids Thutmose I reached the Euphrates – the river that flows in reverse, an odd phenomenon and which appeared to him strange and despicable, like every- thing in Asia. When Thutmose was rebuffed by Mitanni, and thus barred from further expansion, he hunted elephants in the ’Amuq Plain in northern Syria in order to make up for his loss of face.
65M. Bietak, “Avaris and Pi-Ramesse”Proceedings of the British Academy65:225–290 (1979).
66A. Mazar,Archaeology of the Land of the Bible –10,000–586B.C.E.Doubleday, New York. pp. 239–241 (1992).
Table 4. A historical-archaeological timetable of the Near East, from 1500 to 100 B.C.E.
years
B.C.E. Egypt Syria-Palestine Mesopotamia Anatolia
100 200
Roman Period
Ptolemies Hasmonaeans
Parthians Seleucids
Roman Period Kingdom of
Pergamon 300 Hellenistic Period Near East Unified by Macedonian-Greek Civilization
“Return to Zion” Miletos Destroyed
Persian Period Near East Unified by Achaemenid Empire 400
500
600 Late (Saitic) Period 26th–30thDynasty 3rdIntermediate
Period
Neo-Babylonian Empire
Iron Age:
Lydian, Archaic Greek, Phrygian and Urartian Periods 700
21st–25th Dynasty
Iron Age II Assyrian Empire 800
(Libyan & Kushite Period)
Israelite, Neo-Hittite and Aramean Period 900
1000 Ramesside Period Iron Age I
Neo-Hittite (or Luwian) and Arame na
Kingdoms
Neo-Hittite (or Luwian)
Kingdoms 1100 19th–20thDynasty
(“Sea Peoples”) Late Bronze III Middle Babylonian
“Dark Age”
Late Bronze Age 1200
1300 New Kingdom 18thDynasty
Late Bronze II Late Bronze I
(Kassite), Middle Assyrian and Mitannian
Period
Hittite Empire Middle Hittite Period 1400
(Canaanite Period) 1500
After the interlude of the rule of Hatshepsut, the only female pharaoh, Thut- mose’s son Thutmose III (1490–139 B.C.E.) and his successor Amunhotep II (1438–1412 B.C.E.) ascended to become the greatest conquerors. During their reign the Egyptian empire became the supreme overlord of Syria-Palestine.
Egypt had now reached its high water mark, its success reflected in the charac- teristic smiling faces of royal statues of this period, when in the Egyptian view
“the world was again in order”. This artistic convention proved so powerful that it remained standard until the Greeks and neo-Hittites of Syria began copying ancient Egyptian statues complete with their well-known “archaic smile” during the Archaic Period of Greek art nearly a millennium later.
The effects of the incorporation of the Levant into the Egyptian empire, however, should not be compared with the Assyrian or Roman conquests of the region, with their systems of taxation and other extreme forms of exploita- tion. Life in the conquered territories continued very much as before, with no new order or basic changes in the social structure or the economy. The turbulence and infighting of city-states governed by independent rulers (in some cases supplemented by Egyptian “advisors”) continued after the Egyp- tian army had departed.67 The local arts, such as pottery and architecture, declined, and we see an increase of imported items and their local imita- tions.68 Egyptian influence can be seen in the development of a local linear
67Among many publications, a classic and very readable account is G. Steindorff and K.C. Seele,When Egypt Ruled the East. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1971).
68R. Amiran, op. cit. (1969).
script called Proto-Canaanite – the ancestor of the later Hebreo-Phoenician al- phabet – found on pottery at Shechem, Gezer and Lachish.69In northern Syria, a similar alphabet with the same order of letters representing the consonants, but based on cuneiform shaped letters for use on clay tablets was found at Ugarit/Ras Shamra and probably was current at other sites as well. Traditional Hurrianmigdaltemples (i.e. shrines in shape of tall towers) at Megiddo and Shechem co-existed with other types, such as the temple on Mount Gerizim near Shechem, the airport temple at ’Amman, or the fosse temple at Lachish.
An increasing Egyptian influence is seen in the development of residential and sacral architecture, in particular the so-called residences or “governors’
palaces” at some sites, and the classic tri-partite Canaanite temples found from Tell Judeideh in the ’Amuq Valley in the north to Hazor and Beit-Shean in the south – the prototype of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.70
As to be expected, the level of prosperity increases further north, as seen in the excavations of tells in northern Israel, such as Hazor, and in Lebanon and Syria at Byblos, Ugarit/Ras Shamra, Alalakh/Tell Achana, Emar/Meskene and many other sites bear testimony to the high level of art and the sophisticated lifestyle of the urban centers of the Late Bronze Age in Syria.
The term Canaanites appeared during the Late Bronze period to denote the people of the Levant. Opinions differ regarding the etymology and meaning of the term. In the Bible it refers to one of several groups of inhabitants of the land, which was promised to the Hebrews and thus ought to be destroyed.
Their worship of idols, sacrifice of children and temple prostitution were all “abominations to the Lord” and cited as additional arguments for their eradication. Another Biblical meaning for “Canaanite” is ‘merchant,’ perhaps because traders of the famous purple cloth, calledkinahhuin Hurrian sources from Nuzi,71came from the land of Canaan. This cloth, dyed purple with the sap of the murex shell, was traded throughout the Mediterranean world. If Kinahhuis derived from a Semitic root (k.n.’.) it could also mean simply “Low Land” – that is, the coastal plain and its inhabitants.
Data from the archaeological excavations show that the region went through a socioeconomic crisis from the end of the Middle Bronze Age towards the end of 17th century B.C.E. This deterioration may have weakened the hold of the Hyksos on southern Palestine and their stronghold at sites such as Sharuhen (Tell el Far’ah-South), enabling the Egyptians to stage a rebellion and regain their independence. Many of the urban centers shrank in size dra- matically, and the population of the rural hinterland diminished, if it did not disappear completely. At the same time, the same excavations revealed the existence of elaborate palaces and patrician houses, clear signs of an ever greater gap between the poor and the wealthy with the customary conse- quence: unrest and revolts. The local population suffered from the burden of
69J. Naveh,Early History of the Alphabet, Magnes Press, Jerusalem (1982).
70A. Biran, ed.,Temples and High Places in Biblical Times, Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archae- ology, Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem (1981).
M. Ottoson,Temples and Cult Places in Palestine, Almqvist and Wicksel, Uppsala (1980).
71CAD, vol. 8, 379 (1970).
taxes and corvee labor72 from which the Egyptianized elite was, of course, exempted.
The letters found at Tell el Amarna in Egypt vividly portray the political situation in the Levant in the 14th century B.C.E. – many small city-states headed by kings under the loose control of Egypt, all fighting each other, complaining and asking for help from the Egyptian suzerain in their quarrels.
In the background is the threat of the ‘Apiru/Habiru, pastoral nomads who were increasingly gaining a hold in the region their ranks swelled by some locals.73 Whether these ‘Apiru/Habiru are the forerunners of the Hebrew- Israelite settlers and included the later Biblical ‘Children of Israel’ is a question still under debate. What is obvious from the letters is that they infiltrated the sown land and, using a strategy of “divide and conquer” entering into agreements with some of the petty kings to fight their competitors, just as pastoral nomads always interfered in the affairs of their sedentary neighbors (see Appendix III). Between them and the invading Sea Peoples at the be- ginning of the 12th century B.C.E. the fate of the southern Canaanites was sealed: whether it was a finale crescendo or a whimpering out is an open question.
In Anatolia, after a period of turmoil and relentless wars with the Hurrians in the eastern and southern part of the country following the death of Mur- silis I, the Hittite warrior aristocracy adopted the dynastic principle based on the “Edict of Telepinus” around 1500 B.C.E. They increasingly supported the so-called “Great Family” at Hattusas, whose leaders began to style themselves
“My Sun”, i.e. supreme emperor. Cities were rebuilt and fortified, their social order foreshadowing the constitutions of later Greek polis – one of the many enigmatic links with the later periods. The energetic rulers introduced new agricultural systems, most probably abetted by a warmer, more benign climate, when it comes to the Anatolian Plateau. Suppiluliumas I (1370–1330 B.C.E.) was the greatest of these rulers. He reorganized the army, defeated the Hurri- ans, occupied their southern kingdom of Kizzuwatna (the modern Cilicia) and married a Hurrian princess, the famous Tawananna Pudu-hepa, who became empress in her own right and introduced the Great Hurrian pantheon depicted on the rocks of Yazilikaya near Hattusas. He pressed into Syria, defeated the kingdom of Mitanni, and established a secondary capital at Carchemish on the Euphrates, but died of the bubonic plague, along with many of his country- men. His successor, Mursilis II, conquered large areas of Syria and northern Mesopotamia and annexed most of the Hurrian principalities along the rain- fed valleys descending from the Anti-Taurus. This expansion, however, led to unavoidable clashes with the Egyptians, climaxing with the famous battle of Qadesh in 1296, where Ramses II claimed victory, even though he escaped just by the skin of his teeth. This battle is the main subject of the depictions on his temples at Luxor, Karnak, Abu Simbel, the Ramaseum on the West Bank of Thebes and other sites throughout Egypt, which still can be seen. In 1278,
72S. Bunimovitz, “On the Edge of Empires – Late Bronze Age (1500–1200 BCE)” in: T.E. Levy op. cit., pp. 320–331 (1998).
73J.B. Pritchard op. cit. pp. 262–277 (1973).