Ancient Iraq (32 page)

Israelites and Phoenicians

So familiar are we with the Bible that for most of us no more than a brief outline of early Hebraic history is needed here. We have already seen (p. 239) that Abraham and his family came from Ur in Sumer to Hebron in Canaan, probably about 1850
B.C
., and there are good reasons for placing Joseph's migration to Egypt during the Hyksôs period (1700 – 1580
B.C
.). For at least four centuries those who now called themselves ‘Israelites’ lived, multiplied and prospered in the Nile delta, until they were driven out by a Pharaoh ‘whose heart the Lord had hardened’ – more probably Ramesses II (1304 – 1237
B.C
.) than his successor Mernephtah.
³
A man of supreme intelligence and powerful personality, the first great religious reformer in the history of humanity, Moses united the Israelites around the cult of a unique and universal God, led their long march across the Sinai peninsula and died when they reached the threshold of the ‘Promised Land’. Joshua was their next leader, but the conquest of Canaan was in fact achieved by each of the twelve tribes fighting for its own territory under elected chiefs or ‘Judges’ and must have taken at least a hundred years. The formation of an Israelite kingdom under Saul and the victories won by David (1010 – 970
B.C
.) over the Philistines, the Canaanites and the states lying east of the Jordan (Amon, Edom and Moab) consecrated the supremacy in Palestine of Abraham's progeny. Allowances being made for Oriental emphasis, the reign of Solomon was a period of considerable glory for the young nation.
⁴
For the first time in history Palestine obeyed one
ruler whose authority extended ‘from Dan (at the foot of mount Hermon) to Beersheba (on the border of Negeb)’. Jerusalem, formerly a small, unimportant town, took the rank of capital-city, and nearly 200,000 workmen – so we are told – took part in the building of its temple. The Israelite army was armed with weapons of iron and well provided with horses and chariots. From Ezion-Geber, near Akaba, Solomon's ships sailed down the Red Sea and returned from Arabia and Ethiopia loaded with gold. The King himself, though credited with proverbial wisdom, lived in a sumptuous palace among ‘seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines’. Such extravagance was more than this small and austere nation could stand financially and morally. The glorious reign ended in revolts, and after Solomon's death (931
B.C
.) the kingdom was divided by plebiscite into two parts: Israel in the north, with Samaria for capital city, Judah in the south, still commanded from Jerusalem. The period of united monarchy had lasted a bare century.

To the north-west of Israel the Canaanites of Lebanon and of the Syrian coast – the ‘Phoenicians’ as the Greeks were later to call them – were among the first victims of the great turmoil of the twelfth century. The richest of their cities, Ugarit, was for ever destroyed by the Peoples of the Sea,
⁵
while the great emporium of timber, Byblos, already ravaged by local wars during the el-Amarna period, was ruined by the decadence of its traditional client Egypt under the successors of Ramesses III. But by 1000
B.C.
the situation in that area had taken a turn for the better. Because of their position at the points where the roads crossing the Lebanon mountains reach the sea, Arvad (Ruâd island), Sidunu (Sidon, modern Saida) and Sûri (Tyre, modern Sûr) had become the ports of the powerful Aramaean kingdoms of central Syria, and the southernmost of these towns, Tyre, benefited from the proximity of the Israelites, whom it supplied with timber, expert craftsmen and sailors.
⁶
The three cities soon grew rich on this trade and formed the new political and economic centres of Phoenicia.

The Syro-Lebanese coast has always been the meeting-point of Europe and Asia. At the dawn of the first millennium
B.C
. two thousand years of intimate contact with the Cretans, Mycenaeans and Cypriots, on the one hand, and with all the nations of the Near East, on the other, had resulted in the development of a composite but brilliant Phoenician civilization.
⁷
The main contribution of the Phoenicians to the cultural treasure of humanity was undoubtedly the invention of the alphabet, which was taken, in modified forms, by the Greeks throughout Europe and the Aramaeans throughout Western Asia, where it eventually superseded all previous syllabic and ideographic writing systems. The exact date and place of invention are thorny problems which need not be touched upon here, however briefly,
⁸
but we should at least mention that of the three alphabets simultaneously in use on the Mediterranean coast during the last quarter of the second millennium – the ‘classical’ and the ‘pseudo-hieroglyphic’ alphabets of Byblos and the ‘cuneiform’ alphabet of Ras-Shamra (Ugarit) – the last named served as a support for a copious and extremely interesting literature, the discovery of which has considerably enlarged and modified our ideas on ancient Canaanite religion and mythology.
⁹
In the domain of the arts the Phoenicians were perhaps not so creatively minded, but proved excellent pupils. Inspired by Aegean and Egyptian artists, their craftsmen were unrivalled in the Near East, at least during the first millennium
B.C
. They wove beautiful clothes, which they embroidered or dyed with the famous Sidonian purple, made vials of translucent glass, chiselled delicate jewels, carved exquisite ivories and were masters in wood- and metal-work. Their own country produced, besides timber, well-reputed wine and oil. All this formed a light, yet valuable cargo which the Phoenicians, sailors at heart, could now carry around the world themselves, the Dorian invasion of Greece having liberated the sea from its former masters, the Mycenaeans. Soon Tyrians, Sidonians and Arva-dites became the leaders of an astonishing movement of maritime and colonial expansion which reached its peak between
the ninth and the sixth centuries
B.C
. with the foundation of Carthage (814
B.C
.), the creation of numerous warehouses in Malta, Sicily and Spain, and the exploration of the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa.

The Neo-Hittites

Proceeding northward along the Mediterranean shore we reach in the extreme north of Syria the realm of the people called ‘Hieroglyphic Hittites’ or, more simply, ‘Neo-Hittites’.
¹⁰
These terms require some explanation. We know that the Hittites who had Hattusas (Boghazköy) for capital-city used a cuneiform script borrowed from Mesopotamia to write on clay tablets their Indo-European language. But at the same time another kind of script was used in Asia Minor to write on rock or stone official or religious inscriptions. This script consisted of drawings or hieroglyphs bearing no relation to the archaic Sumerian pictograms nor to the Egyptian or Cretan hieroglyphs. Many such inscriptions also appear in various sites of the Taurus mountains and of northern Syria in association with monuments which can be dated from the first centuries of the first millennium
B.C.
, i.e. after the fall of the Hittite empire. The decipherment of hieroglyphic Hittite by various scholars – confirmed and completed by the discovery in 1947 of bilingual Phoenician-Hittite inscriptions at Kara Tepe, in Cilicia
¹¹
– has shown that the language of these inscriptions was a dialectal variety of Luwian, the Luwians being one of the more or less closely related Indo-European-speaking peoples which entered Asia Minor at the beginning of the second millennium. It looks, therefore, as though in the great reshuffling of population which took place in the twelfth century the Luwians, who originally occupied the south-western part of Asia Minor, had moved, or been pushed, southward and eastward and had established themselves in the southern provinces of the former Hittite empire, provinces which had been spared by the Phrygians and by-passed by the Peoples of the sea. But this, of course, is
highly conjectural. Moreover, it should be emphasized that there was no break in the transmission of Hittite culture in those regions, and that the term ‘Neo-Hittite’ is no more than a convenient appellation. The Hittite influence brought into Syria by Suppiluliumas and his predecessors outlived them by nearly five hundred years.

From the tenth century onwards a compact mosaic of Neo-Hittite kingdoms covered the territory comprised between the Taurus range and the Orontes river, forming what the Assyrians called
Hatti or Great Hatti
– (the province of Antioch is still called ‘Hatay’ by the Turks). Starting from the north, we find in the heart of the Taurus mountains about twelve city-states forming the confederation of Tabal (the
Tubal
of the Bible) and along the Upper Euphrates, the kingdom of Kummanu with Milid (modern Malatiya) for capital-city. Then come Kummuhu, the classical Commagene, and Gurgum around the town of Marqasi (Marash). Farther west the rich plain of Cilicia is occupied by the Danuna-folk, who obey the King of Ataniya (Adana) and hold sway over the surrounding highlanders. To the north of Aleppo lie Ya'diya (capital Sam'al, modern Zencirli) in the Amanus moutains, and Karkemish and Til-Barsip (Tell Ahmar), which command the passage of the Euphrates. Aleppo itself, so often taken and lost by the Mitannians and the Hittites, had lost much of its importance to Arpad, while Alalah, in the ‘Amuq plain (
Hattina
), was governed first from ‘Azaz, then from the as yet unidentified city of Kunalua. Finally, hieroglyphic inscriptions found at Hama testify to periodical occupation of the city by the Neo-Hittites.

Excavations at Zencirli, Sakçe-Gözü, Karkemish, Tell Tayanat and, more recently, Kara Tepe (ancient Azitawandas) have shed considerable light on the art and architecture of the Neo-Hittites and enable us to understand the resistance encountered by the Assyrians when they tried to overthrow these small but very strong kingdoms. The towns, roughly circular in plan, were protected by a double, massive wall: an outer wall around the lower town and an inner wall around the acropolis. The
royal palace, in the centre of the city, often had its entrance preceded by a portico of wooden columns resting on stone bases sculptured with crouching lions and sphinxes. Its plan was usually of the type called by the Assyrians
bit hilâni
: a series of oblong rooms, one behind the other, the long sides of which ran parallel with the front of the building. The avenue leading to the acropolis as well as the façade of the palace were decorated with sculptured slabs of basalt or limestone lining the lower part of the walls. The subjects most commonly represented on these ‘orthostats’ are hunting scenes, royal banquets and marching soldiers, frequently intermingled with hieroglyphic inscriptions. The sculptures are too often crude and unskilled, though not devoid of movement and life, and some indeed attain a high standard of barbaric beauty. Most archaeologists agree that we meet here with a provincial version of Hittite art tempered with Assyrian, Egyptian and even Aegean influences.

The Neo-Hittite kingdoms flourished from the tenth to the eighth centuries
B.C.
and their full history will be revealed when all the hieroglyphic Hittite inscriptions are accurately translated and published. Between 745 and 708
B.C.
they fell one by one into Assyrian hands
¹²
and disappeared as independent states, but long before that date some of them had already yielded to their immediate neighbours, the Aramaeans.

The Aramaeans

As usual in such matters, the problem of Aramaean origin is a very difficult one.
¹³
The Aramaean language, or Aramaic, belongs, like Canaanite and Hebrew, to the north-western group of Semitic dialects, but on many points shows strong affinities with Arabic, which might perhaps suggest that the Aramaeans originated or had lived in Arabia. On the other hand, there are several reasons to believe that their homeland was the Syrian desert and the Fertile Crescent, and it must be recalled that the memory of a close, though unspecified, ethnic relationship between Aramaeans and Hebrews has been preserved in the
Bible, where Jacob (Israel) himself is once qualified as a ‘wandering Aramaean’.
¹⁴
At what period the Aramaeans made their first appearance in cuneiform inscriptions is another debatable point. In texts of the Akkadian, Ur III and Old Babylonian periods occasional mention is made of a city
Arami
and of individuals by the name of
Aramu
, but since this may be no more than a phonetic resemblance, two dates only must be considered: the fourteenth or the twelfth century, depending upon the acceptance of some kind of relationship between the Aramaeans and the Ahlamû. The Ahlamû are first mentioned in a mutilated letter from el-Amarna alluding to the King of Babylon; during the same period their presence is attested in Assyria, at Nippur and even at Dilmun (Bahrain), and we have seen (p. 263) that Shalmaneser I defeated the Hurrians and their Hittite and Ahlamû allies in Jazirah. In the following century they cut the road from Babylon to Hattusas, and Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244 – 1208
B.C.
) claims that he conquered Mari, Hana and Rapiqum on the Euphrates and ‘the mountains of the Ahlamû’.
¹⁵
We are thus confronted with a confederation of troublesome tribes active in the Syrian desert, along the Euphrates and about the Persian Gulf, at least from the fourteenth century
B.C.
But an inscription of Tiglathpileser I (1115-1077
B.C.
) refers for the first time to the ‘Ahlamû-Aramaeans’ (
Ahlamé Armaia
),
¹⁶
and from then on the Ahlamû rapidly disappear from Assyrian annals to be replaced by the Aramaeans (
Aramû, Arimi
). In the text just quoted the word
Armaia
is ‘gentilic’ (adjective), and the expression could be translated ‘(Those of) the Ahlamû (who are) Aramaean‘, in which case we might be entitled to consider the Aramaeans as an important and in time dominant faction of the Ahlamû tribes. It is possible, however, that the two peoples had nothing in common, but operated in the same area and were regarded by the sedentary Mesopotamians as one and the same detestable desert folk.

In any case, there can be no doubt that the Aramaeans were established in Syria as early as the eleventh century
B.C.
We read in the Bible that Saul, David and Solomon fought against
the Aramaean kingdoms which lay across the northern frontier of Israel: Aram-Sôbah in the
Beq'a,
Aram-Bêt-Rehob and Aram-Ma‘akah around Mount Hermon, Geshur in the Hauran, and the state which was soon to govern them all: Damascus (
Dimashqa, Dammesheq
). Farther north the Aramaeans were in possession of Hama on the Orontes and were soon to become strong enough to dissociate the Neo-Hittite block. During the tenth or the ninth century they conquered Sam'al (Zencirli), the region of Aleppo which they renamed Bit-Agushi, and Til-Barsip, which became the chief town of Bît-Adini. Only the plain of Antioch (Pattina) and Karkemish remained Hittite in Syrian land. At the same time the Aramaeans invaded the steppe to the east of the Euphrates, where they settled in such numbers that the whole region became known as
Aram Naharaim
, ‘Aram of the Rivers’. One of their earliest kingdoms in Mesopotamia was Bit-Bahiâni, which had for capital-city the very ancient site of Tell Halaf abandoned since proto-historic times (see above, p. 55) and now called Guzana. The Aramaean progression in Mesopotamia will be described later. For the present we would simply like to draw attention to the names of the Aramaean kingdoms, usually formed with the word
bît(u)
, ‘house’, followed by the name of an ancestor. Despite the apparent similarity with our ‘House of Hanover‘, ‘House of Windsor’ and so forth, we have here a typically tribal way of expressing land ownership: the state, the ‘kingdom’ is both the territory around the tent (or house) of the chief and all the chief's relatives forming the clan.

Whether merchants, peasants, shepherds, soldiers or bandits, the Aramaeans were originally uncouth bedouins and contributed nothing to the civilizations of the Near East. Whatever their ancestral religion, it appears from their inscriptions as well as from their own names that they worshipped Sumero-Akkadian and Canaanite gods, such as Hadad (Adad), the storm-god, El, the supreme deity of Canaan, Sin, Ishtar (whom they called ‘Attar), the Phoenician goddess ‘Anat (‘Atta) and others. Nor was there originality in the field of the arts, the
Aramaeans following the traditions of the countries where they settled. The King of Damascus, for instance, employed Phoenician sculptors and ivory-carvers, and Sam‘al under its new masters retained all the features of a Neo-Hittite city. Archaeological excavations at Tell Halaf-Guzana have brought to light the palace of Kapara, an Aramaean ruler who probably lived at the beginning of the ninth century
B.C
.
¹⁷
It was a building of the
bît hilani
type, decorated with orthostats perhaps cruder than the contemporary sculptures of northern Syria, and with strange-looking, almost morbid statues which, on analysis, display a mixture of Mesopotamian, Hittite and Hurrian influences, as would be expected in a region – the Khabur valley – where the three cultures converged.

Yet to these barbaric Aramaeans befell the privilege of imposing their language upon the entire Near East. They owed it partly to the sheer weight of their number and partly to the fact that they adopted, instead of the cumbersome cuneiform writing, the Phoenician alphabet slightly modified, and carried everywhere with them the simple, practical script of the future. As early as the eighth century
B.C.
Aramaic language and writing competed with the Akkadian language and script in Assyria, and thereafter gradually spread throughout the Orient.
¹⁸
About 500
B.C.
, when the Achaemenian monarchs looked for a tongue which could be understood by all their subjects, they chose Aramaic, which became the
lingua franca
of their vast empire. At the close of the pre-Christian era Sumerian and even Hebrew were already dead languages, Akkadian was dying and Greek, introduced by the Macedonian conquerors, was mostly used for official purposes, but Aramaic – the language spoken by Jesus – reigned unchallenged as the common dialect of all the peoples of the Near East and was to remain so until the Arab invasion (seventh century
A.D.
). The Arabic script itself derives from a cursive form of Aramaic, as do all present and past alphabets used in Asia. Moreover, during the sixth century
A.D.
the Aramaic language gave birth in northern Mesopotamia to the extremely rich Syriac literature which the
Nestorian missionaries carried as far as Mongolia, and Syriac has survived as the liturgic tongue of several Oriental Churches. Indeed, Aramaic dialects are still spoken in some parts of the Near East, in particular among the Christian communities of northern Iraq. Few languages in the world can claim such a long and continuous tradition.

But it is time for us to return to our subject, Iraq, which we have left at the end of the Kassite dynasty, nearly twelve hundred years before Christ.