The Middle East: Crucible of Nations (Part 1)
How and why the Middle East was a veritable storm of ethnic and cultural dynamism throughout ancient up until modern times. (Part 1 will go right up to the Achaemenid Persian conquests)
Table of Contents:
This is going to be a huge article, “huge” being in relative terms here, as a full discussion of the topic of this article, in all its width, breadth, depth, complexities, and nuances, would likely require several book volumes. This will also, unfortunately, be rather lightly sourced (much of it shamelessly copied over from Wikipedia, for which I will apologize in advance), because the amount of texts I would need to cite to give this topic full justice would require an entire bibliography, and I’d rather this be an “introductory” series of articles to the subject at hand. If I end up oversimplifying or overlooking some important things, I must apologize in advance.
In our current day and age, the Middle East is often seen as a realm as sterile culturally as it is geographically, filled as it is with Arabic-speaking authoritarians and dictatorships, failing states, Islamic religious extremists, ultra-rich oil sheikhs running around ordering vanity projects built by de facto slave labor, fights and skirmishes between socialist-nationalist (national socialist?) Kurds and increasingly aggressive Anatolian Turks, an atrocity-filled horrorshow in Yemen, and decades of a de facto cold war between an oil-rich Sunni quasi-caliphate ran by Najdi Arab tribes and a wholly parasitic Shia Islamist mullah-oligarchy that sees a historically great land as merely a host with which it can expand its influence, this cold war recently appearing to be to reaching its end. Both states in this cold war are (or were) fond of sponsoring militant/terrorist groups to engage in proxy wars against their rivals, and funding various varieties of Islamic extremism in general, which only led to the increasing destabilization of the region. Good times for all involved.
The sole beacon of anything vaguely resembling peace, prosperity, and a government that can be said to represent the interests of its common people, in a veritable sea of chaos, corruption, misery, (state-sponsored) terrorism, and despotism, is a Jewish-majority state that, while otherwise disproportionately successful given the situation it finds itself in, is a perpetual motion machine in terms of attracting controversy, whether for the “right” or “wrong” reasons. The level of propaganda levied against that Jewish-majority state should be considered in the fact that it’s often called an “apartheid state”, despite the fact that the people its supposed to be keeping “apart” from the majority Jewish population are allowed to comingle and interact with them up to the very highest levels of society1.
However, the current abysmal status the Middle East finds itself in was not always so. Indeed, in various times past, the Middle East could be argued to be the very center of the Afro-Eurasian world in many respects, with a long and venerable history of intertwining civilizational development, ethnogenesis, syncretism, new religious movements, custom and tradition formation, and so much more. It led to a bewildering swirl of ethnic, religious, and cultural identities, some lasting for centuries, other dying out within decades. To understand how the Middle East worked and continues to work, one needs a deep dive into its ethnographic, religious, and cultural history.
And what better to start that off with, than ancient Mesopotamia?
Note: historians and scholars typically use the term “ancient Near East” when speaking about the Middle East in ancient times, but since I like the term “Middle East” more, I’ll just keep using that, interchangeably with “Near East”.
MESOPOTAMIA
Mesopotamia is where one of the world’s earliest written appearances of urban civilization popped up, being one of the four great river valley civilizations alongside Neolithic China, the Indus Valley, and Egypt.
Notice how it says “written appearances” in the above paragraph, because archeology indicates to us that the Mesopotamians themselves were formed by a conglomeration of four Chalcolithic cultures: the Halaf culture, the Hassuna culture, the Samarra culture, and the Ubaid culture, with the Ubaid culture ending up predominating over the others. That’s already four different cultures comingling with each other, before being subsumed into one greater culture. Whether this also led to a mingling of peoples, I cannot say (I simply don’t have enough information on that topic), but it does seem likely to me. This was the period when the first identifiable villages developed in the region, with some villages (e.g. Eridu) even growing to become towns, with monumental buildings in them. This was the period when the marshes were drained for agriculture, trade started to come about, and the weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery industries were first developed in Mesopotamia.
Now, the Ubaid period lasted from around 5500 to 3800 BC, ending upon the slow but steady rise of the city-state of Uruk beginning in 4000 BC. The Uruk period is incredibly important not only for Mesopotamia, but the Middle East as a whole, for it is from this period when the first unambiguously recognizably “Sumerian” people and civilization emerge. It is from this period that the first links between Mesopotamia and Egypt were made. It is from this period that one sees the development of writing, from the purely pictographic proto-writing of proto-cuneiform during the early Uruk period, to the logo-syllabic cuneiform script proper of the late Uruk period and the coming of the Early Bronze Age. It is from this period that we see the invention of the wheel, increasing urbanization and the formation of the first (city) states, the mass adoption of the ard plough, the perfection of molded mud-brick architecture (waterproofed with bitumen, with gypsum as mortar), the development of metallurgy (hence the end of the Uruk period being the beginning of the Bronze Age), the development of accounting and bureaucratic tools (and concurrent explosion of “symbolic technology” - the signs, images, symbolic designs and abstract numbers used to more effectively manage a complex society), the further development of pottery with the potter’s wheel, and so much more besides.
The Uruk-Sumerians were massively influential in their time, bringing every neighboring region, from Susiana to Upper Mesopotamia to northern Syria to even southeast Anatolia into their orbit. The Uruk-Sumerians at the time were ruled by ensi, or priest-kings, who were assisted by councils of elders, both men and women. In all likelihood, the structure of the later Sumerian pantheon was modeled after this system.
It should be noted that despite the clear continuity between the Ubaid and Uruk periods, it is commonly theorized that the Sumerians themselves were not initially native to the region, with Indus Valley2 or Caucasian/Hurro-Urartian3 connections being suggested for them, and the “Ubaidians”/“Proto-Euphrateans” (the people of the Ubaid period) being considered to predate them. Of course, this theory is contested by several scholars, which instead argue that the Sumerians came from what we now know as Eastern Arabia, but in very ancient Mesopotamian times was known as Dilmun4. It should be noted that the Sumerians themselves never make any mention of any preexisting peoples before them, and I personally think that the Sumerians straightforwardly developed from the Ubaidians, and were actually indigenous to the region. But if the Sumerians actually were initially migrants that then absorbed a formerly distinct Ubaidian people, then it follows into another thing that will be discussed later in this article.
The Uruk period went through its course, and was then superseded by the Jemdet Nasr period (circa 3100 BC to 2900 BC). A local development out of the preceding Uruk period, the Jemdet Nasr period was notable largely for its distinctive painted monochrome and polychrome pottery and the further development of the cuneiform script, and it is otherwise little more than a transitory period between the Uruk period and the Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia, save for the emergence of the neighboring Proto-Elamite culture (c. 3100 BC to 2700 BC), which would be of much portent for the future of the Middle East.
As for the Early Dynastic Period itself (c. 2900 to 2350 BC, according to the commonly used middle chronology of the ancient Near East), it was when the Sumerian civilization fully crystalized, Sumerian religion began to be fully codified (each city having its own major god and associated minor gods), and secular kings (lugals) were added to the administration of the priest-kings (ensi), who then became chief priests (the term ensi soon developed to mean the ruler, governor, or prince of a city-state in general, with it’s position vis-a-vis the terms lugal and the more basic en sometimes varying, and often being a topic of Assyriological debates5). The Sumerian city-states often squabbled between each other, and hegemony passed between one state and the next, but the overall culture remained remarkably uniform despite the political fragmentation.
But if the Early Dynastic Period was only notable for the squabbles of Sumerian city-states, it frankly wouldn’t be that much different from the preceding eras. No, the Early Dynastic Period was notable for the emergence of Sumer-adjacent peoples and states that would loom large in the centuries to come. From the crystallization of Elam and Elamite civilization, the arrival of the first recognizably Semitic-speaking peoples in history, the formation of extensive Indus-Mesopotamian relations, the rise of the Hurrians, and the gradual appearance of the Hattians, many groups had formed that would have a significant part to play in the wider history of the Middle East.
As for said Semitic-speaking peoples, even back then there was some development and differentiation between them. There were Old Akkadian speakers in Lower Mesopotamia, varieties of the Eblaite (or Paleo-Syrian) language in Upper Mesopotamia and Central Syria (e.g. the cities of Ebla, Mari, and Nagar), the Semitic-speaking proto-Assyrians of the Early Assyrian period (also in Upper Mesopotamia), and the Kishite language of the Sumerian city of Kish. Notably, all of these languages, which are tiny in number, are East Semitic, in contradistinction to the huge variety of West Semitic languages. This is very likely due to the immediate ancestor of the East Semitic languages being heavily influenced by Sumerian.
The Early Assyrian period itself (c. 2600 BC to 2025 BC; not to be confused with the Old Assyrian period, of course6) is very interesting, as the archaeological evidence suggests that Assur was originally inhabited by Ishtar-worshipping Hurrians, who were then either displaced or (more likely) absorbed by incoming Semitic-speaking proto-Assyrians. The very name “Assur” was not attested before the rise of the Akkadian Empire7, and it is likely that the city was originally named “Baltil”, as later Assyrian kings would use "Baltil" or "Baltila", derived from a personal name of Hurrian origin, to refer to the earliest portion of Assur, or perhaps to a preceding settlement in the same location. So in this regard, we can see that the earliest Assyrians descend from a mixture of East Semitic-speakers and Hurrians.
This ties into one of the most important facts about the ancient Near East, which I alluded to earlier in the paragraph about the theories concerning Sumerian origins and their relations to the Ubaid culture: the ethnic mixing in the Near East was intense, and I mean really intense. You had peoples that were often about as genetically different from each other as modern Italians are from the Turkmens more-or-less casually interacting with each other. With ethnic mixing came intensive cultural mixing as well, usually via the underlying framework of some more ancient civilization.
One example of just this kind of cultural blending was the rise of the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334 – 2154 BC), and the ascendancy of its first ruler, Sargon of Akkad. Uniting Akkadian and Sumerian speakers under one rule for the first time, the Akkadian Empire made its influence felt in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia, sending military expeditions as far south as Dilmun and Magan (a realm in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula), and projecting power even as far east as Elam, the newly-relevant Gutium, and Marhashi (a realm either in the southeast of modern-day Iran, modern-day Luristan, or even the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex).
There was a very deep cultural symbiosis between the Akkadians and Sumerians during this time, from not only widespread bilingualism and mutual linguistic influence (to the point of creating a Sumero-Akkadian sprachbund), but the equation of Akkadian deities to Sumerian ones, creating a larger Mesopotamian religion and mythology. The rise of the Akkadian Empire began the long process of the Semiticization of the Middle East, as Sumerian was rapidly declining as a spoken language by the time the Akkadians came to prominence, although it retained relevance as a liturgical, scientific, and literary language. The Akkadian Empire lasted for 180 years, reaching its height during the reign of Naram-Sin (who noticeably was the first Mesopotamian king recorded to claim divinity for himself) after which it suddenly started to unravel (probably due to some climatic event8), and the whole territory was conquered by the Gutians.
The Gutians (who ruled in Mesopotamia c. 2141 BC–c. 2050 BC) were a strange people, of which very little is known; very little of their language beyond the personal names of their kings; very little of their culture beyond it being apparently nomadic and illiterate; very little of their religion as well. One of the few things we do know for sure about them is that they were in Mesopotamia for at least a century before taking over the region. Another is that the Second Dynasty of the city-state of Lagash would achieve and maintain a high level independence from the Gutians, its power and wealth peaking under the reign of ensi Gudea. Yet another is that after some time of rule, the Gutians were driven out of Mesopotamia by Utu-hengal, king of Uruk, whose son-in-law, Ur-Nammu, then proceeded to found the Third Dynasty of Ur (or the Neo-Sumerian Kingdom, if you prefer). The Gutians did have a clear mark on the Mesopotamian psyche (most of it negative), and even long after their reign, various tribes and places to the east and northeast of Mesopotamia were often referred to as Gutians or Gutium, including the Medes and Mannaeans.
While all this was happening, the Third Kingdom of Mari (or Third Mariote Kingdom, if you prefer; c. 2230–2110 BC), which began as essentially an Akkadian vassal/province ruled by Shakkanakku military governors, became independent as Akkadian power collapsed. The Old Assyrian period (c. 2025 BC–c. 1364 BC; not to be confused with the Early Assyrian period, of course) kicked off during the ending decades of this time as well, as Puzur-Ashur I founded Assur as an independent city-state.
And then the Amorites invaded.
After the rise of Sumer, and then the rise of Akkad, I’d argue that the Amorite expansions were the most important and formative thing to have ever happened to not only ancient Mesopotamia, but the ancient Near East at large. The Amorites, an ancient and pastoralist Northwest Semitic-speaking people from the Levant, took over much of Mesopotamia, starting the Isin-Larsa period (c. 2025–1763 BC) characterized by the political prominence (but not unquestioned hegemony) of the cities Isin and Larsa, as well as nearly every dynasty in this period having an Amorite origin. The Third Mariote Kingdom was conquered by Amorites. The Third Eblaite Kingdom (c. 2000 bc–c. 1600 bc) was practically founded by Amorites. The First Kingdom of Babylon (c. 1894 BC – 1595 BC) was founded by Amorites, reaching its peak under Hammurabi. The kingdom of Yamhad (c. 1810 BC–c. 1517 BC) was founded by Amorites, who then mixed with the Hurrians that settled into the region. Even the Assyrians soon came to be ruled by the Amorite-descended Shamshi-Adad dynasty during the Old Assyrian period.
The only states in Mesopotamia not founded or run by Amorites during this time were the Akkadian-speaking First Sealand dynasty (tentatively dated c. 1732–1475 using the short chronology of the ancient Middle East) and the Sukkalmah dynasty at the tail-end of the Old Elamite period (c. 1900-1500 BC for the dynasty itself; c. 2700 – c. 1500 BC for the period as a whole). The Amorites were so important to the region that they even got their own national deity in the form of Amurru/Martu, who developed as a sort of divine personification and stereotype of the Amorites among more “native” Mesopotamians (hence his initial association with steppes and pastoralism, although he gradually developed other functions, becoming known as a god of the mountains, a warlike weather deity and a divine exorcist). The Amorites are even important to ancient Israelite history, being mentioned in the Bible as inhabitants of Canaan both before and after the conquest of the land under Joshua.
The Amorites, in spite of their Levantine and nomadic origins, quickly acculturated to Mesopotamian civilization. They spoke Akkadian and Sumerian alongside Amorite, combined Mesopotamian religion with Levantine religion, and combined nomadic military power with settled political traditions, thus strengthening and solidifying a cultural continuum between the Levant and Mesopotamia that we still see even to today. It was under the Amorites that Lower Mesopotamia starts being referred to as “Babylonia” in modern historiography (the Babylonians themselves referred to their country as “Māt Akkadī”, a deliberate archaism derived from the self-name of the Akkadian Empire, which the Babylonians considered their states to be the successors of).
The Amorites seemed to have been part of a wave of general (West) Semitic expansions, as we start to hear of other nomadic Semitic peoples roaming around in the region and neighboring regions as well, including the Suteans (who too had their own national goddess, called “Sutītu”), the Shutu, the Shasu, the Ahlamu, and the Habiru. A bit later on, and we also hear of something else: the Kingdom of Mittani.
The Kingdom of Mitanni (c. 1600 BC – c. 1260 BC) was a majority Hurrian-speaking state that popped up in the intersection between Upper Mesopotamia and Northern Syria. that ended up subjugating Assyria (thus adding Akkadian and Amorite-speakers into the mix). It is often noted that at least some portion of the Mitanni society had some type of relation to the Aryans (Indo-Iranians), with the names of certain kings, gods, people, and technical subjects for chariot horse training providing evidence for an Aryan influence on the Hurrian language9. We'll deal with the Mitanni-Aryan connections later.
The First Babylonian Kingdom was shattered when the Mursili I, king of the Hittites (an Indo-European Anatolian people that we’ll get to later), launched an epic raid down the Euphrates River, bypassing Assyria, sacking Mari and Babylon, and ejecting the Amorite rulers from the region. Rulership of the area was then turned over to the Kassites (people who spoke a currently unclassified language and were allies to the Hittites at the time), who proceeded to rule Lower Mesopotamia for about four centuries (lasting c. 1595 BC — c. 1155 BC; the Kassites even had their own pair of national deities: Kaššû and Kaššītu, respectively male and female), in which they thoroughly blended their own culture with the preexisting Mesopotamian one. In fact, the Kassite period marked the apogee of the spread of Mesopotamian culture, as cuneiform script and Akkadian language became the common script and lingua franca of diplomatic correspondence across the entire ancient Middle East.
The Hittites themselves never assumed direct control over Babylon, probably because ruling over such a wide area (from Anatolia to Lower Mesopotamia) stretched their logistics too thin. The Hittites did take the western parts of the Mitanni Kingdom, which was reduced to a rump state by Hittite raids and the Assyrians becoming independent again.
Elam entered the its Middle Elamite period (c. 1500 – c. 1100 BC) at around the same time, which went its course until peaking during the Shutrukid dynasty, which, in conjunction with the Assyrians (who were entering the Middle Assyrian Kingdom phase of their history), began ravaging the Kassite state of the Middle Babylonian period, taking and subjugating various parts of Lower Mesopotamia.
Speaking of the Middle Assyrian Kingdom (c. 1363 BC–912 BC), it took the eastern parts of the Mitanni Kingdom (and then conquered the remaining Mitanni rump state), vassalized Babylon, and generally became the predominant power in Mesopotamia (and Northeast Syria), with a population that spoke Akkadian (by then evolving into a distinct “Assyrian” dialect in Middle Assyria, and “Babylonian” dialect in Babylonia), Hurrian, Amorite, and Elamite. This stew of peoples came about due to the militarism of the Assyrians, and their policy of deporting the various peoples they conquered to other parts of the Assyrian realm. This led to a sort of “jumbling up” of nations, as contacts between the Assyrians and formerly foreign groups grew ever-closer, and people belonging to originally foreign ethnicities often contributed with manpower.
Those foreign ethnicities often assimilated into an “Assyrian” ethnic identity, as the Middle Assyrian Kingdom was rather “loose” and open as to what exactly an “Assyrian” was. As long as you fulfilled your obligations (such as military service), affiliated yourself to Assyria, and affirmed your loyalties to the Assyrian king, you were an Assyrian, regardless of your linguistic or ethnic background. This also allowed the Middle Assyrian Kingdom to thoroughly enrich its own culture, as each conquered people contributed to Assyrian cultural developments with their own cultural traditions. All in all, it was quite good to be an Assyrian during those times.
And then, between c. 1200 and 1150, the Late Bronze Age collapse happened.
While other states were busy collapsing, contracting, or generally severely declining, Assyria not only survived, but thrived, it’s influence even going so far as the Levant, southern Anatolia, and ancient Cyprus. In fact, after the upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse passed by, Assyria began the developments that would soon turn it into a regional (if not pan-Eurasian) superpower.
In Lower Mesopotamia (Babylonia), however, things were quite different. Aside from alternating periods of Assyrian and Elamite subjugation, Lower Mesopotamia began to be flooded with Northwest Semitic-speaking Arameans, Suteans, and Chaldeans, their unchecked migrations bringing irreversible linguistic changes to the region. I’d say “demographic” too, but Lower Mesopotamians at this point were already a thoroughly mixed multitude anyway, and those West Semitic-speakers who came in acclimated quickly enough to Lower Mesopotamian cultural patterns.
The Arameans themselves, like many (more) of the Amorite-adjacent Northwest Semitic-speakers, came into historical prominence in the Near East during and after the Bronze Age collapse. Either direct lineal descendants or descendants of a subgroup of the Ahlamu (even getting a national goddess by the name “Aḫlamayītu”), the Arameans, so far as their activities in Mesopotamia went, were usually little more than raiding and plundering tribal bands. However, this proved more than able to continually confound the Assyrians, who were initially ill-able to handle Aramean guerrilla tactics. However, even though many Aramean tribes fought against the Assyrians, others traded with the Assyrians. Indeed, several Aramean tribes, towards the end of the Middle Assyrian period, had begun to settle and become well-established within Assyrian borders, adding Aramaic-speakers to the Assyrian melting pot.
As an aside, it is hypothesized in many places that there’s a particular connection between the Arameans and the Amorites, as well as the Suteans, as all three groups have been associated with the label of “Ahlamu”. These hypotheses sometimes go all the way to claiming direct lineal continuity between the Amorites and the Arameans (and Suteans)10, with one paper even suggesting a connection between the Amorites, Arameans, and ancient Hebrews11.
Elam was also entering it’s Neo-Elamite period (c. 1100 – 540 BC) during this time, the earlier parts of which very little is known, beyond unsuccessful alliances between Elam and Babylonians, Chaldeans, and other peoples against a growing Assyria. The Mannaeans (a minor people linguistically related to the Hurrians and Urartians [who we’ll talk about later], with maybe some Kassite admixture as well) also became known during this period, but they were mostly irrelevant, and were fast absorbed by the Iranian peoples that would later come into the region.
As for Assyria itself, it was beginning to enter its final and greatest era as an independent state: the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911 BC–609 BC). Conquering the entire Fertile Crescent, the southeastern Anatolia, the Syrian Desert, Egypt, and parts of the southern Caucasus and modern-day Iran, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the largest and most powerful state the world had ever known up to that point. The Neo-Assyrian Empire owed its (at the time) unprecedented success not only to the expansive military might and innovations of the Assyrians, but their ability to innovate administratively and civically as well, efficiently incorporating conquered lands into their administrative system. Roads were built, sophisticated state communications developed, large-scale use of cavalry and new siege warfare techniques were being made and mastered, and a resettlement policy was utilized even more extensively than in the Middle Assyrian Empire.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire made its mark on the Near East in many different ways, with its political structures and claims to universal rule being a model for the later empires that would come after it. The resettlement policy of the Neo-Assyrian state led to an even further “jumbling up” of ethnicities than before, to the point that it facilitated a dilution of the cultural diversity of the Near East, with Aramaic quickly replacing the collective dialects of Akkadian as the lingua franca of the whole region, as the ethnolinguistic composition of many peoples in the Fertile Crescent quickly became “Arameanizaed”/“Aramaized”, with those resettled close to or within the Assyrian homelands being encouraged to adopt an “Assyrian” identity instead. Indeed, the larger “Assyrianization” (as opposed to “just” the Arameanization) of the Middle East was the whole point of this policy, as the Neo-Assyrian government encouraged the intermingling of resettled peoples and native inhabitants where they lived in order to abolish their previous ethnic and religious identity in favor of a new shared "Assyrian" identity.
Interestingly enough, the Assyrians rarely considered their resettlement policy to be a punishment, or even necessarily a bad thing, but rather an attractive opportunity for peoples whose original homes were often devastated or destroyed in warfare with Assyria, with the resettlement being done through a careful and complex selection process, the peoples resettled being transported in relative comfort, and those resettled being allowed to continue living with their families.
At around the time that Assyria was most thoroughgoingly expanding, Elam and its surrounding areas began to be positively inundated with a deluge of Iranian peoples, including (but not limited to) the Medes, the Parthians, the Sagartians, the Scythians12, the Cimmerians, and a little-known people called the Parsu, also known as the Persians. This was just as well, in any case, as Elam was soon epically sacked by Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who actively boasted of the destruction he wrought on Elam. Ashurbanipal also vassalized these Elam-adjacent Iranian peoples, who seemed to have not liked the experience very much, as we’ll soon see.
Pretty much the moment that Ashurbanipal died, the Neo-Assyrian Empire started to completely fall apart, being shredded by an unexpected alliance between rebellious Babylonians, invading Iranian peoples (including the Medes, Persians, Cimmerians, and Scythians), and internal unrest (up to and including civil warfare) among the Assyrians themselves. This all culminated in the Fall of Nineveh (612 BC), the Fall of Harran (610-609 BC), and the Medo-Babylonian partitioning of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which formed the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Median Kingdom.
Now, the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626 BC–539 BC) was not ruled by a “native” Babylonian dynasty, but a Chaldean one. At least, it is commonly assumed to be such, given that, Nabopolassar, the founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is described as coming from southernmost Mesopotamia, where the Chaldeans were a predominant ethnic group. Either way, the Neo-Babylonian Empire ruled over most of the Fertile Crescent, save Egypt (which, under its “twenty-sixth dynasty”, regained its independence from the Neo-Assyrian Empire during the reign of Ashurbanipal), and achieved unprecedented economic and population growth throughout Babylonia, as it soon reached its apex under Nebuchadnezzar II’s rule. After his death, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, fell into political turmoil and instability, regaining a semblance of stability only under the regime of the rather enigmatic Nabonidus.
Nabonidus obtained power via a coup led by his son Belshazzar against the previous king, Labashi-Marduk. Nabonidus made no genealogical claims of relation to past Neo-Babylonian kings, although he might have been connected to the Chaldean dynasty via a marriage to one of its female members. Nabonidus’s rule over Mesopotamia was characterized by an attempted religious reform in which he tried to promote the moon god Sin to the top of the Babylonian pantheon at the expense of the national god Marduk. This didn’t take, due to significant opposition within Babylonia itself, especially among the oligarchy and clergy. It was likely for this reason that Nabonidus took a self-imposed exile to Tayma in northwestern Arabia, a region of that peninsula that Nabonidus himself actually conquered a while back.
Nabonidus then returned from this exile (Belshazzar was ruling as regent during all that), with his faith in Sin now even stronger than before. He no longer had any compunctions about instituting his religious reforms, which only caused further social unrest, especially as a famine occurred in Babylonia while he was doing all this (naturally attributed to Marduk’s wrath at Nabonidus’s heresy by the general populace, and to Sin’s wrath at the people’s unresponsiveness to the religious reforms by Nabonidus himself). Some time after this, Nabodinus ordered that the statue-idols of the Mesopotamian gods be brought to Babylon for safekeeping (although a few remained in their own cities, for unknown reasons), presumably in anticipation and response to the growing threat of Cyrus II, King of Anshan, Media, and Persia.
Nabodinus proved unable to actually counter the threat of Cyrus, however, and Babylon - and Mesopotamia as a whole - was conquered by the Achaemenid Persians in under a year (539 BC), ending millennia of Sumero-Akkadian states and putting Mesopotamia firmly into the hands of the Iranian peoples. But we’re jumping ahead a little bit here, so we’ll further explore the history of the Iranians (especially the Medes and Persians) later in this article, and the Achaemenid Empire itself in the next article.
EGYPT
Egypt is Egypt.
This might seem like a meaningless tautology at first glance, but it emphasizes Egypt’s ability to “stand apart” from the rest of the Middle East, despite otherwise being intimately related to it.
When one looks at a list of ancient Egyptian dynasties, one sees that most of them are “native” Egyptian dynasties, while only a minority of them are “non-native” Egyptian dynasties, whether they be from the Semitic Hyksos, the Libyo-Berber Meshwesh, the Kushite Nubians, the Achaemenid Persians, or the Greeks. It just makes sense: as far as ancient Egyptian ethnicity went, geography, history, language, culture, politics, religion, architecture, etc. were all one and the same. Therefore, foreign elements would stand out much more easily, and were thus much easier to root out as they were visibly “non-Egyptian”.
Well, not really. Because Egypt was not just a state (or series of states), and not even just a nation; Egypt was a civilization, with contacts between itself and the Levant, Mesopotamia, Nubia, and ancient Libya stretching as far back as the predynastic era. There were often foreigners mingling with native Egyptians in the marketplaces, perennial campaigns in the Levant and Libya (especially starting in the Middle and New Kingdoms) necessitated further Egyptian interaction and mixing with the Aamu/Retjenu and Tehenu/Themehu in particular, and Egyptian dynasties would often intermarry with those of foreign powers. What even counted as an “Egyptian” could get quite loose at some times; in some cases, as long as you participated in Egyptian religious rituals and pledged loyalty to the Egyptian king, you were an “Egyptian”. The Egyptians proved quite capable of absorbing foreign deities into their pantheon as well, such as Ba’al (equated with Set because of their shared association with storms, and Ba’al’s “foreignness” tying into Set’s nature as the god of those foreign to Egypt), Resheph, Ashtart, and Anat, and there were even deities of native Egyptian origin that were nevertheless heavily influenced by Canaanite religion and iconography, such as Qetesh.
Now, a country like Egypt, sitting at the crossroads between North Africa, Northeast Africa, West Asia, and the general eastern Mediterranean sea region, would naturally have a population (and genetic) history that is long, involved, and quite complex (some would even say complicated). There is even a controversy - initiated in modern times, by Afrocentrists, and for ideological reasons - over the “race” of the ancient Egyptians.
Despite the fact that genetic tests on both ancient and modern Egyptians generally indicate high affinities to Middle Easterners and North Africans, with only relatively small amounts of sub-Saharan associated haplogroups (actually higher in percentage among modern Egyptians than ancient ones), and the fact that ancient Egyptian art invariably distinguished native Egyptians from the far more unambiguously “black” Nubians (depicting Egyptian males with reddish-brown skin and females with light skin, whereas Nubians of either gender were depicted only with black skin), the controversy over whether the Egyptians were “black” rages on in certain corners of the internet and academia alike, spurned on by new generations of Afrocentrists, bolstered by scholars suspiciously sympathetic to Afrocentrism, and enabled by an overly agreeable academia a bit too unwilling to tell racial “minority” activists to just shut up already.
THE LEVANT
Like Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Levant had a storied history of ethnic and cultural interchange almost from the jump, with its peoples forming from a fusion of the autochthonous Natufian culture and migrants from Anatolia and the Zagros Mountain range13.
The Levant has historically been the center of its own civilization, despite strong influences from Mesopotamia and weaker influences from Egypt and Anatolia. Indeed, there has been much overlap between the histories of the (northern) Levant and (Upper) Mesopotamia, as many of the same peoples (e.g. the Amorites, the Hurrians, the Assyrians, etc) ruled both regions - themselves only loosely and fuzzily bordered between each other - during the Bronze Age.
As for the Levant itself, it had Canaan, a mixed multitude of urban, rural-agricultural, and nomadic pastoralist groups, loosely united by their common speech in the Northwest Semitic Canaanite languages. Some time after the Late Bronze Age collapse, these various Canaanite groups developed different national identities, such as “Moabite”, “Ammonite”, “Edomite”, and the various city-state identities of Phoenicia. The Arameans would come into prominence during this same time period as well, with a regional polity of their own (Aram-Damascus), and several others formed in conjunction with the Luwians and various Hittite hangers-on to revive some semblance of Hittite culture (the Syro-Hittite/Neo-Hittite/Luwian-Aramean states) after the fall of the Hittite New Kingdom (we’ll get to the Hittites, don’t worry).
It is important to note that “Aramean” only became a self-designation for these people during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and the various Aramean tribes (meaning the peoples coming from the regions of Aram and Aram-Naharaim) never collectively identified as “Arameans” in the pre-imperial past. It was all just as well, for soon the “Aramean” identity would cover much of the Fertile Crescent due to the Assyrian expansions, losing its particularistic nomadic-tribal connotations.
Now, I must admit my particular biases here: I am what one might call a “Biblical maximalist”, in that, despite some deliberate anachronisms (in the vein of someone referring to “modern-day Turkey” when speaking of events happening in ancient Anatolia), the Bible, even in its first five books (the Torah/Pentateuch), is a generally reliable guide to ancient history. I am quite partial to the works and theories of David Rohl (especially his “New Chronology”, which is part of made me a Biblical maximalist in the first place), and I affirm the existence of the Biblical patriarchs and the reality of the Exodus and Conquest of Canaan. I’m relatively certain that the Shasu, Shutu, and Habiru of Egyptian and Akkadian records were also connected to the Hebrews in some fashion, noting especially the “mixed multitude” that joined the Hebrews in their journey out of Egypt as written in Exodus 12:38.
What this means is that I don’t take seriously the common theory among (secular) scholars that the Israelites and their culture were “native” Canaanite developments, even though the Israelites were definitely influenced by their Canaanite neighbors, and absorbed many Canaanite peoples. I find it quite unlikely for the Israelite national religion of Yahwism, which explicitly defined itself in contradistinction to the general Canaanite socio-religious milieu (despite the otherwise significant amounts of syncretism, given the frequent Old Testament admonitions of the Israelite people and leaders for taking foreign gods), to have ultimately come from that exact same milieu. This is especially apparent when you consider how the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Phoenicians, and Arameans each had their own national gods (Chemosh for the Moabites, Milcom/Moloch for Ammonites, Qos for Edomites, Ba’al Hadad for Aram-Damascus, various forms of Ba’al [such as Melqart] for the Phoenicians and non-Damascene Arameans), yet those were the only real distinctions between these peoples, as they otherwise generally prayed to the same pantheon of deities as the others. They never seemed to “ethicize” any portion of their shared Northwest Semitic (“Canaanite”) religion like the Israelites had with their own, their national deities were practically the same as each other aside from their names, and almost all of them (except the Edomites) were quickly absorbed into the general Aramaeo-Assyrian (“Imperial Aramaic”) morass when the Neo-Assyrian Empire came knocking.
I don’t take the so-called “Kenite hypothesis” - that groups of Edomites, Midianites, and (obviously) Kenites introduced Yahweh to Israelites, and/or that Yahweh was of an origin immediately south of the Levant (i.e. Northwest Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula) - seriously either, because then an obvious question comes up about all this: why (and when) did they stop praying to Yahweh? Why was there soon no longer any Yahwistic tradition outside of Israel itself? Why did the Israelites rapidly monopolize Yahweh-worship? It makes no sense for one people to introduce another people to a deity that the former would soon quickly abandon.
As an aside, a pet theory of mine is that the figure of Yahweh derived from a “Northwesterly Semiticized” amalgamation of the Sumero-Akkadian deities Anu, Enlil, and Enki. Yahweh has all the most primary attributes of each of these three deities, sharing Anu’s identification with heavenly/celestial power and highest divinity, Enlil’s association with the wind, air, earth, and storms, and Enki’s association with water, wisdom/intelligence, creation, crafts, and fertility (as well as Enki and Enlil’s combined association with the things that make civilization possible). Yahweh soon proceeded to develop in ways that made him different from his hypothetical Lower Mesopotamian antecedents (of course), but that’s a topic for another article entirely.
The Phoenicians, for their part, opened up many, many, many different colonies across the Mediterranean. This had the effect of spreading elements of Phoenician culture all across the region, while allowing Phoenician colonists to mix and mingle with the various natives of the lands they entered (such as the Berbers and the pre-Roman Iberians), laying down the seeds for what would soon become great city-states, such as Carthage of the Punics, Kition in Cyprus, and Gadir (modern-day Cádiz) in the Iberian Peninsula. In the game of colonization, the Phoenicians would enter into a rivalry with the Greeks, which was mostly amicable and peaceful, although some clashes did occur in Crete and Sicily. Further discussion of Greco-Phoenician interactions, however, will have to come later in this article.
While the Philistines are quite important to the history of the Levant, they will have to be discussed later in this article as well.
The cultures of the Levant and Mesopotamia would merge most extensively during the general Arameanization/Aramaization of the Near East under the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and the subsequent Hellenization of the Near East during the Hellenistic period, to the point that both areas would often be referred to as “the two Syrias” (the very name “Syria” was derived from “Assyria”, after all). This state of affairs would only start to break down due to an Iranian cultural revival in the Arsacid Parthian Empire during the reign of Artabanus II, and was fully broken by the Persian renaissance brought on by the rise of the Sassanid Persian Empire, all of this leading to a sort of “de-Hellenization” and (further) “Iranianization” of Mesopotamia.
THE ARABIAN PENINSULA
Believe it or not, the Arabian Peninsula was not some sterile desert filled with nothing but nomadic Semitic-speakers (or “Bedouins”, as many others might say) before Islam, but a land of diverse complexity filled with distinct civilizations of its own.
Let’s first talk about Northern, Western, and Northwestern Arabia. Northwestern Arabia was very close to the Levantine milieu (remember the Midianites), and the peoples and states that formed in this region reflected this. I would use the tribe (or tribal confederation) of Thamud as my first example, but all we know about that people (in historical, not Qur’anic terms) comes entirely from disparate references in a relative few records, so I’ll instead be using the Qedarites.
The Qedarites (9th century BC–1st century BC) were a partly nomadic, partly sedentary pastoralist tribal confederation centered around the Wadi Sirhan (“Valley of Sirhan”) in the Syrian Desert. Forming a powerful polity, the Qedarites played quite an important role in the history of the Middle East, using their close relations with the Levantine (Canaanite and Aramaic speaking) states to facilitate trade in spices and aromatics from South Arabia to the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean regions. The Qedarites spent many centuries participating in the geopolitical power plays of the Middle East, and many Qedarites would migrate into the southern Transjordan and southern Palestine regions during the Neo-Babylonian period (due to a power vacuum caused by the Neo-Babylonian conquest of the Southern Levant), where they would comingle with the (by then largely Arameanized) sedentary Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite populations14. The history of the Qedarites after this deal with their involvement in Achaemenid Persian era power games, and so will have to be dealt with in the next article.
A few centuries after the Qedarite confederation was formed, another state was founded in Northwestern Arabia: the Kingdom of Lihyan/Dedan (7th century BC–24 BC). In all likelihood related to the Qedarites, the Lihyanites/Dedanites played a strong cultural and economic role in the peninsula, as they, like the Qedarites, were an important link in the incense trade routes. The Lihyanites also appeared to host a community of Minaeans within their territories, meaning they were not shy of Southern Arabian influences as well.
Interestingly enough, both the Qedarites and Lihyanites spoke in languages referred to by scholars as “Dumaitic” and “Dadanitic”, respectively. The names of these languages also refer to the scripts in which they are written, which are considered to be part of the Ancient North Arabian family of writing systems. Dumaitic and Dadanitic are considered to be variants of something scholars call “Old Arabic”, which is basically a collection of ancient languages and dialects in western Arabia, northwestern Arabia, and the Syro-Arabian borderlands (think of the Syrian Desert, the Wadi Sirhan, and the Hauran/Harrat al-Sham) considered to be related to the ancestor(s) of Nabataean Arabic, then Qur’anic Arabic, then Classical Arabic (as defined by Abbasid-era Iraqi grammarians).
To go off on a tangent for a bit, “Old Arabic” is a term that I believe is largely anachronistic for any ancient North Arabian language existing before the rise of the Nabataeans (so about 4th century BC).
Due to the fact that languages considered close to the Northwest Semitic language family (such as “Taymanitic”) once existed in Arabia, and the fact that are several “Thamudic” languages that are yet to be deciphered, I’d argue that we should not be classifying Bronze or Iron Age Arabian languages based on how closely they resemble what we understand or believe to be “Arabic”, even in archaic forms. I myself would use the term “Ancient Syro-Arabian” to describe pre-Nabataean Arabian languages and speech varieties otherwise lumped together as “Old Arabic”.
As an aside, both the Qedarites and Lihyanites also spoke Aramaic, starting by the Neo-Assyrian period at the latest, because of course they did.
Eastern Arabia, for its part, was very close to the Mesopotamian milieu - so close, in fact, that it was little more than an extension of Mesopotamia itself, culturally speaking. Even during the time of Dilmun, Eastern Arabia followed Mesopotamian cultural patterns, as Dilmun itself had an East Semitic (read: Akkadian) speaking population, which then became Aramaic-speaking in the Neo-Assyrian period.
Central Arabia wasn’t relevant yet, and was likely extremely sparsely populated back then, so we’ll just ignore that.
Southern Arabia, a land heavily connected to Ethiopia (but that’s a topic for another article), had a long and venerable history of rich, interwoven cultures. The first major Southern Arabian state was the Kingdom of Saba (c. 1200 BC–275 AD), founded and built by the Sabeans. One might know it by another name, the Kingdom of Sheba (as it is written in the Bible), and, indeed, the Sabeans made themselves known throughout the Near East for their central importance to the spice and aromatic trade.
There were other peoples and states that soon emerged in South Arabia alongside the Sabeans, such as the Minaeans of the Kingdom of Ma’in (c. 1000 BC–150 BC), the Hadhramites (proto-Hadhramis) of the Kingdom of Hadhramaut (early 1st millennium BC–c. 290 AD), the Qatabanians of Qataban (early 1st millennium BC–late 1st or late 2nd century AD), and the Awsanites of the Kingdom of Awsan (8th century BC–7th century BC; conquered relatively quickly by the Sabeans; wrote in a language seemingly virtually identical to Qatabanian). These peoples and states would often squabble and conquer each other, ultimately generating a general Southern Arabian culture that transcended any one of them. It is very important to note, however, that these were (originally, at least) largely distinct, albeit closely connected peoples, with each speaking different, but closely related languages within the Old South Arabian language family (they even shared a script) - which honestly made their (geo)political intrigues and conflicts a sort of microcosm of the ancient Middle East as a whole.
The Southern Arabians were generally seafaring peoples, so despite their relative distance from the rest of the Middle East, they were by no means secluded from cultural developments within the wider region. As far as political developments went, however, the Southern Arabians were largely in a world of their own.
You will notice that not once did I ever identify any of these states as “Arab(ic)” or even “proto-Arab(ic)”. There are many reasons for this, but one of the major ones is that the modern “Arab” identity is largely an ahistorical ethnolinguistic political construction, and applying it to ancient peoples for whom “Arab” (and its cognate terms) was merely an exonym usually applied to Northwestern Arabian and Syro-Arabian tribespeople (albeit many of those had begun to use the term as a vague endonym during Nabataean times), and generally identified themselves completely differently from each other, would be completely anachronistic.
ANATOLIA AND THE CAUCASUS
Anatolia and the Caucasus fit very smoothly into the history of the ancient Middle East, as they were realms where Indo-European and non-Indo-European peoples would regularly interact with not only the Levantine-Mesopotamian world, but the Egyptian civilization and the Aegean Sea region as well.
Now, I could talk to you about the various Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures that formed and mixed and matched in these regions, but that would basically be a repeat about what I said about Mesopotamia, just with Anatolian locations substituted for Mesopotamian ones. I frankly find that boring, with the conclusions being obvious, so I’ll instead skip straight to the Bronze Age and talk about the Hattians.
The Hattians (c. 2000 BC [at minimum]-c. 1700 BC) were, in many ways, the predecessors of the Hittites - this despite not even speaking an Indo-European language like the Hittites did, or a Semitic language like many of the peoples that would soon become the Hittites’ neighbors (indeed, the Hattian language, like Sumerian, is conservatively considered a language isolate, although there are certain tantalizing possibilities it might be connected to the Northwest Caucasian and/or Kartvelian language families, alongside the otherwise unattested Kaskian language). Beginning to emerge in the Early Bronze Age, in the plains ringed by the Halys River (called the Kızılırmak River in Turkey), the Hattians, with their capital city of Hattush, became a defined civilization during the Middle Bronze Age.
During the tail end of the Early Bronze Age and the start of the Middle Bronze Age, the Hattians quickly came under the economic and cultural influence of the Akkadians and Old Assyrian Kingdom, both peoples setting up trading colonies (called karum) throughout central and eastern Anatolia. There was even an Assyrian trading post within Hattush itself, showing how well-connected the Hattians were to the general Mesopotamian milieu.
The Hattians were soon faced with a serious threat to their sovereignty, and even their status as a distinct people: the Hittite expansions. The Hattians, unfortunately for them, proved unable to actually stop these expansions, and by 1700 BC were completely conquered and absorbed by the Hittites, who then proceeded to form the Hittite Old Kingdom (c. 1700 to 1500 BC) and expand in all directions, culminating in Mursili I’s legendary raid down the Euphrates River (1595 BC in the middle chronology, 1531 BC in the short chronology) that led to the sacking of Babylon and turning of Mesopotamia over to Kassite rule. The Hurrian kingdom of Isuwa also came under the control of the Hittites, who sacked their cities and vassalized the remains. The Hittites self-consciously considered themselves the continuers of Hattian civilization, as they retained the Hattians’ name for their land (“the land of Hatti”), and made Hattush (“Hattusa” in Hittite) the capital of the Hittite Old Kingdom.
Immediately before all of that, the Hittites were busy fighting amongst themselves, thanks to a rivalry between two branches of the royal family, the northern branch based primarily in Zalpuwa and secondarily in Hattusa, and the southern branch based equally in both Kussara and Kanesh/Nesha. The northerners and southerners squabbled, until a certain Kussaran notable (either Hattusili I or the rather enigmatic Labarna I) united the two and started the Hittite Old Kingdom.
Notably, the northern branch retained Hattian-language names, whereas the southern branch had Hittite and even Luwian-language names. This speaks to the fact that the Hittites have not only long coexisted with the Hattians and Hurrians in their region of eastern and central Anatolia, but have also interacted extensively with other Anatolian Indo-European peoples (such as the Luwians of southern Anatolia, and the Palaics of northern Anatolia), to the point where one is hard-pressed to locate any significant cultural differences between the Bronze Age peoples of Anatolia in the general, the relative cultural uniformity being especially pronounced among Anatolian Indo-European language speakers15. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find any significant cultural differences between the various Iron Age peoples of Anatolia, which we’ll get to later in this section.
The Hurrians themselves, a people native to the regions between Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia, and the northern Levant, remained a major stopgap to Hittite expansions eastward for centuries, especially thanks to the mixed Amorite-Hurrian state of Yamhad, and afterwards the majority-Hurrian, minority-Aryan Kingdom of Mitanni16. The Hurrians (and whatever peoples they would associate with at various times) were so strong that it was they who became the predominant power in Anatolia for a while, because the Hittite Old Kingdom itself was, to put it bluntly, a shithole.
Mursili I’s campaigns strained the Hittites’ treasuries to the point of leaving the capital (Hattusa) in near-anarchy, leading to him being assassinated by his brother-in-law, Hantili I. The subsequent dynastic quarrels and internal unrest made the Hittite Old Kingdom ever-weaker, and thus its outlying lands easy pickings for Mitanni in the east, the Kizzuwatna in the south, the Kaskians in the north, and Arzawa in the west.
The relatively sudden appearance of the Kaskians, Kizzuwatna, and Arzawa in the Hittite historical records during the latter period of the Hittite Old Kingdom tells us that there were deeply involved processes of ethnogenesis going on just outside the Hittite borders, leading to a veritable explosion of previously unrecorded peoples onto the scene. For example, Kizzuwatna (living in a region that would later be known as “Cilicia”) was a state containing a mixture of Luwians, Hurrians, and Hittites; the Kaskians were a non-Indo-European-speaking tribal people who displaced (and likely absorbed) the Palaics, perennially prevented the Hittites from expanding northwards towards the Black Sea, and remained a thorn in the side of the Hittites for generations to come; Arzawa was a polity composed of proto-Carians (probably in the part the Hitties called the Kingdom of Mira), proto-Lydians (likely in the part the Hittites called the Seha River Land, which shares roughly the same area as the later Lydia), and Luwian/Luwic-speakers (likely in the part the Hittites called Hapalla). The Lukka (proto-Lycians) had also formed by this point, and regularly interacted with Arzawa, whilst being hostile to the Hittites (who could never subjugate the Lukka lands for long periods of time).
Something interesting to note about the Kaskians is that they were probably Hattians that were displaced and unassimilated by the Hittites. This would explain the apparent connections between the Hattic and Kaskian languages, and their shared theorized connections to Northwest Caucasian and/or Kartvelian languages (the Zan sub-branch of Kartvelian in particular for Kaskian).
The only Hittite monarch of note after Mursili I would be Telipinu (named after the Hittite agricultural god), who managed to score a few victories against Mitanni, by allying with Kizzuwatna. But minor triumphs aside, Telipinu did something far more important: laying down the rules for Hittite royal succession with the Telipinu Proclamation, an edict designed with the purpose of ending all the royal intrigues which plagued the Hittite Old Kingdom up to that point, destabilizing and reducing the state back to only its heartlands.
Telipinu died in around 1500 BC, which began the start of the Hittite Middle Kingdom (c. 1500 to 1430 BC), a “dark age” in which the Hittites were under constant attack by the Kaskians (leading to the capital being moved first to Sapinuwa, and then Samuha), and from which few surviving records remain. While all that was going on, developments were being made in other parts of Anatolia that would have major ramifications for the future of that region, if not the Middle East as a whole. For example, the Assuwa confederation was born in western Antaolia at some point during this time period, containing many peoples that would prove ancestral to later Iron Age Anatolian groups, such as those of a little-known city called Wilusa and Truwisa/Tarusia in the Hittite language, and Ilion and especially Troy in the Greek (center of the “Troad”/“Troas”, natch). The Achaeans of Homer (i.e. Mycenaean Greeks) had begun to become known during this time period as well, under the Hittite name of “Ahhiyawa”, and thanks to such men as “Attarsiya”17.
The Hittites would finally get themselves back together under the rulership of a certain Tudhaliya I/II, starting at around 1430 BC. This ushered in the age of the Hittite New Kingdom (c. 1430-1200 BC), which is often called the “Hittite Empire” proper. During the reign of Tudhaliya, the Hittites again allied with Kizzuwatna, this time to to take the western parts of the Mitanni Kingdom and reduce it to a rump state (the Assyrians becoming independent again didn’t help the Kingdom of Mitanni either), and then to expand westward at the expense of Arzawa. The Assuwa confederation tried to fight the Hittites, but were quickly defeated, subjugated, and conquered.
After Tudhaliya, the Hittites fell into another “dark age”, with enemies (such as the Mitanni Kingdom, a rebelling Arzawatg, and the eternal Kaskian) attacking them from all directions, and even the city of Hattusa being burned down. One of these enemies was the Hayasa-Azzi confederation that had formed in northeastern Anatolia around the same time period. Hayasa-Azzi was a very interesting state in its own right, for it is often theorized to consist of peoples ancestral to the Armenians, due to (among several other things) the similarity of the name “Hayasa” to the endonym of the Armenians (Hayk/Hay), and of Armenian lands (Hayastan), the seeming prevalence of a non-Anatolian Indo-European linguistic element ascribed to Hayasa-Azzi, and certain apparent proto-Armenian linguistic elements in the names of Hayasa-Azzi’s gods (Hayasa-Azzi’s “Unag-Astuas” = Classical Armenian “Astuats” [meaning “God”, and it’s “Astvats” in modern Armenian]; Hayasa-Azzi’s “Baltaik” probably is connected to Ba’alat, with the Armenian diminutive suffice “-ik”).
This New Kingdom “dark age” would end with the rise of the Hittite’s greatest king: Suppiluliuma I (reigning from c. 1370–1330 BC in the middle chronology, or c. 1344–1322 BC in the short chronology). Suppiluliuma started off his career as the chief advisor and general to his father Tudhaliya II (who, notably enough, also had a Hurrian name: Tasmi-Sarri; the name of Tudhaliya’s wife, Tadu-Heba/Daduhepa, was Hurrian as well), under which the Hittites continued to serious territorial losses. However, thanks to Suppiluliuma’s guidance, the Hittites were beginning to make a recovery, and when Suppiluliuma took the throne himself, the Hittites made a full comeback. Suppiluliuma not only the stopped the Hittite’s territorial losses, he fully reversed them, and even more so than that; Suppiluliuma brought the Hittite state to the greatest territorial extent it would yet have, as he turned what remained of Mitanni into a client state, conquered Kizzuwatna, southern Anatolia, and the city-state of Carchemish, retook Arzawa as far as Hapalla (leaving only their capital city of Apasa and the immediately surrounding lands), subjugated Hayasa-Azzi and Alashiya (basically Middle to Late Bronze Age Cyprus18), and even subdued many of the Kaskians long enough to gain effective control over much of northern Anatolia. Although failing to permanently take the Lukka lands or stretch northwards to the Black Sea, the Hittites would be far and away the most powerful and influential state in all of Anatolia, and even the Near East at large.
To get a good sense of how ethnically and culturally involved the Hittite New Kingdom was, one only has to note that Isuwa (during this time a Hittite vassal) contained Hittite, Luwian, Indo-Iranian/Aryan (possibly connected to the Mitanni), Hurrian, and even Kaskian personal names in various records.
This Hittite high period wouldn’t last very long, however, as a fiasco occurred that would lead to a plague sweeping across the entire Hittite kingdom. To start, a widow of the late Egyptian king Tutankhamun/“Nibhururiya” (the widow being named “Dakhamunzu” by the Hittites) sent a letter to Suppiluliuma asking for one of his sons in marriage, since she was in dire straights and was close to being forced to marry a “servant” (probably Horemheb, probably Ay). After a dispatched Hittite ambassador confirmed the report as accurate upon coming back, Suppiluliuma sent his son Zannanza to Egypt to seal the deal on this marriage alliance. Zannanza, unfortunately, died on the way to Egypt, which led to a very heated exchange in letters Suppiluliuma and the new pharaoh Ay over the circumstances of Zannanza’s death, in which the allegation was presented that Zannanza was murdered by the Egyptians.
Suppiluliuma, being convinced of the Egyptians’ guilt, decided to go on a punitive campaign against Egypt's vassal states in the Levant, in which he would end up basically conquering the entire northern half of that region. and make the Hittite state the largest it would ever be. Unfortunately, many of the captured Egyptian prisoners of war carried a powerful disease for the time: tularemia (also known as “rabbit fever”). This “Hittite plague” would sweep though the Hittite lands, scarring many, and killing quite a few. The Hittites, of course, would soon use this plague to their advantage, in what would be considered by historians as the first known/recorded case of biological warfare: when the remnants of Arzawa tried to attack the Hittites in their weakened state (as they were wont to do), the Hittites sent infected rams to Arzawan villages, which ended up weakening the Arzawans so much with the disease that they completely failed in their attempted raid on the Hittites.
The shine of this little victory would soon fade away quickly, however, as both Suppiluliuma and his immediate successor Arnuwanda II would succumb to the Hittite plague, leaving the young and inexperienced Mursili II (reigned c. 1330–1295 BC in the middle chronology, c. 1321–1295 BC in the short chronology) to become the Hittite king. Sensing the weakness of the current Hittite king, many formerly subjugated peoples revolted, and Mursili had to face down numerous rebellions from the Arzawans, the Kaskians, the Hayasa-Azzi, and various other peoples in Anatolia. Thankfully for the Hittites, Mursili would more than prove his worth, as he quickly subdued these rebels, with an ominous solar eclipse marking the beginning of his campaign against the Hayasa-Azzi. Mursili would also attack the Ahhiyawa at the city of Millawanda (Miletus), placing it under Hittite control.
Mursili II died after a reign of 25 to 27 years, with his eldest son, Muwatalli II, succeeding him. Muwatalli moved the Hittite capital from Hattusa to the more southerly Tarhuntassa, likely for strategic reasons. At the time, the Hittites were fighting the Egyptians over control of the northern Levant and the vital trade routs (and metal sources) linking what would later be called the Cilician Gates with Mesopotamia. This culminated in the Battle of Kadesh, which had an inconclusive result (likely a stalemate), was the first pitched battle to have its tactics and battle formations described in detail in the historical record, and is believed to be the largest chariot battle ever fought (involving up to over 10,000 chariots in total).
After the Battle of Kadesh, both the Hittites and the Egyptians started to decline in power, as the Middle Assyrian Kingdom was on the move, conquering the Hurrians and the Mitanni rump/client state, and pushing Assyrian borders all the way to the head of the Euphrates. The Middle Assyrian Kingdom was the most powerful foe the Hittites ever faced, possessing an equal, if not bigger threat to Hittite trade routes than the Egyptians ever had, especially since the Assyrians were taking Hittite territories for themselves. The Hittites had tried to militarily support the failing Mitanni Kingdom against the might of the Assyrians, but that didn’t work, and eventually (after some brief royal intrigues and civil wars) the Hittites made the Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty (or the “Treaty of Kadesh”, if you prefer) with the Egyptians, who were also fearful of the rising Assyria. To seal the deal, Hattusili III (the Hittite king at the time) married a Hittite princess to Ramesses II (the Egyptian king at the time).
As an side note, the Hittites would also interact a bit more with the Ahhiyawa at around this time, as evidence by the Tawagalawa Letter, in which an unnamed Hittite King (likely Mursili III) requests his Ahhiya counterpart to either extradite, expel, or keep in asylum (under the condition of never rebelling again) a certain Piyama-Radu, a warlord who would occasionally lead anti-Hittite revolts and rebellions in Anatolia, with his last one being in the Lukka lands. Notable in the Tawagalawa letter is the mention of a “Wilusa episode”, in which the Hittites and Ahhiyawa squabbled over control of ancient Troy. This was likely at least partially the historical basis for the later myth of the Trojan War.
While the Treaty of Kadesh led to peaceable relations between the Hittites and Egyptians for at least as long as Ramesses II reigned, it did nothing to stop Assyrian expansions into Hittite territory, which were relentless and unceasing. An attempt to check the Assyrians over control of the remnants of Mitanni led to the Battle of Nihriya, in which the Middle Assyrian Kingdom gained a decisive victory over the Hittites. The Hittite New Kingdom continued to be eaten up by the Assyrians in waves and thrusts, with the weakness of the Hittites becoming increasingly pronounced.
And then the Late Bronze Age collapsed, taking the Hittite New Kingdom with it. The Sea Peoples swarmed in, took Alashiya and proto-Cilicia, cut off all-important Hittite trade routes in those regions, and crippled the Hittites to the point where Hattusa was sacked for the last and most thorough time by the Kaskians and the newly appearing Bryges/Phrygians. It was all over for the Hittite New Kingdom after that, with attempted successor kingdoms forming in southeastern Anatolian and the northern Levant, which we now call the Syro-Hittite states. The lingua franca of Anatolia by this time was now Luwian, a process that started during the course of the Hittite New Kingdom itself, to the point where Luwian became the main language of the capital Hattusa by the 13th century BC.
In the wake of the collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom, interesting things started to happen. For one thing, Ionian, Aeolian, and Dorian Greeks started displacing and absorbing the (earlier, but related) Mycenaean Greeks and settling western Anatolia en masse. The Mycanaeans themselves started to migrate into Alashiya (which we’ll just call “Cyprus” from now on) in massive waves during this time period. The Phrygians, a people who had been in the region for quite some time before the collapse of the Hittites, formed their own kingdom, which would soon become a significant player in ancient Middle Eastern geopolitics.
The collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom also seemed to be a powder keg for ethnogenesis in both Anatolia and the Caucasus, for many different peoples would enter the historical record during this time. For example, the Urumeans, a tribe of the Hayasa-Azzi confederation, had also formed (or at least entered the historical record) by the collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom, and allied with the Kaskians and a people called the “Eastern Mushki” (most likely proto-Georgians) to invade the Middle Assyrian Kingdom (only to be rebuffed, of course). The tribal confederation of Diauehi (probably proto-Georgian, proto-Armenian, Hurrian, or a combination of at least two of the three) formed during this time as well, either within or bordering the lands of the now-defunct Hayasa-Azzi confederation. There were also states that had formed in what would later be called the Armenian highlands (and thus considered proto-Armenian), such as the tribal confederation of Nairi and (Arme-)Shupria/Shubria (although those had become known a bit before the collapse of the Hittites, in the late 13th century BC).
The Phrygians are a very interesting people, as scholars cannot precisely agree on their origins, their relations with other Indo-European peoples (particularly Greeks, Armenians, and/or Thracians), and whether they migrated to Anatolia right before the Bronze Age collapse, well before the Bronze Age collapse, or even during the Bronze Age collapse (as one of the Sea Peoples). It is also a matter of debate how they are related to a people called the “Western Mushki”, who they are clearly identified with by the Assyrians, but distinguished from by the Greeks (who used the term “Moschoi” to refer to the Mushki)19. What scholars can agree on, however, is that the Phrygians were a vast ethno-cultural complex residing mainly in central Anatolia, and not a single “tribe” or “people”.
Aside from the Phrygians, the polity of Colchis, a Kartvelian-speaking proto-Georgian state, had become known (even though it likely began to form during the Middle Bronze Age). Colchis mainly comprised of a tribal people ancestral to modern-day Svan and Zan Kartvelians, although Greek, Anatolian, Iranian (Scythian), and even possibly (proto-)Abkhaz names have been found in archeological items related to Colchis (albeit most certainly belonging to time periods later than the Early Iron Age). A subdivision of the Kaskians might have been instrumental to the formation of Colchis as well, as they probably fled to the Caucasus and merged with proto-Colchian autochthons after the Kaskian (and Eastern Mushki, and Urumean) invasion of the Middle Assyrian Kingdom was repulsed by the Assyrians themselves.
Another branch of the Kaskians probably established themselves in the former land of Hatti (which would later be called “Cappadocia”), only to be vassalized by the future Neo-Assyrian Empire and then quickly absorbed into the general Anatolian morass.
The kingdom of Lydia had also developed from the remnants of Arzawa, the region of Caria from Karkiya, Lycia from the Lukka lands, Mysia from the “Land of Masa”, and Iron Age Troy and Cyprus from ginormous waves of Greek settlements in those areas. Western Caria was also extensively colonized by Ionian and Dorian Greeks, to the point of forming a mixed Greco-Carian people in those areas (albeit with a strongly Hellenized culture), as well as bringing parts of Caria into a newly formed Doric Hexapolis (c. 1100 BC - c. 560 BC).
With the states of Phrygia, Lydia, Lycia, Caria, and the Neo-Hittites standing strong for quite a while, we now turn to the east of Anatolia to find the Assyrians continuing some incursions there, before stagnating for a bit at the beginning of the 9th century BC. In the backdrop of this temporarily stagnant (Middle, then Neo) Assyrian Empire, a state would start to emerge around Lake Van in the Armenian Highlands that would rival even the Assyrians in the Caucasus and Upper Mesopotamia for quite a while: Urartu (c. 860 BC – 590 BC), a merger of the Urartians and a people that would soon be known as the Armenians.
Urartu began its life as a statelet that the Assyrians called “Uruatri”, one of the tribal principalities that made up Nairi. This statelet, like all the rest of Nairi, would be continually raided by the Assyrians during the Middle and early Neo-Assyrian eras, especially by the Assyrian rulers Tukulti-Ninurta I (c. 1240 BC), Tiglath-Pileser I (c. 1100 BC), Ashur-bel-kala (c. 1070 BC), Adad-nirari II (c. 900 BC), Tukulti-Ninurta II (c. 890 BC), and Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC). This motley collection of chiefdoms was unified into a single kingdom by one Arame of Urartu (c. 860–843 BC)20, whose reign was brought into an extremely rough star as the Urartian cities of Sugunia and Arzashkun were sacked by the Neo-Assyrian emperor Shalmaneser III (c. 859–824 BC; sacked Sugunia in c. 858 BC, and Arzashkun in c. 856 BC). Urartu recovered from this (naturally), and during that Neo-Assyrian stagnant period of the early 9th century BC, grew to become a significant player in ancient Middle Eastern geopolitics, able to fend off the endless waves of Assyrian attacks, and even take parts of Assyrian territories for their own.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire itself (after the stagnant period wore off) would conquer the Syro-Hittite states of Bit Adini and Bit Bahiani, as well as subjugate Bit Agusi, during the end of the 9th century BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire would also make periodic incursions into Anatolia, resulting in ever-increasing Assyrian influence in the region as they took much of its east and southeast.
The 9th century BC was also when the Eastern Iranian-speaking Scytho-Siberian world (or “cultures”/“civilization”, if you prefer) emerged, with three Scythian/Scythic (Scyth?) peoples in particular having migrated rather close to the ancient Middle East during this time: the Agathrysi, the Cimmerians, and the Scythians proper. But they won’t be truly relevant until just a bit later, so they’ll be left alone for now.
Back to Anatolia, we observe the steady growth of the Phrygian kingdom, which expanded into a massive state (centered around the capital of Gordium) that dominated most of central and western Anatolia by the 8th century BC. The Aeolian Greeks in their part of western Anatolia (Aeolis, more-or-less a subsection of Mysia) formed the Aeolian Dodecapolis at the turn of the 8th century BC as well. Meanwhile, the Agathrysi were being pushed into the Balkans by the increasingly aggressive Cimmerians, who were themselves being pushed by the increasingly aggressive migrations of the Scythians, who were themselves pushed by either the Massagetae or the Issedones (or both)21. This led the Cimmerians to initially settle in the Northern Caucasian and Caspain steppes, until further pressure by the Scythians forced many of the Cimmerians to move further into the ancient Middle East (their main base of operations now being Southern Caucasia), with those that remained being absorbed into the Scythian population.
At this point, much of Anatolia was vassalized by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose only real rival in the general area was the Kingdom of Urartu, which was reaching the peak of its power under the reign of Argishti I (c. 785–760 BC), who conquered much of Diauehi, Colchis, and the northern Levant (which would include many Syro-Hittite states).
One notable episode during Argishti’s reign was when he had to deal with with an uprising in his newly conquered regions. To end this uprising, Argishti took a page right out of the Assyrians’ book and deported these peoples to various parts of his kingdom, repopulating their former regions with peoples from other parts of his kingdom, in order to effect a “jumbling up” of nations that would (at least theoretically) kill any potential for future revolts.
In the backdrop of the conflict between the Kingdom of Urartu and the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which often involved military clashes (sometimes the Assyrians won, sometimes the Urartians won), the Phrygians were busy developing their own kingdom, such that it would reach its zenith by the late 8th century BC, even striking several peace deals between itself and Assyria during that time.
It was just as well, to be honest, because things were going crazy during the late 8th century BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered nearly all of the remaining Syro-Hittite states at this time — save only Quwê, which became the ancient Kingdom of Cilicia. The Urartu–Assyria conflict had ramped up into the Urartu–Assyria War during this time as well, with Assyrian emperor Sargon II invading deep into Urartian territory. The Cimmerians had also decided to strike at around this time, raiding the Urartians to the point of heavily weakening them, and crashing into Anatolia, where they completely blindsided the Phrygians, and proceeded to rampage all across the land, leading to the Phrygian capital of Gordium being sacked at the turn of the 7th century.
Also at the turn of the 7th century, Lydia was starting to turn into a great kingdom in its own right, taking much territory from the Phrygians, and soon also incorporating the newly incoming Thracian tribes of Bithyni and Thyni. Gyges would become the king of Lydia (reigning c. 680-644 BC), and he attacked the Ionian Greek cities of Miletus, Smyrna, and Colophon, although only Colophon was vassalized (the other two cities repelling the Lydian assault), and Gyges soon made peace with Miletus and Smyrna. Gyges also made sure to maintain the alliances and strong cultural connections the Lydians had with the Carians, as well was make war with the Cimmerians (and defeating them), and conquering the region of Troad, subsequently filling it with Lydian settlers. Gyges’s reign would end with his death at the hands of the Cimmerians (this time led by king Tugdamme), who also sacked Sardis, the Lydian capital city.
Urartu had managed to temporarily fight off the Cimmerians, but lost to the Assyrians, and so became a dependency of them, even as the Cimmerians resumed their attacks alongside the newly incoming Scythians proper. A “Meliac War” kicked off in the Greek coast of western Anatolia, after which the Ionian League formed.
Gyges was succeeded by his son, Ardys (reigned c. 644–637 BC), whose reign was short-lived on account of having to constantly fight the ever-improving Cimmerians, who allied with the newly incoming Thracian tribe of the Treri and sacked the city of Sardis again, Ardys presumably being killed during the sack. Ardys would be succeeded by his own son, Sadyattes (reigned c. 637- 635 BC), whose reign would be even shorter than his father’s, likely due to also dying in combat against the Cimmerians.
Enter Sadyattes’s son, Alyattes (reigned c. 635–585 BCE). With Assyrian approval, and an alliance with the newly incoming Scythians (the Anatolian portion ruled at the time by king Madyes), the Lydians would finally defeat the Cimmerians and expel their Thracian Treri allies from Anatolia. The Cimmerians mostly stayed put in Cappadocia after that, and were eventually absorbed into the general Anatolian morass. The Scythians, however, would reach the peak of their power not only in Anatolia, but in the Middle East in general, with a great kingdom that stretched from the Halys river in Anatolia in the west to the Caspian Sea and the eastern borders of Media in the east, and from Transcaucasia in the north to the northern borders of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the south.
After all that, Alyattes would start expanding Lydia in all directions, taking advantage of the power vacuum the defeat of the Cimmerians left in much of Anatolia. Alyattes extended Lydian power further into Phrydia, while conquering at least some portion of the Mysians, Mariandyni (an obscure tribe of unknown origin), Chalybes (an obscure people of Scythian and/or proto-Georgian origin, related to the later mentioned Mossynoeci and Tibareni), Paphlagonians (undifferentiated central-northern coastal Anatolians), Thyni and Bithyni Thracians, Carians, Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, and Pamphylians (a mixture of Pisidian-speaking aborigines, Cilician migrants, and Greeks).
The Neo-Assyrian Empire, meanwhile, would reach the apex of its expansions over the course of the 7th century, conquering not only Egypt, but extending its strong influence to practically the entirety of Anatolia as well. Even the kingdom of Lydia, which was otherwise itself the primary power in Anatolia, was a vassal of Assyria during this time. But as said before, after the death of Ashurbanipal, it all started to come undone. The unraveling of the Neo-Assyrian Empire also led to the collapse of the Scythian Kingdom, as the Medes revolted from their hegemony (the Scythians held control over the Medes before this), and the Median king Cyaxares murdering the West Asian Scythian rulers after getting them drunk at a banquet he invited them to. After this, many Scythians would take advantage of the power vacuum created by the declining Assyrians in order to overrun the Levant and press all the way to the Nile River Delta, upon which Egyptian king Psamtik I (664–610 BC) gave them gifts to go away.
The Scythians would pass through the Philistine city of Ascalon without much incident, although some stragglers did loot a temple of Ashtart in the city, which apparently led to them getting cursed by the goddess with a “female disease”, causing the stragglers, at least according to some legends, to become transvestite diviners called the Enarei, a Greek rendition of the Scythian term “Anarya” (“unmanly”), itself composed of the elements a- (“non-”) and “narya” (derived from nara-, meaning “man”). I guess that’s one striking example of Middle Eastern influences on the Scythians.
By the tail end of the 7th century, the Neo-Assyrian Empire would collapse thanks to a combination of civil war and revolts/invasions by the Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Cimmerians, and Scythians. This led to the Medes conquering much of Anatolia, primarily Cappadocia, something which would have much portent for the next century.
At the start of the 6th century, the Medes conquered what remained of the Kingdom of Urartu, as well as expelling most of the Scythians from the Middle East into the Pontic Steppe, with those that remained in the Middle East generally being absorbed into the Median ethnicity, although a splinter group fled to Lydia after some hostilities between them and Cyaxares flared up. Speaking of Lydia (still under Alyattes at this time), they would go on to conquer the Ionian Greek city of Smyrna, place Colophon under direct Lydian rule, and get repelled in an attack on Clazomenae. Alyattes then decided to push eastward, bringing the borders of Lydia to conflict with those of the Median Kingdom. This, coupled with Alyattes’s refusal to extradite the Lydo-Scythian splinter group to Cyaxares (remember that the Scythians were allies to the Lydians before), led to the five-to-six-year Battle of the Eclipse, which was named as such for being suddenly ended when both parties saw a solar eclipse (dated to around 585 BC), which they took as an omen to make peace between each other and fix their borders at some point in eastern Anatolia.
Alyattes died shortly after all this, and was succeeded by his son Croesus (c. 585 – c. 546 BC), who won the throne after a brief power struggle between himself and Alyattes’s other son, Pantaleon. Croesus would bring the Lydian Kingdom to the greatest extent it would ever have, conquering all of mainland Ionia, Aeolis, and Doris, and bringing Caria into the direct control of Lydia. Croesus also solidified Lydian control over the Mysians, Mariandyni, Chalybes, Paphlagonians, Thyni and Bithyni Thracians, and Pamphylians as well, whilst making sure to maintain good relations with the Medes.
At 550 BC, Astyages, the last king of the Medes, son of Cyaxares, and Croesus’s brother-in-law, was dethroned by Cyrus II of Persia, who was in the process of founding the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Croesus responded to this by attacking the city of Pteria, a city that was probably trying to rebel against the Lydians and declare their allegiance to the Persians. Whatever the case may be, when the Lydians attacked, the Persians retaliated in kind, meeting the Lydians at the Battle of Pteria, which ended in a strategic Lydian retreat. This retreat proved to be a fatal mistake for the Lydians, as the Persians immediately followed them and crushed them at the Battle of Thymbrara, which ended with the successful Siege of Sardis, the absorption of the Lydian Kingdom into the Achaemenid Persian fold, and the annexation of all of Anatolia by the Persians. Croesus’s fate after this battle is uncertain, with traditional narratives typically either claiming that Cyrus kept Croesus as an advisor or governor of some sort, or that Croesus was essentially deified after some divine power (Apollo or the Greek sage Solon), invoked by either Croesus himself or his son, saved him via thunderstorm from an incident involving a stake/pyre, and a fire (the accounts differ on whether Croesus had a pyre be lit on himself for a suicide attempt, or whether Cyrus condemned him to be burnt at the stake). I myself, considering that Croesus basically fades out of the historical record after this battle, believe that he was straightforwardly killed by the Persians during it.
By the time the Persians had finished conquering Anatolia, it was a mixture of Greeks, Anatolians, Hellenized Anatolians, Phrygians, Thracians, some Armenians, various absorbed non-Indo-European peoples (think of the Kaskians and Hurrians, for example), and Medes (with Cimmerians and Scythians absorbed into the Median ethnocultural framework), to which the Persians would naturally add their own elements, thus crystallizing Anatolian culture into a particular combination of Greek culture, Iranian culture, Thraco-Phrygian culture22, and the otherwise undifferentiated Anatolian cultures. By the time the Persians had conquered the Caucasus as well, the Armenians and Colchians they brought into the fold had already formed coherent national identities23, although they would soon be heavily influenced by the Persians, adding to the already intensive Iranian influences they’ve absorbed from the Cimmerians, the Scythians, and the Medes. It got to the point that by the time Alexander III of Macedon came to prominence, one could easily consider the Armenians and Colchians “para-Iranian” peoples.
THE AEGEAN SEA REGION AND THE BALKANS
One might object to ancient Greece being included in a discussion about the ancient Middle East, but given that the Greeks have had extensive interactions with the region, it would be absurd not to include it in its general history.
Even from very early on, the land that would eventually be known as “Greece” was marked by cultural (if not ethnic) mixing, with the Aegean civilization starting to form at around 3,500 BC from the interchange between the broadly contemporary Helladic culture (in mainland Greece), Cycladic culture (the Cyclades), and Minoan civilization (Crete). Speaking of the Minoans, they ran a thalassocratic society that had contacts with very ancient Cyprus, the Levant, Anatolia, and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. The Helladics would later evolve into a people remembered as the “Minyans” by the later Greeks, with the pre-Greek (and, after the Greeks came, non-Greek) Aegean peoples in general being referred to as “Pelasgians”.
One interesting thing to note about the Minoans is that, even as of the writing of this very article, their language, their hieroglyphs, and their Linear A writing system have yet to be deciphered24. There was also a later-recorded “Eteocretan” language, which might have some type of relation to the Minoan one. Indeed, Eteocretan might be related to the Eteocypriot language (written in the Cypriot and likely the even earlier Cypro-Minoan syllabaries) and even the Tyrrhenian languages (including Lemnian) in some “Aegean” language family. But until we get further data on this issue, it is impossible to say for sure whether Eteocretan and Eteocypriot belong to any language family at all.
The strangest thing about the undeciphered nature of the Minoan language is that the Minoans (and, by extension, the other pre-Greek Aegeans) were otherwise genetically related to the much more linguistically well-understood Mycenaean Greeks, who migrated to what would later be known as ancient Greece and largely absorbed and merged with the preexisting Aegean peoples. The Mycenaeans soon developed a name for themselves (becoming known as the Achaeans, Danaans, and Argives), with some settling on the western coasts of Anatolia, and all of them trading with both inner Anatolia and the adjacent Bronze Age Paleo-Balkan peoples.
Mycenaean civilization went by relatively peacefully over the centuries (save a couple natural disasters here and there), until the Bronze Age collapse occurred, and a massive wave of destruction forced many Mycenaeans to flee to the Levant and Cyprus, while other parts of Mycenaean Greece strangely prospered, such as the Ionian islands, the northwestern Peloponnese, parts of Attica and a number of Aegean islands. The Acropolis of Athens too remained strangely untouched. The source of the wave of destruction is still hotly debated among scholars, but many believe it might, at least in part, have something to do with the “Dorian invasion” described by ancient Greek historians, and also with the activities of the Sea Peoples (who might be linked to the Dorian invasion). It was all just as well anyway, since the newly appearing Ionian, Aeolian, and Dorian Greeks started to absorb the remaining mainland Mycenaean populations, as well as settling into Anatolia themselves (thus absorbing the Anatolian Mycenaeans) in even greater numbers than the Achaeans ever had.
After all that chaos dies down, we find ourselves in the Greek Dark Ages, named so due to the lack of surviving records in the earlier parts of that period. In the later parts, by the mid-to-late-8th century BC (or between 950 and 750 BC more broadly), the Greeks would adopt the alphabet from the Phoenicians, a people that, alongside others in the Levant, Cyprus, and Egypt, the Greeks would keep close contacts with for centuries to come. Speaking of Cyprus, it would be inhabited by a mixture of “Pelasgians” (Eteocypriots?), Phoenicians, and the first Greek settlements during this time period, with the Greeks soon flooding the island, and Hellenizing the Phoenicians and Pelasgians.
By around 800 BC, Greece had started to leave the “dark ages” and enter the Archaic period. The earlier parts of this would also be known as the “Orientalizing” period, as massive amounts of greater Middle Eastern cultural influences started to reach Greece during this time. The very goddess Aphrodite, for example, originated as a Hellenized form of the Levantine deity Ashtart (herself a reflex of the Mesopotamian Inanna-Ishtar). The Archaic period also saw not only the recodifying of a broader “Greek” identity and culture after the Bronze Age collapse (with the first Olympic Games, held in 776 BC), but an explosion of Greek colonization all throughout the Mediterranean, the Black Sea coasts, and even in pre-Roman Gaul. These Greek colonists would interact and mix not only with the neighboring native peoples (primarily in Anatolia, coastal southern Italy, and the Balkans), but also with friendly-rival Phoenician colonists, leading to intensive mutual influences. Indeed, much of Greek mythology originated from attempts to integrate initially foreign religious and cultural ideas into Greek cult and practice, and by the 6th century BC, the impact of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Levantine, and even Italian concepts on Greek thought, alongside the political developments of commercial democracy, led to the first philosophical schools (as such) being founded in Greece25.
The Archaic period also gives us the first known recorded mentions of the Thracians, particularly Homer’s Iliad (generally dated to the 8th century BC). Known mentions of the Illyrians (as such) are found significantly later, in fragments of Hecataeus of Miletus from the the late 6th and the early 5th century BC, but they had already formed states of their own by this time, the first known one being Enchele (of the Enchelei tribe). This was soon followed by the states of the Taulantii (to the west of Enchele), the Autariatae (to the north), the Dardani (to the northeast), the Paeonians (to the southeast), the Dassaretii (to the south, later Hellenized into becoming the Dexaroi), and many other Illyrian tribes, culminating in the formations of the Illyrian Kingdom and the later Kingdom of Dardania.
It goes without saying that the Thracians and Illyrians regularly interacted and mixed with the Greeks, but one interesting to note is the connections between the Paleo-Balkan and Anatolian peoples. The number of parallel ethnic names in the Balkans and Anatolia (Trojan Dardanians and Paleo-Balkan Dardani, Illyrian Eneti and Paphlagonian Eneti, Bryges and Phryges, Moesians and Mysians, etc) are a bit too numerous to be mere coincidence, and I’d almost go so far as to say that there’s a specific Thraco-Illyro-Phrygo-Anatolian linguistic and cultural continuum that historical scholars need to dive into more.
During the later part of the Archaic period (and as detailed in the “Anatolia and the Caucasus” section of this article), Greek interactions with the various peoples of Anatolia, as well as the recently arrived Iranian peoples such as the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Medes, led to the development of a Greek-Anatolian-Iranian culture, which was topped off by the advent of the Persians and the addition of Persian cultural elements to the mix. These cultural interchanges would lay the groundwork for much of classical Greek philosophy, especially Platonism.
I would continue on from this, but I’m saving the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and thus Greek interactions with that, for the next part of this series, as I said before.
THE SEA PEOPLES
One of the most important events associated with the Bronze Age collapse is the rampage of the Sea Peoples across much of the ancient Near East, particularly the Eastern Mediterranean. The Sea Peoples were a loose confederation of marauders, pirates, and raiders that ravaged the Hittite New Kingdom, attacked the Egyptian New Kingdom, and generally made a mess across the Levant. The names of the Sea Peoples given in these surviving records were, in total: the Denyen, the Ekwesh, the Lukka, the Peleset, the Shekelesh,
The origins of the Sea Peoples are diverse, and the surviving records about them are mostly Egyptian-language in origin. However, the identifications of several of the Sea Peoples were relatively straightforward processes. The Ekwesh are identified with the Homeric Achaeans (Mycenaean Greeks); the Denyen are identified with the Homeric Danaans (again, Mycenaean Greeks); the Lukka are, well, the Lukka/proto-Lycians; the Teresh are identified with the Tyrrhenians; the Shekelesh are identified with the Sicels; the Sherden are identified with the Nuragic proto-Sardinians; the Peleset are identified with the later Philistines (or rather, vice versa). The two Sea Peoples whose origins are more heavily disputed are the Tjeker (due to the fact that the Egyptian exonym that is their name can be Romanized differently) and the Weshesh (due to how little attestations they have even among the Sea Peoples).
There are, of course, alternative identifications for all of these (except the Ekwesh and Lukka), but those given above are the ones most prominent in general scholarly circles. Given that the Sea Peoples are generally described as seafaring, and as a whole seemed to have come from areas west of the Hittite New Kingdom and north of the Egyptian New Kingdom, it is quite likely that the identifications given above are the most accurate in any case — certainly none of the Sea Peoples could have come from any further east than the very coastal edges of western Anatolia.
Most of the Sea Peoples were defeated by Egypt in various wars and settled in various parts of Egypt and the Levant. The Peleset are the most interesting and special case in this regard, as they evolved into the Philistines that were so infamous in the Deuteronomistic history (the series of Biblical books from Joshua to 2 Kings), running roughly concurrently with the Syro-Hittite state of Palistin. The Bible, in Genesis 10:13-14, describes the Philistines as descending from the otherwise obscure Casluhim — who were themselves came from Mizraim (Egypt) — and connected to the Pathrusim and Caphtor(im). Caphtor in particular is where the Philistines are said to have come from in Jeremiah 47:4 and Amos 9:7, with a possible description of a Philistine conquest in Deuteronomy 2:23, and Caphtor itself generally being identified with Crete. However, it should be noted that the Philistines of the Torah/Pentateuch and the Philistines of the Deuteronomistic history are often argued to be two chronologically distinct peoples, with the appellation of “Philistine” to the peoples named as such in the Pentateuch even being considered an anachronism by many.26
Indeed, the scholarly consensus, given from both archeological and genetic studies, is the the (Deuteronomistic) Philistines were of a Cretan-Mycenaean Greek and/or general Aegean origin, who mixed with native Levantines to the point of adopting the Canaanite religion and Canaanite language (which quickly replaced the Philistines’ original tongue27), thus being absorbed into the general Canaanite genetic and cultural sphere.
The Philistines built a pentapolis (“Philistia”) in the southern Levant, consisting of the cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, Gath, Gaza, and for a time, Jaffa. From this region, the Philistines would regularly engage in conflicts with the Israelites, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, sometimes stalemating, but neither side gaining a permanent victory over the other — although a defeat by the Israelite king David did seem to lead to a subjugation of the Philistines that lasted until civil war divided Israel into northern amd southern halves. This state of affairs lasted until the Neo-Assyrian Empire came about and subjugated the Levant, with the Neo-Assyrian suzerainty actually being a time of relative peace and prosperity for the Philistines. This prosperity ended when the Neo-Assyrian Empire fell and the Neo-Babylonian Empire filled the power vacuum left by it in the Levant, with Nebuchadnezzar II ultimately destroying Philistia, deporting part of its population (mainly the elites) to Babylonia, and ending the Philistines as a distinct ethnicity unto themselves, as they were absorbed into the general Imperial Aramaic morass of the Middle East at the time.
THE ARYANS
Of the many ancient Indo-European peoples, some of the most culturally fecund overall were the Aryans, in this context meaning the Iranians, Indo-Aryans, and Mitanni-Aryans. They are grouped together under the umbrella term “Aryan” because it was their collective self-designation and because, even well after the Vedism-Zoroastrianism Split28 (more on that later), the distinctions between these peoples were almost entirely linguistic and not more broadly cultural in nature before the rise of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and even nowadays the cultural and linguistic distinctions between the various Iranian and Indo-Aryan subgroups can get very fluid, fuzzy, and downright arbitrary at times. It goes without saying that the various Aryan groups regularly intermixed with each other as well, adding to the fuzziness of internal Aryan distinctions29.
When one looks at just the ancient Iranians alone, one sees this Aryan cultural “koine” clear as day. As just one example, the only real difference between the Medes and Persians, both before and after the Achaemenid Persian Empire, was what branch of the Iranian language family they spoke. And Medo-Persian religious and cultural concepts were completely interoperable with those of the Sogdians and Bactrians, the Parthians and Sagartians, the Margians and Drangians, and all the other Iranian peoples living within Achaemenid borders. The only Iranian peoples that actually formed a relatively distinct culture of their own during the Achaemenid period were those of the Scytho-Siberian world, specifically due to the Scythians being pastoralist nomads while most of the Achaemenid Iranians (whether urban or rural) were settled peoples, and even then there were clear and present similarities and parallels between Scythian religion and Achaemenid Mazdaism and Mithraism.
As for the Indo-Aryans, most Indians will tell you that any cultural differences between them, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, invariably comes down almost entirely to regional peculiarities and local idiosyncrasies. Even the Nuristanis, an obscure people whose languages are part of a relatively anomalous “third” branch of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) language family, used to practice what has only ever been described as a particular variety of Hinduism.
As for connections between the Iranians (in the sense of “Greater Iran”) and Indo-Aryans themselves, this wider Aryan cultural “koine” has deep roots, starting all the way back not in the Andronovo or Sintashta cultures, but in a region that stretches all the way from modern-day Afghanistan to the modern-day Indian provinces of Haryana and (western) Uttar Pradesh, which the Avesta called “Airyanem Vaejah”, and the Vedas called “Āryāvarta”. This is where we start to completely dispense with the standard renditions of history in this section, and start dealing with independent scholarship, because the “amateur” Indologists from India itself have quite a lot to say about this topic.30
Just a few years ago, I would have dismiss notions of the Aryan languages being “indigenous” to eastern (Greater) Iran and northwest South Asia as merely being the products of modern ethnic/religious nationalist mythmaking, especially since Indian nationalists in particular love to claim that all Indo-European languages ultimately came from this area in general (which I find questionable), or from Vedic Sanskrit in particular (which even now I find completely absurd). But when I started looking deeper into it, I found that, at least for the Indo-Iranian languages, the idea that they might be “indigenous” to that culturally “fuzzy” region between modern-day India and Iran does have a lot of weight to it.
For one of the better representatives of these ideas, I direct the reader to Shrikant G. Talageri, and the many articles he wrote concerning the origins of the Indo-Europeans in general, and the Aryan peoples in particular. For brevity’s sake (this article is already long enough as is), I wont go in-depth on any of Talageri’s articles, but the (over)simplified gist of them overall is that, aside from the typical dross about a geographically “Indian”/“Indo-Iranian” origin of the Indo-European languages, the Aryan peoples gradually spread out east (for the Indo-Aryan branch) and west (for the Iranian and Mitanni-Aryan branches), while a relative few (such as the proto-Bactrians, proto-Sogdians, proto-Khwarazmians, proto-Baluchis, proto-Sindhis, and proto-Punjabis) stayed within the Indo-Iranian border/buffer regions. In regards to the connection between Zoroastrianism and Hinduism, the explanation is that they are rival entities within a single overarching tradition derived from the Old/Early Rigveda (Books 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 of the Rigveda), with the Avesta of Zoroastrianism and the New/Later Rigveda of Hinduism (Books 1, 5, 8, 9, and 10 of the Rigveda) developing concurrently with each other.
And let’s not forget that, in any case, there were extensive interactions between the Indus Valley (also known as the Harappan) Civilization and Mesopotamia — with the Mesopotamians likely referring to the Indus Valley as “Meluhha” — before the former civilization collapsed. Doubtless various elements of Mesopotamian culture found their way into the Aryan proto-tradition, such as veneration of the northern celestial polar and circumpolar regions in the form of rectangles (as described in just one of many books here31), and the particular design of the central figure of the Pashupati seal. Roughly concurrently with either the Early Harappan (c. 3300 BC to 2600 BC) or Mature Harappan (2600 BC to 1900 BC) civilization, a few pre-Iranian states had also formed on or adjacent to what we now call the Iranian Plateau and Zagros Mountains, such as Marhasi, Lullubi, and Elam.
As the Iranians and Mitanni-Aryans spread west, the Iranians themselves would split into two major different directions, with one cluster starting to settle into the land that would later be known as “Iran” proper, and the other cluster electing to move deeper into Central Asia and eventually Eastern Europe, covering much of the Eurasian steppes and laying the foundations for the Scytho-Siberian world. The Mitanni-Aryans, whose language is often said to be “Indo-Aryan”, but was actually significantly closer to Iranian, migrated much faster and further into the Middle East than the other Aryan groups at the time, where they would form the Maryannu chariot-riding warrior class of the Bronze Age. The Maryannu/Mitanni-Aryans were relatively very quickly absorbed into the general Hurrian and Semitic-speaking morass of the Kingdom of Mitanni, which explains not only why there is no recording of any wider cultural distinctions between the Mitanni-Aryans and the Mitanni-Hurrians/Amorites/Assyrians, but also variants of the term “Aryan” in the Semitic languages32.
Once the Bronze Age collapsed, and the Iron Age came into view, there was an explosion of Iranian activity in the Middle East. This also coincided with an explosion of non-Aryan state formation during the 9th century BC in the land that would later be known as “Iran”, such as the states of Ellipi, the Hurro-Urartian Mannaea, and the extremely obscure Gilzan, Ida, and Gizilbunda. All of these non-Aryan states would sooner or later be absorbed by the flood of migrating Iranians over the course of the 8th and 7th centuries BC — if not by some tribal group, then by the later Median Kingdom or Achaemenid Persian Empire. As for the peoples of the Scytho-Siberian world, they were busy expanding in waves towards the Caucasus and further into Eastern Europe, Anatolia, parts of Mesopotamia, and modern-day northwestern Iran, fighting as much amongst themselves as with non-Scythian peoples, as was mentioned in the previous sections of this article.
The various peoples that the Scythians have either mingled with or absorbed included not only Kartvelians, Anatolians, Urartians, proto-Armenians, and non-Aryan peoples of modern-day Northwestern Iran, but a few groups of tribes that can only be described as “proto-Circassian”, such as the Cercetae and Zygii. Indeed, the Scythians were not only instrumental to the formation of the Circassian ethnicity, but very likely (at least influence-wise) also the formation of all the other North Caucasian-speaking peoples as well.
The Scythian kingdom in West Asia stretched from the Pontic Steppe to the southern Caucasus, and eventually ancient Cappadocia and modern-day northwestern Iran (primarily the region of Media) as well. The Scythians, using the southern Caucasus as a base of operations, conquered the Urartians, Mannaeans, and Medes, with the Assyrians themselves recognizing the Scythians as equals after the Scythian conquest of the Anatolian Cimmerians. The West Asian Scythian kingdom was still dependent on the general regional order set by Assyria, though, so when the Neo-Assyrian Empire collapsed, the Scythian kingdom entered into severe decline with it, disintegrating as the Medes revolted and expelled most of the Scythians from the Middle East, while absorbing the remainder. The Scythians did manage to pull off some truly epic raids before their ultimate expulsion from the Middle East, such as that one that straight down the Levant towards Egypt (ultimately only reaching the borders of Egypt, their advance being stopped by Nile Delta marshes, and pharaoh Psamtik I offering them gifts to turn back), and the ones against Assyria during the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Naturally, the Scythians were vastly culturally influenced by the Assyrians, through which they absorbed many Levantine and Mesopotamian religious elements — the presumptive divine origin of kingship, the general style of Mesopotamian kings, and the development of the cults of Artimpasa and the Snake-Legged Goddess by the Fertile Crescent cults of Ishtar/Ashtart and Atargatis, respectively. The Scythians also adopted their characteristic acinaces sword from the Caucasians, while influencing the Medes to adopt Scythian archery techniques and equipment.
Moving beyond just the Scytho-Siberian world, many of the non-Aryan peoples the Iranians absorbed had cultures and histories related to the that of the wider Mesopotamian region, and this affected how Iranian culture would later develop. For example, when the Persians absorbed the Elamites, whose history was always related to wider Mesopotamian history, Elamite culture was not wiped out, but absorbed into the Persian and wider Iranian cultural sphere. This is very important to note, because it brings us to an equally important point:
For the same reason we speak of “Greco-Roman” civilization, we need to speak of “Assyro-Persian”, “Aramaeo-Persian”, or “Mesopotamian-Iranian” civilization. At no point from the rise of the Achaemenids to the Arab conquest of Iran was the culture between the Mesopotamians and Iranians ever sharply distinguished. As a matter of fact, they shared many ideas and concepts between each other, with just one example being the Mesopotamian concept of “melam” (“melammu” in Akkadian; basically a divinely sourced authority-granting aura of charisma, and even universal life-force energy), which influenced the Elamite concept of “kitin”; both melam and kitin influenced the Zoroastrian concept of “khvarenah”.
The beginnings of this were possibly present even in the Medes, who conquered Elam, Urartu/Armenia, a good portion of Anatolia (mainly Cappadocia), and much of what would later be called Iran (including modern-day Afghanistan and Tajikistan), with the notable exception of Gedrosia (i.e. ancient Makran in modern-day Balochistan). The Medes, due to bordering the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and having been vassalized by the preceding Assyrians and conquered by the Scythians well before that, had ample opportunity to absorb many elements of Mesopotamian culture. However, we can’t know for sure, since there is a relative lack of (surviving contemporary) records, documents, archeological items, or other sources about the Median state, making the culture of the Medes surprisingly poorly attested. Median culture might have been based on Zoroastrianism, given that Herodotus once wrote that there was a Median (sub)tribe called the “Magi”, who may or may not have been related in some way to the Zoroastrian priestly magi.
In any case, the Median Kingdom held to itself for some time, until Cyrus II, then the king of the Median province/vassal of Persia proper (particularly the by then thoroughly Persianized former Elamite city of Anshan), revolted against the Median king Astyages. Cyrus won, Astyages lost, the Medes became subjected to the Persians, and Cyrus and his descendants would go on to conquer and/or vassalize almost the entire ancient Middle East, with the sole major exceptions being the interiors of Greece and the Arabian Peninsula.
The Medes didn’t lose much in the transfer of power towards the Persians, often being employed as satraps, officials, and generals, having their court ceremonies be adopted by the Persians, sharing their old capital city of Ecbatana with the Persians, and generally standing on an equal level to the Persians. Indeed, one could argue that the Medes and Persians actually formed a general “Medo-Persian” Empire, with Cyrus’s successful revolt amounting to more a change in dynasty than a change in state. The Persians seemed to have the stronger cultural identity overall, because the Medes, specifically as such, appear to disappear from the historical record after the conquest of the Persians by Alexander the Great at the latest. The term “Media” itself would survive as a term for the northwestern Iranian region, before largely being replaced by terms such as “Atropatene” (Adurbadagan/Iranian Azerbaijan), “al-Jibal”, “Pahla”, and “Ajami Iraq”.
We’ll further explore the history of Iran, and the Middle East in general under the Achaemenid Persians, in the next part of this series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3770703/
https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdlj/2014-4
https://web.archive.org/web/20140109135715/http://www.theeffect.org/resources/articles/pdfsetc/Eden.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugal#Lugal,_ensi_and_en
Wouldn’t a far better name for the so-called “Early Assyrian period” be the “proto-Assyrian period”? Alas, I probably am not credentialed enough to ask for such a change.
I find usages of the word “empire” to refer to any state before the Neo-Assyrian Empire (solely excepting the Akkadian Empire and probably the Middle Assyrian Kingdom/Empire too) to be erroneous, since the paradigmatic examples of “empire” (such as the Roman and Han Chinese) invariably claim universal authority over, if not the entire world, then the principal portion(s) thereof - and generally make good on attempts to exert said authority.
This authority is almost never just geographical (and it is certainly never restricted to just one people or small group of peoples; otherwise, commonalities in geography, culture, and/or ethnicity would effect something of a “national” unification instead), and indeed there are typically religious or ideological elements in the authority of historical empires, from being the defender/expander of a faith, to being the spreader of a civilization, to even being the unifier of all peoples/ethnicities of a specific, yet broad type (such as Eurasian steppe nomads).
The usage of the term “empire” merely to refer to any state that is bigger than the average kingdom in the region, any “super-state”, or any regional hegemon, is something I find very glib, superficial, and diluting of the word’s meaning. Further explanation of this can be found here: https://www.friesian.com/notes/oldking.htm#sumer. You need to scroll down to the part that starts with “Treatments of Mesopotamian history seem to have become very free with the idea of "empire."” to see it, though.
Thus, I typically refer to pre-Neo-Assyrian states in Mesopotamia, even large ones, as kingdoms. Even the grandiose royal titles (see the “Dominance over Mesopotamia” and “Claims to universal rule” sections of the linked article) that were seen in Mesopotamia were most commonly used by, and associated with, either the Akkadians or the Assyrians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2-kiloyear_event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_superstrate_in_Mitanni
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-the-Amorites-are-the-ancestors-of-the-Arameans-Why
http://aramean-dem.org/English/History/Is_There_a_Connection_Between_the_Amorit.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C5%A1kuza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_Middle_East#Levant
In conjunction with the arrival/rise of various Nabatu/Nebaioth-related tribes, this mixture probably led to the formation of the Nabateans, who would become very prominent in northwestern Arabia in the coming centuries.
This Anatolian cultural mixture and subsequent broad homogeneity is most clear when one takes a look at Hittite religion, which was deeply influenced by the Hurrians, and was in total a combination of Hattian, Hurrian, and native Hittite influences, with Levantine and Mesopotamian elements entering through the Hurrian influence. The Luwian religion, despite being less influenced by the Hattians than the Hittite one, and thus having a more apparently Indo-European element, was still so strongly affected by foreign influence in all periods (such as the Levantines, the Hurrians, the Mesopotamians, and of course the Hittites too) that it is by and large impossible to separate from the neighboring cultures.
Due to the long periods of exchange and interchange between the Hurrians and other Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Anatolian societies, it is often practically impossible to tell which features of Hurrian culture (save their language, the names of many of their gods, and their penchant for metallurgy) were exclusively Hurrian in origin, and which developed through contact with other cultures. And frankly, given the generally “mixed” nature of the Middle East even during this time, such a search would be largely void of meaning anyway.
Pre-“Byzantine” (Medieval Eastern Roman) Greek historical ties to Anatolia and interactions with Anatolian peoples (both indigenous and non-indigenous) in general seem to be way too overlooked by both the public and even some scholars alike.
Notably, it was a nexus of trade between Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaean Greeks, Akkadian-speakers, and Ugaritic-speakers, as evidenced by some variant of the name “Alashiya” appearing in texts from all these languages. It is arguably even found in the Hebrew Bible under the name “Elishah” (not to be confused with Elisha, the prophet).
As an aside, I don’t think it is at all necessary to ascribe mono-ethnic identifications to a people like the Mushki, especially given the ethnically dynamic nature of the Middle East in general. I believe that it is perfectly possible for the Mushki (both Eastern and Western) to be a mixture of Phrygian, proto-Georgian, and proto-Armenian tribes.
I wonder if there’s a hidden-in-plain-sight connection between the Armenians and the Arameans, given that the term “Aram” holds quite a bit of prominence for both peoples.
The Agathyrsi would soon mix with with native Thracian peoples in their area of the Balkans, forming a “Thraco-Scythian” culture, which was also related (if not largely identical) to the concurrent “Thraco-Cimmerian” culture formed by the interchange between Thracians and some newly arriving Cimmerians. Indeed, wider Thraco-Scythian connections seemed to hold true for a very long time, given things like the similarities in name and culture between the Getae (called “Dacians” by the Romans) and the Massagetae. The Getae and Massagetae could also be related to the Geats, Goths, Gutes, Gutones, and Jats on account of various similarities in both name and culture. One might be tempted to attach the Illyrians, Phrygians, Greeks, and Armenians to this continuum as well, given broad connections between these peoples and the Thracians.
Thracian and Phrygian culture being similar enough in Anatolia that they can be lumped together without too much trouble.
The Urartians have been absorbed into the Armenian ethnos a long time ago by this point.
It should be considered no coincidence that Thales of Miletus, the man generally considered to be the first (Greek) philosopher, developed his theory that water was the fundamental basis of the universe after his travels to Egypt and Babylon, two Middle Eastern civilizations with creation narratives involving primordial water.
This Biblical peculiarity is examined in great detail in “The Lords of Avaris” by David Rohl. It’s quite involved, but to (over)simplify it a bit, he basically argues that the Philistines and the Deuteronomistic Philistines are simply two waves of the same people. It’s a very interesting book overall, and I recommend anyone interested in “non-standard” histories of the Middle East to try it out, as well as Rohl’s other works. David Rohl’s bibliography probably deserves an entire series of articles all by itself, but I want to stick to the “standard history” of the peoples involved in this article, at least until getting to the Aryans.
Most likely a variant of Mycenaean Greek, although many have proposed Luwian or some other Anatolian language as an alternative. Personally, I think it’s entirely possible that the Philistines mainly spoke a dialect of Greek (this being the “Philistine language” proper), but also spoke a few Anatolian languages as well.
I’d normally write “schism” instead of “split” here, but “Vedism-Zoroastrianism Split” just rolls off the tongue better for me than “Vedism-Zoroastrianism Schism”. Other names I’ve thought up include “Vedism-Mazdaism Split” and “Vedism-Avestism Split”.
The highly intertwined histories of Bactria, Sogdia (Transoxiana), Khwarazm, and Greater Khorasan, to the point where it is frequently difficult to tell where one of them ends and the others begin, should provide enough evidence of the often “fuzzy” nature of Aryan cultural boundaries.
Iranology in Iran itself, so far as I know, doesn’t really focus on Iranian origins, and is at a low ebb altogether due to the religious and political attitudes of the Islamic Republic of Iran, so I don’t really count Iranian Iranologists.
I find In and Outside the Square: The Sky and the Power of Belief in Ancient China and the World, c. 4500 BC – AD 200 by John C. Didier especially pertinent due to its description of the ancient Middle East (particularly in regards to the development of horse-riding) in pages 62-63 of Volume I: The Ancient Eurasian World and the Celestial Pivot (with regards to the format of the text itself; in regards to the PDF file I’ve linked, this description is found in pages 112-113). The paragraph breaks are my own, and done so for readability purposes. The addition of the brackets was also done by me:
“First, during the 4th–2nd millennia BC nowhere but in the Near East were resources so concentrated and was so powerful a momentum of civilizational development building. The Near East was the center of ancient trade, political organization, developing social complexities, and industry. It was in the Near Eastern [cultural] koine that the technologies of bronze-making and writing emerged. The underlying cause of the Near Eastern momentum of this period was, of course, the region’s superior agricultural fertility borne of control of the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates riverine systems.
From the 4th through the middle 2nd millennia BC the political, social, cultural, economic (industry & trade), and inventive momenta of the Near East became self-perpetuating, self-magnifying, and self-accelerating as particularly the economic activity of the ancient developing world of our expanded vision of [Stuart] Piggott’s koine — but here including, even further afield, the cultures and economies of Persia and the Indus region — centered on the pivot of Mesopotamia. With such centrality energies and resources were concentrated in the Near East, which in turn created a self-perpetuating inventive momentum that could not be matched in other regions with far more diffuse demographic patterns and less sophisticated political and social, and thus also labor organization, constructs.
Further, political organization begot the concentration of wealth not only in the populace of the Near East generally but also specifically within the grasp of the politically powerful, enabling further a concentrated investment of such wealth in technologies that would lead to both economic and military success. The case of astronomical observation, to be reviewed in the following chapter, is a case clearly demonstrating this point.
Again, less organized and more sparsely populated, i.e., less urbanized, regions could not have brought to bear the immense human and physical resources available to the politically powerful and economically prosperous elites of the Near East, and, as a result, with much less ability to invest in the development of promising or successful technologies, the people/cultures of such regions were far less likely than those in the Near East to originate the immensely significant (and expensive) development of the technologies of particularly wheeled transport and bitted, bridled riding of the Equus caballus.”
I’m of the mind that connections between the Indo-Europeans and Afro-Asiatics should be investigated a lot more by historians, as well as connections between the non-Indo-European, non-Afro-Asiatic languages of the ancient Middle East, which are (solely excepting the Hurro-Urartian language family) otherwise deemed language isolates or unclassified, even though they are commonly theorized to have some type of “ancestral” relationship to the languages of the Caucasus. As for Hurro-Uratian itself, there is a hypothesized “Alarodian” language family that connects Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian, although another hypothesis instead connects Hurro-Urartian to Indo-European.
As a (minor) aside, one comment by a certain “Jason Muniz” in the New Indology article “The term 'Aryan' and its Semitic cognates” reads: “Semites are just Afro-Asiaticized Indo-Europeans.” That still sticks with me, even today.
Pardonne mon français . . . Je suis obligé d'écrire dans plusieurs langues parce que : 1. La plupart des gens aux États-Unis ont subi un lavage de cerveau leur faisant croire que les Juifs sont leur salut ; et 2., leur anglais est de la merde et ils ne peuvent pas rester silencieux assez longtemps pour entendre ou voir ce qui se passe évidemment autour d'eux . . .
Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Les banquiers juifs ont inondé l’Europe de musulmans et l’Amérique de déchets du tiers-monde . . . L'exil comme punition pour ceux qui prêchent la sédition devrait être rétabli dans le cadre juridique de l'Occident . . . Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire