The New Penguin History of the World (23 page)

Settlement in Palestine had been essentially a military operation and military necessity provoked the next stage in the consolidation of a nation. It seems to have been the challenge from the Philistines (who were obviously more formidable opponents than the Canaanites) which stimulated the emergence of the Hebrew kingship at some time about 1000
BC
. With it appears another institution, that of the special distinction of the prophets, for it was the prophet Samuel who anointed (and thus, in effect, designated) both Saul, the first king, and his successor, David. When Saul reigned, the Bible tells us, Israel had no iron weapons, for the Philistines took care not to endanger their supremacy by permitting them. None the less, the Jews learnt the management of iron from their enemies; the Hebrew words for ‘knife’ and ‘helmet’ both have Philistine roots. Ploughshares did not exist, but if they had they could have been beaten into swords.

Saul won victories, but died at last by his own hand and his work was completed by David. Of all Old Testament individuals, David is outstandingly credible both for his strengths and weaknesses. Although there is no archaeological evidence that he existed, he lives still as one of the great figures of world literature and was a model for kings for 2000 years. The literary account, confused though it is, is irresistibly convincing. It tells of
a noble-hearted but flawed and all-too-human hero who ended the Philistine peril and reunited the kingdom which had split at Saul’s death. Jerusalem became Israel’s capital and David then imposed himself upon the neighbouring peoples. Among them were the Phoenicians who had helped him against the Philistines, and this was the end of Tyre as an important independent state.

Yet it was David’s son and successor, Solomon, who was the first king of Israel to achieve major international standing. He gave his army a chariot arm, launched expeditions to the south against the Edomites, allied with Phoenicia and built a navy. Conquest and prosperity followed.

‘
And Solomon reigned over all kingdoms from the river [Euphrates] unto the land of the Philistines, and unto the border of Egypt… and Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon.’
          I Kings 4: 21, 25

Again, this sounds like the exploitation of possibilities available to the weak when the great are in decline; the success of Israel under Solomon is further evidence of the eclipse of the older empires and it was matched by the successes of other now-forgotten peoples of Syria and the Levant who constituted the political world depicted in the obscure struggles recorded in the Old Testament. Most of them were descendants of the old Amorite expansion. Solomon was a king of great energy and drive and the economic and technical advances of the period were also notable. He was an entrepreneur ruler of the first rank. The legendary ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ have been said to reflect the activity of the first copper refinery of which there is evidence in the Near East, but this is disputed. Certainly the building of the Temple (after Phoenician models) was only one of many public works, though perhaps the most important. David had given Israel a capital, thus increasing the tendency to political centralization. He had planned a temple and when Solomon built it the worship of Yahweh was given a more splendid form than ever before and an enduring focus.

A tribal religion had successfully resisted the early dangers of contamination by the fertility rites and polytheism of the agriculturists among whom the Hebrews had settled in Canaan. But there was always a threat of backsliding which would compromise the covenant. With success came other dangers, too. A kingdom meant a court, foreign contacts and – in Solomon’s day – foreign wives who cherished the cults of their own gods. Denunciation of the evils of departing from the law by going a-whoring after the fertility gods of the Philistines had been the first role of the prophets; a new luxury gave them a social theme as well.

The prophets brought to its height the Israelite idea of God. They were
not soothsayers such as the Near East already knew (though this is probably the tradition which formed the first two great prophets, Samuel and Elijah), but preachers, poets, political and moral critics. Their status depended essentially on the conviction they could generate in themselves and others, that God spoke through them. Few preachers have had such success. In the end Israel would be remembered not for the great deeds of her kings but for the ethical standards announced by her prophets. They shaped the connections of religion with morality which were to dominate not only Judaism but Christianity and Islam.

The prophets evolved the cult of Yahweh into the worship of a universal God, just and merciful, stern to punish sin but ready to welcome the sinner who repented. This was the climax of religious culture in the Near East, a point after which religion could be separated from locality and tribe. The prophets also bitterly attacked social injustice. Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah went behind the privileged priestly caste to do so, denouncing religious officialdom directly to the people. They announced that all men were equal in the sight of God, that kings might not simply do what they would; they proclaimed a moral code which was a given fact, independent of human authority. Thus the preaching of adherence to a moral law which Israel believed was god-given became also a basis for a criticism of existing political power. Since the law was not made by man it did not ostensibly emerge from that power; the prophets could always appeal to it as well as to their divine inspiration against king or priest. It is not too much to say that, if the heart of political liberalism is the belief that power must be used within a moral framework independent of it, then its tap-root is the teaching of the prophets.

Most of the prophets after Samuel spoke against a troubled background, which they called in evidence as signs of backsliding and corruption. Israel had prospered in the eclipse of paramount powers, when kingdoms came and went with great rapidity. After Solomon’s death in 935
BC
Hebrew history had ups as well as downs, but broadly took a turn for the worse. There had already been revolts; soon the kingdom split. Israel became a northern kingdom, built on ten tribes gathered together around a capital at Samaria; in the south the tribes of Benjamin and Judah still held Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom of Judah. The Assyrians obliterated Israel in 722
BC
and the ten tribes disappeared from history in mass deportations. Judah lasted longer. It was more compact and somewhat less in the path of great states; it survived until 587
BC
, when Jerusalem’s walls and Temple were razed by a Babylonian army. The Judaeans, too, then suffered deportations, many of them being carried away to Babylon, to the great experience of the Exile, a period so important and formative that after it
we may properly speak of ‘the Jews’, the inheritors and transmitters of a tradition still alive and easily traced. Once more great empires had established their grip in Mesopotamia and gave its civilization its last flowering. The circumstances which had favoured the appearance of a Jewish state had disappeared. Fortunately for the Jews, the religion of Judah now ensured that this did not mean that their national identity was doomed too.

Since the days of Hammurabi, the peoples of the Mesopotamian valley had been squeezed in a vice of migratory peoples. For a long time its opposing jaws had been the Hittites and the Mitanni, but from time to time others had ruled in Assur and Babylon. When, in due course, the Hittites also crumbled, ancient Mesopotamia was the seat of no great military power until the ninth century
BC
, though such a sentence conceals much. One Assyrian king briefly conquered Syria and Babylon early in the eleventh century; he was soon swept away by a cluster of pushful Semitic tribes whom scholars call Aramaeans, followers of the old tradition of expansion into the fertile lands from the desert. Together with a new line of Kassite kings in Babylon they were the awkward and touchy neighbours of the reduced kings of Assyria for 200 years or so – for about as long as the United States has existed. Though one of these Semitic peoples was called the Chaldees and therefore subsequently gave its name somewhat misleadingly to Babylonia, there is not much to be remarked in this story except further evidence of the fragility of the political constructions of the ancient world.

Shape only begins to reappear in the turmoil of events in the ninth century
BC
when Mesopotamia recovered. Then, the Old Testament tells us, Assyrian armies were once more on the move against the Syrian and Jewish kingdoms. After some successful resistance the Assyrians came back again and again, and they conquered. This was the beginning of a new, important and unpleasant phase of Near Eastern history. A new Assyrian empire was in the making. In the eighth century it was moving to its apogee, and Nineveh, the capital high up the Tigris, which had replaced the ancient centre of Assur, became the focus of Mesopotamian history as Babylon had once been. Assyrian empire was unified in a way that other great empires were not; it did not rely on the vassalization of kings and the creation of tributaries. Instead, it swept native rulers away and installed Assyrian governors. Often, too, it swept away peoples. One of its characteristic techniques was mass deportation; the Ten Tribes of Israel are the best-remembered victims.

Assyrian expansion was carried forward by repeated and crushing victory. Its greatest successes followed 729
BC
, when Babylon was seized. Soon after, Assyrian armies destroyed Israel, Egypt was invaded, its kings
were confined to Upper Egypt and the delta was annexed. By then Cyprus had submitted, Cilicia and Syria had been conquered. Finally, in 646
BC
, Assyria made its last important conquest, part of the land of Elam, whose kings dragged the Assyrian conqueror’s chariot through the streets of Nineveh. The consequences were of great importance for the whole Near East. A standardized system of government and law spanned the whole area. Conscript soldiers and deported populations were moved about within it, sapping its provincialism. Aramaic spread widely as a common language. A new cosmopolitanism was possible after the Assyrian age.

This great formative power is commemorated in monuments of undeniable impressiveness. Sargon II (721–705
BC
) built a great palace at Khorsabad, near Nineveh, which covered half a square mile of land and was embellished with more than a mile of sculpted reliefs. The profits of conquest financed a rich and splendid court. Ashurbanipal (668–626
BC
) also left his monuments (including obelisks carried off to Nineveh from Thebes), but he was a man with a taste for learning and antiquities and his finest relic is what survives of the great collection of tablets he made for his library. In it he accumulated copies of all that he could discover of the records and literature of ancient Mesopotamia. It is to these copies that we owe much of our knowledge of Mesopotamian literature, among them the Epic of Gilgamesh in its fullest edition, a translation made from Sumerian. The ideas that moved this civilization are thus fairly accessible from literature as well as from other sources. The frequent representation of Assyrian kings as hunters may be a part of the image of the warrior-king, but may also form part of a conscious identification of the king with legendary conquerors of nature who had been the heroes of a remote Sumerian past.

The stone reliefs which commemorate the great deeds of Assyrian kings also repeat, monotonously, another tale – that of sacking, enslavement, impalement, torture and the final solution of mass deportation. Assyrian empire had a brutal foundation of conquest and intimidation. It was made possible by the creation of the best army up to this time. Fed by conscription of all males and armed with iron weapons, it also had siege artillery able to breach walls until this time impregnable, and even some mailed cavalry. It was a coordinated force of all arms. Perhaps, too, it had a special religious fervour. The god Assur is shown hovering over the armies as they go to battle and to him kings reported their victories over unbelievers.

Whatever the fundamental explanation of Assyrian success, it quickly waned. Possibly, empire put too great a strain on Assyrian numbers. The year after Ashurbanipal died, the empire began to crumble, the first sign being a revolt in Babylon. The rebels were supported by the Chaldeans
and also by a great new neighbour, the kingdom of the Medes, now the leading Iranian people. Their entrance as a major power on the stage of history marks an important change. The Medes had hitherto been distracted by having to deal with yet another wave of barbarian invaders from the north, the Scythians, who poured down into Iran from the Caucasus (and at the same time down the Black Sea coast towards Europe). These were light cavalrymen, fighting with the bow from horseback, and the first major eruption into western Asia of a new force in world history, nomadic peoples straight from Central Asia. It took time to come to terms with them in the seventh century. Like all other great invasions, the Scythian advance pushed other peoples before them (the kingdom of Phrygia was overrun by one of these). Meanwhile, the last of the political units of the Near East based on the original Caucasian inhabitants was gobbled up by Scyths, Medes or Assyrians. All this took a century and more, but amounted to a great clearing of the stage. The instability and fragmentation of the periphery of the Fertile Crescent had long favoured Assyria; it ceased to do so when Scyths and Medes joined forces. This pushed Assyria over the edge and gave the Babylonians independence again; Assyria passes from history with the sack of Nineveh by the Medes in 612
BC
.

This thunderbolt was not quite the end of the Mesopotamian tradition. Assyria’s collapse left the Fertile Crescent open to new masters. The north was seized by the Medes, who pushed across Anatolia until halted at the borders of Lydia and at last drove the Scyths back into Russia. An Egyptian pharaoh made a grab at the south and the Levant, but was defeated by a Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, who gave Mesopotamian civilization an Indian summer of grandeur and a last Babylonian empire, which more than any other captured the imagination of posterity. It ran from Suez, the Red Sea and Syria across the border of Mesopotamia and the old kingdom of Elam (by then ruled by a minor Iranian dynasty called the Achaemenids). If for nothing else, Nebuchadnezzar would be remembered as the great conqueror who destroyed Jerusalem in 587
BC
after a Jewish revolt and carried off the tribes of Judah into captivity, using them as he used other captives, to carry out the embellishment of his capital, whose ‘hanging gardens’ or terraces were to be remembered as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He was the greatest king of his time, perhaps of any time until his own.