Back to The Near East: 3000 to 1500 B.C.

There were multiple nomadic tribes in the Arabian Peninsula and very dry areas were opened for settlement by the use of lime plaster for watertight cisterns. In present day Jordan, Ammon became the capital of the Ammonite tribe and legend has it that this city was conquered by the Judean King David. The Aramic-speaking Arameans lived primarily around Palmyra and with their camels they began to attack the "fertile crescent" to the north and east. At about 1,000 B.C. they began to migrate east to Babylonia, north toward Asia Minor and west to Damascus. Their relatives, the Chaldeans, began to emerge from central Arabia and also started toward Babylon, and more particularly toward Ur, in Sumer. (Ref. 8)

About 1,500 B.C. an entirely new type of writing was recorded for the first time, in the Sinai Peninsula. This was an alphabet in which each sign represented one consonant. It soon spread among the Phoenicians and other Semites on the coast. Although originally written in a cuneiform, the Phoenicians later replaced it with letters which could be written faster on paper. The derivation of various mid-eastern scripts is as follows: Note: Insert chart from p107

In the northern and western parts of Persia, cultural traditions were broken about 1,300 B.C. with the appearance of monochrome, polished pottery along with the definitive Iron Age, and the arrival from the northeast of the Indo-European languages, as the Medes and Persians migrated down from areas of central Asia. In the southwest, Elam continued as a more or less independent state with a high cultural level which reached its height from 1,300 to 1,100 B.C., reaching a special peak under Untash-Gal. The largest surviving ziggurat in the world, some 170 feet high with five levels, is at Tchoga Zanbil, some eighteen miles from Susa, the ancient capital of Elam. In the middle of the 12th century B.C. Elam had a brief expansion into the Dujala area and eastern Assyria (old Mesopotamia), when the leaders were probably seeking to gain control of the Zagros trade routes. The Elamites had a glass technology and cast bronze. (Ref. 18, 18, 176, 8)

The famous Trojan War, formerly considered only an Homerian legend, probably actually occurred about 1,200 B.C. with Agamemnon leading the Mycenean Greek forces against Troy. Homer said that the Thracians, led by King Rhesus, came to the Trojans' aid, and it is known that at that time the Mycenaeans did assume power over all the eastern Mediterranean. Hittite and Egyptian chronicles seem to confirm this. Farther inland the Hittites, under their greatest king, Shubbiluliu (also Suppiluliumas) reconquered central Anatolia and northern Syria and reduced the Mitanni to a small vassal kingdom by about 1,350 B.C. and all north Syria was under their control by 1,340. In 1,250 they forced Ramses II of Egypt to acknowledge their king as his equal. Carchemish, in Syria, was one of the more important of the smaller Hittite states, and the people were the Hittites mentioned in the Bible. At that time, what little iron was available in the world was in the Hittite Anatolian kingdom, but it was worth forty times its weight in silver. In fact, it is said that the Chalybes, a sub-tribe of the Hittites, even made steel bars by about 1,400 B.C., using them in limited quantities for knives and swords. (Ref. 213, page 282) The Hittite language is the earliest documented Indo European tongue and was written usually in cuneiform script borrowed from Mesopotamia about 1,500 B.C. The capital city, Hattusas, was protected by a massive, dry stone wall three and three-quarters miles around. Some of the stones were as large as twenty-six by twenty feet. When this capital was mysteriously sacked about 1,190 B.C., the brick houses of Hattuses were subjected to such intense heat that the bricks fused. It should be realized that the Hittites had access to the same Lebanese cedar forests as the Phoenicians and that they built elaborate wooden ships even before the latter. Ancient Hittite seals indicate that they also built reed ships. Remarkable conformities exist if one compares the early Hittite civilization and the early Olmec civilization at La Venta, Mexico. The similarities include motifs and technique of highly specialized ceramic effigy jars, stone statues with inlaid shell and obsidian eyes, adobe mounds, a solar deity sculpted with a feather crown and a body half serpent and half bird (plumed serpent) and some hieroglyphics - completely different from other middle eastern scripts. (Ref. 45, 136, 215, 95)

At the end of the 13th and in the 12th century B.C. part of the Hittite territory was taken over by the upsurging Sea People and in the 11th century, the Assyrians took over the rest, so that the Hittite civilization, as such, died out or was absorbed in the next few hundreds of years. Phrygean invaders from Thrace, and Luvians, may have played a major part in this destruction of the Hittite Empire. As the political entity collapsed, however, these ironsmiths of Anatolia then spread far and wide, taking their iron weapons with them so that their culture actually survived in neo-Hittite kingdoms, particularly in north Syria near Carchemish. (Ref. 45)

Still farther east, in Urartu, also known as the Kingdom of Van and later as Armenia, the Hurrian and Vannic peoples (related to the Mitanni) whose languages were related continued their own high level civilization.

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