Old Man River

Two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates), an unlikely regional name (Mesopotamia), and a couple of guys named Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar. All of which your elementary school teacher packaged under the name, “The Fertile Crescent,” which sounded suggestive. (It was sixth grade…everything was becoming suggestive, you just didn’t know why.) Public education at its finest.

For a less-hormonal read, we ponder today A History of the Ancient Near East by Marc Van De Mieroop. This one does not so much clear up misperceptions as it provides the detail we skipped over in elementary school on our way to the much more flashy Egyptians and much more pronounceable Romans. As his subtitle tells us, Mieroop limits his consideration to the years 3000 B.C. (the origin of written language) through 323 B.C. (the death of Alexander the Great). A sufficiently large swath of history by anyone’s standard, and a book that rewards detailed reading. Do be warned, however, that although a fun read, this one is an actual textbook. And strap in for the names… “Van De Mieroop” is about the easiest one we encounter.

To be clear: despite our intro, nowhere in the book does our author use the term, “Fertile Crescent.” Outstanding.

He does, however, explain the term without using it: Mesopotamia is north of the Syrian and Arabian Deserts, and the parts that are airable really do form a crescent shaped margin at their top edge. (Strictly speaking, “dry farming,” farming with irrigation, is possible in the zone between the 200 mm and 400 mm isohets, an isohet being points of equal rainfall…and it is this zone that is crescent-shaped. I warned you the man is serious.) Mieroop begins just before the written record, with the growth of Uruk, “the first true city.” Across the Near East communities had begun to grow in the years 4000 B.C. to 3500 B.C. Our author explicitly ponders the question of why anyone would move from the clean, orderly agrarian world into a dirty, noisy, crowded urban environment. At that time, as today, work was much of the reason. At Uruk (and presumably elsewhere), the city grew up around its temple: people brought offerings to the temple, and priests redistributed the donations to the needy (and its own employees). The volume of donations became such that distribution became a full-time job and those doing it settled near the temple, as did the people who worked in the service industries that supported them...even in the fourth millennium B.C. nobody wanted to commute.

So far, so good: you got your fertile crescent, you got your cities, you got your commute concerns…now throw in written language.

Cuneiform writing is the other thing we all remember from school, although with limited understanding. First of all, cuneiform is a script, like Roman letters, not a language, like English or Latin. Cuneiform could and did record many different languages; you can use it to write Akkadian as easily as Babylonian. Cuneiform first arose as an accountancy tool: we think of triangular sticks pressed into clay, and those are, of course, a natural for recording counts of things like money or livestock. Nouns came into the writing system originally as pictograms, stylized representations of sheep, say, or of a bull. “Stylized” is the operative word…if you’re great at picking out constellations, you might have a knack for reading cuneiform. The written record of the ancient Near East has proven surprisingly enduring: fired or unfired, clay tablets in a dry climate are more durable than the parchment and paper used by later civilizations, mainly because bugs don’t eat clay tablets. The depth and extent of the written record varies over the centuries, of course, and for the periphery of the Near East, our author speaks of people coming into and leaving history based on the written record they left.

Cities grew into city-states as they began to control their surrounding regions and as they began to war and treat with other city-states. The most famous, the most influential culturally, and (in popular imagination) simply the most fabulous was Babylon. Founded in about 2300 B.C. by Akkadian-speaking people, it was ruled from 1792-1750 B.C. by Hammurabi, of whom you have heard.

The Code of Hammurabi exists as a black stone stele covered in Old Akkadian writing. The text reads like it was written by a bunch of programmers, since the whole thing is a series of if/then statements: “If a man steals, then his hand shall be cut off,” that sort of thing. Historically we have touted Hammurabi’s Code as the first written system of law, which sounds delightfully authoritative. Trouble is, modern scholarship seems to disprove our understanding. The Code (our term for it, not Hammurabi’s) seems in reality to be more of a tourism brochure, touting the excellence of the king and his rule: “Come to Babylon, we’re so very fair here!” Ancient virtue signaling…you may have heard of it, dreadfully popular just now.

The presence of large, stone tourist brochures implies tourism, and as it turns out, trade.

By the end of the thirteenth century B.C., we arrive at what our author calls the Club of Great Powers, and with it, the Late Bronze Age trade. The Great Powers in question were Mycenae, forerunner to ancient Greece; Hatti, in Anatolia; in Mesopotamia, we have the nations of Mittani (which was succeeded by Assyria in the fourteenth century B.C.), Babylonia, and Elam; and finally, in the south, Egypt. The rulers of these nations addressed one another as “brother,” while considering rulers of all other nations to be servants of one of the Great Powers or another. They even squabbled between themselves about who was a brother and who was a servant. Among them they controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean, and their trade was extensive, in all manner of goods. Trading metals was particularly important. Bronze is made of copper and tin, and none of the Great Powers had deposits of both metals. One plate in the book shows a sunken ship from the period laden with standardized copper and tin bars…in exactly the ratio of ten-to-one needed for bronze. The Egyptians were the only ones with gold deposits, and so naturally everybody wanted to trade with the Egyptians. It was, it seems, a profitable club for all.

Which made it especially painful when it ended, when “something happened” at the beginning of the twelfth century B.C. that destroyed much of the truly ancient world.

Just what that “something” was remains anyone’s guess. Mieroop acknowledges that our old friends the Sea Peoples were a big part of it…theirs was a mass migration of people from the north through the Levant to Egypt. Our author is reluctant to fully blame (or credit) the Sea Peoples for all the destruction and change. First of all, whatever happened occurred in waves or stages; additionally, the destruction seemed to target public buildings and spared private residences; and finally, it appears that the structures that were destroyed had been abandoned well before the attack. You gotta love mystery to read history. Mieroop speculates on local political conditions, crop failures, and geologic movement in addition to the northern migration as causes of the widespread disruption. But in the end, all we really know is that at the close of the Bronze Age, society in the ancient Near East was disrupted and entered a century-long Dark Age.

When the Near East re-emerged it was much changed, and quite a bit of history ensues. Iron and steel are smelted and become important. A common language, Standard Babylonian, emerges. An alphabetic script arises to replace cuneiform and is spread by the Phoenicians. Camels are domesticated and change the pattern of nomadism. The Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) was written between 2000-400 B.C. (it was an installment job), and Mieroop’s discussion of the touchpoints between the Biblical and the archeological/historical records of the period are illuminating. Assyria, Babylon, and the Medes contended for dominance, only to be shut out by the Persians who came from out of nowhere, a place known as Fars in southeast Iran. Starting with Cyrus II in 559 B.C., the Persians built what our author calls “the first world empire in history,” which lasted for two hundred years.

Only to end, inevitably, with Alexander of Macedon, Alexander the Great.

To say that Mieroop is ambivalent about Alexander is an understatement. Actually, he’s ambivalent about the Greeks. Much of our history of the Near East was written by Greek historians, who may or may not have set foot outside their own country. Relations between the Greeks and many of the Near East nations were less than cordial at times — the big battle with the Persians at Marathon comes to mind — so our author applies some skepticism to their accounts. It is the Greeks, filtered through later historians, who gave us the image of the East as effeminate and its leadership enervated. Anything but, in Mieroop’s view. Yet it is undeniable that Alexander conquered the Persians on his way to India, and he returned to Babylon to die. Our author posits the idea, new to me, that Alexander may have been murdered by his own troops…the conventional story is that he died of the flu coupled with too much wine. As a final flourish, Mieroop discusses the continuity of regional history post-Alexander; in his view, Alexander’s death was a bigger change for the Greeks than for those in the Near East.

Missing from history? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Purportedly built by Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604-562 B.C.), archaeologists have searched for, but never found, any evidence of the gardens, and the terrain makes their existence unlikely, at least not in Babylon itself. But the undiscovered gardens give the city and the era a veil of distant mist, an aura of the exotic and unknowable. You want to find out more, and curiosity is the best promoter of tourism ever.

Hammurabi and his stele should have been so lucky.