A Brief History of the Middle East, Part 1

by Don Lowry

1. SUMER: The word "civilization" means life in cities. According to the best guesses of historians and archeologists, the first civilization in the whole world began along the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what it now southern Iraq and Kuwait. Different sources give widely different dates, but sometime between 6000 BC and 3900 BC a people known today as the Sumerians settled in that area, which is thus called Sumer (evidently it was known then as Shoomer). In the Old Testament it is referred to as the land of Shinar. Where the Sumerians came from is not known - probably from the east or from the Persian Gulf - but their language was not related to any other known language. By around 3000 BC, if not before, they had begun to use writing and make objects of bronze. They supposedly invented the animal-drawn plow, the wheel, large-scale irrigation and many other technological advances.

2. EGYPT: A somewhat similar civilization developed along the Nile River around the same time. But while Sumeria was a collection of independent city states, Egypt was united - first in two kingdoms and then into one single empire. The unification of Egypt is estimated to have taken place around 2900 BC, when the king of Upper Egypt (the Nile Valley) conquered Lower Egypt (the Nile Delta). This is called the Early Dynastic Period, and it soon segued into the Old Kingdom, which is conventionally said to have extended from around 2650 BC to around 2150 - a neat 500 years. Egyptologists like to think that they have worked out the chronology of ancient Egypt perfectly, but their whole system is actually highly suspect. But, whatever dates might be assigned them, the Old Kingdom was followed by a short First Intermediate Period of chaos, followed by the Middle Kingdom, a long Second Intermediate Period, and the New Kingdom, before falling to foreign conquests. Incidentally, the name Egypt is an Anglicization of the Greek Aegyptus. But the people who lived there called the Nile Valley "Kemet," meaning the Black Land (as opposed to the desert, which was Deshret, the Red Land). United Egypt's first capital was On, called by the Greeks Heliopolis (meaning Sun City), which was near the point where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, just across the river from the pyramids at Giza, near present-day Cairo.

3. SUMER & AKKAD: Sometime around 2500 BC the Sumerians were conquered by a Semitic people, led by a king known as Sargon I, and I should here define the term "Semitic." It is taken from Biblical genealogy - according to which the Hebrews, Arabs, and many other peoples of the Middle East were descended from Shem, one of Noah's three sons. More properly, these days, it refers to a group of related languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and ancient Akkadian. The latter name comes from the name of the capital city Sargon built: Agade or Akkad. Sargon conquered the various Sumerian cities and founded an empire that included all of southern Iraq, and from time to time much more. It was known as "Sumer and Akkad." Most of the culture and technology was Sumerian, while the Semites provided the ruling class that unified the empire.

4. BABYLON: Around 2200 BC this empire was conquered by a tribe known as the Gutians, from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, but they were thrown off by the native Sumerians/Akkadians about 100 years later. However, their independence was brief, for about 100 years after that they were conquered again, this time by Amorites, a Semitic people from Syria, who built a new capital at Babylon. This was not an instant conquest, but took a few generations to complete. Also around this time the old Sumerian city of Ur was sacked by Elamites from what is now southwest Iran. (This is believed by some to be what caused the family of the Hebrew patriarch, Abraham, to leave Ur and move to Haran, on the upper Euphrates.)

5. ISRAELITES: If you remember you Bible stories you know that Abraham migrated from "Ur of the Chaldees," in Sumeria, to Haran, in modern Syria, and later into what was then called Canaan, or modern Palestine. He had an illegitimate son (that is, not by his official wife) named Ishmael, whom the Arabs claim to be descended from, and a legitimate son named Isaac, whom the Jews claim to be descended from. Isaac, in turn, had two sons, twins: Esau, the oldest, and Jacob. But Jacob pulled a fast one and received his father's "blessing" or inheritance, instead of Esau (who also figures in Arabic genealogy, I believe). Jacob later changed his name to Israel after spending the night "wrestling with an angel." Thus his descendants were called "Israelites." Jacob/Israel had 12 sons (by four different mothers), the next-to-youngest of which was Joseph, whose older brothers, finding him rather uppity, sold into slavery. He wound up in Egypt (probably during the Middle Kingdom period), found favor there by interpreting dreams, and became the Pharoah's minister in charge of storing up grain for a future drought, which he had predicted. Maverick Egyptologist David Rohl thinks this really happened and places it at around 1666 BC. He has identified what he thinks was a statue of Joseph and the tomb of Jacob/Israel in Egypt (his body was later exhumed and taken with the Israelites on the Exodus). For when the drought came, Jacob/Israel and his family, servants, etc., came to Egypt asking for a hand-out, and were surprised to find long-lost Joseph in charge. They settled down in what the Bible calls the land of Goshen, probably just east or southeast of the Nile Delta, and eventually were put to work making bricks for the Egyptians to earn their keep. We'll get back to them later.

6. ASSYRIA: Around 1600 BC Babylon was sacked by the so-called Hittites from Asia Minor (modern Turkey), after which a Semitic people in what is now northern Iraq became independent of Babylon and founded what we call the Assyrian Empire, because its first capital was Ashur, but later its main capital was Nineveh. The Assyrians were the real "bad boys" of the ancient Middle East, even more ruthless and militaristic than the others, who were bad enough. Soon thereafter the Kassites, from the Zagros Mountains, conquered Babylon and took over its empire, though not all at once. Around 1225 BC the Assyrians sacked Babylon but did not keep it, and Babylonia remained independent, though less powerful.

7. THE EXODUS, CANAANITES, HYKSOS, PHILISTINES, ETC.: Many experts will tell you that the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt never took place because they can find no mention of it in Egyptian records. These are the same guys who keep saying, when it suits their purpose, that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" ... (which, it is, of course; it's not proof, but it's evidence). Immanuel Velikovsky found an Egyptian account of the plagues that preceded the Exodus, but he is discounted because of his supposedly crazy ideas about astronomical events (although one idea is not dependent on the other) and because it doesn't fit the favored chronology of Egyptian history. Those who do believe that there was an Exodus vary widely on when it took place, both relative to us and in terms of what Egyptian dynasty was in power at the time. Both Rohl and Velikovsky place it at the end of the Middle Kingdom, which Rohl dates to around 1450 BC. At this point Egypt was invaded by "barbarians" from "Asia," they called the Hyksos, who took over Upper Egypt. Velikovsky equates them with the Amelikites, from Arabia, whom the Israelites battled with after leaving Egypt, positing that these Amelikites/Hyksos went on to invade Egypt in the wake of the destruction left behind by the Israelites. In Egyptian history this is the Second Intermediate Period, between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. Be that as it may, the Israelites, led by Moses (who was Israelite by birth but raised as an Egyptian prince), and by now swollen to a pretty good-sized mob (say half a million people), rebelled against the Egyptians, took flight, wandered in the desert for 40 years, passed to the east of the Dead Sea, and, now led by Joshua, crossed the Jordan River, destroyed Jericho (one of the oldest cities in the world), and over several generations conquered most of Canaan. They divided up the land among their twelve tribes, descendants of the sons of Israel/Jacob. (Actually, the Levites, descendants of one son, Levi, formed a priestly class and received no land. Descendants of the two sons of Joseph are counted as two separate tribes, bringing the number back up to 12.) The Canaanites, incidentally, were the same people the Greeks called the Phoenicians, another Semitic people, probably originally from the Red Sea area (think Mecca). Their language was pretty much identical to Hebrew, and they are credited, by the Greeks, with inventing the alphabet, though it might even have been the Israelites who did that. By this time - Rohl says around 1290 BC - the Hyksos had been expelled from Egypt, leading to what is called the New Kingdom, whose capital was at Thebes in Upper Egypt. This is the era of some of the most famous Pharoahs: Akhenaten, Tutenkhamen, and Ramses the Great. Around 1250 BC a volcanic eruption/earthquake/tsunami apparently destroyed the so-called Minoan civilization on Crete, and the Phoenicians, from their coastal cities in what is now Lebanon, took the Minoans' place as the great sea power of the Mediterranean after that. The Israelites also came up against the Philistines, a non-Semitic people who controlled a few cities on and near the coast of what today is called, after them, Palestine. (Gaza, for instance, was a Philistine city.) They probably came from Cypress or Crete, perhaps because of the destruction on those islands caused by the volcano, etc. This is also the era traditionally ascribed to the Trojan War, but that's another story. And 1200 BC is also roughly the time of the beginning of the Iron Age in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Assyrians and the Babylonians were still going, and around 1100 BC the Assyrians briefly captured Babylon again, but that still did not end their rivalry.

8. ISRAEL & JUDAH: Somewhere around 1000 BC, give or take, the Israelites decided they needed a king, just like their neighbors, and they selected one, whose name comes down to us as Saul. (Since this probably meant "chosen," it is more likely a cognomen than a name in the sense that we use them today.) He reigned only a couple of years, however, and was killed by the Philistines. He was succeeded by his son-in-law and sometime-rival David, who then conquered the city of Jerusalem and made it his capital, at least partly because it was right on the border between the territories of two Israelite tribes: Judah and Benjamin. David had a long and successful reign, and after him there is no more mention of the Philistines or Canaanites. His son, Solomon, had an even longer and more prosperous reign, extending his rule far up into Syria. Solomon, of course, built the Temple at Jerusalem, or had it built, the king of the Phoenician city Tyre providing many of the skilled workmen needed. But after him the kingdom split in two. A son of Solomon ruled the southern Kingdom, known as Judah, consisting of the tribes of Judah and what was left of Benjamin (the latter had been pretty much wiped out by then), with its capital at Jerusalem. The other ten tribes were ruled by one of Solomon's generals and his descendants; he had been in exile in Egypt and was sent back by the Egyptians to stir up trouble, much as the Germans sent Lenin to Russia in 1917. The northern kingdom, consisting of the other 10 tribes, continued to use the name Israel and eventually built a new capital at Samaria. Around 722 BC the Assyrians conquered this northern kingdom, and, as was their practice, deported much of the population to other parts of their empire and replaced them with peoples conquered elsewhere. The deportees are what are known as the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. They disappeared from history. (The Mormons claim, I believe, that some of them came to America.) The mixture of Israelites and peoples imported by the Assyrians became what the New Testament calls Samaritans, who were despised by the Judeans (Jews) of the southern kingdom, even in New Testament times. (Thus Jesus's story of a "good Samaritan" - which was something of a contradiction in terms to the Jews.)

9. ASSYRIA, BABYLON & PERSIA: The Assyrians also invaded Judah, in 701 BC, but were turned back by what the Bible describes as a miracle - probably actually an outbreak of plague in the Assyrian army. In 664 BC the Assyrians bypassed Judah and sacked the Egyptian capital of Thebes, far up the Nile! But around 50 years after that the Assyrians finally got their come-uppance. The Babylonians, allied with the Medes, an Indo-European people of northwest Iran, conquered the Assyrians and destroyed Nineveh. However, in 598 BC Jerusalem was conquered anyway, by the Babylonians, who, borrowing the Assyrian idea, deported part of its people. They installed a puppet king, but a few years later he rebelled against them. In 586 or 587, the Babylonians came back, conquered Jerusalem again, destroyed the temple Solomon had built, and carried off much of the ruling class to Babylonia. In 558 BC the Persians, related to the Medes and subject to them, refused to pay tribute to the Medes, defeated the Median king when he came to collect, and took over his kingdom. The first Persian king, known to us as Cyrus (but in Persian as Karush), then went on to conquer Lydia, the richest kingdom in Asia Minor, among other places, and in 539 BC he conquered Babylon and took over its empire. Cyrus is fondly remembered in the Old Testament because he allowed the Jews (that is, Judans) to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. Cyrus was tolerant of all religions, but Zorastrianism was big in the Persian Empire, and it strongly influenced Jewish thought thereafter. In 525 BC Cyrus's son and heir went on to conquer Egypt and add it to the Persian Empire, which then covered the entire area we now call the Middle East. Since the Persian language was virtually unknown outside its own small part of Iran, Cyrus adopted several official languages for his empire. One of them was Aramaic, the Semitic language then spoken in Syria, which became the official language in Palestine as well, and was the common tongue there even in New Testament times.

10. THE GREEKS & PARTHIANS: The Persian Empire is perhaps best known in Western history for its attempts to invade Greece in the 400s BC, leading to epic battles at Thermopylae, Marathon, etc. Suffice it to say that they never succeeded. And they sewed the seeds of their own downfall, for eventually the Greeks returned the favor. In the 330s BC Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia and Captain General of Greece, conquered the Persian Empire, including Egypt, and extended it eastward as far as the Indus River in what is now Pakistan. He founded many Greek colonies wherever he went, naming most of them after himself, the most famous being Alexandria, Egypt, which became the greatest city of the Mediterranean World in its day. However, he died young and his generals fought over his empire until it was eventually divided into three kingdoms: Macedonia, Egypt, and everything else. Macedonia is beyond the geographic scope of this history. Egypt was taken over by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, and ruled by his descendants until the last of them, Cleopatra VII, was conquered by the Romans under Augustus. The greater part of Alexander's empire fell to another general, Seleucus, and is known as the Seleucid Empire. But the eastern provinces soon fell away, then Persia revolted under a dynasty called the Parthians and it soon conquered Mesopotamia (Iraq). Much of Asia Minor split up into small independent countries, leaving the Seleucids only Syria, Palestine and parts of Asia Minor. In these areas, as well as Ptolemaic Egypt and several small kingdoms in Asia Minor, the Greek language and culture were wide-spread, at least among the wealthy and educated classes.