the Sea People (Original)

[Apollo]

rockessence

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Member # 1839

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   posted 07-07-2004 02:33 AM                       
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Some more material:
Heracles was the superman of his time, his adventures were famous, they were known by all greek people, far and wide.

In time he got married with Deianeira and got his own children but in a spout of madness, which Hera had conjured, he killed them all.
One of those children had been named Hyllus.
Later on he got more children with Melite, the doughter of river-god Aeleus.
Again one son was named Hyllus.
This Hyllus became the king of the Phaesians, in the island of Corcyra, present-day Corfu.
Later on he emigrated with some of his people to the Cronian sea, as is told by Apollonius Rhodius.

This Cronian sea is none other than the Gulf of Finland, according to the British historian Robert Graves.

The reason for the immigration was to trade with amber.

The Phaesians knew the route to the Gulf of Finland from earlier expeditions they had made.
It started from the head of Adriatic sea.
Amber is still being found at the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland and at the Baltic Sea shores.
It is said to be the tears of the daughters of the sungod, Uden, or the gold of Boreas, north wind.
The amber has been tested to be from 40 to 120 million years of age, it being most probably resin from tropical conifers.
It is being found and mined mostly at 12 meters deep, where there is a layer of it, in Poland.
But why just 12 meters deep?
At that time there must have existed forests of such trees.
Here is a direct link to the Bock Saga, from 40 to 120 million years ago tropical weather had existed here.

When could the Phaesians have made this expedition? Good guess is presumably 13th century BZ. or earlier.
But history does not mention anything more about the Phaesians, or of their king Hyllus, so the track is lost here.

The areas around Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland were called Hyperborea.
Hyper meaning extreme and borea north.

But also areas as far east as Altai-mountains, and England to the west, have been thought to be the Hyperborea, but that sounds unlikely.
They are too far east and west
.
Finland is due north, looking from Greece and Greek people are the ones who used that expression.

HYPERBOREAN VIRGINS AND THE MESSAGE

A strange thing is to be seen, even today, in the holy island of Delos, which is in the middle of Cyclades and of greek archipelago, in the Aegean Sea.

There are two graves of hyperborean virgins in that island.

Even their names are known, Opis and Arge, in one grave.
Two others are Laodice and Hyperokhe, in another grave.
And their’s are the only graves left in that island, after it was purified by removing all other bodies out of by 400 BZ.

But let’s begin anew.
According to Herodotus, two virgins were sent from Hyperborea to bring gifts to the goddess and protector of childbirth, Eileithyia.
Their names were Laodice and Hyperokhe.
Five men, called ”perferies”, were sent with them as guardians for a long and arduous trip.
They came via the land of Scyths, which was northwest of Black Sea, where Ukraine is today.
From there to the head of Adriatic sea and thence to the mainland of Greece, through the island of Euboia and finally to Delos.
Those four hyperborean maidens remained in Delos the rest of their lives, as priestesses, in the temple of Artemis, and there they also died.
They were highly respected for many centuries.
When Delian youngsters got married, both girls and boys cut a lock of hair and placed it on the grave of Laodice and Hyperokhe.
To ask for easy deliveries and healthy babies.
An olive tree grew on the grave when Herodotus saw it, at 450 BZ.

But Delians told him that two maidens, named Arge and Opis, had come there first, from Hyperborea, at the same time with the two gods, Artemis and Apollo.
Arge and Opis had come to help and assist Leto with the delivery of the two gods.
They were respected by a choir that sung a song a Lycian man, named Olen, also said to be hyperborean, had composed for them, during the festivals that were held every fourth or later every fifth year.
Their names were repeatedly mentioned in that song.
When an animal was sacrificed, it was eaten mostly but the hind leg was burnt on the altar and the ashes were spread to the grave of Arge and Opis.

But this is important, Arge and Opis brought with them a message, bronze plates in which were written the joys and grievings of Paradise and Hades.
This story is to be found in the writings of Plato.
In his book number seven, he writes what Socrates had told to his friend Aksiokhos.
Socrates mentions the story he had heard from a man named Gobryes.
The grandfather of this Gobryes had been sent to the island of Delos to save the valuables from the marauding Persians, in the year when they were invading Greece, 480 BZ.
This here is the text of the bronze plates;
”Soul goes to the land of shady light after parting from the body, deep underground, where Pluto rules as a King, areas which are as large as the halls of Zeus.
When the Earth is in the center of universe, and universe is like a ball, gods of the Sky rule one half and the gods of Hades rule the other half.
Other gods are brothers, and others are the children of brothers.
On the road to the outer court of Pluto there are iron gates which are closed with iron keys.
When gates are opened, first Acheron and then Cocytos rivers must be crossed to get to the fields of truth where Rhadamanthys and Minos wait for you.
There the judges ask what kind of life you have lived when the soul was still within you.
(Rhadamanthys judged the asian people, Minos the european.)
There you cannot lie.
Those who have obeyed the voice of good consience, go to the fields of blessed.
There fruits grow in a mild climate, clean rivers flow and fields are full of springtime flowers.
Philsophers talk, plays are being acted, choirs dance and music is being played.
There are no pains, life is full of enjoyments, the weather being not too cold, nor extremely hot, but the sunshine warms pleasantly.
Festivals are being held any time, no reason is needed for them.
Front seats are reserved for those who are engaged to the Mysteries, there they perform the holy rites.
The story tells that right here Herakles and Dionysos were initiated in to the holy Mysteries before they stepped down to the land of Hades, and that it was the Queen of the Eleusian Fields who encouraged them to do so.

But those who have led a criminal life go to the dark caves of Tartaros where the spirits of revenge take hold of them.
There the daughters of Danae endlessly scoop water and Tantalos suffers from unending thirst, Tityos, who’s mutilated organs just keep growing forever and Sisyfos, who pushes a big boulder uphill to start it anew time after time.
There the tongues of beasts lick them and the flames of the torches burn them.

Just figure it yourself, Aksiokhos, what Gobryes told me.
My own thinking is in doubt, but I do know that when souls part from us they are out of reach of pains.”

This is the text of the bronzeplates that Arge and Opis had brought with them from the land of Hyperborea, as told to Socrates by Gobryes.
These plates are no more to be seen because barbarians stole all metals later on, but we are lucky to see the texts from the writings of Plato.

Were these maidens, Arge, Opis, Laodice and Hyperokhe Finns or the descendants of the Hyllean people who had emigrated from the island of Corfu to the Cronian Sea, we will never get to know, perhaps.
But the writing of those bronze-plates describing the conditions of Paradise and Hades were most probably from Hel.
Herodotus wonders that even in his time, 450 BZ, those graves were to be seen in Delos.
But they are still there today, well kept and marked, in the maps too.

But when were those virgins buried there?
Three vases have been found in their graves beside the bones during the excavations.
They have been dated to be made at the Mycenaean time, 1600–1200 BZ.
Herodotus says that Herakles lived 900 years before him.
That would be about 1350 BZ.
It could be assumed that Hyllean people emigrated to the Cronian Sea at about 13th century BZ, or earlier, and that hyperboreans sent those virgins to Delos soon after.

The question is; how did they know anything at all about Delos?
They must have known the importance of that island and the way to get there much before.
Messengers had been sent from Hel to Hellas by the 0 meridian, which is the direct route, in time immemorial, as is told in the Bock Saga.
Herodotus tells also that a hyperborean man named Abaris had traveled widely without eating anything at all carrying an arrow with him??
What story is hidden here, we don’t know, and Herodotus is too shy to tell.
But here we can use the ”Rot” language, trying to find out.
A-BAR would mean a naked, under his tunic, Aser man, (IS probably added later) carrying the arrow, which would mean that he was the ”breeder”.

But when hyperboreans realised that the virgins they sent never came back they ceased sending any people to bring offerings, instead they gave the gifts to a neighbouring nation which sent them to a next one until they reached Delos at the end.
The gifts were always wrapped in wheat straws.
Herodotos tell’s that still in his time women from neighbouring islands brought gifts that were wrapped in wheat straws, to the temple of Artemis.
Hyperborea is by Greek mythology an area north of northwind, where there is eternal springtime and constant sunshine, that is; the land of Uden, in Finland.

Another question is, why Delos?
Was it because Knossos in Crete and the Minoan culture had been devastated by the huge tsunami or wave at about 1500 BZ which was caused perhaps by the explosion of the volcano at Santorini, or Thera?
This seems possible.

LETO, APOLLO AND ARTEMIS,
THE BIRTH OF GODS

Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis, the immortals, after Arge and Opis were sent there to help her with the delivery, which took place along the shores of the sacred lake, under a palm tree.
(The lake has been dried out but a palmtree still grows there.)

Apollo, the sungod with a golden hair, was born and he became protector, and god of music and other arts, as well as prophecy. He is also said to be the son of Hephaestus, the smith-god, and that he brought the laws to Arcadia.
He was also connected to the development of intellectuality, philosophy, astronomy and medicine.
There he practised with his bow and arrows and played with his seven-string lyre.
The music he played was said to have therapeutic effects.
(Check the Kalevala, poem 41, same story)

Artemis, Apollo’s sister, became a virgin goddess, a protector of hunters as well as wild animals.
She was also the patroness of motherhood and deliveries.
(Again a connection to Bock Saga)

Later on temples were erected for both of them and lavish celebrations were held every fourth, or later every fifth year.
Delos became famous just as the birth-place of Apollo and Artemis.
The fame lasted there nearly 1500 years.

These symbolic stories were the way to tell to the people about the beginning of the world and life.

Notice the syllable ”RA” in the names of Herakles and Hera.

THE (HI)STORY OF DELOS


Delos is a small island, just about five kilometers long and one and half wide.
It is relatively flat, only 112 meters high Mount Kynthos rises in the middle of it.
It was the center of religious, political and commercial activities for nearly 1500 years.
It’s size was not proportional to it’s importance at all.
It is situated right in the middle of Cyclades and also of Aegean Sea, between mainland Greece and Asia Minor.
And from Crete to Lemnos.

* * *

The excavations made by the French Archaeological School of Athen’s have revealed the ruins of the first settler’s houses on the slopes of Mount Kynthos to be from the early cycladic, the Carian period, at the 3rd millenium BZ.
Next populations there were the Mycenaeans, 1600–1200 BZ, on the more level ground on the north-west corner of the island.
It was during the Mycenaean time when the Hyperborean virgins came there to bring the bronze-plates in which were written the details of Paradise and Hades.

Ionians had invaded the eastern side of the Aegean Sea and the archipelago at about 1200 BZ.
They were the ones which started the holy quadrennial festivals, the Delia, to honor Apollo, Artemis and Leto, their mother, no later than on the 7th century BZ, at least.
Some scholars believe that Ionians may have perpetuated even more ancient tradition that they acquired from the Carians who inhabited these islands before the great Ionian migration.

* * *

According to Greek mythology, Apollo had a son, Anios, who became the king of Delos, and the first high-priest of the sanctuary of his divine father.
Anios had three doughters, Elais (Olive girl), Spermo (Seed Girl) and Oeno (Wine Girl), who received from Dionysos, one of their divine ancestors, the gift of producing olive oil, grain and wine at will.

Aside from being the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, Delos was also the centre of the very ancient cult of the fertility goddess known as Great Mother Earth, marble idols of whom are found in virtually every Bronze-Age grave in Cyclades.
Artemis was the successor of this goddess, as well as the protector of wild animals.
She was also considered to be the protectress of childbirth and motherhood, which role she had inherited from Eileithyia, a goddess of Mycenaean era.

Delos was also held sacred because of Theseus, who had stopped there on his return from Crete where he had slain the monster Minotauros.
A crane dance was performed during the great Delian festivals in memory of his escape from the labyrinth with the aid of bundle of string which Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, had given him because she had fell in love with Theseus.

Geranos was the name Delians had given to that dance, which twisted to and fro and sideways as is the form of labyrinth.
Dancers had a white piece of cloth in their hands to mark the string which enabled Theseus to find his way out.
It is still being danced in Greece.
Another theory for the dance is that the dancers copied the zigzag flying of Leto when she tried to find a place to land for the childbirth.
Hera had employed the snake Python to chase her, so she had to twist here and there in order to avoid being caught.


Great festivities were held in Delos every fourth year, to honor Apollo and Artemis.
Later on, during the Athenian domination, every fifth year.
They were sumptuous.
During the Theoria, as it was called, delegations from all Greek nations participated by sending envoys, called theoroi, to march in front of cavalcade of pilgrims and choirs that sung a song called Prosodion, to honor the immortals, Apollo and Artemis, and their mother Leto.
Treasurers followed, bringing gifts to the sanctuary and a golden crown to Apollo.
During the festivals choirs competed, actors played and poets recited.
Athletes run in the stadium and even horseraces were being held for the first time.
Because it was forbidden to execute anybody during the festivals, Socrates had to wait one month for his turn in an Athenian jail, at 399 BZ.
(That jail is still to be seen in Athens, by the way.)

Ceremonial oxen had been slaughtered at the beginning of the festivities, at the end they were eaten in a huge banquet.
The Geranos-dance was the highlight of the festival, it was danced in front of the Apollonian altar.
Athenians would come with the same black-sailed ship that Theseus had used on his Cretan trip.

Athenian tyrant Peisistratus ruled from 546 to 528 BZ and he ordered Delos to be ”cleansed” by removing all bodies out of their graves within the sight of the temple.
In 426 BZ the Athenians under Nikias carried out a more thorough purification on Delos by ordering the rest of all graves to be dug open and the remains to be transferred to a neighbouring, Rheneian island, into a so-called purification pit.
It was forbidden even to give birth or die in the holy island of Delos.

But the graves of the hyperborean virgins were left intact.

After this last purification the games and festivities were ruled to be held every five years and they were more lavish than ever.

During the Classical and Hellenistic periods Delos was involved in some of the most important political events in history of ancient Greece.
During the invasion of Greece by Darius in 490 BZ the Persian fleet, commanded by Datis, first reduced Naxos and then attacked other islands but he spared Delos, leaving the island and its inhabitants unharmed.
Datis went ashore just to worship at the shrine of Apollo and Artemis, piling 300 talents worth of frankincense upon their altars and burning it as offering.

Ten years later Xerxes, the heir and son of Darius, attacked Greece again, crossing the Hellespontos with a huge army and navy, causing heavy losses to the Greeks.

(This is just the case and time Plato is referring to in his text where he tells how the grandfather of Gobryes, also by the same name, being sent to Delos to save the valuables and then reading the texts on the bronze-plates Arge and Opis had brought from Hyperborea, beyond ”north wind”)

A very strange episode happened in 421 BZ when Athenians expelled all Delians from the island.
As Thukydides writes; ”Next summer the year’s truce, lasting up to the Pythian games, came to an end.
During the armistice the Athenians expelled all Delians from the island, because some crime committed during the purification of the island”.
Later on they were allowed to return after all.
In 404 BZ. Delos was liberated from Athens for a short period, but 392 BZ. they took control of the island again.
In 343 Delians petitioned for a independence of Athenian control, to no avail.
The Greek armies were defeated by Macedonians at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BZ. but they let the Athenians to govern Delos as long as they remained Macedonian’s allies.

The situation in Delos changed greatly after the death of Alexander the Great, when Delos and other Aegean islands revolted against Athenian rule and won their freedom, under the protection of Ptolemy I Soter, the king of Egypt.
Delos became the capital of Ptolemaic League of the islands and that increased it’s importance as a financial centre.
The Ptolemies were the greatest graindealers of the time, annually they exported millions of bushels of grain.

But another era opened for Delos in the year 167 BZ when it was decreed a free port after Romans had taken control of the Greek world.
People came from Italy and from all points of compass, bringing their own gods and manners.
The population reached up to 25 000.
All kinds of goods passed through the hands of Delian merchants.
Most bizarre were perhaps the slaves that were sent from the port of Side.
As many as 10.000 slaves were passed and sold at the marketplaces, a day.
It was a wholesale market of slaves that were sold to the farms in Italy and other places.

But this spree didn’t last long.
At 88 BZ. The King of Pontos, Mithridates, attacked Delos and killed most of it’s inhabitants, taking the rest of them into slavery.
At 69 BZ. his ally, Athenodorus came to complete the destruction.
The importance of Delos was reduced to nil, it never again flourished.
Only some pirates kept it as their hideaway-place.
Athenians tried to sell it but there were no buyers.
At 5th century it was again called A-Delos, badly seen, because it was laid waste and was uninhabited.

At that state it remained until 1873 when the French Archaeological School in Athens began the excavations.
Scientific studies have continued up to this day and the history of Delos has been recorded quite well.
From 1950 on there has been organized travel from the nearby island of Mykonos, which is only about 10 km off.


The ”Rot” language, revealed by Bock Saga, will give some new and concrete translations of the names of the gods, or the energies, employed here, and of the whole story of Delos.
Dionysos, for example.
Dion being the stem, -ysos probably added later to help the pronounciation.
DI meaning to ”drink” the sperm, also from man to man, when sacrificing it, as is explained in the Bock Saga.
”O” meaning ”Uden”, and ”N” is the North Pole.
The Dionysian mysteries must have been the fertility rites mentioned in the Mythology of Väinämöinen, where sperm was sacrificed from lower ”castes” men, to an upper caste man, in order to energize him, so that the breeder had enough energy to beget children, as is explained in the next part.








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Posts: 3128 | From: Port Townsend WA | Registered: Feb 2004   

[Apollo]

Helios

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Member # 2019

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   posted 07-07-2004 01:05 PM                       
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Interesting thread, with much worthy material on it. I would like to add this material on the Minoans and draw your attention to this quote from it:
"Crete appears to have been first inhabited during the Neolithic period (new stone age), from the 6th millennium BC. The earliest people may have come from Asia Minor and they were early agriculturalists with domesticated animals..."

They may have come from Asia Minor, The Asia Minor reference may or may not be accurate. I hope it is apparent, though, that scientists are speculating when they say this and that it does not disqualify other locations. The important thing is that Crete, an island, may have well been inhabited by the sixth century b.c., which means also that those who settled there could have indeed had ships, made from wood, and so, long rotted away.

Here is the full material:
http://www.dragonridge.com/greece/minoan1.htm


Mysteries of the Minoans
The Minoan civilization, based on the island of Crete, achieved political and economic dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean at their height of power. They were a sophisticated culture that was generally peaceful and enjoyed the profits of a healthy trade economy. Trading ties existed to Egypt and the Turkish coast, as indicated in the writings on Egyptian temples and by artifacts found. They have also been linked to the Atlantis legend (see Akrotiri) described by Plato. After the Minoan civilization collapsed, the Mycaneans from the mainland filled the power vacuum.

Greece is seismically active, and a series of quakes may have helped to spell the doom of Minoan civilization. All of the palace sites, which were unfortified, have repeatedly burned down. The palaces were not fortified either. Earthquakes can cause fires to start from cooking fire, oil lamps (may have used beeswax lamps though, not olive oil as suspected earlier), etc., although the Minoan usually rebuilt. Finally, some series of events overtook the Minoans, and they never did fully rebuild from that calamity.

Go to the ruins of Akrotiri on Thera.
Pulse Ventures Ltd. Greece Screensaver

The Minoans left no written histories, although they had two types of writing known as Linear A, and a Linear B. Clay accounting tablets have survived (baked accidently in the fires that periodically destroyed palaces), and tell of their economic wealth. Linear B has been deciphered, but Linear A has not. While the writing looks like scratches on clay, hand writing styles can be discerned from studying enough tablets to say that it was either the same person at one or more sites writing or that students from a certain school learned to write with a particular hand. If it is the same writer, then it poses interesting questions about travelling scribes or accountants moving from one palace to another.

Crete appears to have been first inhabited during the Neolithic period (new stone age), from the 6th millennium BC. The earliest people may have come from Asia Minor and they were early agriculturalists with domesticated animals. These people had good craft making skills and made burnished pottery that was often decorated with incised geometric motifs. Metal working was unknown and tools and weapons were made of stone, including obsidian from the Cycladic Island of Milos . Simple figurines have been found that suggest they worshipped a female fertility goddess.

The Bronze Age arrives in Crete via new immigrants, and they use bronze for creating jewellry, tools, and weapons. The use of bronze rapidly spreads on the island and the new mix of peoples becomes the Minoans. Not much is known about the Pre-Palace settlements, but there were strongly built houses of stone and brick A few settlements are at Vassiliki and Myrtos. These Pre-Palace period people left many tombs behind that have provides many artifacts from the period. There was a variety of tombs, including large vaulted tombs on the plain of the Messara, cist tombs cut into the rock at Mochlos, chamber tombs at Agia Photia, Sitia, and grave compounds at Archanes, Malia, Palaikastro and Zakros. The arts and crafts continued to develop and the pottery styles include the famous Vassiliki wares. The Vassiliki style pots have striking mottled decoration, produced by the firing, and sophisticated shapes, like the "teapot" and the tall, beaked pitchers. The first polychrome pottery makes its appearance towards the end of the period. Jewellry making, particularly gold smithing is outstanding, and early examples of seals tones made of ivory and steatite appear. The Mother Goddess is still being worshipped.

Sir Arthur Evans who excavated the palace at Knossos named them the "Minoans" after Minos, the legendary king of Crete. Very little was known about Minoan Crete prior to the late 19th century AD, and a great deal of the work was done by Sir Arthur Evans. The Minoan civilization lasted about 1200 years from 2200 BC to about 1000 BC (with the last two hundred years or so in a period of great decline). They reached the height of their prosperity around the 18th - 16th centuries during the Second Palace Period. The palace at Knossos appears to have been the center of Minoan government.


The memory of the Minoans survives only vaguely in Greek myth. Ancient authors speak mainly of Minos, the king who had his capital at Knossos. Minos was a wise lawgiver, a fair judge, and a great dominator of the sea. Homer calls him "..companion of mighty Zeus." Thucydides mentions he was the first man to hold sway over the Aegean with his fleet, and Plato mentions that Attica peninsula (Athens, etc.) paid a heavy tribute to Minos. The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus, etc., are all concerning Minos, a son of Zeus.

Th Minoan domination of the sea was due to their fortune in having the island home of Crete, which was the crossroads that linked the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Trade in goods and ideas allowed for the growth and development of their advanced civilization. Their arts and crafts were without comparison against many of their contemporaries and had unique charms and variety.

Minoan Time Line
Neolithic 6000- 3500 BC, Bronze Age 3500 - 1100 BC. EM = Early Minoan, MM = Middle Minoan, LM = Late Minoan.

3500 or 3300 BC Pre-palace period 3300 - 2200 BC EM I Hand made pottery, but more skillfully fired. Patterned, burnished Beak Spouted Jug
2900 BC EM II Mottled red, orange and black Vasilikiware. Myrtos is from this period. Vasiliki is a communal type ruin - forerunner of the later palaces?
2300 BC First palace period 2200 - 1700 BC EM III Pottery of white spirals on a dark background develops into thin, polychrome Kamaresware.Use of potter's wheel to do this. Production of fine bronze daggers and weapons. Beginning of foreign contact.
1900 BC MM IB/IIA
Old_Palace Period.
Great strides in bronzework and other metal work. Superb goldwork being done. Harder seal stones being used. Extensive foreign contacts. Egyptian scarabs found on Crete.
1750 BC MM IIB Seal cutters workshop found at Mallia. 7000 seals found in a deposist at Phaestos. Hieroglypic deposit at Knossos.
1700 BC Second palace period 1700 - 1500 BC MM IIIA
New Palace Period.
Great palatial destruction via earthquake. Huge blocks at Knossos hurled from south facade into 'House of Fallen Blocks'. All palaces rebuilt. Most ruins seen today are from this period. Efficient plumbing and drainage systems.Marine style pottery and other excellent pottery (later pottery with more repetitive patterns). Prosperous, with many large pithoi magazines. Linear A in use.
1600 BC 1628 Thera Blows! MM IIIB
1550 BC LM IA Increasing influence on mainland Greece.
1500 BC Third palace period 1500 - 1200 BC LM IB Knossos less affected by destruction and repaired. Mycanaean influence increases. Knossos flourishes for several more generations.
1450 BC LM II
Post Palatial Period.
Widespread destruction at the end of LMI period. Most sites never reoccupied. Shrines have snake tubes and clay femal figures with upraised arms and cylindrical skirts (see Knossos). Larnake burials in chest introduced. Linear B used. Heavy Mycanaean Influence.
1400 BC LM IIIA Some evidence for a further destruction at Knossos but parts of the palace are still used.
1300 BC LM IIIB
1220 BC Post-palace period 1200 - 1050 BC LM IIIC
1050 Sub-Minoan period 1100-1000 BC Early Iron Age Geometric. Mycanaeans and Minoans lose dominance. Dorians enter the picture. The 'Polis' or city-state appears.

Go to the Archeological Museum in Heraklion which specializes in Minoan Antiquites to see a sample of the more famous works.

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First Palace period 2200 - 1700 BC
Power began to be centered around kings. The first large palace centers came into being. Excavation has revealed four large palaces at Knossos, Phaestos, Malia, and Zakros so far.

The skimpy remains of these palaces are typically discovered beneath the later palaces as the Minoans rebuilt upon the same sites. All the features of Minoan architecture are already present. The buildings are arranged around a central court and have fine facades of closely fitted stone blocks with monumental entrances. Inside, they are multi-storied and have workshops, storage magazines and sacred rooms. The finest example was uncovered in the west palace section at Phaestos. The palaces workshops are also producing fine wares already.

The gorgeous Kamaresware pottery dates to this period and the style is named after the cave of Kamares where it was first discovered. Kamaresware is exquisitely made pottery with polychrome motifs of rosettes, spirals and hatching vibrantly painted on a shiny black background, and was produced in a variety of vase shapes (see picture at left). The workshops also produced fine vases and vessels of stone and faience; seal stones of precious or semi-precious stones, with hieroglyphics and dynamic natural scenes; elegant weapons and tools; vessels of bronze or silver; jewellery of marvellous technique ("the Bee Pendant" from Malia); and charming miniature sculpture.

The Minoan religion is centered around the Mother Goddess, and the use of sacred symbols such as the sacred horns and the double axe becomes prevalent. Hieroglyphic script, which quickly developed into a linear A, was used in the palace archives.

The first palace centers and the settlements of Crete were reduced to ruins possibly by earthquakes .

Second Palace period 1700 - 1500 BC
Minoan Civilization reached its zenith in the Second Palace Period. Magnificent new palaces were built upon the ruins of the old ones. The cities around them expanded. Many lords in rural villas controlled areas in the same way as the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. Their ships carried both the products of Minoan and other societies throughout the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean to trade. The new palaces were multi-storeyed and complex. They had great courtyards with grand porticoes, broad staircases, processional paths and monumental entrances. Many rooms could be opened for air circulation and sunlight to enter via pier and door partitions making the rooms quite bright and pleasant in the summer. Benches and thrones were found in royal rooms. There were many interior light wells to allow light in through all levels of the palace via the roof. Bathrooms and water supply and drainage systems allowed for a easier style of life. Sections of the palaces were royal quarters, sacred areas (pillar crypts, tripartite shrines), audience and banquet halls. Large areas of these palaces were set aside as storage areas (magazines), and workshops also existed within the palaces. Wonderful fresco painting decorating the walls with fresh, lively scenes in an array of colors. Gypsum was a common building material used for wall siding and floors.

The marine style of pottery developed with flowing elements including stylized octopuses and seaweed.




This is a jar about 3
feet high in the marine
style with stylized seaweed. Another similar sized
jar with the stylized
octopus.
Octopus flask.

The floral style also developed inventive plants and open flowers. Frescos depicted landscapes with animals along with scenes from religious and social life. Bull jumping and other festivities were shown on the frescos. Faience work, decorative plaques, figurines such as the snake goddesses, royal gaming boards, detailed gold and silver jewellery and vessels were produced in the workshops of the day. Some very fine bronze work was achieved during this period.

The main deity is still the Mother Goddess, who is portrayed in different forms such as the "goddess with the snakes." The Bull was also worshipped as a powerful symbol of fertility beside her. Deities were worshipped in sanctuaries of the palaces, various dwellings, the peak sanctuaries, and in sacred caves. Many of the features of Minoan religion passed into the cycle of the Greek mystery religions. Most of the tombs were cut into the soft rock and had a square burial chamber and a sloping dromos. Some were still vaulted tombs with a circular or rectangular chamber.

The still undeciphered Linear A is now in use. There are about 200 surviving texts on clay tablets apparently deal with accounting and inventory information. The tablets come from the archives of palaces such as Knossos or villas and were preserved by firing in the fires that destroyed the palaces. The Phaestos Disk, with its unique hieroglyphic text, belongs to the first phase of the second palace period.

All of the centers of the second palace period were destroyed around 1450. The terrible volcanic eruption of Santorini had large impacts on Crete depending on how the ash fell, but did not have enough effects to destroy the palaces or the Minoan way of life. The eruption of Santorini may have destroyed some coastal towns and shipping, and would have depressed the economies of the eastern Mediterranean though. Terrible palace destructions did happen though (probably through earthquake again). Life resumed only at the palace at Knossos, which was reconstructed and served as the residence of a new Mycanaean (Achaean) rulers from the mainland. Their presence is inferred by the appearance of the very archaic written Greek language of Linear B and by the appearance of Palace Style pottery. Changes were made in the arrangement of the palaces, and the Knossos Throne Room and many surviving frescoes (such as the Corridor of the Procession also at Knossos) date from this period.




Bulls head found at Knossos.
Snake goddess figurine found at Knossos.

Third Palace period 1500 - 1200 BC
After the final destruction of about 1380, none of the Minoan palaces were rebuilt. Even the palace at Knossos was not rebuilt, although the city around it stayed alive. The Mycenaeans built their megara on other sites, some of which survived on the ruins of earlier royal villas (Agia Triada) and houses (Tylissos). Mycenaean centers were spread throughout all of Crete and many existed down into Greek times. The new civilization was Minoan, but its character was archaic Greek. The palaces were replaced by the austere Mycenaean megaron. Pottery styles were simpler and more uniform by repeating the same shapes with simpler decoration and patterns. Even the frescoes became more rigid in appearance. There was no substantial change in religion though.

Post-palace period 1200 - 1050
The last phase of this period was a time of decline and disorder caused by the movement of many peoples in the East Mediterranean. The forerunners of the Dorians may have begun to arrive in Crete.

Sub-Minoan Period 1100-1000 BC
Crete entered upon the purely Greek period of its history with the arrival of massive waves of Dorians at about 1100 BC. The Protogeometric period that followed (1100-900 BC) unfolded alongside the Sub-Minoan, as the earlier Minoan cultural traditions continued on especially in the mountain areas of central and eastern Crete. Many mountain top settlements existed due to their defensive locations. The use of iron, and cremation of the dead became general.

Are The Minoan Palaces Really Palaces?
There is some controversy around the actual purpose of the Minoan Palaces. Sir Arthur Evans, who first extensively excavated the site of Knossos, was the first to call the large structural ruins a "palace" at the beginning of the 20th century. Some archeologists suspect that the palaces were really temples, so they were not palaces at all. However, we know very little about the exact political and governmental structure of the Minoans as there are no written records that survived. Still, archeology has given us many clues or well founded educated guesses.

Study of the archaeological remains of the palaces revealed they served as religious and economic centers. Religion is evident as large amounts of cult equipment and areas are found in the palaces. In addition, frescoes with religious representations abound in the palace of Knossos (few frescos have survived in the other palaces). The economic aspect comes from the large storage magazines found at the palaces so they were obvious centers for regulating the flow of goods and storing them. However, there is a connection between religion and economy too, as the magazines and workshops are close to the palace shrines. The large concentrations of magazines in the west wings of all the palaces, which was also the major cult area of the palaces, also supports this idea.

The connection between religion and economy suggests the system was theocratic where the economy and government was controlled by the priesthood. Such systems were well known in Egypt with the Pharoahs as god-kings, and Mesopotamia with its temple states. There may have been king, or a priest-king or priestess-queen, or a board of priests running Minoan society. A king may have ruled in the palace with his administration carried out by a priesthood. A king may also have shared power with a priesthood too, but all these governing relationships are just suggestions. The palaces may have been palaces for royalty and a temple, but we only know for sure that there are luxurious quarters, large halls, workshops, storage areas, and religious shrines in these structures.

Mesopotamian Temples and Minoan Palace Comparison
The land of Sumer of the third millenium BC was divided into city states. Each city had the temple of the deity to whom the city belonged at its center. The temple was primarily the dwelling of the god, but also a ceremonial center, a treasury, a town hall, a store house and a commercial center. In addition it housed the priesthood and the temple workers.

Both Minoan palaces and Mesopotamian temples had:

A general resemblance between the Mesopotamian temple and the Minoan Palace in layout and design.
A substantial section was occupied by the workshops and magazines. In the Sumerian economy,controlled by the priesthood to a large extent, the temple acted as a redistribution center. It amassed wealth from the land it possesed and from tribute. This wealth was then redistributed to the population as wages for their services. Rations of flour, beer and even clothing were given as wages, as we can tell from the written records of the temples. Regarding the rituals and ceremonies that took place in the precinict of the temple, sacrifices and cult meals were among the most frequent ones.
Banquet areas and cult eating areas (possibly bench sanctuaries in Minoan Palaces exist in both types of buildings for ceremonial communal meals.
Kings emerged in 3rd millenium Sumeria because of the increasing military threat that these people faced from the invading tribes of the desert and the mountains, so kingship with the Minoans is not out of the question either.

Minoan Sources
There are many sources, but more detailed overall works on the Minoans tend to be scarce, and often very opinionated. Recent stuff is usually found in archeological journals in university libraries.

Blue Guide to Crete by Pat Cameron. Best general overall source to archeological sites and info.
The original source. Arthur Evan's massive 3 volume dig report on Knossos, which laid a great deal of groundwork. It is detailed but made prior to the field developing real excavation reports, and there have been new interpretations since on some of the material. Researchers really digging here usually end up having to look at the original field notes in pen and pencil.
Art and religion in Thera : reconstructing a Bronze Age society / Nanno Marinatos, Athens : D. & I. Mathioulakis, 1984.
Excavations at Thera / Marinatos, Spyridon Nikolaou, 1901-, Athens : s.n., 1968-.
Thera and the Aegean world III : proceedings of the third international congress, Santorini, Greece, 3-9 September 1989 / editors: D.A. Hardy, with C.G. Doumas, J.A. Sakellarakis, P.M. Warren London : Thera Foundation, 1990. Massive 3 volume set.
Knossos A Labyrinth of History. The British School at Athens, 1994.
A New Guide to the Palace of Knossos by Leonard R. Palmer.
Minoan and Mycenaean Art by Reynold Higgins.
Minoan Civilization by Stylianos Alexiou.
Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete by Rodney Castleden. Has annoying habit of calling all the periods New Temple. Seems technically correct overall, even if you don't agree with his theories.
Guide ot Cretan Antiquities by Costis Davaras.

Sources on Minoan Religion
It was Evans, of course, who also laid the foundations for the study of Minoan religion. In 1902 Sir Arthur Evans published the important article "The Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult." prior to the rich finds he would later make.

M. P. Nilsson's The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion (1927,1950).
Axel W. Persson's The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times (1942).
B. Rutkowski's Cult Places in the Aegean (1971, 1986).
G. Gesell's Town, Palace, and House Cult in Minoan Crete (1985).
Articles by K. Branigan and P. Warren discussing new material, Warren's most recent piece is a summary of current trends for, ""Minoan Religion as Ritual Action" (1988).
C. Renfrews shrine of Phylakopi on the island of Melos in the Aegean
K. Kilian, have introduced new methodological approaches to the study of prehistoric religions. Minoan and Mycenaean religions are coherent autonomous and distinct systems, not primitive versions of later Greek religions.

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   posted 07-07-2004 01:44 PM                       
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This material serves nicely as a brief overview of Carthage:
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ca/CarthageAf.html
Carthage, ancient city, N Africa

(kär´thj) (KEY) , ancient city, on the northern shore of Africa, on a peninsula in the Bay of Tunis and near modern Tunis. The Latin name, Carthago or Cartago, was derived from the Phoenician name, which meant “new city.” 1

The Rise of Carthage
Carthage was founded (traditionally by Dido) from Tyre in the 9th cent. B.C. The city-state built up trade and in the 6th and 5th cent. B.C. began to acquire dominance in the W Mediterranean. Merchants and explorers established a wide net of trade that brought great wealth to Carthage. The state was tightly controlled by an aristocracy of nobles and wealthy merchants. Although a council and a popular assembly existed, these soon lost power to oligarchical institutions, and actual power was in the hands of the judges and two elected magistrates (suffetes). There was also a small but powerful senate. 2
The greatest weakness of Carthage was the rivalry between landholding and maritime families. The maritime faction was generally in control, and about the end of the 6th cent. B.C. the Carthaginians established themselves on Sardinia, Malta, and the Balearic Islands. The navigator Hanno is supposed to have sailed down the African coast as far as Sierra Leone in the early 5th cent. The statesman Mago arrived at treaties with the Etruscans, the Romans, and some of the Greeks. 3
Sicily, which lay almost at the front door of Carthage, was never brought completely under Carthaginian control. The move against the island, begun by settlements in W Sicily, was brought to a halt when the Carthaginian general Hamilcar (a name that recurred in the powerful Carthaginian family usually called the Barcas) was defeated (480 B.C.) by Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse, in the battle of Himera. The Greek city-states of Sicily were thus preserved, but the Carthaginian threat continued and grew with the steadily increasing power of Carthage. 4
Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal (another name much used in the family), destroyed Himera (409 B.C.), and his colleague Himilco sacked Acragas (modern Agrigento) in 406 B.C. Syracuse resisted the conquerors, and a century later Carthage was threatened by the campaign (310–307?) of the tyrant Agathocles on the shores of Africa. After his death, however, Carthage had practically complete control over all the W Mediterranean. 5

The Punic Wars and the Decline of Carthage
In the 3d cent. B.C. Rome challenged Carthage’s control of the W Mediterranean in the Punic Wars (so called after the Roman name for the Carthaginians, Poeni, i.e., Phoenicians). The first of these wars (264–241) cost Carthage all remaining hold on Sicily. Immediately after the First Punic War a great uprising of the mercenaries occurred (240–238). Hamilcar Barca put down the revolt and compensated for the loss of Sicilian possessions by undertaking conquest in Spain, a conquest continued by Hasdrubal. 6
The growth of Carthaginian power again activated trouble with Rome, and precipitated the Second Punic War (218–201). Although the Carthaginian general was the formidable Hannibal, Carthage was finally defeated, partly by the Roman generals Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus (see under Fabius) and Scipio Africanus Major, and partly by the fatal division of the leading families in Carthage itself, which prevented Hannibal from receiving proper supplies. 7
After Scipio had won (202) the battle of Zama, Carthage sued for peace. All its warships and its possessions outside Africa were lost, but Carthage recovered commercially and remained prosperous. Deep divisions among the Carthaginian political parties, however, gave Rome (and particularly Cato the Elder) the pretext to fight the Third Punic War (149–146 B.C.), which ended with the total destruction of Carthaginian power and the razing of the city by Scipio Africanus Minor. 8
Romans later undertook to build a new city (Colonia Junonia) on the spot in 122 B.C., but the project failed. A new city was founded in 44 B.C. and under Augustus became an important center of Roman administration. Carthage was later (A.D. 439–533) the capital of the Vandals and was briefly recovered (533) for the Byzantine Empire by Belisarius. Although practically destroyed by Arabs in 698, the site was populated for many centuries afterward. 9

Today’s Carthage
There are hardly any remains of the ancient Carthage, although a few Punic cemeteries, shrines, and fortifications have been discovered. Most of the ruins that remain are from the Roman period, including baths, an amphitheater, aqueducts, and other buildings. Louis IX of France (St. Louis) died there while on crusade. A chapel in his honor stands on the hill that is traditionally identified as Byrsa Hill, site of the ancient citadel. The Lavigérie Museum is also there. 10

Bibliography
See B. H. Warmington, Carthage (2d ed. 1969); T. A. Dorey and D. R. Dudley, Rome against Carthage (1971); N. Davis, Carthage and Her Remains (1985).



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Posts: 406 | From: Rhodes (an island near Cyprus) | Registered: Jun 2004   

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Helios

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   posted 07-07-2004 01:50 PM                       
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Some interesting facts about the Phoenicians, these may or may not all be fully truthful:
http://www.phoenicia.org/didyouknow.html
A Bequest Unearthed Phoenicia -- Encyclopedia Phoeniciana
Did you know? 900 pages on
Phoenicians Search Phoenicia

Western/Latin and other alphabets come from the Phoenician alphabet?
Beritus or Berytus (modern Beirut, Lebanon) had a very important School of Law in the Roman Empire?
The Bible is called thus because it refers to the Phoenician city of Byblos?
King Solomon's great Temple was built in the style of Tyre's Melqart Temple by Phoenician artisans using the Cedars of Lebanon?
The Egyptian Pharoahs employed Phoenician cedar for their wood needs?
King Solomon, in his old age, became a worshipper of the Phoenician goddess Ashtarte?
Melchizedek, the King of Salem (King of Jerusalem) and Priest of the Most High God (El Elion), who offered bread and wine to Abraham, was Phoenician?
The Pentateuch (Moses' first five books, if not more, of the the Old Testament Bible, the Torah) was/were written down (transliterated) in Phoenician script?
Jesus Christ visited Phoenicia and among the first to believe in him was a Phoenician woman?
The bishops of all Phoenician cities were consecrated as bishops by the Apostles or their immediate successors?
Tyre, Sidon and other Phoenician Christian cities and towns provided rest-stops and shelters for the Apostles on their way to convert the world?
St. Jerome referred to Tyre as the place where St. Paul once knelt; and called Zarephath, Elijah's town?
Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa?
Phoenicians were the first to use the Pole Star for navigation?
Phoenicians were able traders throughout the Mediterranean?
Phoenicians colonized the far corners of the Mediterranean from the Island of Cyprus in the East to Spain and Gibraltar including the outer Atlantic coast and North Africa in the West?
Britain was the Phoenicians' secret treasure of tin where the name "Britain" may be coming from Barr (land) of Tannic (Tin)? Hence Britannia did not come from Prutani, the name applied to the Celts by the Romans, and some claim that the Celts were Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians reached North America BC and Punic inscriptions in Massachusetts and Iowa confirm this fact?
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer mentions Phoenicia, Phoenicians and Phoenician cities.
The Phoenician possessed the science or art of dentistry as evident by the fine braces on a lower jaw of a scull?
The Phoenician language is still spoken today in Malta (or Maltese is a mixture of Phoenician/Punic and other Mediterranean languages) ?
To beef up their naval powers, conquerors employed the Phoenicians in building warship-fleets?
The Phoenicians raised elephants on farms?
The first parliament ever to convene in the Middle East met in the Phoenician confederate city of Tripoli?
Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (193 - 211 AD) descended from early Phoenician settlers and spoke with a Phoenician accent?
Pythagoras was Phoenician and was initiated into the 'Ancient Mysteries' of the Phoenicians c. 548 B.C. and studied for about 3 years in the temples of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos and that his father was a Phoenician merchant from Tyre?
Archimedes c.287 B.C.-212 B.C., Greek mathematician, physicist, and inventor, died during the Roman assault on Syracuse while designing a catapult and the Carthaginians fought on his side to defend the city.
Thales of Miletus (who was half Phoenician), one of the first great scientists, is said to have forecast the solar eclipse of the year 585 BC.
Zeno of Citium was a glowing star in the pre-Socratic age but was ridiculed in Athens for his Phoenician appearance.
Popes Anicetus (155 - 166 AD), John V (685-686 AD), Sergius I (687-701 AD) and Gregory III (741-752 AD) and Constantius were Phoenicians?
Aristotle held up the constitution of Carthage as a model.
Hasdrubal-Clitomachus added to Arcesilas a critical interpretation of certitude which makes him a forerunner of modern thought.
St. Augustine was Phoenician. He wrote "...there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books".
St. Jerome believed Punic erotic poetry to be pernicious and described it as "lewd".
Many parts of the Old Testament were plagiarized from Phoenician literature, poetry, and religion, similar to plagiarizing of the Book of Job (for example ) from Babylonian tales?
Phoenician sacrifice of children to the gods was copied/practiced by many Semites such as Abraham's attempt to sacrifice his son?
The Phoenicians had a rough knowledge about pi (3.1416) at the time of Hiram and the building of Solomon's Temple?
St. Frumentius, Phoenician from Tyre, converted Ethiopia to Christianity?
Mochus, a Sidonian, wrote a work on the atomic theory.
Return Home to "A Bequest Unearthed, Phoenicia"


[This message has been edited by Helios (edited 07-07-2004).]


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   posted 07-07-2004 01:54 PM                       
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A condensed history of the Phoenicians:
History of the Phoenician Canaanites
900 pages on
Phoenicians Search Phoenicia
http://www.phoenicia.org/history.html

3000 B.C. to 634 A.D., Invasions, Sieges and Plunders
The Phoenicians of the Iron Age (first millennium B.C.) descended from the original Canaanites who dwelt in the region during the earlier Bronze Age (3000-1200 H.C.), despite classical tradition to the contrary. There is archaeological evidence for a continuous cultural tradition from the Bronze to the Iron Age (1200 -333 s.c.) at the cities of Tyre and Z araphath. In the Amarna age (fourteenth century B.C.) many letters to Egypt emanated from King Rib-Addi of Byblos, King Abi-Milki of Tyre, and King Zimrida of Sidon, and in other New Kingdom Egyptian texts there are references to the cities of Beirut Sidon, Zaraphath, Ushu, Tyre, and Byblos. Additionally there is a thirteenth-century B.C. letter from the king of Tyre to Ugarit, and a Ugaritic inscription has turned up at Zaraphath. Despite these facts showing that the coastal cities were occupied without interruption or change in population, the term "Phoenician" is now normally applied to them in the Iron Age (beginning about the twelfth century B.C.) onward when the traits that characterize Phoenician culture evolved: long-distance seafaring, trade and colonization, and distinctive elements of their material culture, language, and script.

The Phoenicians, whose lands corresponds to present-day Lebanon and coastal parts of Israel and Syria, probably arrived in the region in about 3000 B.C. They established commercial and religious connections were established with Egypt after about 2613 BC and continued until the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the invasion of Phoenicia by the Amorites (c. 2200 BC).

Other groups invading and periodically controlling Phoenicia included the Hyksos (18th century BC), the Egyptians of the New Kingdom (16th century BC), and the Hittites (14th century BC). Seti I (1290-79 BC) of the New Kingdom reconquered most of Phoenicia, but Ramses III (1187-56 BC) lost it to invaders from Asia Minor and Europe. The roster of Phoenician cities changed during the near millennium-long period beginning in 1200 B.C., reflecting the waxing and waning of their individual fortunes and the impinging historical events of the Near East. At the beginning of the Iron Age, as part of the invasion of the Sea Peoples (groups from the Greek islands, especially Crete), the Philistines occupied the coastal area south of Mt. Carmel, including Dor, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza. By the eighth century B.C., however, the material culture of the Phoenicians extended southward, and Sidon controlled Dor and Joppa during the Persian period (539-333 B.C). The Achaemenians, an Iranian dynasty under the leadership of Cyrus II, conquered the area in 538 B.C. Sidon became a principal coastal city of this empire. The history of Tyre and Sidon is intertwined (indeed they were only twenty-two miles [35 km.] apart). Classical tradition suggests that Sidon was the more powerful at first but by the tenth century B.C. Tyre dominated. Tyre's kings ruled a stretch of the coast that included Sidon and often they were referred to as kings of the Sidonians (1 Kings 16:31).


This Monument at Nahr el Kalb (Dog River) served, across the ages, as the s visitors' register or depository of "business" cards of invaders. The hill that rises directly from the sea contains engravings and inscriptions of invaders of Phoenicia for thousands of years. There are ancient inscription such as those made by Pharaohs or the Allied Forces of the First and Second World Wars.


There were no major Phoenician cities north of Arvad, but Phoenician influence extended into Cilicia in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. Obscurity surrounds the emergence of Phoenician culture during the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C. In a foray, the Assyrian king Tiglathpileser I (1114-1076 B.C.) sojourned at Arvad and received tribute from Byblos and Sidon, and there are archaeological data from Tyre and Zaraphath for this period. The Egyptian Tale of Wenamun, dating to the mid-eleventh century B.C., graphically portrays the decline of Egyptian prestige and power in the Levant. This was due in part to the invasions of the Sea Peoples and the general disruptions of Late Bronze Age cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean, with the collapse of Mycenaean and Hittite cultures and the destruction of city-states in the Levant. Trade was severely affected. In the aftermath of the disruptions and the power vacuum a new order emerged in which flourishing Phoenician settlements replaced such destroyed centers as Ugarit on the coast of northern Syria. Instead of the Levant being the recipient of Aegean wares, Phoenician cities began exporting goods and services.

In the 10th century B.C. the city state of Tyre rose to hegemony among Phoenician states and founded colonies throughout the Mediterranean region. During the same time, Tyre strengthened its influence over the northern kingdom of Israel. Phoenician influence is also to be seen in the region of Cilicia at Zinjirli where King Kilamuwa, probably Aramaean in origin, chose the Phoenician language and script for a long inscription at the front of his palace. Other Phoenician inscriptions come from the same region in the following centuries Azitiwada marked the rebuilding of his city with bilingual inscriptions in Phoenician and hieroglyphic Hittite at Karatepe. The strong Phoenician influence in Cilicia may be due to trading activities in a network including Urartu, the northern rival of Assyria in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.

The pace of Assyrian activity in Phoenicia quickened in the ninth century B.C. when Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III, and Adadnirari III exacted tribute and taxes from Sidon, Tyre, and other Phoenician cities. Assyria was gradually extending its control over the Levant. As a result of the far-reaching reorganization of the Assyrian Empire by Tiglathpileser III (744-727 B.C.), the nature of the impact on Phoenicia changed from one of occasional demands by raiding armies to incorporation as vassals into the empire. Many cities lost their autonomy altogether and became part of Assyrian provinces administered by governors; for example, an Assyrian province of Simyra was established by Tiglathpileser III.

During Sennacherib's reign (705-681 B.C.) he crushed a serious revolt by coastal cities in 701 B.C. and forced Luli (Elulaeus), king of Tyre, to flee to Cyprus (see graphic depicting escape to Cyprus), where he died. Later Sidon revolted against the Assyrian ruler Esarhaddon (681-669 B C.) who in 676 B.C. sacked and destroyed it and in its place built a governor's residence, called Kar-Esarhaddon, for a new Assyrian province. He also made a treaty with Baal, king of Tyre. Ashurbanipal (668-627 B.C.) laid siege to Tyre and Nebuchadnezzar besieged it for thirteen years (586-573 B.C.; Ezek. 26-28: 19).

Sidon reemerged as the dominant city of Phoenicia in the Persian period (539-333 B.C.) and led a Phoenician contingent in the Persian wars of the early fifth century B.C., helping bridge the Hellespont and fighting at Salamis.

Herodotus and Phoenician history
by Nina Jidejian
Everyone, at some time or another, has read about the Greek and Persian wars fought during the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. What he perhaps does not know is that the Phoenicians played an important role in this great historical drama.

The reason is simple.

Persia is not a sea power and is land locked in Asia Minor and on the East Mediterranean coast with a formidable array of soldiers from many nations.

The Phoenicians, on the other hand, have the fleets, the navigators, the seamen and the "know-how". Guided by the stars they sail at night over dark, dangerous, uncharted waters, guided only by the stars. An arrangement is therefore reached with the kings of the Phoenician cities to furnish a fleet to the Persians provided they are not bothered by them at home.

Soon after Greece is invaded by Xerxes, the Persian "King of Kings". Bloody battles on land and sea follow. Sporadic fighting spreads to the Greek islands and Cyprus.

Then in 333 B.C. Alexander the Great at the head of his Macedonian phalanxes crosses the Hellespont in pursuit of Darius Codamannus, the Persian king, thus bringing the war into Asia. City after city go over to him.

Alexander's conquest of the East ushurs in the Hellenistic Age. With the spread of Greek culture and ideas, a new political and social order arises and travels to the farther reaches of his empire contributing to fashion the course of the modern world in which we live.

The Greek and Persian Wars
550 to 330 B.C.
Herodotus is a Greek born during the fifth century B.C. in Halicarnassus, southwest Asia Minor. Centuries before his time the Greeks abandon their homes on the mainland, put their families and belongings in ships and sail eastwards across the Aegean. Some settle for good on the islands, others found a number of Greek cities all along the coast of Asia Minor.

As a young man Herodotus, intelligent and inquisitive, displays a great gift for story-telling. He wanders freely throughout a large part of the great Persian empire recording all he sees and hears. He is the world's authority on the Greek and Persian wars that shook the ancient world so long ago.

This is his story.

Soon after his conquest of the empire of the Medes, Cyrus, king of Persia, is attacked by a coalition of the other great powers of the day: Babylon, Egypt and Lyclia who come to fear him, joined by Sparta, the greatest military power of Greece. In the spring of 546 B.C. the richest and most powerful man in the world, Croesus, king of Lydia, advances into Cappadocia, Asia Minor while the other kings are still feverishly gathering their troops for battle. But Cyrus cleverly attacks first, marches one thousand miles overland, even through the outlying provinces of Babylon. He defeats Croesus and follows him to his capital city. In the autumn of 546 Cyrus storms Sardis and orders that Croesus be taken alive. The Lydian kingdom henceforth becomes a province of Persia.

The gateway to Greece and the Near East now lies open before the Persian king. The Ionian Creek cities of Asia Minor, the Carians, the Lycians and the king of Cilicia humbly acknowledge Persian supremacy.

War with Babylon is inevitable. In a single swift campaign, Cyrus destroys the mighty kingdom. The army of King Nabonidus is defeated and Babylon surrenders without resistance in October 539.

In Sidon at this time Mapen and his sister Myrra live in a little stone house near the port. Their father, Elibar, is a carpenter and is greatly respected for his ability and his skill. Not only does he saw heavy logs of wood with precision for sea-faring galleys but he can also carve smaller bits of wood into various objects: luxury boxes to hold jewelry, plain boxes to hold precious spices, wooden toys with which children can play: a cow, a horse, a dog and even a small doll for Myrra. Children follow him closely when he walks through the streets of Sidon, hoping for a toy.

Mapen and Myrra not only love their father but are very proud of him. They love their mother too, because she keeps the little stone house spic and span. She also welcomes her children's friends with warmth at any time.

Life is peaceful in Sidon. At nightfall around the fire their parents talk about what is happening in Babylon. But all this is so far away.

Then one day the mighty king of Babylon is no more. The king of Persia from afar assumes sovereignty over Babylon's possessions on the east Mediterranean seaboard. Thus Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Beirut, Arvad (Ruad) and the other port cities are left to themselves to enjoy a period of freedom and peace.

Great excitement spreads in Sidon and Tyre when news arrives that all displaced persons by order of Cyrus can now return to their homelands. The Jews taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar are allowed to proceed to Jerusalem. Cyrus grants a royal concession of Phoenician timber to the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem and their temple. Phoenician artisans make their way to Jerusalem to take part in the reconstruction of the city. In the Old Testament, Ezra (3.7) infers that Jews and Phoenicians renew commercial relations:

"So they gave money to the masons and the carpenters and food, drink and oil to the Sidonians and Tyrians to bring cedar trees from Lebanon to the sea to Joppa, according to the grant that they had from Cyrus, king of Persia."

Cedar trees are cut on the mountains of Lebanon and rolled down the slopes. Logs are tied one to the other and dragged by teams of oxen to the port of Byblos. There they are lashed together with heavy ropes into rafts and floated down the coast.

From afar Mapen and Myrra see the logs arriving. There is a frightening sound as they collide against each other. In the port there is a large galley ready to carry the carpenter and stone masons. Elibar hugs his wife and children tight to his bosom and embarks for Tyre to pick up more artisans and then sails further south.

A year goes by . . . The children miss their father. Then one day from afar, a galley is seen slowly approaching the port. Mapen and Myrra rush to the shore. They are overjoyed to see their father once again. He has worked hard, has been well-paid and has a leather pouch full of gold pieces. But he is glad to return to the little stone house in the port. There the family receives relatives and friends who eagerly listen to the stories Elibar tells them about Jerusalem, the temple and other unfamiliar sights.

Peace reigns in the region. Trade prospers. Herodotus (1.143) tells us that the Ionian Greeks too and those living on the Greek islands in the Aegean have nothing to fear from the Persians. For the Phoenicians alone control the sea routes and are free to come and go. The Persians are not seamen nor do they have a fleet.

The situation however soon changes. Egypt alone remains unconquered by the king of Persia. In 529 B.C. Cyrus dies and is succeeded by his son, Cambyses. The conquest of Egypt is necessary if Persia is to dominate the east Mediterranean world. The Mediterranean seaboard must be taken but first an understanding reached with the kings of the Phoenician cities to supply Persia with the necessary ships and crews.

An arrangement is therefore made whereby the kings of the city-states place their fleets at the disposal of the Persian monarch. In return the cities are not occupied and are allowed to retain their native kings. All during the Persian period of domination (550 to 330 B.C.) the kings of the Phoenician cities command their naval contingents and are treated as friends and allies.

In 525 B.C. Cambyses captures Pelusium in the Delta. The fall of Memphis completes the Persian conquest of Egypt.

When Cambyses plans a campaign against Carthage, the Phoenicians refuse to sail because they consider the city is a colony of Tyre. Cambyses abandons the expedition. Herodotus (3.19-20) explains:

"Cambyses did not think fit to bring pressure to bear because the Phoenicians had taken service under him of their free will and his whole naval power was dependent on them."

Cambyses dies. The year 521 B.C. marks the accession of Darius Hystaspis. Darius believes that the greatest danger to the Persian empire is a rebellion in a distant province. To prevent power being held by one man, he appoints three officials in each province: a satrap, a general and a secretary of state. independent of each other they spy on each other and report to the king direct.

Herodotus (3.91) lists the twenty satrapies of the Persian empire and the taxes paid by each. Phoenicia is united with Syria, Cyprus and Palestine in the Fifth Satrapy and is taxed lightly compared to the others.

Darius is the first Persian king to coin money. The Maric", a gold coin weighing 130 grains, soon becomes the gold currency of the old World. Herodotus (4.168) tells us that silver coinage, also called Maric% is subsequently minted by a Persian satrap in Egypt.

Darius realizes the importance of good communications to hold his empire together. He orders that a royal highway with one hundred and eleven post houses link Sardis in Lydia to Susa in southern Persia. Herodotus (4.52-56) travels on this royal road. At the post houses tired horses are exchanged for fresh steeds for the onward journey. Royal courriers find shelter and the much needed rest.

But trouble is now brewing in the provinces. The Ionian cities in Asia Minor revolt against Persia. The revolt spreads to Caria and the island of Cyprus. Darius orders the Phoenician cities to assemble a fleet. Ships are sent to Cilicia to transport Persian troops to Cyprus. The fleet anchors in the bay opposite Salamis, Cyprus, facing the Ionian fleet already there. This is the very first encounter at sea between Phoenicians and Greeks. The Phoenicians lose the battle but Persian land forces gain a victory over the Cypriotes. Hatred flares up between the Phoenicians and the Greeks for the Greeks in the Aegean are a serious threat to Phoenician domination of the commercial sea lanes.

A series of rebellions follow. Sardis is taken and burned to the ground by Athenian and Ionian forces.

Next the Creek cities in Asia Minor rebel against Persia. Herodotus (5.106) tells us that in his anger Darius commands one of his attendants to repeat to him three times whenever he sits down to dine: Waster, remember the Athenians".

A great clash is in the offing. The decisive battle between the Ionian Greeks and Persia occurs at sea In the naval battle of 494 near the island of Lade opposite Miletus, the Persians with the Phoenician fleet defeat the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor.

Darius is pleased with the outcome of the battle and realizes that the conquest of mainland Greece will not present much difficulty. He decides to lead his army through Thrace and Macedonia with the ultimate goal of punishing Athens. Herodotus (3.136) tells us that he has already sent a spying mission of Persian nobles in Phoenician ships to the coast of Greece.

The Phoenician cities furnish a large part of the fleet led by the Persian general Mardonius in the year 492 But heavy losses occur when the ships are dashed against the rocks of Mount Athos and most of the fleet sinks.

Then comes the Persian setback at Marathon in 490 B.C. The Persian archers are cut down by the Greek phalanx of hoplites.

In 485 Darius dies and with the accession to the throne in 481 of his son Xerxes we are about to witness the greatest expedition of all times.

Forces are drawn from every quarter of the Persian empire. Two bridges are thrown across the Hellespont, the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia (called the Dardanelles today).

At Abydos on the Propontis a lofty seat of white stone is carved out on the hilltop to enable Xerxes to look down on the seashore where his army and fleet are assembled. A race of ships is organized in his honor and the ships of Sidon win, to the king's great pleasure. Xerxes shows a marked preference for Phoenician vessels, the Sidonian ones in particular.

 
 

[Apollo]

Riding in his chariot, the king drives past the men of each nation, foot soldiers and cavalry, questioning them while his scribes write down the answers. Then the king alights from his chariot and, according to Herodotus (7.100) boards a ship of Sidon, sitting under a golden canopy. He sails past the prows of all the ships assembled before him, questioning the seamen and ordering that their answers be written down.

The loss of the fleet in the previous expedition off the rocky coast of Mount Athos prompts Xerxes to order that a canal be dug through the isthmus to allow his ships to pass in safety. No sooner this is done, however, the sides cave in. Phoenician engineers, Herodotus (7.23) writes, rescue the project.

in the section of the canal allotted to them, the Phoenicians dig a trench double the width at the top than at the canal level thus preventing wall collapse. The other engineers follow the Phoenicians'. example.

Xerxes, at the head of his army, marches into Thessaly and quarters his troops at Therma, Macedonia. There he embarks on a ship of Sidon to reconnoiter by sea. After the Persian victory at Thermopylae, Xerxes gives orders to proceed to Artemisium, where the Greeks await him. A fierce battle ensues. The Athenians and Sidonians fight bravely.




But the decisive battle is yet to come. Before throwing his troops into battle at Salamis, Greece, Xerxes holds a council of war. His high esteem for the king of Sidon is seen by the place assigned to him at the meeting. Herodotus (8.67) tells us "First in place is the king of Sidon and next the king of Tyre." Among the kings and princes of Phoenicia who sail with Xerxes, Herodotus (7.98) records, are Tetramnestus, son of Anysus of Sidon, and Matten, son of Sirom (Hiram) of Tyre.

Xerxes has one woman admiral. She is Artemesia, a widow, in command of the naval contingents of Halicarnassus, Cos, Nisyra and Calydna in Asia Minor. She is the only one to object to plans for a battle at sea, claiming that the Greeks are far superior to the Persians in naval matters.

On Mount Aegaleos Xerxes surveys the naval engagement from his silver footed throne. The narrowness of the straits at Salamis and the fact the Greeks are fighting in home waters leads to the defeat and flight of the Phoenician ships. When some of the captains appear before him to furnish explanations, Xerxes has them executed on the spot. Other Phoenician commanders become so alarmed that they desert the fleet and sail away.

This is perhaps the reason why for the next fifteen years there is no record of Phoenician contingents in the service of Persia's kings. In 465, however, the victorious Athenians threaten Cyprus. The Phoenician fleet appears in support of the Persians once again as many of the cities of Cyprus are Phoenician colonies. From 465 to 390 B.C. they protect Cyprus from the Athenians and more than once fight them off.

During the Persian period Phoenicians find the time to do a bit of business on the side and exploit mines on the island of Thasos. Herodotus (6.47) claims to have seen them: "A whole mountain has been turned upside down in the search of gold."

In the early fourth century B.C. a very important political development takes place. Tripolis in north Lebanon is founded by Aradus, Sidon and Tyre. These cities are united by federal bonds. A historian living in the first century B.C., Diodorus Siculus (16.41.1-2) records that they convene a common council or "parliament" in Tripolis, the first to be held in the East Mediterranean world.

In the meantime, the pharaohs of the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth dynasties stir rebellions in Cyprus against the Persians. Repeated attempts by the Persian king to regain Egypt, conquered earlier by Cambyses, fail. The Phoenicians and the kings of Cyprus now show open contempt of the Persians. In 366 the Phoenician cities join dissident satraps who wish to break away from the empire. In 358 Artaxerxes Ill (Ochus) ascends the throne of Persia. He feels he cannot deal with any rebellion until he conquers Egypt. His failure to do so brings forth the great Phoenician revolt led by Tennes, king of Sidon.

The Persian king's satraps and generals dwell in Sidon. Nearby is a beautiful royal park, where the kings of Persia hunt called the paradeisos in Creek (from the old Persian term pardes, meaning "garden"). This Greek word has been passed on from one generation to another to mean "paradise" in our days, a place of beauty and delight.

The first hostile act of the Sidonians is to cut down and destroy the royal park, then they burn the fodder for the horses. Next they arrest Persian officials.

Ambassadors are sent to Egypt to seek aid from the pharaoh. In return, King Tennes receives four thousand Creek mercenaries. Adding these men to his own forces, Tennes defeats the satraps and drives them out of Phoenicia.

The year is 351 B.C. Artaxerxes 111 is in Babylon and hastily assembles a large army. News of its great size reaches Tennes. Fearing that his forces cannot hold them off, the king of Sidon treacherously decides to come to secret terms with the Persians in order to save his own life.

Without the knowledge of his people, Tennes sends Thettalion, a faithful attendant, to the Persians with a promise he will betray Sidon. Tennes will also assist the Persian king defeat Egypt, for according to Diodorus (16.43.2), he is familiar with the topography of Egypt as well as the landing-places along the Nile. Thettalion returns to Sidon and reports on the success of his mission.

The conquest of Egypt at this point is of great importance. Persian envoys are sent to the cities of Greece for reinforcements. Thebes despatches one thousand men, Argos sends three thousand and the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor send six thousand. Artaxerxes does not wait for them to arrive and, at the head of his troops, marches on Sidon.

The Sidonians dig triple ditches and raise high fortifications. They store up food, armor and missiles. In wealth and resources Sidon by far excels her sister-cities. There is an important number of Greek mercenaries available ready to fight. More important still is the fact that Sidon possesses over one hundred triremes and quinqeremes.

All this feverish activity raises the suspicion of young Straton, the son of a respected palace official. For some time now his father has remained at court all the time and has not come home at night. From an upstairs window Straton can easily see who enters and leaves through the palace gates. He begins to fear for his father's life.

In those days it was usual for a king to hire foreign mercenaries to swell the ranks of his army. These men are paid generously for their services. Since they love money, adventure and the dangers of warfare, they are proud of their condition and insolently swagger through the streets of Sidon. Straton does not trust them, nor does he like them. After all, a man who is paid for his services can easily switch to another master if the pay is better.

Tennes in secret confides to Mentor, the commander of the Greek mercenaries in Sidon, that he plans to hand over the city to the Persians. Leaving him in control behind, the king at the head of five hundred citizens, leaves the city pretending he is going to meet with the kings of other Phoenician cities to plan a united strategy. On this pretext he also takes with him one hundred of the city's most distinguished citizens to serve as advisors. Among them is the father of Straton.

Upon approaching the Persian camp, Tennes and the one hundred Sidonians are suddenly seized and handed over to the king. Artaxerxes welcomes Tennes as a friend but has the dignitaries executed as the instigators of the plot. Then come the five hundred Sidonian notables carrying olive branches as suppliants. They too one by one are shot down and fall to the ground.

Tennes assures the Persian king that he will now deliver Sidon to him. He leads the way and approaches the part of the fortifications held by Mentor and the Greek mercenaries. They allow the Persians inside the city walls. Thus Sidon, by Tennes' betrayal, is secretly delivered to the Persians. Now that Tennes is of no further use to him, Artaxerxes at once has him put to death.

Unaware of their king's betrayal, the Sidonians in the meantime take many precautions to defend their city. They burn all their ships so that the townspeople will remain to fight off the Persians and cannot secretly sail away.

Diodorus (16.45.3-6) tells us that when the Sidonians see the myriads of soldiers entering the city and swarming over the city walls, they shut themselves, their wives, children and servants in their houses. Straton and his mother do the same. Once the doors and windows are bolted securely, they set their homes on fire. Plumes of dust and smoke rise over the city. About forty thousand perish in the flames. A vast amount of silver and gold is melted down by the fire. This treasure is gathered up and later sold by the Persian king for many talents.

News of the disaster that has destroyed Sidon spreads far and wide. The remaining Phoenician cities, panicstricken, go over to the Persians. After the destruction of Sidon and the arrival of his Greek mercenaries, Artaxerxes marches towards Egypt. The pharaoh picks up all his possessions and flees to Ethiopia. Artaxerxes installs a Persian satrap in Egypt and. starts the long march back to Babylon. The year is 350 B.C.

Alexander the Great
356-323 B.C.
Far away in Macedon Philip 11 (382-336 B.C.) becomes king. He gathers together a large force of infantry and the phalanx to support his cavalry and looks eastward, fired by ambition, to free Asia Minor of the Persian king.

He marries Olympias, the wild, witch-like daughter of the king of Epirus. According to Plutarch in his Life of Alexander (2.3-4) when newly wed, Philip comes upon his wife asleep with a serpent by her side. He is filled with revulsion and fears her as an enchantress.

Alexander, born of their union, is a fair-skinned handsome youth, quick to anger. He studies under Aristotle, the most celebrated philosopher of his time and has Leonidas as a tutor, a man of stern temperament. Alexander thus becomes a great lover of all kinds of knowledge and always puts Homer's Iliad with his dagger under his pillow when he sleeps.

Alexander's faithful companion in both battle and the hunt is his horse Bucephalus. Plutarch (6.1-4) records that Alexander, barely fifteen years of age, tames this tempestuous and unruly steed. Bucephalus is brought before Philip by a Thessalian who demands an exorbitant sum of thirteen talents in exchange. No sooner does an attendant attempt to mount him, the horse rears up and tosses him to the ground. As the horse is being led away, Alexander exclaims that he is able to mount him. Philip mocks his son and asks him what sum will he pay in case he is unhorsed. Alexander replies that he will pay his father the full price of the horse. The king and his attendants burst out into loud laughter. Unabashed, Alexander runs to the horse and turns him directly towards the sun, for the youth had observed that Bucephalus is afraid of the motion of his own shadow. He then leads the horse forward, stroking him gently, and with one nimble leap, mounts him, lets him go at full speed and gallops away. Philip and his attendants look on in wonder. When Alexander dismounts, according to Plutarch (6.5), Philip embraces him and says: "0, my son, look thee out a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself for Macedonia is too small for thee."

In the following years Philip's estrangement from Alexander's mother, Olympias, leads to other marriages. At his wedding to the youthful Cleopatra, Attalus, the bride's uncle in a drunken fit implores the gods to give the couple a lawful heir to the kingdom. Alexander is outraged by this affront and throws his drinking cup at Attalus' head. When Philip rises in anger with his sword drawn to attack his son, his foot slips and he falls to the ground. Plutarch (9.4-5) records that Alexander says insultingly: "See there, the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another."

After this incident Alexander and his mother withdraw from Philip's court. The sullen and jealous queen travels to Epirus, Alexander to Illyria. Friends of the family bring about a reconciliation, although short lived.

After subjugating his neighbors, Philip crosses into central Greece. In 337 he is in the Peloponnesus where he holds a congress of the Greek states at the Isthmus. A Hellenic league is organized that acknowledges Philip in the military command and furnishes contingents for an expedition against Persia.

In 336 Philip is murdered during the marriage festivities of his daughter in Aegae, Macedon. He leaves behind him a kingdom beset by troubles, but at the same time, the Macedonian army that enables his son within ten years to change the face of the old World.

Alexander is barely twenty years old when Philip is murdered. The countries surrounding Macedonia want to free themselves of its rule. The Greek cities are on the verge of rebellion. Alexander puts down the revolts and at the general assembly at the Isthmus, the Greek cities agree to join him in the war against Persia and proclaim him their general.

Public officials and philosophers come from all parts of the land to congratulate Alexander -- all but Diogenes of Sinope who is living at the time in Corinth. According to Plutarch (14.1-2) he does not even bother to leave Cranium, the suburb where Alexander finds him lying in the sun. When the philosopher sees so much company about him, he raises himself a little and glances at Alexander who asks him kindly whether he wants anything. "Yes", Diogenes replies, "I would have you stand from between me and the sun." Alexander is struck by this answer and is so impressed by the man that, as he goes away, he tells his followers were he not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes.

Alexander's aim is to strike at the heart of the Persian empire and ultimately conquer the entire East. He crosses the Hellespont into Asia and at Troy sacrifices to Athena, goddess of wisdom, and honors the memories of the heroes buried there.

The Persian advance guard is encamped on the further bank of the Granicus river. Except for a few hand-picked soldiers and a body of Greek mercenaries, the Persian king depends upon oriental recruits, large in number but weak in fighting power. Alexander crosses the river on horseback and is met by a shower of arrows. He charges, horse against horse with his raised lance. While the horsemen are thus engaged, the Macedonian phalanx crosses the river. The Persians take fright and flee leaving the high roads of Asia Minor open to the young Macedonian conqueror.

News of this military disaster reaches Darius. At the head of a large force he marches toward Cilicia to engage Alexander in battle. Their armies meet at Issus (near modern Alexandretta) in October 333. Alexander fights in the foremost ranks while his army closes in on the Persians, putting them to flight. Darius narrowly escapes, leaving behind his queen, his daughters and court officials.

Now the gates of the Near East lay open before Alexander. However he does not pursue Darius. It is of strategic importance for Alexander to control the naval bases from which the Persian fleet operates. So he marches instead on to Phoenicia.

Eye witness accounts of the daring exploits of Alexander unfortunately do not exist. What we know about him comes from secondary sources. Arrian (first century B.C.) refers to the works of Ptolemy, a general of Alexander, and Aristobolus, whose writings are lost. Diodorus Siculus (first century B.C.) and Quintus Curtius (first century A.D.) no doubt had access to earlier histories that have been destroyed.

Surprisingly enough, very few likenesses of the young Macedonian conqueror have come down to us. Plutarch (4.1) records that the finest statues of Alexander were made by Lysippus for he was the only sculptor tolerated by the young man. Even the inclination of Alexander's head a little on one side towards his left shoulder was reproduced in marble and was imitated afterwards by the generals who succeed him in an effort to emulate him. Coins minted during Alexander's reign have on the obverse the head of the god Heracles wearing the lion skin. Portraits of Alexander only appear later on the third century B.C. coins of Lysimachus, king of Thrace. Here Alexander appears as a god wearing the sacred horns of Ammon.

As Alexander moves down the coast, the Phoenician cities are panic-stricken. The Persian fleet is manned by Phoenician crews and the kings of the Phoenician cities are at the time at sea with the fleet.

Independent of each other, each city adopts a position that suits it best. Aradus (Ruad) is the most northern of the Phoenician city states. The king's son Straton, according to Arrian (2.13.7-8), hastens to welcome him and lays on his head a golden crown. He yields to Alexander the island of Aradus and Marathus, a great and prosperous city which lies opposite on the mainland (modern Tartous).

Byblos (Gebal) surrenders without resistance. The king ruling at the time is called Ayinel. He is away sailing with the Persian fleet. Alexander leaves Byblos behind him and marches on to Sidon.

Sidon was dealt a severe blow in 351 when Artaxerxes took the city. Many Sidonians perished in the flames and the memory of this disaster lives on. The city is ruled at the time by a puppet of the Persians and Alexander is determined to get rid of him.

Hephaestion, the trustworthy companion-in-arms of Alexander, is given the mission to choose a new king. He finds two Sidonians, each one is worthy to rule. However it is the custom in Sidon that the king should come from royal stock, so the choice falls upon a man, distantly related to the royal family. This man, modest and poor, lives in the suburbs of Sidon where he cultivates a small garden.

Hephaestion delegates the two Sidonians to bring him before Alexander. They find him, Abdalonymous by name, in his garden plucking weeds. As he stands up to greet them, the two men dismount from their horses and hail him as king. They give him royal garments to wear and accompany him to Alexander in his camp.

Gazing at him steadily, Alexander tells Abdalonymous that after all the years he has lived in poverty and privation, he will now become powerful and rich. Quintus Curtius (4.1.24-28) records that the new king of Sidon puts out his grimy, work-worn hands and replies: "These hands having nothing, I lack nothing." Alexander is impressed by these words and leaving him to rule Sidon, he marches south to Tyre.

The king of Tyre is at sea with the Persian fleet. So a delegation headed by the king's son and noblemen comes out to meet the invader. It is of strategic importance for Alexander to take Tyre as the city is an important base for the Persians.

Alexander uses the pretext that he wishes to enter Tyre in order to sacrifice to Heracles, for the kings of Macedon hold they are descended from the god. Once Tyre is his, Alexander believes, all the Phoenician ships will desert the Persian king and come over to his side.

Confident in the fortifications of their island city, the Tyrians object. They realize the danger is great should Alexander enter their city. So they send envoys to Alexander telling him that there is a temple of Heracles on the mainland at Palaetyrus (old Tyre), suggesting that he offer sacrifices to the god there.

Alexander's face reddens with anger at this affront. He threatens to join the island fortress to the mainland by an artificial isthmus, turn Tyre into a peninsula and bring his powerful siege engines up to the city's walls.

That night Alexander falls asleep and has a dream. He sees Heracles stretching out his right hand to him to lead him into the city. The seers are summoned by him at once. Tyre would be taken with great toil and difficulty, they predict, for toil is the mark of Heracles' achievements.

It takes Alexander seven months before he can enter Tyre. A strait of four stadia separates the island city from the mainland and is especially exposed to southwest winds. Alexander orders that large stones and tree trunks from the mountains of Lebanon be brought down to the coast and cast into the sea. As long as the building of the mole is near the mainland, work goes on smoothly enough but as his men get into deeper water and nearer the city, a volley of arrows fall around them shot by archers positioned on the walls. Tyrians sail up on either side, mocking and harassing them.

Alexander orders that two towers be built on the mole equiped with siege engines. Hides and skins cover the towers so they can not be pelted with fire darts. The Tyrians fill a large horse-transport ship with dry boughs and other combustible materials. They fix two masts on the prow, each with a projecting arm from which is suspended a cauldron filled with bitumen, sulphur and other highly inflammable materials. The stern of the vessel is loaded with stone and sand and is thus depressed. In this way the prow is elevated so it can easily glide over the mole and reach the towers. The Tyrians wait for a wind blowing towards the mole and tow the ship astern with triremes. Running the "fire-ship" at full speed upon the mole, they set torches to the combustible materials. They dash the ship violently against the mole and the cauldrons scatter the fiery mass in all directions. The crew of the burning ship easily swim away to safety.

The kings of Aradus and Byblos hear that their cities are in Alexander's hands. They promptly desert the Persian fleet and arrive with their contingents and Sidonian triremes to side with Alexander. The kings of Cyprus learn that Darius has been defeated at Issus and sail to Sidon with one hundred and twenty ships. Triremes arrive from Rhodes, Soli, Mallos, Lycia and a fifty-oar from Macedon.

Arrian (2.20.3) records: "To all these Alexander let bygones be bygones supposing that it was rather from necessity than choice that they had joined naval forces with the Persians."

While all the ships are being prepared for battle and his siege engines fitted for the final assault, Alexander with some of his archers and cavalry march to the Anti-Lebanon. He conquers part of the country, others readily surrender.

The Tyrians have no choice but to go on the offensive before Alexander attacks. The enemy fleet must be sunk, including the ships of their sister-cities. This is not an easy task because ships from Cyprus are blocking the mouth of the "Sidonian" port, so-called because it faces north towards Sidon. Plans must be made in secret. So sails are spread before the entrance of the harbor to hide their preparations. At midday when the Cypriote sailors are not on their guard, the Tyrians set sail with their bravest seafighting men and attack the surprised enemy, sinking several ships.

Alexander is infuriated by this setback. He orders his ships at once to sea to blockade the harbor. Those on the walls of Tyre see this and try with shouts and gestures to beckon their men to turn back. It is too late. Wheeling their ships about, the Tyrians attempt to sail back to the harbor. A few manage to get to safety but Alexander's naval forces put most of them out of action. Some of the crew jump overboard and swim to land. This victory allows the Macedonians easier access to Tyre's city walls. The battery rams are brought up against the walls. The fortifications on the mole are so high the Macedonians are unable to scale them.

Alexander is forced to turn south to the "Egyptian" port -- that facing Egypt -- testing the walls on his way. There, a part of the city's fortifications have broken down. Bridges are thrown over the walls but the Tyrians repulse the attack.

A great fear now arises in Tyre. Quintus Curtius (4.3.22) tells us that a rumor spreads like wildfire that the god Apollo is about to leave the city. The Tyrians bind the statue of Apollo with a chain of gold to its base and attach the chain to the altar of Heracles, their patron god, hoping that he will hold Apollo back.

Alexander has another dream. In it he sees a satyr mocking him at a distance and eluding his grasp when he tries to catch him. Finally after much coaxing, the satyr surrenders. Plutarch (24.5) records that the seers are called in and dividing the word satyros into two parts, say to Alexander plausibly enough: "Tyre (Tyros in Greek) is to be thine."

The final assault is frightening. Triremes are ordered to sail both to the "Sidonian" and "Egyptian" ports in an effort to force an entrance. Alexander's ships close in on the city from all sides and bridges are thrown over the walls from the vessels. Crossing over and advancing through breaches in the walls, the Macedonians now easily fight off the Tyrians. Both harbors are forced and the Tyrian ships are captured.

A large number of Tyrians desert the walls and barricade themselves in the Shrine of Agenor. This monument is particularly revered by the people of Tyre for, in legendary tradition, Agenor is their king, the father of Cadmus and Europa. According to Arrian (2.24.2) it is there that Alexander attacks them with his bodyguards. There is a bloody massacre. The Macedonians are infuriated, Seeing themselves at last masters of the city, they fall mercilessly on the Tyrians. They are also determined to avenge the death of their companions, who when sailing from Sidon earlier, are captured by the Tyrians. These men are dragged up on the walls, executed in full view of Alexander's forces and flung into the sea.

Quintus Curtius (4.2.10-12) tells us that at this time a Carthaginian delegation is in Tyre to celebrate the annual festival of Melkart-Heracles. The king of Tyre, Azemilcus, the chief magistrates and the Carthaginian embassy take refuge in the temple of Heracles. To them Alexander grants full pardon but he severely punishes the people of Tyre. Some thirty thousand are sold into slavery. Two thousand Tyrians, according to Quintus Curtius (4.4.17) are nailed to crosses along a great stretch of the shore.

Alexander offers a sacrifice to Heracles and holds a procession of his armed forces in the city. A naval review is also held in the god's honor. The siege has lasted seven months. Diodorus Siculus (17.46.5-6) ends his account of the dramatic siege of Tyre by telling us that Alexander solemnly removes the golden chains and fetters from Apollo and orders that henceforth the god be called Apollo "Philalexander". He rewards his men who have distinguished themselves and gives a lavish funeral for his dead.

Alexander leaves Tyre. With the fall of Gaza to the south, the way lies open to Egypt. Upon his arrival there, Alexander consults the oracle of Zeus Ammon and is hailed by the high priest as the son of the god.

He founds the city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile destined to be the new commercial and intellectual center of the East Mediterranean world.

In the spring of 331 B.C. Alexander leaves the Mediterranean to strike into the heart of the Persian empire. It is near Nineveh that Darius awaits him with a large army, hastily assembled. At the battle of Arbela Darius is defeated and flees into Media.

Alexander follows the Tigris River into Babylonia, the central seat of the Persian empire and its richest region. From there he proceeds to Susa, then to the royal city of Persepolis with its enormous treasure. There he destroys the palace by fire according to the geographer Strabo (15.6), ostensibly as revenge for the burning of Greek temples by Xerxes during the Graeco-Persian wars. Plutarch (38.1-4) gives another version saying that the fire is started during a drunken revelry but is then extinguished by order of Alexander who regrets the deed.

What we see next is a king being chased by another king. From Ecbatana Alexander pursues Darius to the Caspian. The Persian empire is crumbling, Darius is deserted by his generals one by one and by his troops. His cousin, Bessus, seizes this opportunity to rid himself once and for all of the Persian king. At night he and a few followers burst into Darius' tent, tie him up with ropes and carry him to his chariot and on to Bactria. He hopes eventually to offer the Persian king as a hostage in exchange for Alexander's recognition of him as ruler of the eastern satrapies. Alexander follows Darius in hot pursuit. Seeing he cannot escape, Bessus suddenly gallops up to the royal chariot, stabs Darius to death and gets away. When Alexander finally catches up with his rival, he comes into possession only of his corpse. Alexander looks down on his fallen foe with compassion, and covers his body with his purple cloak.

Eventually Bessus is captured and put in chains. Due to the nature of the crime, Alexander has him sentenced by Persian judges, not by himself. Bessus is found guilty of rebellion against his king. The sentence is cruel. Bessus' nose and ears are cut off and he is led to Ecbatana where he is crucified on a tree.

Alexander marches through Bactria and Sogdiana putting down rebellions and founding Greek cities. Then he crosses the Hindu Kush and proceeds to India. One of the principalities, situated between the Hydaspes and Ascenines, is ruled by Porus. Alexander crosses the Hydaspes, Porus holds the opposite bank with a powerful force and two hundred elephants. During the battle Porus is wounded and falls into Alexander's hands. However Alexander gains the fallen king as a friend.

It is at this time, Plutarch (61.1) tells us that Bucephalus dies, wounded in battle. Others relate that the horse dies of fatigue and old age. Alexander is overcome with grief. On the banks of the Hydaspes River he builds a city on the tomb of his horse which he names Bucephalia in his memory. When he reaches the Hyphasis River (Beas) the Macedonian army refuses to go farther although Alexander believes he has not much more to go to reach the ocean and the eastern limit of the inhabited world. He is obliged to give way and the return begins.

In the spring of 323 he returns to Babylon. There he makes plans for the construction of a great fleet and the opening of a route by sea from Babylon to Egypt around Arabia. In Babylon he falls ill, consumed by a raging fever that does not leave him. He dies towards evening on June 13, 323 at the age of thirty-three.

His. son by Roxana, the beautiful daughter of Oxyartes, king of Bactria, is born a short time later. The child, named Alexander "Aegus", is accepted by the Macedonian generals as joint king with Alexander's half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, mentally unfit to rule. Alexander's successors use these two pathetic figures as a symbol of legitimacy to cover up their own ambitions. The day is now nearing when they can carve out a kingdom for themselves on the ruins of Alexander's empire.

The two kings, a child and one feeble of mind, are put under the guardianship and protection of Perdiccas, Peithon and Antipater, in succession. Upon the death of Antipater, Roxana flees with her child to Epirus seeking the protection of Olympias, Alexander's mother. She is taken there by Polyperchon, an officer close to Alexander to whom Antipater had delegated his power. From there Polyperchon accompanies Olympias, Roxana and the boy to Macedonia. All three fall into the hands of Antipater's son, Cassander, whose ambition knows no bounds. Olympias is put to death, young Alexander and his mother are kept under close arrest. They are murdered in 310-309 by order of Cassander. Thus the dynasty of Alexander the Great comes to an end with the death of Alexander IV Aegus, his son, barely twelve years of age.

The Hellenistic Age [please also see below Hellenistic Phoenicia (Review by Nigel Pollard)]
330 to 64 B.C.
The generals who succeed Alexander are Antigonus Cyclops or Monophthalmus, so-called because he lost an eye in battle, and his son Demetrius Poliocertes, Antipater and his son Cassander, Seleucus, Ptolemy, Eumenes and Lysimachus. They argue bitterly among themselves for each is determined to build a Hellenistic or Greek monarchy on the ruins of Alexander's empire.

Ptolemy, son of a Macedonian nobleman and the most trusted of Alexander's generals, was among the seven bodyguards attached to his person. In the division of the empire, Ptolemy takes Egypt as the safest and farthest place to establish a dynasty. He even manages to carry off the body of Alexander from Babylon to Egypt in order to bury him in Alexandria and thus enhance his own position.

Later Ptolemy mints a gold coin at Alexandria on which we see a car drawn by four elephants. Perhaps this is an attempt made by him to represent Alexander's funeral cortege that included elephants.

Antipater establishes himself in Macedon. He dies soon after and is succeeded by Cassander, his son.

Seleucus Nicator, a youth of twenty-three of age when he accompanies Alexander to Asia, wins distinction in the Indian campaign. Seleucus is given the government of the Babylonian satrapy.

Antigonus defeats Eumenes, installed as satrap of Cappadocia, and has him put to death. He thus gets rid of his most dangerous rival. Ostensibly Antigonus and his son Demetrius Poliocertes hope to reunify Alexander's collapsing empire but for their own purposes. Antigonus also controls parts of Greece, Asia Minor and Syria.

Lysimachus sets himself up in Thrace.

Military clashes eventually occur as each tries to encroach on the other's territory. Ptolemy annexes Phoenicia to his possessions and places garrisons in the Phoenician port cities. Antigonus too decides to enlarge his territory and set himself up as king of Asia Minor.

Returning from successful wars in Babylonia, Antigonus easily takes over the cities of Phoenicia but meets with firm resistance from Tyre. Seventeen years have passed since Alexander took Tyre and the city has recovered rapidly. Antigonus has few ships as Ptolemy is holding all Phoenician vessels and their crews in Egypt, so he decides to build a fleet of his own. He camps before Tyre, summons all the kings of the Phoenician cities and the viceroys of Syria and demands them to assist him in building ships.

Antigonus blockades Tyre by land. He establishes three shipyards, one at Tripolis, one at Byblos, one at Sidon. Diodorus Siculus records that Antigonus collects wood-cutters, sawyers and shipwrights from all regions and has wood carried from the mountains of Lebanon to the sea. Eight thousand men are employed to cut and saw the timber; one thousand pairs of draught animals are used to transport it. "This mountain range", Diodorus (19.58.3-5) writes, "extends along the territory of Tripolis, Byblos and Sidon and is covered with cedar and cypress trees of wonderful beauty and size." We thus have a description of the extent of the luxuriant forests covering the mountains of Lebanon about two thousand three hundred years ago.

[Apollo]

After a siege of fifteen months, Tyre is taken by Antigonus. He allows Ptolemy's garrison to leave and establishes his own in the city.

In order to enhance their personal prestige, Alexander's successors strike their own coins. On the obverse of his early silver coinage, Ptolemy has engraved the head of the newly deified Alexander with the sacred ram's horns of Ammon and an elephant headdress. Alexander's name, not his, appears on the reverse of his coins.

On the coins of Seleucus, Alexander is portrayed as the god Dionysus wearing a helmet covered with panther skin adorned with a bull's ear and horns.

Lysimachus in his turn presents on his coins the diademed head of Alexander, deified, wearing the sacred horns of Ammon. When Alexander conquered Egypt, he was hailed by the high-priest of Ammon as the son of the god and Alexander's generals are determined to let no one forget it.

In 305 B.C. Antigonus and his son Demetrius assume the title of king. Ptolemy, Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus react to the challenge by doing the same. Henceforth the effigies of these men, wearing the Macedonian diadem, appear on their gold and silver coins. Their patron gods appear on the reverse. This ushurs in the age of royal portraiture.

The battle of lpsus in Phrygia in 301, called the "battle of the kings", signals the great military clash between Alexander's generals. The war elephant plays an important role in the outcome of this battle and is the symbol of military strength. The armies of Seleucus and Lysimachus with one hundred and fifty elephants cut off the infantry of Antigonus, left mortally wounded on the battlefield.

Notwithstanding, his son Demetrius rules Phoenicia until 287 when it once again passes back to Ptolemy. It remains a dependency of the Ptolemies for nearly seventy years. In the year 285 Alexander's empire is neatly divided between three of his former generals, Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and Lysimachus in Thrace.

At his death at the age of eight-four Ptolemy leaves behind him a well organized kingdom and the great library at Alexandria. He is succeeded by his son, Ptolemy 11 Philadelphus (285-246).

The persistent lug of war between Ptolemies and Seleucids over Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine also results in great cultural changes in the region. Phoenician is discarded as a literary language and is replaced by Greek. Greek religious practices and beliefs take root but at the same time a Phoenician god travels south to Egypt and is honored with great pomp in Alexandria.

Byblos is the center for the worship of Adonis, a youth of great beauty, loved by Aphrodite. In legendary tradition, Adonis is hunting the wild boar one day in the company of Aphrodite at Afka, the source of a river high up in the mountains of Lebanon. The boar turns on him and gores his thigh. Adonis dies of the wound as his blood flows into the river turning the waters red and the anemones in the river valley scarlet. Aphrodite appeals to Zeus, king of the gods, to bring her lover back to life. Zeus pities the youth and allows him to pass part of the year on earth, the other part underground in Hades. His death is mourned annually at Byblos. He returns in the spring time to the upper world and there is great rejoicing. Adonis in Phoenician means "lord" and is the title given to the young god of vegetation.

Theocritus, a Greek poet born in Syracuse c. 315 B.C., lived in Alexandria in the time of Ptolemy if Philadelphus. In his Idyll 15 he describes how the Festival of Adonis is celebrated in the city. On the first day a great procession forms as women and children pour out into the crowded streets to watch. Adonis has come back to life for a brief reunion with Aphrodite and there is great rejoicing. The second day is one of mourning as the women bewail the god's departure once again for the underworld.

In Alexandria, Adonis is represented by a graceful statue reclining on a silver couch in a temporary bower ornamented with birds and cupids. He is portrayed as a beautiful youth and the women cluster around him as he is carried through the streets in the procession. The crowd enters the royal palace as part of the ceremony is performed there. Praises are sung to Queen Berenice, the mother of Philadelphus and Arsinoë, his sister-wife, one way of eulogizing the family of Ptolemy who patronize the festival.

On the second day the women lament the departure of the youthful god. At the end of the festival the statue of Adonis is carried outside the city and flung into the sea amidst the wailing and weeping of the women.

The years roll by...

In Egypt descendants of Ptolemy rule at Alexandria, one after the other. In Syria a line of Seleucid kings, usurpers and imposters alike, sit on the throne of Antioch.

The Seleucid king Antiochus III the Great (223-187) makes Phoenicia a battlefield in his wars against the Ptolemies. Antiochus III drives the forces of Ptolemy IV Philopator out of Syria, takes Tyre and Acre (Ptolemais) and even threatens Egypt. In the following years the cities of Phoenicia pass back and forth between the two powers. In 196 B.C. Phoenicia and Coele Syria (the Bekaa valley) pass into the possession of the Seleucid kings. The Phoenician cities welcome the change, for the establishment and commercial expansion of Alexandria is a threat to their commerce.

The discovery in 1897 of several painted funerary stelae in a garden south of Sidon point to the presence of Greek mercenaries in the armies of the Seleucids during the second century B.C. These soldiers of fortune from the Greek mainland and cities of Asia Minor died here while on active duty and were laid to rest forever in foreign land. The stelae today are exposed in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul.

The Seleucid monarchy is now in a state of chronic civil war. In the struggle to seize the throne between the usurper Tryphon and Antiochus VII Sidetes during the latter part of the second century B.C., the situation becomes so unbearable that merchants of Beirut desert the city and open commercial establishments on the Greek island of Delos where they conduct a flourishing business.

But in the West the rise of Rome presents a danger. The Italian wars of 91-83 B.C. keep the Romans at home. The chaotic conditions in Syria permit Tigranes 11 the Great, king of Armenia, to overrun Cappadocia and expel one of the last feeble representatives of the Seleucid monarchy. By 83 B.C. Tigranes sits on the throne at Antioch and his frontier extends to Mount Lebanon.

In 69 B.C. the Roman general Lucullus arrives in the East, crosses the Euphrates in pursuit of Tigranes and invades Armenia. However his army does not support him so he withdraws to Asia Minor.

Pompey replaces Lucullus in 66 B.C. Syria is taken out of the hands of the Seleucids once and for all on the ground that they have virtually ceased to rule. Pompey turns the districts of the Seleucid territory, including Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine into a new province named "Syria". Although this political move consolidates Roman authority in the East and increases the annual revenue of the Roman treasury, in return a measure of security is given to the peoples of the region that they had not enjoyed since the conquests of Alexander. Anarchy and piracy is brought under control and the cities of Phoenicia turn to the sea and trade.

Hellenistic Phoenicia
Review by Nigel Pollard
John Grainger's second book, Hellenistic Phoenicia, follows remarkably closely on the heels of his first, The Cities of Seleukid Syria (Oxford University Press, 1990), and deals with the same region and the same period. Both deal with the impact of Graeco-Macedonian expansion into the Near-East. While in his earlier volume, G. dealt with the imposition of an entirely new Graeco-Macedonian urban network on Syria, in this second book he considers the manner in which the cities of Phoenicia, which existed and partook of a distinctive culture before the arrival of Alexander, survived through Macedonian conquest and Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule.

In his Introduction, G. refers to three important themes. The first is the Phoenician cities' "methods of survival, the compromises they made to do so, and their varying responses to Greek and Macedonian power." The second theme is the fascinating issue of the cultural relationship between Phoenician and Graeco-Macedonian. To what degree did Phoenicia preserve a distinctive cultural identity? Does the concept of "Hellenistic Phoenicia" have any meaning at all beyond the purely geographic and chronological definition? The final theme is the economy of Phoenicia in the Hellenistic period, a question raised by the reputation of Phoenicians as traders.

The organisation of the book is generally chronological rather than thematic, and given the extremely limited nature of the evidence G. is dealing with, this tends to weaken his ability to tackle these key problems. However, this arrangement works well enough for a study of the political and military impact between the Graeco-Macedonians and Phoenicians. 360-287 B.C.was a period of tremendous upheaval in Phoenicia, with the revolt of Sidon against Achaemenid rule in 345 B.C. and its subsequent destruction (though G. suggests, sensibly enough, that the latter was not as severe as implied by Diodorus' account) and the arrival of Alexander in 333-2 B.C.G. illustrates the varied responses of the Phoenician cities to Alexander. The ruler of Aradus submitted, the king of Sidon was overthrown (perhaps by Alexander or perhaps by his own people) and replaced by a pro-Macedonian (and perhaps more popular) appointee. Tyre, of course, resisted and was captured after a prolonged siege. Alexander is supposed to have executed 2000 leading citizens but maintained the king in power, and G. suggests (p.36-7) that he showed a preference for monarchs and popular control, as opposed to some form of oligarchy, which the 2000 executed men may have represented. After the siege of Tyre, no Phoenician city seems to have resisted occupation, despite the shifting control of the area by Ptolemaic and Antigonid/Seleucid armies in the following decades. G. suggests (p.50-51) that the sacks of Sidon and Tyre had taught the value of cooperation and compromise with conquerors.

The years 287-225 B.C.saw the Ptolemies gain and maintain control of the cities (except for Aradus), and the disappearance of the Phoenician monarchies. G. suggests (p.58) that in some cases the depositions were carried out by Graeco-Macedonian rulers because the kings had failed to change sides swiftly enough in the period of rapidly changing hegemony early in the century. They were replaced by nominally republican constitutions of "the Tyrians" and "the Sidonians," with epigraphic formulae (in Greek) suggesting similarities to the boule and demos combination of contemporary Greek cities in the area. Little is known about civic magistrates or the franchise, and the only possible expression of something untypical of Hellenistic cities in general is the use of the Greek term dikastes for a Sidonian magistrate in an inscription, a usage which may reflect the Phoenician title shofet (p.65-6; 81). However, just as in Seleucid northern Syria, (p.66) "real power, military power lay in the hands of the king, Ptolemaic or Seleukid." Thus there is little evidence of any major political distinction between the "Phoenician" cities and the "Greek" foundations of the Hellenistic world.

The Seleucids gained control of Phoenicia early in the second century, but from late in that same century there is evidence of increased assertion of local independence in the Phoenician cities as royal control broke down. This phenomenon occurred in other geographically marginal areas of the Seleucid kingdom too, notably those controlled by the Palmyrene, Ituraean and Emesene neighbours of Phoenicia. As before the Macedonian conquest, in Phoenicia this independence focused on the autonomy of individual cities, not some wider political and cultural entity of that name.

Thus G. provides a good survey and discussion of the limited evidence regarding the political histories of the cities of Hellenistic Phoenicia in the Hellenistic period. But what of his second theme, that of cultural identity? Regarding the violence and shifting control of the period 360-287 B.C.G. raises the pessimistic possibility (p.51) that the "cultural heritage (of the Phoenician cities) was also surely mutilated beyond repair, leaving an impoverishment which Greek culture could hope to fill." As noted above, there is little to distinguish the Phoenician cities from "Greek" Hellenistic cities in terms of political situation and institutions. Likewise the ruling classes are known to have engaged in Greek philosophy, Greek athletics and to have set up inscriptions in Greek. In contrast, Grainger refers us to sites away from the major urban centres, such as the cult centre of Astarte at Wasta and the rural community and cult centre of Umm elAmed. The former (p.78) "remains resolutely local, Phoenician and traditional" in terms of the names of worshippers, the languages they employed and the cult symbolism employed. The latter (p.81-82) includes inscriptions in Phoenician (and only in Phoenician), and, according to Grainger, the material culture such as pottery shows little evidence of external influence, except for imported Rhodian amphorae. "Yet of Hellenization there is no sign" (p.81) he claims of Umm el-Amed. Examination of the excavation report suggests that this assertion is an unfortunate over-generalization. Certainly the inscriptions are Phoenician, and the courtyard plans of the temples on the site owe much more to Near Eastern antecedents than to contemporary Greek planning. However, the details of those temples, such as the architectural mouldings and the forms of column capitals and bases show very strong Greek influences. As G. indicates, there are fragments of imported Rhodian amphorae. But the report indicates that there were significant quantities of characteristically Hellenistic black slipped wares and some red-slipped "Hellenistic Pergamene" (Eastern Sigillata). On a more fundamental level, the bulk of the pottery from the site, which the excavators suggest was of local production and which G. dismisses as "the usual local type," displays strong evidence of the influence of the wider Hellenistic world. The forms of most of those vessels, incurved rim bowls, everted rim bowls, fish-plates, fusiform unguentaria and even a lagynos and an amphoriskos, would be at home at just about any site in the Hellenistic world. Certainly these are not "Phoenician" in origin. The inhabitants of the site may not have been importing much pottery from Greece, but local potters were copying shapes from Greece and elsewhere in the Hellenistic world. The significance, nature and chronology of this "Hellenization" of the material culture of the site are all open to dispute, but it deserves more careful consideration than G. gives them. This tends to weaken the dichotomy between the "Hellenized elite culture" of the urban centres and the supposedly "more traditional" culture of the rural population.

In addition, one must take issue with some of G.'s comments regarding what one might describe as "pan-Semitic" cultural sympathies (such as his description, on p.145 of Tyre and the Jews under John Hyrcanus as "both-self-consciously Semitic"), which manifested themselves as occasional political cooperation between Phoenicians, Jews and Ituraeans in the late Hellenistic period. The evidence of such cooperation is slim enough, and there is plenty of evidence for conflict between "Semites" too, as G. himself documents (cf. p.153f., between Phoenicians and Ituraeans). What cooperation existed surely was based on immediate and practical considerations. Even if those responsible for policy-making in Phoenician cities at that time (the "hellenized" urban elite discussed above) had any conception of themselves as "Semitic," surely it was as Phoenician or Tyrian rather than "Semitic" in any general sense which included Jews and Ituraeans too.

The third topic considered in the book is the economy of Hellenistic Phoenicia. Of course, Phoenicians are, and were, known as traders, but at a more basic level it might be interesting to consider the contribution of local agricultural resources to the development of Hellenistic Phoenicia. Unfortunately there is little evidence. We do not have a clear idea of the rural hinterland controlled by the individual cities at specific times, and we lack archaeological survey data. However, G. does marshal some of the scattered evidence for the rural economy, including olive oil production at Umm el-Amed and Sarepta (p.67-69) and the possible Phoenician involvement in the development of villages in the hinterland (p.114). For the most part G. focuses on trade and traders, since that was how Phoenicians appeared to the Greeks and Romans to whom we owe most of our evidence. Much of what G. says is reasonable. However, when he tries to make a case for the Phoenicians as the developers of trade routes eastwards in the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, to the Red Sea, Arabia and India, by way of Syria and the Euphrates, he does seem to be stretching some very tenuous evidence too far. If Phoenicians were important in trade east along the Euphrates, one might expect to find evidence of their presence at Dura Europos, for example, along with the Palmyrenes who are attested there, albeit in the later Hellenistic and Roman period.

Roman Phoenicia
In 64 BC Phoenicia was incorporated into the Roman province of Syria though Aradus, Sidon, and Tyre retained self-government. Berytus (Beirut), relatively obscure to this point, rose to prominence by virtue of Augustus' grant of Roman colonial status and by the lavish building program financed by Herod the Great (and in turn by his grandson and great-grandson). Under the Severan dynasty (A.D. 193-235) Sidon, Tyre, and probably Heliopolis (Baalbek) also received colonial status.

Emperors embracing Christianity protected the area during the later Roman and Byzantine periods (c. AD 300-634). A 6th-century Christian group fleeing persecution in Syria settled in what is now northern Lebanon, absorbed the native population, and founded the Maronite Church.

More to come...

In 608-609 the Persian king Khosrow II pillaged Syria and Lebanon and reorganized the area into a new satrapy, excluding only Phoenicia Maritima. Between 622 and 629 the Byzantine emperor Heraclius mounted an offensive and restored Syria-Lebanon to his empire. This success was short-lived; in the 630s Muslim Arabs conquered the old Phoenician that cities offered only token resistance to the invader.

The geographical location of Phoenicia at the cross-roads of the Eastern Mediterranean made it a fertile ground for invading armies as indicated earlier. Hence, the Phoenicians were influenced in many ways by the invaders. Also, the Phoenicians as a people did not remain pure Semites. With this in mind, references to individuals as Phoenicians need to be seen in this light.




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Posts: 406 | From: Rhodes (an island near Cyprus) | Registered: Jun 2004

[Apollo]

Andre
Member
Member # 661

Member Rated:
   posted 07-07-2004 02:00 PM                       
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Please, just post the link and copy paste only a few sentences that seem to be important like this:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/seapeople.htm

quote:
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The 12th century brought dramatic changes that permanently affected Asia Minor and the civilized world of that time. Between 1200 and 1176 BC, the chaos that occurred in that region was probably a direct outcome of Sea People activity,
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Various scholars have tried to place these people with recognizable regions....
It would seem that, rather then bands of plunderers, the Sea People were probably part of a great migration of displaced people. The migration was most likely the result of widespread crop failures and famine.
...
After organizing themselves with the Libyans, they began to penetrate the western Delta, and were moving southwards towards Memphis and Heliopolis.
...
This first attack of the Sea people occurred during the 5th regnal year of Merenptah, the 19th Dynasty ruler and son of Ramesses II, and it seems that at first it took that king by surprise. Of course, Merenptah could not allow the Sea People to advance on Egypt's most sacred cities, and it seems that he put an end to this in a six hour battle by killing more than six thousand of them and routing the rest.
...
Merenptah's victory was recorded on the walls of the temple of Amun at Karnak and on the document we often refer to as the Israel Stele from his funerary temple.
...
In the 8th regnal year of Ramesses III, they again returned to attack Egypt, by both land and sea.
...
Again, Egypt seems to have been ready for this onslaught, for they have positioned troops at Djahy in southern Palestine and fortified the mouths of the Nile branches in the Delta. The clash, when it came was a complete success for the Egyptians. The Sea Peoples, on land, were defeated and scattered


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Now if Solon/Plato was inspired by the story of the inscriptions then the sea people should have build the famous city somewhere.

But the direct reason for the sea people to be restless and to roam around was agony, famime and natural disasters. So they spend their time fighting, and trekking until their defeat against Egypt.

Now. it seems to be a very rare event that trekking tribes build fairy tale cities, methinks





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Posts: 758 | From: Zoetermeer, the Netherlands | Registered: Dec 2001   

[Apollo]

Orion von Koch

Member
Member # 2038

  posted 07-07-2004 02:17 PM                       
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Is it possible that the Sea People were a collection of people from the very distant past who lived near or on the seas for some 12,000 to 9,000 years ago. Could they have been part of the Atlantis Cultures. They seemed to have been a very hardy lot. Strong willed and strong of body. I think from what you have posted, that they had a common "WAY" about them. They were like the media of ancient times adrift upon the waters of time slipping in and out of focus leaving bits and parts of our ancient past in every port and and during every invasion. They were a collective. Could a history of them exist hidden somewhere on the shores of some ancient unfound civilization. Say in Costa Rica?
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Posts: 4978 | From: Deep, Deep West Texas | Registered: Jun 2004   

[Apollo]

 
Helios

Member
Member # 2019

Member Rated:
   posted 07-07-2004 02:43 PM                       
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This time chart, which I have just posted in the other thread, should also be of some use here:
http://mirrorh.com/timeline2.html
Historical Timeline
O.T.

Chronology:
15 Billion - 11,000 B.C.
11,000 B.C. - 9,000 B.C.
9,000 B.C. - 3,000 B.C.
3,000 B.C. - 1 A.D.

1 A.D. - Present

9,000 B.C. - Lunar Calendar / Uganda - "The Ishango bone from modern Uganda in equatorial east Africa was identified by Marshak as a Lunar Calendar, dated about 9,000 B.C."

9,000 B.C. - Wheat Cultivation / Turkey - "The wild progenitor of einkorn wheat, one of the first crops to be domesticated (ca. 9000 B.C.), has been identified genetically in southeastern Turkey, according to a report in the journal Science. Manfred Heun of the Agricultural University of Norway, along with Norwegian, German, and Italian colleagues, examined the DNA of 68 lines of cultivated einkorn (Triticum monococcum monococcum), 194 lines of wild einkorn (T. m. boeoticum) from nine geographical regions within the Fertile Crescent, and nine lines of a weedy einkorn (T. m. aegilopoides) found in the Balkans."

9,000 B.C. - Tools / North America - "The Wenachee site, dated to 11,000 B.P. and located in the Inner Columbia River Basin, presents evidence of a new assemblage of stone tools in the Americas at their earliest known horizon." [link 5]

8,810 B.C. - Equinox at Cancer - "About this time, the Vernal Equinox was at Cancer."

8,600 B.C. - Irish Elk - "Until this time, Irish Elk [Megaloceros giganteus] lived in temperate climates throughout Europe and western Asia."

8,500 B.C. - Cities / Middle East - "According to popular history, this was the date when the first cities were established in the Middle East. One of the leading contenders is Jericho."

8,466 - Neptune-Pluto Conjunction - "There are five major planets with average cycles of motion relevant to the study of history. These are: Pluto [250 years], Neptune [165 years], Uranus [84 years], Saturn [28 years] and Jupiter [12 years]."

8,451 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

8,000 B.C. - Neolithic Age - "According to popular history, this period [10,000 - 8,000 B.C.] in which herding and agriculture came into use, is called the 'New Stone Age' or [in Latin] the 'Neolithic Age.' "

8,000 B.C. - Glacial Decline / Northern Hemisphere - "Popular Belief: By 8,000 B.C. the Wisconsin Glaciation and the European Wurm Glaciation had withdrawn completely.

8,000 B.C. - Vedas - "Reportedly, the Vedas have been passed down through oral tradition for over 10,000 years, appearing in written form between 2,000 - 4,000 B.C."

8,000 B.C. - Ancient Ruins / India - "At Poompuhur, facing the Bay of Bengal, Indian divers found a horseshoe-shaped object, measuring 85 metres in length, in water more than 23 metres deep. According to one scientist, the land on which this structure was built last stood above water more than 11,000 years ago. In January [2002], Indian marine scientists discovered what may be the more extensive remains of two ancient cities in the Gulf of Cambay. The site spans an area of about 25 square kilometres, 35 metres deep, which, until as late as 6,900 years ago, was entirely above water. About 2,000 possibly man-made artifacts have been dredged and carbon-dated from 8,500 to 9,500 years old."

8,000 B.C. - Civilization / Ur - "The Ur culture developed during the Neolithic Age and became global in expanse by 8,000 B.C. According to popular belief: 'Where the Sumerians came from is still disputed. Typologically, the language of Sumer resembles Chinese, which suggests an eastern origin. Some scholars have proposed that the Sumerians came by ship, landing on the north shore of the Persian Gulf.' "

8,000 B.C. - Writing - "Clay tokens have been used since as early as 8,000 B.C. in Mesopotamia for some form of record-keeping."

8,000 B.C. - European Inscriptions - "Epigraphers remain perplexed concerning such ancient European inscriptions as the Azillian signary c.8000 B.C.E. from southern France."

8,000 B.C. - Stonehenge - "Stonehenge was for a long while thought to have built slowly - over about 1000 years between 2,100 and 1,100 BC. This chronology was called into question in 1996 by new archaeological evidence. Following a two-year study commisioned by the English Heritage Foundation, researchers concluded that the great circles of blustones and sarsens had in fact been put up between 2,600 BC and 2,030 BC. Less than a year after these results were published another study showed that the stone circles had been preceded by wooden circles of 6-metre pine 'totem poles' dated to 8,000 BC. [Heaven's Mirror, Quest For The Lost Civilization, by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, p. xiii]

8,000 B.C. - Geography / Ireland - "The shape and landscape of present-day Ireland—an island of 27,100 square miles [70,200 square kilometers]—were formed 10,000 years ago when Atlantic Ocean glaciers slowly began their retreat. The event left the country rich with the soil that has nurtured Ireland's flora and fauna for centuries, and which offered a hospitable environment for migrating people to settle and plant seeds."

8,000 B.C. - Bog Bodies - "Over the past centuries, remains of many hundreds of people - men, women, and children - have come to light during peat cutting activities in northwestern Europe, especially in Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark. These are the "bog bodies." The individual bog bodies show a great degree of variation in their state of preservation, from skeletons, to well-preserved complete bodies, to isolated heads and limbs. They range in date from 8,000 B.C. to the early medieval period. Most date from the centuries around the beginning of our era. We do not know exactly how many bog bodies have been found--many have disappeared since their discovery."

8,000 B.C. - Florida Indians - "Florida's Aucilla River is yielding evidence of the adaptability of Paleoindians to their changing environment at the end of the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago. For a decade, researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History have been excavating the Page-Ladson site, and this past fall [1996] they uncovered the ground surface of a Paleoindian habitation at a depth of 15 feet. Radiocarbon dates place the beginning of the occupation at ca. 10,000 years ago. At the time, the site, now only five miles from the Gulf Coast near Tallahassee, was nearly 100 miles inland, and Florida's landscape resembled Africa's savannahs. Within 100 years, however, rising water at the end of the last glaciation flooded the site, sealing it with deposits that contain shells of freshwater molluscs."

8,000 B.C. - Human Occupation / South America - "The altiplano of Peru and Bolivia appears at first sight to be a very inhospitable land. Its high mountains, windswept plains, and icy waters of Lake Titicaca make it a stark, yet beautiful landscape. This 'high plain' (literally!) at a base elevation of 12,600 feet above sea level, is the ancestral home to the famous Andean animals (llamas and alpacas) and plants (potatoes and quiñoa). These creatures evolved in this harsh environment through natural selection. However, the highly successful human occupation of the area that began approximately 10,000 years ago depended largely on cultural adaptations, rather than biological ones. These cultural developments from the Archaic (ca.9,500- 4000 years ago) through the Formative Period (ca. 3200-2000 years ago) attest to a long period of economic and social intensification, a trend that is common throughout the world. In this 7,000 year span, we see the first colonization of the altiplano, the settling of permanent villages, and the rise of chiefly societies that formed the basis of Tiwanaku, one of the high civilizations of the New World. Dating of squash seeds from a cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, has confirmed that plant domestication in the Americas began some 10,000 years ago. The new finding, reported by Smithsonian archaeologist Bruce Smith in the journal Science, indicates that planting began in the New World about the same time as in the Near East and China."

7,422 B.C. - Copper Age - "Theoretical date for the beginning of the Copper Age based on computations using the number 2,160 years for the length of Kali Yuga."

7,420 B.C. - Mummy / Nevada - "A mummy excavated in 1940 and stored at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City was recently dated to ca. 7,420 B.C., making it the oldest mummy ever discovered in North America.

7,300 B.C. - Kennewick Man - "A skeleton was found in July, 1996 A.D. by the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. It was named the 'Richland Man.' The 9,300 year old bones were later studied and determined to be most closely related to Asian people, particularly the Ainu of northern Japan. It was concluded in 2,000 A.D. that he was an American Indian. The bones were dated to 7514-7324 B.C. Most intriguing is that the mummy was wearing moccasins and shrouds of woven marsh plants. The weave of the shrouds indicates that it was made on a loom. 'Kennewick Man' represents the best-preserved - human remains yet found in this part of the world, among the oldest anywhere in North America."

7,300 B.C. - Neolithic Surgery - "New accelerator radiocarbon dating of the Dnieper Rapids cemeteries near Kiev in Ukraine by the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory has produced evidence that trepanation, the surgical removal of bone from the cranial vault, was performed during the Mesolithic period. During a study of 14 individuals at the Vasilyevka II cemetery, Malcolm C. Lillie, a geoarchaeologist and palaeoenvironmentalist at the University of Hull, found one skeleton [no. 6285-9] to have evidence of trepanation. The cemetery, excavated in 1953 by A.D. Stolyar, has been dated to 7,300-6,220 B.C., making the trepanned cranium the oldest known example of a healed trepanation yet discovered. The skull, which was originally reported in Russian by I.I. Gokhman in 1966, has a depression on its left side with a raised border of bone and 'stepping' in the center showing stages of healing during life. The complete closure indicates the survival of the patient, a man who was more than 50 years old at his death. The dates for the individual are 1,000-2,000 years earlier than those of the skull at Ensisheim in France, recently reported by Kurt Alt to be the earliest evidence for trepanation [see Neolithic Surgery, September/October 1997]."

7,000 B.C. - Chinese Flute - "Archaeologists discover a 9,000 year old playable Flute in China. The 8.6 inch instrument in pristine condition has seven holes and was made from a hollow bone of a bird, the red-crowned crane. It is one of six flutes and 30 fragments recovered from the Jiahu arcaeological site in henan province."

7,000 B.C. - Human Skeleton / England - "In 1903 A.D. a skeleton of a man, 9,000 years old, was discovered in the underground caves at Cheddar, 130 miles west of London, England."

7,000 B.C. - Human Occupation / Alaska - "The Discovery Channel's latest archaeological offering takes mummy-mania to an unpublicized corner of the known mummy world - Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The Unangan, seafaring ancestors of today's Aleut, made their home in the barren archipelago for some 9,000 years, honing techniques for hunting large sea mammals, building sturdy houses, and, perhaps surprisingly, perfecting ritual mummification in a hostile, wet climate."

7,000 B.C.

6,800 B.C. - Jarmo Settlement / Iraq - "Reportedly, the settlement of Jarmo, in the foothills of northern Iraq, dates to about 6,800 B,C."

6,500 B.C. - Equinox at Gemini - "About this time, the Vernal Equinox was at Gemini."

6,500 B.C. - Catalhuyuk - "A prehistoric city located in Anatolia, or modern day Turkey where a number of artifacts appear to support evidence for the widespread practice of Goddess worship. Reportedly, 'the oldest layer of Catal Huyuk yet excavated [virgin soil has not yet been reached] is reliably carbon dated to 6,500 B.C.' "

6,500 B.C. - Mexican Step Pyramid - "Just south of the university campus of Mexico City, off the main road connecting the capital to Cuernavaca, stands a circular step pyramid of great complexity [with four galleries and a central staircase]. It was partially excavated in the 1920's from beneath a mantle of lava. Geologists were called to the site to help date the lava, and carried out a detailed examination. To everyone's surprise, they concluded that the volcanic eruption which had completely buried three sides of this pyramid [and had then gone on to cover about sixty square miles of the surrounding territory] must have taken place at least seven thousand years ago. It is worth noting, however that Byron Cummings, the American Archaeologist who origianally excavated the site for the national geographic Society, was convinced by clearly demarcated stratification layers above and below the pyramid [laid down both before and after the volcanic eruption] that it was 'the oldest temple yet uncovered on the American continent.' He went further than the geologists and stated categorically that this temple 'fell into ruins some 8,500 years ago.' "

6,200 B.C. - Domesticated Cattle - "The archeological record shows traces of domesticated cattle back to this time."

6,001 - Neptune-Pluto conjunction -

6,000 B.C. - Ocean-Going Vessels / Mesopotamia - "By 6,000 BC, the people of the Mesopotamian Near East were using ships on the open sea."

6,000 B.C. - Flax Cultivation - "Flax was being cultivated well before 6,000 B.C."

6,000 B.C. - Pottery Established - "By 6,000 B.C. pottery was a well established product."

6,000 B.C. - City / Ugarit - "Ugarit experienced a very long history. A city was built on the site in the Neolithic period around 6,000 B.C. Since the discovery of the Ugaritic texts, the study of the Old Testament has never been the same."

6,000 B.C. - Ancient Structure / Japan - "The submerged structure near the isle of Yonaguni [Japan], that is approximately 75 ft under the sea level, which has an evident artificial origin; it is 600 ft wide and 90 ft high, and it's about 8,000 years old." Links: 1 [7th photo]

6,000 B.C.

5,500 B.C. - Cities Established / Mesopotamia - "Reportedly: "Cities, or settlements which became cities, existed in Mesopotamia from 5,500 B.C. The earlier cities lay in the northern part of Iraq, and in northeastern Syria. City living quickly spread down the Euphrates River and into the valley of the Tigris River, reaching the swamps at the head of the Persian Gulf before 4,000 B.C." Links: 1, 2

5,546 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

5,400 B.C. - Human Settlement / Eridu - "Mesopotamia is located on the fertile flood plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a hot desert ecology. Human settlements based on irrigation agriculture first appeared coincident to the establishment of Eridu about 7,400 BP. A great stepped tower, a ziggurat, which culminated a series of 20 structures built one upon another during a span of 3,500 years evidences Eridu's importance. Public architectural monuments were the focus of early Mesopotamian community centers. By 6,500 BP. large scale canal systems and many towns with public architecture had been founded. Eridu was the largest."

5,508 B.C. - Neptune-Pluto Conjunction -

5,292 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto conjunction."

5,149 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto conjunction."

5,038 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto conjunction."

5,015 B.C. - Neptune-Pluto Conjunction -

5,000 B.C. - Horus - "According to reports, many Egyptologists have endowed Horus with a grand old age. He commenced life at the time of Osiris 22,000 years ago and kept up his health and strength down to the time of Menes 5,000 years ago. A grand old age of 17,000 years. This goes the Hindu mistranslation about Rama one better. Rama lasted only 10,000 years. From the commencement of Egyptian history, and apparently for thousands of years, Egypt was governed by the Church with a Horus. The last Horus as the Hieratic head of religion in Lower Egypt was the Horus that immediately preceded King Menes, according to Manetho [in the writings of Manetho there are references to six different Horuses as Hieratic heads]. The date of Mena, the first king of Egypt, is variously given B.C. 5,867 [Champollion], B.C. 5,004 [Mariette], B.C. 5,892 [Lepsius], and B.C. 4,455 [Brugsch]."

5,000 B.C. - Megaliths / Egypt - "Standing megaliths and a ring of stones were erected from 6,700 to 7,000 years ago in the southern Sahara desert. They are the oldest dated astronomical alignment discovered so far and bear a striking resemblance to Stonehenge and other megalithic sites constructed a millennium later in England, Brittany, and Europe."

5,000 B.C. - Sahara Ecology - "Dried-up riverbeds as well as cave paintings indicate that at this time the Sahara was a land of flowing rivers, lush green pastures, and forests."

5,000 B.C. - I Ching - "The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is the most widely read of the five Chinese Classics. The book was traditionally written by the legendary Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi [2953-2838 B.C.]. It is possible that the the I Ching originated from a prehistoric divination technique which dates back as far as 5,000 B.C. Futher commentaries were added by King Wen and the Duke of Chou in the eleventh century B.C."

5,000 B.C. - Trepanation - "A 7,000-year-old burial at Ensisheim, in the French region of Alsace, has yielded the earliest [1997] unequivocal evidence for trepanation, according to Kurt W. Alt of Freiburg University and his colleagues. Trepanation is a surgical operation that involves the removal of a rectangle or disk of bone from the cranial vault. Most previous claims to cases predating the Late Neolithic age have been shown to be untreated head injuries or the results of decomposition."

5,000 B.C. - Human Habitation / Lebanon - "Stone age farmers and fisherman inhabited the area around Byblos, Lebanon. Archeologists at Byblos found at least 12 layers of civilizations that dated back 7,000 years."


5,000 B.C.

4,900 B.C. - Abandonment / Catalhuyuk - "An estimated date when the Catalhuyuk area was abandoned."

4,895 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

4,784 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

4,700 B.C. - Megaliths / Carnac - " 'Prehistory' itself is just the name that we give to the almost total amnesia that our species has suffered concerning more than 40,000 years of our own past. This amnesia covers the entire period from the emergence of anatomically modern humans until the first 'historical records' began to be written down in Sumer and in Egypt in the third millenium BC.
"Out of that long period of amnesia, and from its borders with history, a number of mighty monuments have come down to us. These include rock-hewn temples, circles of megaliths, and sacred sites arranged in dead straight lines over vast distances, such as the avenues of standing stones at Carnac in northern France. One earthern mound there, which contains a megalithic passageway orientated to the winter solstice sunrise, has been carbon-dated to 4.700 BC. [Heaven's Mirror, Quest For The Lost Civilization, by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, pp. x-xi]

4,641 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

4,530 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

4,522 - Neptune-Pluto Conjunction -

4,500 B.C. - Elephants / China - "A sacrificial dump [4,500 - 2,000 B.C.] in Guanghan, Sichuan Province, in China was uncovered in 1976. Large quantities of elephants tusks reveal that elephants roamed the area. Human figures, monster masks, and tree fragments made of bronze tubes were also found."

4,500 B.C. - Cities / Assyria - "Between 4,500 and 2,400 B.C., complex societies appear in the form of cities, with craft specialization and writing. These features were associated with the Sumerians, but they quickly spread to other parts of Mesopotamia, including Assyria. In Assyria, settlements had become large and guarded by fortifications walls, which implies the risk of attack from outside, and hence the need for defense and warfare.

4,500 B.C. - Burial Cave / Galilee - "A 6,500-year-old burial cave full of clay ossuaries, ceramic and stone vessels, figurines thought to have been ritual objects, and piles of human skulls and bones has been discovered in Galilee in northern Israel. Until now, archaeologists believed that Chalcolithic cultures in different parts of Israel were more or less self-sufficient. But clay jugs found at the new site are similar to those uncovered in the Golan Heights, and bronze ax heads are like those from the Judean Desert, suggesting some interaction between cultures. The ossuaries, however, are unique. 'Decorated ossuary facades characteristic of this period that depict human faces are flat, with protruding noses,' says Zvi Gal, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority Northern Region. 'Here we found three-dimensional sculpted heads, with distinct eyes, noses, and ears, unlike any ever found.' "

4,468 B.C. - Narmer Plate - "The original sky chart of the remote Ancient Egyptians was incorporated into the Narmer Plate in 4,468 B.C."

4,387 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction"

4,380 B.C. - Equinox at Taurus - "The immediate predecessor of the Age of Aries was the Age of Taurus - the Bull - which spanned the period between 4,380 B.C. and 2,200 B.C. It was during this precessional epoch [when the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the constellation of Taurus] that the Bull-cult of Minoan Crete flourished. It is interesting to note that at the very beginning of the dynastic period, the Egyptians were already venerating the Apis and Mnevis Bulls. Furthermore, the Sumerians represented the Bull of Heaven with human head and bull's body. The Greek representations of the Minotaur, depict him with human body and bull's head." Links: 1

4,276 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto conjunction."

4,241 B.C. - Egypt - "A date believed to indicate the earliest recorded date in the Egyptian calendar."

4,133 B.C. - Configuration - "Uranus-Pluto conjunction."

4,029 B.C. - Neptune-Pluto conjunction -

4,022 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

4,004 B.C. - Biblical Creation - "Reported date for the creation of the world according to Bishop Ussher [1581-1656]. Based on O.T. Chronology, according to Ussher, Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4,004 B.C. Ussher was Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin. According to John Lightfoot [1602-1675], Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and a contemporary of Ussher, man was created on October 23, 4,004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning. Other dates for the beginning of the world include: August 21st, 4004 B.C. and March 21st, 4004 B.C."

4,000 B.C. - Ancient Scythians - "The ancient Scythians [a transient kingly tribe who first domesticated the horse before 4000 BC] were indeed the early occupiers of Akkad in pre-Sumerian times." [Laurence Gardner, Genesis Of The Grail Kings, p. 46]

4,000 B.C. - Mesopotamian Flood - "Among some 20,000 preserved clay tablets, excavated from the world's most famous library at Nineveh [old Ninua] in Mesopotamian Assyria, are twelve which tell the story of the Flood. According to these texts, the hero of the epic, who was commanded by the gods to 'build a ship', was King Uta-napishtim of Shuruppak, who reigned around 4,000 BC. His story even states that when the waters had abated, 'All mankind had turned to clay; the ground was flat like a roof'." [Laurence Gardner, Genesis Of The Grail Kings]

4,000 B.C. - Flood Strata / Mesopotamia - "Flood strata of Mesopotamia has been scientifically dated to about 4,000 B.C."


4,000 B.C. - Stone Age - "The entire period of hominid history prior to 4,000 B.C. might be termed the Stone Age."

4,000 B.C. - Megoliths / Malta - Reportedly: "Malta is the site of the world's most ancient temple complexes: recent dendrochronological dating has put the age of these monuments at just short of 6,000 years."

4,000 B.C. - Human Occupation / Indus Valley - "The Indus Valley encompasses a large floodplain of rich alluvial soils that supported human occupation sites with irrigation based agriculture as early as 6,000 BP." [use link number 10]

4,000 B.C. - Human Advancement / Sumer - "Although Mesopotamia was a world leader in numerous aspects from around 10,000 B.C., there appears to have been a very marked further advancement from about 4,000 B.C. when southern Mesopotamia became identified as Sumer and the truly municipal cities flourished. By that time they were formally recognized as city-states which operated as individual kingdoms, and it is the story of the amazing rise of Sumer which provides the very thrust of the patriarchal narrative in Genesis. This sudden cultural expansion was not simply a matter of general evolvement; it was a mighty technical and academic revolution which has long baffled scholars and historians worldwide."

4,000 B.C. - Emergence / Sumerian Culture - "Tho this day, the majority are baffled by the sudden, extraordinary emergence of the Sumerians, seemingly from nowhere. But there is no doubt that, upon their advent in southern Mesopotamia, they were already highly advanced to a level far beyond that recorded or sustained from anyplace where logically they could have emanated. Nowhere on earth was there a culture like that of the Sumerians, who appeared soon after 4000 BC - at least that is what is generally supposed." [Laurence Gardner, Genesis of the Grail Kings, p. 45]

4,000 B.C. - Temple of Ur - "In the early 1900's, the builders of the Baghdad railway placed a station about 120 miles north of Basra because the landmarked site was a recognized travellers' rest. Here, an enormous solitary hill rose above the desert - a hill known to the Bedouins as Tell al Muqayyar [Mound of Pitch]. But some thousands of years ago this desert waste was a lush, fertile valley with cornfields and date groves. As was soon to be discovered, within this great mound was the towering multi-levelled Temple of Ur, along with the rest of the ancient city.
In 1923 , the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Wooley, with a joint team from the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, set out to excavate the mound because some years earlier a collection of very old texts, engraved on stone cylinders, had been unearthed near the summit. One of these cylinder-seals [as they became known] had revealed the name of Ur-nammu, King of Ur in about 2,010 BC, and so it was determined that this was probably the location of Abraham's home." [Laurence Gardner, Genesis Of The Grail Kings]
"When the Wooley team investigated beneath the foundations of the 4,000-year-old ziggurat and its confines, they fiound the remains of another great ziggurat and a buried city from even more ancient times, with courtyard bricks dating back to the 4th millennium BC. Also there were graves and artifacts from 3,700 BC, around the time of Adam, along with numerous archaeologically valuable items from a far more distant era. They even discovered a kingly burial ground, together with documentary records and cultural treasures unsurpassed in all Egypt." [Laurence Gardner, Genesis Of The Grail Kings]

4,000 B.C. - Set [the "Devil"] / Egypt - "About ten thousand years after the time of Thoth [about 14,000 B.C.], the vile, unscrupolous Egyptian priesthood, to bring fear and dread into the hearts of people and to enslave them for their priestly purposes, turned Set into the devil of today. Before a devil was invented by the Egyptians, a devil was unknown. Before that it was a fight between the Soul or Divine Force and the material affinities for control of man's mind and, through his mind, his bodily actions. The Soul's endeavor was to raise the material man to a higher plane. This the material affinities fought against and tried to keep him down to their own level." [Col. James Churchward]

4,000 B.C. - Hittite Settlements / Cappadocia - "The Hittites settled around Cappadocia in present day Turkey. According to reports: 'Sumerian as well as Akkadian words were borrowed into the Hittite language. Wherever Akkadian influence spread [among the Hurrians, Hittites, Elamites, Canaanites and still farther afield into the Aegean and Egypt], the Sumerian impact was felt. 'Cuneiform Hittite texts are not only written in the script of Mesopotamia, but are full of Sumero-Akkadian logograms and loan-words; so much so that the interpretation of Hittite texts comes more easily to Assyriologists than to Indo-Europeanists.' "

4,000 B.C. - Bulgarian Inscriptions - "Epigraphers remain perplexed concerning such ancient European inscriptions as the Azillian signary c.8000 B.C.E. from southern France, the Tartaria tablets from Romania and the 'proto-writing' from Gradeshnitsa, Bulgaria dated before 4,000 B.C."

4,000 B.C. - Human Settlement / Poland - "In Poland the archeological site at Oslonki uncovered some 30 longhouses and 80 graves."

4,000 B.C. - Amber Trade / Europe - "Chiefdoms of northern Europe were trading in amber."

4,000 B.C. - Teotihuacan - "Neither the Street of the Dead, nor the temple of Quetzalcoatl, nor the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon had ever been definately dated. The majority of scholars believed that the city of Teotihuacan ['place of the gods'] had flourished between 100 B.C. and 600 A.D., but others argued strongly that it must have risen to prominence much earlier, between 1,500 and 1,000 B.C. There were others still who sought, largely on geological grounds, to push the foundation back to 4,000 B.C. before the eruption of the nearby volcano Xitli. Still other reports push the date back well beyond 10,000 B.C. Incidentally, the architects who had planned Teotihuacan had deliberately chosen to incline the Street of the Dead 15 degrees 30' east of north."

4,000 B.C. - Ice-Free Antarctica - "The Piri Reis Map, which is a genuine document, not a hoax of any kind, was made at Constantinople in A.D. 1513. The ice-free coast of Queen Maud Land shown in the map is a colossal puzzle because geological evidence confirms that the latest date it could have been surveyed and charted in an ice-free condition is 4,000 B.C. The true enigma of this 1513 map is not so much its inclusion of a continent not discovered until 1,818 but its portrayal of part of a coastline of that continent under ice-free conditions which came to an end 6,000 years ago and have not since recurred. Piri Reis tells us that he was not responsible for the original surveying and cartography, but he admitts that his role was merly that of compiler and copyist and that the map was derived from a large number of source maps. In 1963 professor Hapgood argued that some of the source maps the admiral had made use of, in particular those said to date back to the fourth century B.C., had themselves been based on even older sources, which in turn had been bassed on sources originating in the furthest antiquity. There was, he asserted, irrefutable evidence that the earth had been comprehensively mapped before 4,000 B.C. by a hitherto unknown and undiscovered civilization which had achieved a high level of technological advancement."

4,000 B.C.

4,000 B.C. - Pa Kua / China - "According to Chinese legend, in the 4th millenium B.C. a dragon delivered the eight mystic trigrams, the Pa Kua, to a legendary emperor."

4,000 B.C. - Chinese Writing - "In many pots, jades, and bronzes ranging from the late third millenium B.C. to as late as Shang and Chou dynasties, bird and sun motifs appear together, often joined, and possibly can be read as yang niao, or 'sun birds', the name of a local eastern Yi group which had settled in the Lower Yangtze valley. This could be an example of the precursor to Chinese writing."

4,000 B.C. - Copper - "Copper was in use by this time."

3,879 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,768 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,761 B.C. - Jewish Creation - "The Jewish era in use today is dated from the supposed year of the Creation, with its epoch or beginning in what is 3,761 B.C. on the Gregorian calendar. According to Jewish tradition, the year 1 of the Jewish calendar was the time of 'waste and void,' referred to in Genesis 1.1. Nothing was yet created, and only a virtual clock started to tick on the first day of that year, heard, as it were, only by the Creator."

3,625 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,600 B.C. - Sumer / Iraq - "Soon after 4,000 B.C., southern Mesopotamia was identified as Sumer [pronounced 'Shumer'], and it was here that the early patriarchs prevailed. One of the foremost cities of ancient Sumer was Uruk [modern-day Warka], from which derived the country's eventual name of Iraq." Other Links: 1

3,600 B.C. - Malta Temple - "A temple on the Medeterranian island of Malta was reportedly constructed around 3,600 B.C. [Note: Since Carbon 14 dating measures the age of organic materials only, nearly all of the stone ruins [composed of inorganic rock] have not been Carbon 14 dated. Rather, what have been Carbon 14 dated are so many organic materials lying with, next to, or around those stone ruins.]

3,536 B.C. - Neptune-Pluto Conjunction -

3,514 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,500 B.C. - Pottery - "Early Mesopotamian pottery, from about 3,500 B.C., has links as far afield as peninsular Greece, via Anatolia. Cultural links between Mesopotamia and Greece have persisted, in varying degree, from period to period, ever since."

3,500 B.C. - Qumran Relics - "The excavations at Qumran have produced relics dating back about 3,500 BC, at which time [during the Bronze Age] the settlement was a Bedouin camp."

3,500 B.C. - Bronze Age - "According to popular history, the Sumerians began to use bronze tools and about 3,500 B.C., entered the Bronze Age."

3,500 B.C. - Temple of Ur - "Six years after beginning their excavations at Ur, Woolley's archaeologists found an intriguing complex of ancient graves dating to about 3,500 BC, including a stone-built tomb of unusual significance. It was significant because stone has never existed in this desert area; barely a pebble can be found within 30 miles of Ur."

3,500 B.C. - Wheeled Carts / Sumeria - "According to popular history, about 3,500 B.C., animal-drawn wheeled carts were in use in Sumeria."

3,500 B.C. - Writing - "Reportedly, the earliest attested documents in cuneiform were written in Sumerian, the language of the inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia and Chaldea from the 4th until the 2nd millennium B.C. According to popular belief, the original Sumerian script consisted of pictographs. It later became linear and then evolved into the cuneiform script."

3,500 B.C. - Semites / Egypt - "According to popular history, about 3,700 years ago, West Semitic-speaking people of the Sinai became workers or slaves under the sway of Egyptian rule. The Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols these Semitic speakers saw made an impression on them, and encouraged the adoption of a limited number of hieroglyphics to write down sounds in their language."

3,500 B.C. - Burial Sites / Ireland - "In Ireland, burial sites have been dated to at least 3,500 B.C."

3,400 B.C. - Gezer - "Creamware was found at bedrock."

3,371 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,300 B.C. - Stonehenge - "Stonehenge in Britain has long been a site of celebration of the summer solstice, June 21. But there are more than 1,000 other prehistoric stone circles in the British Isles. Not much is known about them, except that they appear to be giant sundials and astronomical clocks. What is known is that between 3300 and 900 B.C. there were three phases of stone-circle building. During the first phase, before 3000 B.C., impressive circles, more than 30 meters [33 yards] across, were built on hillsides around the Irish Sea. They usually had one wider gap to serve as an entrance. Sometimes they had one single standing stone outside the ring, like a signpost proclaiming the land was occupied. Many perfectly constructed rings of stones were created around 2600 B.C., perhaps because metal was then available. These include the circles of Stanton Drew, in Somerset, and the Ring of Brodgar, in the Orkneys, each more than 90 metres [98 yards] across. Certain areas seemed to adopt a preferred number of stones. They show a wide range of styles, from plain and concentric rings to rings with avenues, like that at Avebury. From 2000 to 900 B.C., the tradition of building stone circles declined. By 900 B.C. stone circles, including Stonehenge, were abandoned." [Note: Since Carbon 14 dating measures the age of organic materials only, nearly all of the stone ruins [composed of inorganic rock] have not been Carbon 14 dated. Rather, what have been Carbon 14 dated are so many organic materials lying with, next to, or around those stone ruins." More Links: 1

3,260 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,200 B.C. - Indus Valley Civilization - "Traditional date when the Indus Valley civilization [3,200-1,600 B.C.] grew up along the banks of the Indus River in what is now Pakistan."

3,200 B.C. - Lebanon - "Semitic people come to the area around Byblos, Lebanon. It was then called Gebal and the people Giblites, who with flat axes cut timber from the mountains."

3,117 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,114 B.C. - Mayan Fifth Sun - "Central American cultures believed that prior to the fifth epoch [Fifth 'Sun'] there had been four previous 'Suns,' each of which had ended in a cataclysm that had wiped the face of the earth clean. The fifth epoch was said to have begun in darkness on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, a date in the Mayan calendar corresponding to 13 August 3114 BC, and was expected to come to a catastrophic end as the result of a 'great movement of the earth' on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin - which corresponds in the modern calendar to 23 December AD 2012."

3,102 B.C. - Kali Yuga - "According to Vedic tradition, we are in the fourth World Age, or Kali Yuga [Iron Age], furthest from the celestial seat of Brahma, an age when humans are capable of understanding only gross material reality. The traditional date in India for the beginning of the Kali Yuga is February 18, 3,102 B.C. The duration for the Kali Yuga is believed to be 432,000 years. According to Hesiod, the present race of man [the iron race] had been preceded by three earlier races – the golden race, the silver race, and the bronze race respectively. Each of these three peoples had been destroyed by cataclysms, at the command of the gods, the most recent of which had been the flood of Deucalion. The disappearance of Atlantis, rather intriguingly, was dated by Plato to the third cataclysm before this flood of Deucalion."

3,100 B.C. - "Scorpion / Egypt - "In the protodynastic period of Egypt 'Scorpion' ruled and was followed by Narmer."

3,100 B.C. - 1st Egyptian Dynasty - "Traditional date when the two regions of Egypt were believed to have been united under the rule of Narmer [known as Menes, to the Greeks] and the First Egyptian Dynasty was founded. Incidentally, the number of years credited to some kings of the 1st and 2nd Dynasty is so high, that, in those particular cases, they are most likely not correct. It has sometimes been postulated that this high number of years does not reflect the length of a reign but the age at which the king died. Such high numbers for reigning kings also appear in the Sumerian King Lists."

3,100 B.C. - Important Period - "Historically, the date of 3,100 B.C. has proven to be one of the most important periods, if not the most important period, regarding three of the world’s most ancient civilizations: Sumer, Egypt and India."

3,100 B.C. - History Begins - "Reportedly, a society that possesses writing is 'historic'. One that does not is 'prehistoric'. By 3,100 B.C., the Sumerians had a system of writing that could communicate anything they wanted to say. In other words, human history begins with Sumeria not long before 3,000 B.C." [Asimov]

3,043 B.C. - Neptune-Pluto Conjunction -

Note: "This date represents an approximation only. Most likely the calculation is off by several years." [Etznab Mathers]

3,006 B.C. - Uranus-Pluto Conjunction -

3,000 B.C.





[This message has been edited by Helios (edited 07-07-2004).]


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Posts: 406 | From: Rhodes (an island near Cyprus) | Registered: Jun 2
 

[Apollo]

 
Helios

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   posted 07-07-2004 02:55 PM                       
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I believe that this information n the Sea People has yet to be added to the discussion:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/foxmob/sea_peoples.htm
The Sea Peoples and Egypt:

Abstract

Conflicting perspectives in the past 50 Years of Egyptology

Since the latter half of the previous century, a vast amount of research has been directed toward the ‘Sea Peoples’ phenomenon, ranging from strict adherence to literal interpretations of Egyptian texts to liberal theories about invincible Sicilian pirates and adventurers. Each of the perspectives on this matter, (un)fortunately, contains its merits and its incongruities. That is, they all share a common truth while, simultaneously, a degree of misinformation. To what extent these widely varying perspectives are the result of a particular culture (our own) or whether there exists a universal truth to which all (or none) of the theories discussed herein may claim, is called into question. The debate can be broadly broken down into two schools of thought, which serve both as critiques and stimuli for each other: (1) those who believe that the ‘Sea Peoples’ were a local phenomenon (Nibbi) and, (2) those who argue for a large scale migration and a close link between the dissolution of the Hittite Empire, Mycenaean palaces, mass destruction along the Levantian coast, and the repulsion of the ‘Sea Peoples’ from Egypt in the Late Bronze Age (Sanders, Redford, Tubb, Oren, et al.). By contrasting these various theories, perhaps scholars may arrive at a more plausible “truth” on the matter.

Introduction

The Postmodern World and the Study of History

As Western Civilization moves from the late 20th and into the 21st Century, it does so as a decidedly postmodern peoples. One of the underlying tenants of postmodern thought is that while absolute truth exists, reality is absolutely perceptive and, therefore, subjective[1]. This philosophy, one of subjective reality, permeates every aspect of 21st Century life – including, of course, the academic disciplines. Today, there exist such disciplines as Postmodern Philosophy, Post-Structural analysis of literature and language (semiotics?); there is even such a discipline as Postmodern Anthropology (a particularly ironic term for any discipline which exists in the space of generalization and speculation – i.e., forms and models). But perhaps the academic discipline most questioned (abused?) by postmodern analyses is that of History. History (the academic field) has a well documented history of subjective methodology (traditionally labeled aristocratic, white male), a subjective history brought to the surface, time and time again, through postmodern analyses (feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, etc.).

Because History purports to tell the “true” story of its subject[2], an inevitable conflict with postmodern thought arises, which is a likely reason why postmodern criticisms of History have been so popular and invasive in the past 50 years. Another underlying tenant of postmodern thought has to do with (dis)association. That is to say, the further removed from the object of study one is, the more aware one becomes of any inclination (to borrow the psychoanalytic term) to transfer one’s own subjective reality onto the object of study. It is simply easier, in theory, to remain objective about the study of Egyptian history than, say, American history. Therefore, when one studies Egyptian (or any ancient) history, one remains hyperconscious of the fact that the particular document (or object) which is analyzed comes from a very particular (foreign) source. For example, of the multitude of inscriptions carved throughout Egypt by Rameses II, the historian is acutely aware of the fact that much of the confident, bombastic text is, in fact, an attempt on the part of the pharaoh to create a certain (majestic? divine?) persona for himself. That is to say, the inscriptions are an attempt (apparently successful, in this case) at immortality by remaining, on account of his extraordinary deeds depicted in the inscriptions, in the consciousness of the living world forever[3]. However, a modern historian is faced with a whole different set of value laden difficulties in trying to write the history of American Democracy in relation to its counterparts in Communism, Fascism, etc.[4] The crux of this dilemma has to do with one’s (dis)association with the object of study. In this case, the highly charged (politicized?) values of contemporary political theories of Communism, Fascism, etc. are too close to the world of the person who analyzes them – one’s own environment is inherently laden with a multitude of second level signifiers based solely on one’s position within said environment (that is, one’s particular relationship to one’s environment). Try as one might to remain objective, the position of the individual within the context of a particular system necessitates a subjective – in contrast to a universal – analysis.

That having been said, one cannot help but be amused by the plethora of competing (postmodern) theories regarding Egyptian history. Have you heard the theory informing us that the great pyramids at Giza were constructed with tuning forks? That is right; each block was floated into place by three men, a rope and a tuning fork. It is a comical farce, no doubt, but if the lost city of Plato’s(!) Atlantis can be found in the Andes Mountains of South America, why couldn’t the ancient pyramid builders have built their engineering marvels with a handful of men and some tuning forks? After all, it is now known that the pyramids were not constructed on the shoulders of enslaved Hebrews. But that is the beauty of a postmodern world: truth is something to be constructed, shaped, and molded (from a certain point of view)[5]. And the construction of each truth, like that of each pyramid, must be analyzed for not just why and how it was constructed, but for how reliable the foundations are upon which each truth rests. Such are the questions which must be asked in the present endeavor: Who, exactly, were the ‘Sea Peoples’ referred to by Merneptah and Rameses III? And to what extent, if any, were they associated with the large scale, catastrophic events that heralded end of the Late Bronze Age and sent the Aegean spiraling into a Dark Age, destroyed many coastal cities in the eastern Mediterranean, saw the dissolution of the Hittite Empire, and saw Egyptian influence in the Near East wane and retreat to its ancestral home in the Nile Basin?


Contending Theories about the ‘Sea Peoples’

There are almost as many conflicting theories regarding the so-called ‘Sea Peoples,’ recorded during the reigns of Merneptah (c. 1220 BCE) and Rameses III (c. 1185), as there are ancient Mediterranean scholars fortunate enough to study them. The present study has tried to narrow its discussion to only a handful of the more convincing, popular, or intriguing theories on the matter – not necessarily in that order. One of the difficulties, which will be discussed later, has to do with interpretation of sources. Since much of the textual evidence (i.e., the Egyptian evidence) regarding ‘Sea Peoples’ is based on syntactic and semantic interpretation, it is not so much the evidence that continues to change (from the Egyptologist’s point of view) but how it is interpreted. Each individual theory (or collection of theories) regarding the ‘Sea Peoples’ takes a relatively clear stance in regard to how each piece of evidence should be interpreted.

There are three primary Egyptian sources which come into question by most theorists: Inscriptions, both textual and pictorial, on both the interior and exterior of Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Rameses III; the Papyrus Harris, a historical document dated to within a few decades of Rameses III’s victories over the ‘Sea Peoples’; and the “Hymn of Victory,” also known as the ‘Israel Stela,’ erected by Merneptah to celebrate his repulsion of the ‘Sea Peoples’ (Nibbi, 1975, p. 102). Additionally, there are the ‘Athribis’ Stela, the Cairo Column, and the long inscription at the Karnak temple, all dealing with Merneptah’s reign c. 1220 BCE (Nibbi, 1975, p. 102). The sources most often referred to are the inscriptions at Medinet Habu.

The theories themselves can be loosely categorized[6] in the following way:

· Those who believe the Sea Peoples came from points all over the Mediterranean: from Sicily, the Aegean and Anatolia and were largely foreign to both Egypt and the Southern Levant (e.g., L. Cottrell, 1969)

· Those who believe the Sea Peoples came, in part, from the Aegean, but also largely from the coasts of Anatolia and were well established in the Southern Levant before their raids on Egypt (e.g., N. Sanders, 1985)

· Those who believe the Sea Peoples were local enemies of the Egyptians, occupying lands in the Delta, Southern Levant and Libya, excluding any incursions from invaders overseas, such as from Italy, the Aegean or Anatolia (e.g., A. Nibbi, 1975)

Although listed intentionally without numbers, which would almost certainly be construed as a qualification of validity, the items listed above are constructed with a certain spatial relationship in mind. The first grouping consists of peoples ranging far and wide, from extremely far off lands in the north, east and west, even according to the most liberal interpretations of Egyptian geography. The third grouping (and the lowest, thus placing it furthest south on a hypothetical map) views the ‘Sea Peoples’ as neighbors directly bordering Egypt and, at times, living in places occupied by Pharaoh. From the Egyptian perspective, all potential ‘Sea Peoples’ were invaders from the north; thus, the further “south” a people originates, the closer they are in relation to Egypt. The grouping listed between the first and third theories represents, logically enough, those who believe the ‘Sea Peoples’ were a mixture of foreign (Aegean, Anatolian) and neighboring (Southern Levant, Jordan Valley) peoples[7]. The following sections will survey the most divergent and controversial theory at present, that of Alessandra Nibbi (1975), then move from Nibbi to where the bulk of the ‘Sea Peoples’ scholarship seems to point (the middle grouping on the above list). While neither Nibbi (1975) nor Sanders (1985) – nor the bulk of other recent scholars – agree with each others’ final analyses, they sufficiently refute or incorporate the first (and earliest) theoretical grouping, espoused by Cottrell (1969), to the extent that it would be redundant to provide a separate section for that grouping.



Nibbi’s Argument

Alessandra Nibbi’s contribution to the ‘Sea Peoples’ debate is her 1975 treatise, The Sea Peoples and Egypt. Her thesis must be understood in its context as a rebuttal to the scholarship which dominated the scene prior to her involvement, mainly that the Mycenaeans were being pushed out of their land; “And the Trojans, too, were on the move, the Danaoi, whom the Egyptians called the Danu” (Cottrell, 1969, p. 126); that the ‘Achaiwasha’ (from Hittite documents) were Homer’s Achaeans; that the ‘Shardana’ were men from Sardinia, “tall men with feathered helmets and long swords who fought as mercenaries in the Pharaoh’s armies” (Cottrell, 1969, p. 126); that the ‘Shekel’ were from Sicily; the Phillistines from Palestine; that the ‘Khatti,’ (Hittites) had joined them; and that “All now became reluctant allies, since all had been dispossessed of their ancestral lands” (Cottrel, 1969). And, of course, Nibbi (1975) wanted to refute the popular belief that the ‘Sea Peoples’ listed in Egyptian texts were responsible for the mass destruction and turmoil which gripped the East Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age:

We must not hope to find in the Sea Peoples the answer to all the destruction of cities at the end of the Bronze Age. One is encouraged by the more objective methods now being used by archaeologists in these areas and by their conclusions which do not require an invasion of peoples from the north. (p. 2)


Nibbi’s argument centered around two relatively major points of contention with the manner in which Egyptian sources had been understood up to that point: translation of the texts, a largely philological/linguistic field; and a fundamental understanding of Egyptian geography. Each raises its own fundamental questions about how historians interpret the data before them, and neither is fully independent of the other[8].

First, Nibbi’s linguistic contention about how Egyptian texts are translated must be addressed. She is very upfront about her idea that each text must be taken literally; this will become an easy – and justified, to an extent – criticism of her thesis by later scholars. The most significant of her linguistic contentions has to do with the translation of “sea.” She contends that the translation of “Great Green” as “sea” is problematic because the translation is based on the Semitic word for “water.” This usage for “water” was not used in Egypt until the New Kingdom period, brought in by the Hyksos (Nibbi, 1975). She also notes that the distinction between various ‘Asiatic’ tribes is not made in Egypt until after the expulsion of the Hyksos (p.24). The term “Great Green,” however, dates back well into the Old Kingdom (Nibbi, 1975, p. 35). The logical question, then, is what did “Great Green” mean in the Old Kingdom?

It is possible that green was associated with spring, richness, and fertility, but green is often used across cultures as a color for sickness or ill health, so such a simple explanation is not entirely convincing, albeit plausible. Nibbi (1975) associates the “Great Green” with still, inland (fresh?) water: “If ‘Great Green’ originally referred to stretches of papyrus, then its meaning would denote swamp – land and essentially undrained areas, because we now know that papyrus will not grow where the level of the water changes very much or where there is fast flowing water” (p. 36). Thus, if “Great Green” is a reference to inland and/or swampy water, then it could not be a reference to the Mediterranean itself but, rather, the Nile Delta and northeastern border of Egypt between the Sinai mountains, Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea. Figure 1 is Nibbi’s hypothetical organization of the Nile Delta based on this linguistic evidence.

“In the earlier texts from the time of Merneptah, the Ekwesh are said to be ‘of the hill-countries of the ym’…[and] When the Asiatics are mentioned in the Egyptian texts, they always have as their determinative the hill-country sign” (Nibbi, 1975, p. 46-7). In other words, the Ekwesh (i.e., the supposed ‘Sea Peoples’) are really called the ‘of the hill-countries of the sea (ym) peoples.’ They are not only described as being “of the sea [ym].” However, the signs for “island” and “hill” were, more or less, interchangeable (Nibbi, 1975, p. 49). So there had to be a reason for including both ym and “hill-countries” (or possibly “isle countries”) into the description of these northern invaders.

Depictions of ‘Sea Peoples’ are very consistent as far as it being a migratory event including women, children and beasts of burden:

Bearing in mind the extent of the area threatened and destroyed by the enemy it seems reasonable to conclude that the only people who would have been in a position freely to attack both the Hittite states and the Egyptian frontier…would be the people who were actually at home in the area between the two…. One cannot imagine outsiders attempting to do this in similar conditions, and accompanied by women and children. (Nibbi, 1975, p. 66)


If Nibbi is correct on this matter, then the usage of both ym (sea or something to do with water) and hill-countries would be perfectly feasible descriptions for peoples in the Southern Levant/northeastern Egyptian border[9].

Nibbi’s final piece of linguistic evidence is very damaging to the idea of a battle near the Mediterranean proper and is very relevant to her fundamental understanding of Egyptian history: Not only did Egyptians not have a word for “sea” until the Hyksos came, but there is a conspicuous absence of any ‘sea deity’ in the very large Egyptian pantheon (1975, p.125-6). This absence of a designated sea deity suggests that (a.) Egyptians did not frequent the open waters of the Mediterranean and, consequently, (b.) were an inland peoples. (1975, p. 126). Nibbi (1975) is, therefore, confident when she states, “It is becoming increasingly clear that Lower Egypt, and particularly the Delta, contained at all times a number of strong foreign elements which were often actively hostile to the Pharaoh” (p. 7). Furthermore, Rameses II records “having plundered the warriors of the Great Green without any reference to a naval battle or to an attack on the part of the enemy” on the Aswân Stela (Nibbi, 1975, p. 105). Thus, Nibbi (1975) contends that “the Delta had never been Egypt, and it had always been quite a triumph for the Pharaoh to subdue any of its nomes sufficiently to extract dues from them” (p. 56). Rameses III boasts of taking the land of the ‘Sea Peoples’ after having defeated them. This would necessitate a border proximity to Egypt and points toward the Delta, northeast toward the Southern Levant and/or Libya (all areas bordering Egypt on the north). Crete, Sicily, Greece, Cyprus and, to a large degree, Anatolia are too far afield and were never controlled by Pharaoh (Nibbi, 1975, p. 70).

But how does one make sense of the ‘conspiracy’ on the ‘islands’ of the Sea Peoples? “When the Nile rose, the whole country was under water, except for the settlements, which were situated on natural hills or artificial mounds, which, viewed from a distance, resembled islands” (Nibbi, 1975, p. 10); see figure 2.

Nibbi seems to present a well thought-out, convincing case for who the ‘Sea Peoples’ were (or were not). That is, hers is a very convincing case if one agrees with her translation of the texts and her fundamental understanding of Egyptian geography. More recent analyses of the ‘Sea Peoples’ phenomenon must be to Nibbi’s work.


N. K. Sanders

N. K. Sanders’ study of the ‘Sea Peoples’ question is at once contemporary with, and more updated than, Alessandra Nibbi’s treatise. The first edition of her book, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, was published a mere three years after Nibbi’s, in 1978. A revised edition followed in 1985. The necessity for a second edition, however, is understandable[10] because of the nature of the evidence she dealt with. While Nibbi’s work was consciously Egypt-centric, bordering on xenophobic (not unlike the Egyptians themselves), and almost entirely dealing with reinterpretation of old evidence, Sanders’ approach was much more archaeological in character. That is, the analysis employed by Sanders was to compare grave goods, pottery styles, sword styles, etc. from the Danube to the Red Sea. In large part, Sanders was presenting and synthesizing evidence for the first time as opposed to retranslating extant texts. Of course, Sanders would have liked to deal with the efforts of translating new texts, but that, alas, is one of the many problems with Late Bronze Age history outside of Egypt and the Levant, no such texts exist.

Sanders’ (1985) analysis of the situation equates as follows:

Confusion has been increased by throwing together all sorts of widely differing events. The wars of Merneptah and Rameses III on the borders of Egypt, the fall of the Hittite empire in Anatolia and the disasters that overtook the Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland, the ‘fall of Troy’ and the rise of the Philistines: all these are attributed to the ‘Sea Peoples.’ Whoever or whatever they were, the trouble-makers were not ‘a people,’ and only to a limited extent were they ‘of the sea.’” (p. 10)



In some respects, then, Nibbi and Sanders appear to be in agreement: (a.) the ‘Sea Peoples’ were not one particular people, (b.) their label as being “of the sea” is misleading, and (c.) earlier attempts to blame the cataclysmic collapse throughout the East Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age on the Sea Peoples is untenable.

Among possible scenarios forwarded in the past, Sanders (1985) notes that there is no evidence for a Dorian (or Eastern European) invasion of Greece, and “Theories of catastrophic drought towards the end of the 2nd millennium…do not stand up to investigation” (p. 20). Populations north of Greece, primarily along the Danube, show very little sign of a mass population movement. Although large stockpiles of bronzes indicate a high incidence of warfare, and there is evidence for a shift, over time, from agrarian to pastoral living (Sanders, 1985, pp. 86-8). Instead of an invasion of Greece in the Late Bronze Age (Dorian or otherwise), “the whole of the southern and central Greek mainland was not overwhelmed at the same moment, as might have happened if there had been a massive attack from beyond the frontier” (Sanders, 1985, p. 180). The evidence for this slow and steady “migration” can be found in the massive cyclopean walls of Mycenae and Tiryns, which were not the kind of projects built in haste to ward off invading armies, and in other areas of Greece (notably in Messinia and at Pylos), there is no evidence at all for a strategic defense of the palace center. In fact, the nearest likeness to the fortifications at Mycenae and Tiryns is at the Hittite capital of Hattusas (Sanders, 1985, p. 62), another Late Bronze Age fort whose ultimate demise continues to elude archaeologists and historians alike.

“There is a lot of evidence, both archaeological and linguistic, for a southward shift of Anatolian people from the plateau to northern Syria” (Sanders, 1985, p. 143). On Cyprus, “Enkomi and Kition are our best guide to events” between 1200 and 1050 BCE (Sanders, 1985, p. 144). The destruction of a defensive wall at Enkomi is replaced by ashlar masonry of Mycenaean character, preceding deposits of LH IIIC pottery (Sanders, 1985, p. 144), thus placing the ‘Mycenaean reconstruction’ securely in the LH IIIB phase.

Unlike Nibbi, Sanders (1985) does attempt to draw a connection between the events in Egypt and those which preceded them in the Levant: “the further we travel from Egypt the less confident we must be…and where Egypt is a broken reed we are hard put to know where to turn for help” (p. 12). Often, residual cultural evidence is all one has to work with: The destruction of major Mycenaean palace centers coincides with the use of LH IIIB pottery and also “with an intense interest in the Levant” (Sanders, 1985, p. 180). Thus, it appears likely that the Mycenaeans were familiar with the Levant (including Analtolia) and may have emigrated there for one reason or another.

In fact, Sanders (1985) is very forthcoming with her theories about why and how such an emigration from the Aegean to the Levant occurred:

An epoch of prosperity and comparative stability throughout the East Mediterranean and the Near East had depended upon an equilibrium that held between the two major powers, Egypt and Hittite Anatolia; and it virtually ended with the death of Pharaoh Rameses II around 1224, and Tudhaliyas IV, the last really powerful Hittite king, a few years later. (p. 11)


When the fruits of trade with the Near East broke down for Mycenaean lords, they could not or would not return to subsistence farming, meaning they were left with only their weapons and their boats (Sanders, 1985, p. 184). However, “if there was a disporia it was limited to one class, the lords and their immediate followers” (Sanders, 1985, p.186), because subsistence living did occur on the mainland after the Mycenaean Palace Age came to an end.

Although Sanders (1985) never specifically refutes Nibbi’s somewhat maverick claim that the Egyptians were an inland peoples, she does suggest evidence to the contrary:

An ambassador in Cretan dress shown on the walls of the 15th-century tomb of Rekhenire in Egypt is overpainted by one wearing a mainland kilt…. For a time Cretan exports to the Levant, to judge from pottery found there, continued alongside Mycenaean ones, and there are still Egyptian imports in late-15th-century warrior graves at Knossos; but a significant increase in the amount of mainland pottery in the Levant follows the fall of Knossos in the early 14th century. (p. 58)


She also adds, “Egypt imported goods from Greek lands in the early 14th century (Armarna period), but that trade fell off sharply after this” (1985, p. 75). Unfortunately, this evidence avoids addressing Nibbi’s actual claim because it is very possible that the only peoples navigating the Mediterranean at this point in time were Cretans and Mycenaeans. In fact, if the boom in Mycenaean-like pottery (LH IIIB) in the Levant, after the fall of Knossos, is any indication, one would suspect that the Mycenaeans were the initiators of trade (be it between Egypt, Anatolia or the Levant). Similarly, an apparent shower complex was unearthed at the Cretan palace of Phaestos, which is unique among Aegean structures and has its only corollary in Egypt, where such bathing apparatuses were common. Sanders (1985) states, “That the Egyptians had some knowledge of Cretan and mainland topography is shown by the Theban Topographical List of Amenophis III of around 1400” (p. 114). If this does not provide evidence that Egyptians ventured outside the confines of the Nile Delta as early as the 15th Century, it certainly suggests that the Egyptians were aware of the Mycenaean and Minoan cultures, with whom they were involved in some form of trade and/or diplomacy.

Furthermore, the steady shift in Mycenaean weaponry, influenced by peoples near the Danube, is mirrored in the Levant, presumably because of Mycenaean emigration there:

What really happened, rather than any shortage of metal, was a change in fighting tactics, with the long spear now the principal weapon, and the dagger (type E and F) a supporting weapon. (Sanders, 1985, pp. 73-4)


Figure 3 provides examples of the sword (flange hilt, type IIa) with origins in the Danube, but they were likely in-troduced to the Levant by My-cenaean emigrants.


Finally, San-ders (1985) re-sorts to the Egyptian and (scanty) Hittite/ Levantian texts which deal with po-tential ‘Sea Peoples’: The Shardana are listed among the Lybian allies by the Merneptah stela. These same Shar-dana are shown as Egyptian allies under Rameses II in the battle of Kadesh (depicted at Karnak). The Shardana wielded swords: “They were swordsmen and spearmen, whereas the native Egyptian troops used the bow” (pp. 105-6). The Shardana, it is safe to infer at this point, appear to be mercenary forces under Rameses II. They are typically depicted with round shields and horned helmets, but helmets of those attacking Egypt are always variant from those fighting for Pharaoh – Pharaoh’s forces usually included a sun disc, perhaps representing allegiance to Amun-Re (Sanders, 1985, p. 106). The fact that they (Shardana) wore horned helmets presents a problem for earlier theories about origins of the ‘Sea Peoples.’ The only precedent for this is from Mesopotamia and the Levant, but the Shardana are often associated with Sardina, an apparent anomaly (Sanders, 1985, pp. 106-7). “Wherever these great fighters came from it is a fair assumption that it was not far from the northern Syrian coast, and the same might hold true for the troop on the Warrior Vase from Mycenae” (Sanders, 1985, p. 107).

“The Lukka, who also joined the Lybian invaders, had been allies of the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh,” while the Ekwesh are singled out as forming the largest contingent of the Libyan allies against Egypt (Sanders, 1985, p. 107).

Again, like Nibbi before her, Sanders (1985) states, “Much depends on how we, or rather how the Egyptians, understood ‘the Countries of the Sea’” (p. 114). Sanders (1985) analyzes certain Hittite texts which may be of some use in this matter:

Two important points arise from the correspondence concerning the ‘Sikala who live in the ships’…. First, they are people as yet unknown to the Hittite king, about whom he wants information, so that they must be newcomers to the coast of Anatolia; and second, they are a real potential danger [to Hatti]. (142)


Since the king of Hatti was unfamiliar with the Sikala ‘who live in the ships,’ it is a fair assumption that they were, indeed, foreign to Anatolia (i.e., not the Lukka, who are attested in various contexts on the Anatolian coast), and since Hittite influence stretched well into the Levant, it is not likely that the Sikala originated from there either. Whether they actually originated from Italy/Sicily, as previous scholarship has claimed based on similar sounding names, is questionable, but they were at least as foreign to the Hittites (and Egyptians) as any mainland or Cycladic Mycenaean settlement might have been.

In sum, although Sanders (1985) rules out a Dorian invasion and a single, concentrated attack on Anatolian, Levantian and Egyptian lands, she believes there is much evidence to suggest a gradual dissemination of Mycenaean culture into the East and a likelihood of Mycenaean (war)lords, sailors, soldiers and craftsmen emigrating eastward in the Late Bronze Age. She sees a similar scenario playing itself out in Anatolia, except the largely inland people of the Anatolian plateau emigrated south via land routes, thus creating somewhat of a domino effect in the Southern Levant and, finally, Egypt. All the while, local warfare between sea fairing peoples, using recently introduced ‘Mycenaean-like’ tactics, continued to characterize the entire eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Sanders’ speculative layout of the East Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age can be viewed in figure 4. Unlike Nibbi, Sanders does not attempt any retranslation of extant Egyptian accounts (i.e., “Great Green” translates as “the sea” or “Mediterranean”), and while acknowledging the likelihood of at least some of the ‘Sea Peoples’ coming from neighboring territories in the Levant, she gives no indication that the Delta was ever under the control of anyone but Pharaoh.


Other Recent Contributions

While Nibbi and Sanders provide some of the most in-depth, influential scholarship regarding the ‘Sea Peoples,’ many recent scholars have provided illuminating insights on particular aspects of the period in question. Among the most influential areas of scholarship are those dealing with late Hittite history; the Levant in the Late Bronze Age, particularly the last days of Ugarit; and, of course, the continual reinterpretation of the canonical extant Egyptian sources.

Donald Redford (2000), describes the state of the Post-Amarna period for 19th Dynasty Egypt:

[C]uneiform texts mentioning Egypt from Hittite or north Syrian sites are sparse in the extreme…. There is a thinning out of Egyptian texts which the historian might use, and an increase in the rhetorical ‘triumph stela.’ Painting and relief, though fascinating for what they portray, tend to the generic or lack captions. (p. 3)


In other words, as Sanders (1985) alluded to in her treatise, there exists a noticeable gap in both Egyptian and Hittite literature in the late 13th and early 12th centuries (during which time the Hittite kingdom becomes extinct altogether).

Redford (2000) has an interesting take on Egyptian interests in the Levant, considering it was Thutmose III who expanded Egypt’s dominion farther north than any pharaoh before or after:

The heightened interest of the Ramessides (in contrast to the Thutmosids) in Egyptian territory in the Levant may be put down to several changes in the geopolitical make-up of Western Asia. For one thing, the 19th Dynasty hailed from the eastern Delta and were closer to and more familiar with Palestine than their predecessors. (p. 6)


Finally, Redford (2000) was the only scholar who directly addressed Nibbi’s readings of the Medinet Habu inscriptions: “A superficial reading which takes metaphor, simile and metonymy at face value can only result in egregious error in attempting to reconstruct the event” (p. 7). This was an attack on Nibbi’s methodological approach that the Egyptian texts must be taken literally, “at face value” (1975).

Clearly, a fundamental, ideological chasm exists within the field of Egyptology regarding how such texts should be interpreted. To a certain extent, Nibbi (1975) contradicts herself by asserting that the texts must be taken literally. She is quite willing to ignore the “bombastic” element of Pharaoh’s accolades and, despite strong emphasis on the need for the texts to be translated in their entirety, so as to ascertain the proper context of the individual phrases found therein, Nibbi’s translations regularly skim, paraphrase, and jump between inscriptions and areas within the same inscription[11]. Nonetheless, there is merit to her theory of dealing with the Egyptian sources in their own context – although whether one believes the Delta was or was not a part of that context seems highly tenuous. And she is certainly justified to insist that evidence other than phonetic similarity across cultures be instrumented if one is to draw any associations between peoples listed in Egyptian texts and those identified in various other areas of the Mediterranean basin. However, phonetic change (vowel shifts) is widely used in linguistic and anthropologic studies (of which linguistic is a subcategory of). What Nibbi meant to imply – and on this point, most scholars would adamantly agree with her – is that sound patterns,[12] phonemic shifts, need to be systematically analyzed and categorized and then the corresponding sound patterns between Egyptian and Hittite pronunciation may be compared – based on the structural correspondents in the phonemes, not the actual phonetic likenesses of the two sounds/words in question.

Dealing with the scholarship of exclusively Egyptian sources, David O’Connor (2000) states, “[Sea Peoples] never use the bow and arrow, a classic Egyptian weapon extensively used in the Near East as well” (p. 85). This fact is interesting because so much of the modern scholarship on the matter tells us that the ‘Sea Peoples’ were as much native to the Levant as they were sea-born raiders (Sanders, 1985). However, Sanders’ theory (1985) accounts for this in that the ‘Mycenaean element,’ who would have almost certainly been depicted in Egyptian art with swords and round shields, introduced their LH IIIB way of life into the Levant prior to any raids on Egypt proper. So this evidence need not conflict with Sander’s thesis, although there is certainly potential for such a conflict.

O’Connor (2000) goes on to state, “the narratives about the Libyan campaign of Year 11 are much more specific about the Libyan leaders than is the case with the Year 5 Libyan campaign, or the Se Peoples narrative” (p. 94). This fact makes perfect sense if one considers the dates involved and is willing to shrug off some of the Pharaoh’s haughty recollection of events as a function of political hyperbole; myth-making. It is entirely possible and, in fact, likely that the Libyan and ‘Sea Peoples’ wars of Years 5 and 8 of Rameses III were not quite as decisive as the inscriptions at Medinet Habu would have one believe. Thus, while it is safe to assume that Rameses III did manage to repel Egypt’s attackers in Years 5 and 8 (Egyptian culture did continue, after all), it would appear that Rameses III did not achieve complete victory over the Libyans until the campaign of Year 11. As for the vaunted encounters with ‘Sea Peoples’ in Year 8, it is easy to believe that a healthy portion of the foreigners, with their magnificent ‘Mycenaean’ weapons and tactics, were able to escape the ‘massacre’ in the Nile mouths. ‘Sea Peoples’ appear to have integrated well on Cyprus, Anatolia and the Southern Levant, after all.

While the foreign tactics and weaponry of the ‘Sea Peoples’ is fresh in mind, perhaps it would be best to turn to O’Connor’s (2000) final point: the imagery of the Year 8 inscription at Medinet Habu. A lion hunt scene is placed between two ‘Sea Peoples’ scenes on the exterior northern wall of the temple. Therefore, O’Connor posits, the Sea Peoples are alluded to as lion-like, ferocious enemies – a plausible interpretation considering their different fighting tactics and weapons as opposed to Egypt’s traditional enemies (Libyans and Nubians), who are associated on the southern walls of the temple with ‘desert asses’ (Libyans) and bulls (Nubians) (p. 95).

In regards to evidence outside of Egypt, it is useful turn to Itamar Singer. Singer (2000) analyzes a cuneiform letter from Ugarit which refers to the Sikila:

[T]he Sikila people who live on boats [is]…the first mention by name of one of the raiders of Ugarit, who are usually referred to simply as ‘the enemy.’ This cuneiform spelling probably corresponds to Skl in the Egyptian texts, one of the Sea Peoples who fought against Rameses III. (p. 24).


However, lest one attribute all the mass destruction in the East Mediterranean to ‘Sea Peoples,’ Singer (2000) believes Aramean tribes, rather than the various ‘Sea Peoples,’ seem more likely to be the immediate cause of destruction to “Emar and other inland cities” (p. 25).

Regarding the Jordan Valley, Johnathan Tubb (2000) had this to say:

t would certainly be reasonable to assume the presence of groups of Sea Peoples within the populations of Egyptian-controlled cities in Canaan, either as military personnel or, perhaps, as industrial specialists…. Fortunately, the consensus seems, mercifully, to have shifted away from the more fanciful location, arrived at purely on the grounds of name similarity, and, on the basis of sounder archaeological and textual investigations, has settled instead on the more reasonable, if more generalized suggested homelands of the Aegean and southern and southwestern Anatolia [for the Sea Peoples]. (p. 182)


Singer’s (2000) evidence for a ‘Sea Peoples’ presence in Egyptian controlled territories of the Jordan Valley has to do with burial finds: Pithos and double pithos burials were foreign to Jordan but were characteristic of Aegean and Anatolian practices. Excavations at the Bronze Age settlement of Sa[h]idiyeh[13], an Egyptian controlled city in the Jordon Valley, contain many (37) of these burials. Allowing for ‘Sea Peoples’ to have originated from the Anatolian coast and the Aegean lends credence to the idea that Egypt was familiar with and, in fact, employed ‘Sea Peoples’ prior to the wars of Rameses III and Mernerptah (pp. 186-91).

While an Aegean and/or Anatolian origin for the ‘Sea Peoples’ is certainly possible based on the circumstantial evidence provided, Neal Bierling (1992) tempers any desire to equivocate LH IIIB pottery, burials, weaponry and walls with an identification of the ‘Sea Peoples’ as Mycenaean or Hittite:

The scholars referred to above make numerous other comparisons between the Sea Peoples pictured on the Medinet Habu reliefs and the Greeks from the Mycenaean and Anatolian world. These comparisons of modes of dress, weapons, and means of travel cannot be considered as conclusive evidence that the Sea Peoples, of which the Philistines were a part, were from the Aegean and from Anatolia, since these various modes could have been adopted through travel and trade. However, any study of these characteristics will reveal that the Sea People, including the Philistines, have much in common with the Mycenaean world and with Anatolia, especially the west and southwest sector.



It is this commonality between the Levant and the Mycenaean and Hittite worlds which studies of the ‘Sea Peoples,’ outside of Egyptian texts, focus on.

Finally, Phoenician archaeology has taken off in the past quarter century, allowing pertinent observations to be made about their traditional homeland, the Southern Levant: The term “Phoenician” is derived from the Mycenaean word for “red,” which was po-ni-ki-ja, a reference to chariots – chariot warfare was prevalent in the Near East during the Bronze Age. A form of the word was also used in Homeric texts and stems from the word phoinix, meaning “purple-red” – Phoenicians were famous throughout the ancient world for their purple dyeing techniques (Mascati, 1999b, pp. 17-8). This etymology is particularly interesting because the term “Canaanites,” which seems to have encompassed Phoenicians and other inhabitants of the Levant, also stems from a word in 2nd millennium cuneiform texts (‘Cannan’), meaning “purple-red” (Mascati, 1999b, p. 18). Of course, it is not known whether the Phoenicians referred to themselves as such (not likely), but the fact that people occupying their traditional homeland were, in the 2nd millennium, already recognized by the traits which Phoenicians were to become famous for (in classical times) is certainly worth noting.

It is also worth noting that there do not appear to be any significant linguistic or cultural differences between coastal (“Phoenician”) settlements and those that were land locked in the east until c. 1200 BCE (Mascati, 1999b, p.18). “Phoenician cities emerged as quite independent entities” following the turbulence of c. 1200 BCE (Mascati, 1999b, p.18). Mascati (1999b) seems to suggest that the coastal cities did not change in the radical fashion of their inland neighbors, and this is what distinguished them (finally) as Phoenician (p.19).

Sergio Pernigotti (1999) discusses the extent of known Phoenician involvement with Egypt in the Late Bronze Age: Byblos was a particularly important Near East connection for Egypt dating back the 3rd millennium – notably the cedar trade (p. 592). ‘Asiatics’ began gradually filtering into the Delta as early as the First Intermediate Period (Pernigotti, 1999, p. 592). We have, here, the only significant hint by a recent source which might support Nibbi’s 1975 claim that the Delta was, at least at some point in the Late Bronze Age, foreign to Egypt – or not under the immediate control of the pharaoh. This “migration” was curbed by the ‘walls of the prince’ in the 12th Dynasty (Pernigotti, 1999, p. 592). After the expulsion of the Hyksos, “Egypt had abandoned all vestiges of its tradition of an ‘oasis’ closed to contact with its neighbors” (Pernigotti, 1999, p. 601). But Egypt’s imperialist mentality was short-lived. The Egyptian withdrawal into an “oasis” civilization after their successful repulsion of the ‘Sea Peoples’ meant that they no longer exercised control over the Syira-Palestine territory, allowing Phoenician culture to develop unhindered by Egyptian (or Hittite, for that matter) hegemony (Pernigotti, 1999, p. 602).


Conclusion

In the final analysis, the gulf between Nibbi’s reading of Egyptian history remains as anomalous and provocative as it is taboo. When it comes to non-literate[14] archaeological evidence versus written documentation (or inscription), the written evidence is always given the most fervent scrutiny and credence. Perhaps this is because we are, ourselves, a highly literate culture, so we understand things in a literate manner[15]. And in that sense, barring anymore fantastic discoveries of ancient library stores, the Egyptian story of the ‘Sea Peoples’ will forever be foremost in the minds of ‘Sea Peoples’ scholars.

That being said, there remain a few serious, fundamental questions to be answered in the analysis and translation of extant Egyptian sources: (1) What does “Great Green” really refer to? Or, more to the point, how do certain scholars know that it does (or does not) refer to the Mediterranean Sea? (2) What was the status of the Delta in relation to the kingdom of the Pharaoh, both throughout Egyptian history and, more importantly, in the Late Bronze Age? The latter is a question which may yet bear fruit from Egyptian soil. One of the positive effects (if one could call it that) of the Aswan Dam is that the Nile inundation in the Delta area is significantly less than what it was for the past 4,000 years. This may be bad for the environment, but it is helpful to archaeologists who want to dig in the area in search of evidence for a more complete picture of the Delta’s relation to Egypt. Of course, they will also be looking for artifacts that endured 4,000 years of Nile inundations before the advent of the man-made marvel that is the Aswan Dam, so the survival of such artifacts still remains far less likely than in areas of Upper Egypt. The chances of any new papyrus stores being unearthed are also almost nil, because the atmospheric conditions are far more humid in Lower Egypt than in the arid regions of Upper and Middle Egypt.

At last, the debate has come full circle: a question of perspective. There are no absolutes, especially not in this postmodern world. There will always exist a contentious dynamic of ‘he said/she said.’ No doubt, both Rameses II and Muwatallish each returned home with their own versions of how the Battle of Kadesh was won (never lost). And, in a very real sense, both kings have claim to truth on the matter (Mertz, 1978). Today, history tells us that it was more of a draw than a victory for either side. For that matter, the United States has never lost a war; one must continually remind oneself that Vietnam was not a war but a ‘policing action.’ 2,000 years from now, however, one may be confident that Vietnam will be referred to as a war lost. Alas, the same rings true for the understanding of extant Egyptian texts. The texts themselves do not and, one may be confident in stating again, will not change. The perspectives of those who read them, however, will continue to change for as long as they remain in the critical consciousness. Does this reality (in)validate Nibbi’s, Sanders’, O’Connor’s, Cottrell’s or Redford’s analyses? In typical postmodern form, the answer is ‘yes and no’; it does both.






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[1] Based on the particularly unique perspective of the subject (i.e., the “I,” the first person, the “beholder”)

[2] This is a different usage of the term, subject, from its previous usage in the paper. Here, it refers to the object of study. The current discussion will refer to this kind of “subject” as “the object of study” throughout this paper so that the terms do not come into conflict with each other again.

[3] Quite apart from any immortality associated with the traditional conception of an Egyptian afterlife

[4] A problem which is lessened immensely when the object of study is the ancient world, where monarchy and oligarchy do not automatically equate to evil, wrong, or oppressive

[5] No doubt, postmodern analysts would take exception with the flippant tone to which their methods are here referred. In truth, the ‘molding’ and ‘shaping’ of which the author writes is not so easily dismissed as the result of an additional dynamic tacked onto the structural analysis of “truth.” A postmodern scholar would argue that these ‘additions’ are not additions at all but, rather, are dynamics inherent in the system which are simply ignored by other (read not postmodern) analyses.

[6] The selection of these categories is a somewhat arbitrary distinction made by the author in order to illustrate general differences between theories. These categories, in no way, are meant to imply that all the theorists grouped together are in agreement with each other, only that their arguments coincide with each others’ in regard to certain, distinguishable issues.

[7] Although this category includes, by far, the largest number of modern scholars, they are sufficiently differentiated from each other so that to state anything more than they represent a middle ground between the first and third theories would be to misrepresent the individual scholars’ analyses on the matter.

[8] That is to say, Egyptian geography relies heavily on linguistic interpretation of ‘writing,’ and linguistic interpretation has a basis in geography (consider the dialectical differences between various English speaking regions of the modern world for an excellent example of this geographic influence on linguistics).

[9] Note the abundance of water and hill country along the northeastern border of Egypt (figure 1).

[10] Beyond any claims for the popularity of the work

[11] See Nibbi’s translation-paraphrase-translation on pp. 64-5 of The Sea Peoples and Egypt, regarding the inscriptions of Year 8 of Rameses III’s reign, for an excellent example of her own incomplete translation technique.

[12] ‘Sound pattern’ is the terminology used by Ferdinand de Saussure during his revolutionary lectures in the early 1900s, collectively titled Course in General Linguistics. A sound pattern is therein referred to as a pattern of sound(s) which are meaningful within the structure of a given language. For instance, the sound pattern of “the”: whether it is pronounced with a long-e (thee) or a short-e (the/thuh/tha/thah), the sound pattern remains the same and recalls a specific conceptual image within a given system of signs (language). Above is a simplified example dealing strictly with phonemes and allophones whereas a sound pattern need not be limited to just one vowel/consonant sound.

[13] The author was unable to find a character resembling the one used in Tubb’s original text. It appears to be the same symbol used in classical Greek to represent rough breathing. It is possibly a superscript “C.” For the purposes of this paper, it is transcribed as an “H” to replicate the sound of a rough breathing mark in Greek. This spelling/sound may very well be completely wrong for the proper pronunciation of the word, but it is adequate for the purposes of this paper.

[14] Evidence that does not contain, in itself, one form or another of literature (written/inscribed documentation)

[15] By “literate manner,” here, the author is specifically referring to our preference for literature as evidence (no matter the genre) as opposed to the many number of alternate forms of anthropological cultural markers.

Bibliography

Aldred, Cyril. (1985). Egyptian Art: In the Days of the Pharaohs, 3100-320 BC. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Andrews, Mark. (n.d.) Tour Egypt Feature: The Tomb of Merneptah, Valley of the Kings. Internet. Retrieved February 11, 2002, from
merneptaht.htm.

Bierling, Neal. (1992). “Attacks on Egypt.” In Giving Goliath His Due: New Archaeological Light on the Philistines. USA: Baker Book House. [Electronic version] Retrieved Monday, February 11, 2002, from http://www.phoenixdatasystems.com/goliath/c3/
c3a.htm.

Cottrell, Leonard. (1969). The Warrior Pharaohs. New York: Putnam.

Hodel-Hoenes, Sigrid. (2000). Life and Death in Ancient Egypt: Scenes from Private Tombs in New Kingdom Thebes. (D. Warburton, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell.

Hymn of Merneptah (n.d.) Internet. Retrieved Monday, February 11, 2002, from http://nefertiti.
iwebland.com/merneptah_hymn.htm.

Mascati, Sabatino. (1999a). “Part I: Phoenician Civilization: Who Were the Phoenicians?” In Sabatino Mascati (Ed.) The Phoenicians. (pp. 17-19). NY: Rizzoli.

–– (1999b). “Part I: Phoenician Civilization: Territory and Settlements.” In Sabatino Mascati (Ed.) The Phoenicians. (pp. 20-22). NY: Rizzoli

Mertz, Barbara. (1978). Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt. (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Bedrick.

Nelson, Harold Hayden. (1981). The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications Volume 106: The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak: The Wall Reliefs (Vol. 1, part 1). (W. J. Murnane, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago.

Oren, Eliezer D. (Ed.). (2000). The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Pernigotti, Sergio. (1999). “Part IV: The Phoenicians and the World Outside: Phoenicians and Egyptians.” In Sabatino Mascati (Ed.) The Phoenicians. (pp. 591-610).

Redford, Donald B. (2000). “Egypt and Western Asia in the Late New Kingdom: An Overview.” In Oren, Eliezer D. (Ed.) The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment (pp. 1-19). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Sanders, N. K. (1985). The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the ancient Mediterranean. (2nd ed.). Great Britain: Thames & Hudson.

Singer, Itamar. “New Evidence on the End of the Hittite Empire.” In Oren, Eliezer D. (Ed.) The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment (pp. 21-34). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Tubb, Johnathan N. (2000). “Sea Peoples in the Jordan Valley.” In Oren, Eliezer D. (Ed.) The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment (pp. 181-196). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Wilson, Hilary. (1997). People of the Pharaohs: From Peasant to Courtier. Ebbw Vale, Great Britain: Brockhampton.

Wood, Michael. (1996). In Search of the Trojan War (2nd ed.). Berkley: University of California.


[This message has been edited by Helios (edited 07-07-2004).]


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Posts: 406 | From: Rhodes (an island near Cyprus) | Registered: Jun 2004   
 

[BlueHue]

Dear. APOLLO,
 nice of you to write this
 but Have you read in the Other TOPIC of thiss same Thread
what Dr Velikovky had to say about the TIME Line of THE  SEA-PEOPLES ?
It occurred in 380 bc NOT in 1200 bc nor 1193 bc(='Troy' )

[Apollo]

That makes no sense at all.  Of course, we know that Ramses fought the Sea People, and he existed many, many years before 380 bc. You musy stop placing so much faith in Velikovky, Bluehue, his assumptions are incorrect.

[Apollo]

dhill757

Member
Member # 1890

Member Rated:
   posted 07-07-2004 10:53 PM                       
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Arx,
Thanks for the help on the links, computer wasn't doing the best that night, as you can see!~
I've reposted the links with the ones you provided, thanks for the help. The pictures on "tourEgypt" are especially interesting.

By the way, speaking for the rest of us, we'd love to see more of your research. Any input from new members is always welcome. The Tartessos angle hasn't been explored in depth on any of the topics, to my knowledge.


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Posts: 544 | From: Madison | Registered: Mar 2004   

[Apollo]

dhill757

Member
Member # 1890

Member Rated:
   posted 07-07-2004 11:14 PM                       
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Riven, Helios, Cleasterwood, Absonite, Atalante & Rockessence, interesting points as usual! All this would make a good book on all the ancient sea-faring people of the Mediterranean! Anymore feedback on any of the people we've already discussed..?
[This message has been edited by dhill757 (edited 07-07-2004).]


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Posts: 544 | From: Madison | Registered: Mar 2004