Meanwhile, the priests of Amun were growing richer. Amun’s reenthronement as chief god, under Tutankhamun, meant that pharaoh after pharaoh made rich offerings to the Temple of Amun. Rameses III gave Amun so much land that at the time of his death, the priests of Amun controlled almost a third of all the cropland in Egypt.
Horemheb’s appointment of military officers to the priesthood—done to assure priestly loyalty to the throne—eventually backfired. Sometime around the twelfth year of Rameses XI, a general named Herihor managed to have himself appointed High Priest of Amun. He now controlled not only the army, but also the greatest treasure in Egypt. When he began to make demands, Rameses XI seems to have buckled without a fight. Less than five years later, Herihor became the Viceroy of Kush; not long after that, he began to style himself as Vizier of Egypt; and ten years later, his name began to appear as co-ruler of the entire country. His portrait was carved into the temple walls beside that of Rameses XI, the two men equal in size and power.16
When both men died within five years of each other, neither leaving a son and heir behind, their sons-in-law began a civil war. Rameses XI’s son-in-law enthroned himself in the north, while Herihor’s son-in-law claimed a divine right to rule the south from the city of Thebes.
This time, no great unifier appeared on the horizon. The New Kingdom had ended. Egypt remained divided, and soon sank into a confused and battling disaster: the Third Intermediate Period.
Chapter Forty
The Dark Age of Greece
In Greece, between 1200 and 1050 BC,
Dorian invaders bring a Dark Age
AFTER THE DEVASTATING VICTORY AT TROY, the Mycenaean ships had limped or blown back to the mainland of Greece, there to find that their homes had grown poor and troubled. Odysseus battled for ten years to get home and found his house overrun with enemies; Agamemnon returned to his wife and was murdered in his bath by her and her lover.
This was only a foretaste of disaster to come.
Around 1200 BC, a rash of fires spread across the peninsula. The Mycenaean city of Sparta burned to the ground. The city of Mycenae itself fought off an unknown enemy; the fortress survived, although damaged, but the houses outside the walls were left in ashes and never rebuilt.1 The city of Pylos was swept by fire. A score of towns were shattered by some other disruption.
Archaeology suggests that the cities were resettled by a new people, who had no knowledge of writing (none appears in their remains), no skill in building with stone or brick, and no grasp of bronzeworking.2 These new settlers came from the northern part of the peninsula, and were now moving south. Later historians called them the Dorians.
Both Thucydides and Herodotus credit the Dorians with a massive armed takeover of the Mycenaean cities. Herodotus tells of four Dorian invasions of Attica (the land around Athens), the first happening in the days when “Codrus was the king of Athens.”3 The later Greek writer Konon preserves the traditional story of the earliest attack: An oracle at the Dorian camp told the savage invaders that they would win the battle for Athens, as long as they didn’t kill the Athenian king Codrus. When Codrus heard of this, he disguised himself as an ordinary Athenian, left his city, and went into the Dorian camp, where he picked a fight with armed Dorian warriors. In the brawl afterwards, he was killed, thus fulfilling the oracle and saving his city.4
40.1 Dorian Greece
The Dorians, amazed at such nobility, lifted the siege of Athens, but the retreat was only temporary. By the time the invasion was over, Thucydides tells us, the Dorians had become the “masters of the Peloponnese” (the southernmost part of the Greek peninsula).5
Thucydides and Herodotus both write of a violent irruption that spread across the land of the heroes and destroyed it. Like the Egyptian historians who recorded the invasion of the Hyksos, they could not conceive of any reason why their great ancestors should be defeated except for overwhelming military might. But the ruins of Mycenaean cities tell a slightly different story. Pylos and Mycenae burned as much as ninety years apart, which means that the Dorian influx itself spread slowly down over the peninsula over the course of a century. It was hardly a surprise attack; the Mycenaean Greeks had plenty of time to organize some sort of resistance.
But whatever defense these experienced soldiers mounted was too feeble to protect them—even against the Dorian newcomers, who were neither sophisticated nor battle hardened. And in some cities, there is no evidence of fighting at all. The tales of Athenian resistance (among the Mycenaean cities, only Athens boasted of repelling the invaders) may preserve a slightly different reality: no one ever attacked Athens. Excavations at Athens show no layer of destruction, no fire scars.6
But even so, the population of Athens shrank alarmingly. By 1100, a century and a half after the war with Troy, the northeast side of the Athenian acropolis (the high rock at the city’s center, its most secure and defensible spot) had been peacefully abandoned. The Sparta that the Dorians burned down was already empty; its inhabitants had gone some years before.7 The northerners poured down into a south already weakened and disorganized.
The war with Troy certainly had something to do with the slow decay of the Mycenaean cities, something which Thucydides himself makes note of: the “late return of the Hellenes from Troy,” he remarks, provoked strife so severe that many Mycenaeans were driven from their own cities. But there must have been other factors at work. Two or three years of bad weather in a row, lessening crops just at a time when the old reliable sources of grain from Egypt and Asia Minor had also been disrupted by wars in both places, would have forced the Mycenaean cities to compete for food; hunger can kindle wars between cities and send city-dwellers into exile. And in fact the rings of Irish oaks and some trees from Asia Minor show signs of a drought that came sometime in the 1150s.8
Another, more fearful enemy may have stalked the Mycenaeans as well.
In the opening scenes of the Iliad, the Trojan priest Chryses begs the god Apollo to send illness on the attacking Greeks, in repayment for the kidnapping of Chryses’s daughter by the Greek warrior Agamemnon. Apollo answers his prayer and fires down arrows of sickness on the enemy ships. The result is deadly:
He made a burning wind
of plague rise in the army: rank and file
sickened and died for the ill their chief had done.9
Very likely the Mycenaeans encamped on the shore were struck by plague, and the sickness was probably bubonic.
The Trojans didn’t know, any more than other ancient peoples, exactly how bubonic plague was spread. But they knew that the sickness had something to do with rodents. The Apollo who spreads sickness was honored, at Troy, with a name peculiar to Asia Minor: he was called Apollo Sminthian, “Lord of the Mice.”10 The Iliad also tells us that Apollo Sminthian’s arrows carried off not just men, but horses and dogs; this spreading of sickness through the animal population is a constant in ancient accounts of bubonic plague. (“This pest raged not only among domestic animals, but even among wild beasts,” wrote Gregory of Tours, fifteen hundred years later.)11
The Mycenaean heroes, returning, would have brought death back with them. A ship with no sick people on board, docking on an uninfected shore, might still have plague-carrying rats in its hold. In fact, plague tended to follow famine; grain shipments from one part of the world to another carried rats from one city to the next, spreading disease across an otherwise unlikely distance.
Plague, drought, and war: these were enough to upset the balance of a civilization that had been built in rocky dry places, close to the edge of survival. When existence became difficult, the able-bodied moved away. And so not only Mycenaeans, but Cretans and residents of the Aegean islands spread out from their homeland in small bands, looking for new homes and hiring themselves out as mercenaries. It is impossible to tell how many of the Sea People fighting against Egypt were hired hands. But Egyptian accounts tell us that in the years before the Sea People invasion, the pharaoh had hired troops from the Aegean to fight for Egypt ag
ainst the Libyans of the western desert. By the middle of the eleventh century, the Dorians, not the Mycenaeans, were masters of the south; and Mycenaean soldiers were available to the highest bidder.
The Dorian settlers had no king and court, no taxes and tributes, and no foreign sea trade. They farmed, they survived, and they had no particular need to write anything down. Their occupation plunged the peninsula into what we call a dark age: we cannot peer very far into it because there are no written records.98
Chapter Forty-One
The Dark Age of Mesopotamia
Between 1119 and 1032 BC,
the Hittites collapse, and the prosperity of Assyria
and Babylon withers
WHILE THE MYCENAEANS deserted their cities and the Dorians trickled down into them, disruption was rippling eastwards, past Troy (now shabbily rebuilt, resettled, and a ghost of its former magnificent self) and farther east, into the lands still held by the Hittites.
By this time, the Hittite empire was not much more than a shadow state. The poverty, famine, and general unrest of Tudhaliya IV’s reign had worn away its outer edges, and fighting over the throne continued. During the Mycenaean slide downwards, Tudhaliya IV’s younger son took the crown away from his older brother and claimed the country for himself. He called himself Suppiluliuma II, in an effort to evoke the great Hittite empire-builder of a century and a half earlier.
Suppiluliuma II’s inscriptions brag of his own victories against Sea Peoples. He fought several naval engagements off the coast of Asia Minor, beating off Mycenaean refugees and mercenaries, and managed for a time to keep his southern coast free of invasion. But he could not bring back the golden days of Hittite power, when his namesake had almost managed to put a son on the throne of Egypt itself.
The same wandering peoples who had pushed towards Egypt—peoples fleeing famine, or plague, or overpopulation, or war in their own lands—were pressing into Asia Minor. Some came from the direction of Troy, across the Aegean Sea and into Hittite land. Others came from the sea; Cyprus, the island south of the Hittite coast, apparently served them as a staging point. “Against me the ships from Cyprus drew up in line three times for battle in the midst of the sea,” Suppiluliuma II writes. “I destroyed them, I seized the ships and in the midst of the sea I set them on fire…. [Yet] the enemy in multitudes came against me from Cyprus.”1 Still other enemies crossed over the narrow Bosphorus Strait, from the area north of the Greek peninsula called Thrace; these tribes were known as the Phrygians.
41.1 End of the Hittites
There were too many of them, and the Hittite army was too small. The newcomers moved right through Suppiluliuma’s troops, scattered his defenses, and arrived in the heart of his kingdom. The capital city Hattusas burned to the ground; its people fled; the royal court dispersed like dust.
The Hittite language survived in a few separated cities around the southern edge of the old empire; Carchemish was the largest. In these last outposts of the Hittites, the Hittite gods hung onto life. But the kingdom that had worshipped them was gone.
THE EBB of three civilizations in a western crescent—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Egyptians—coincided with a sudden burst of power to the east. For a few brief years, while the wandering nomads and Sea Peoples were busy harassing the west, Assyria and Babylon brightened.
In Assyria, the king Tiglath-Pileser was crowned not long after the sack of Hattusas. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had each in turn ruled over the Assyrian heartland—an upside-down triangle with Assur at its bottom point, stretching up and over to Erbila on the west and Nineveh on the east. It was a nice little area, prosperous and easily defended, with the richest corn-growing land in all of Mesopotamia. All three kings had been content to hold it, defend it, and keep it safe.
Tiglath-Pileser wanted more. He was the first warlike king since Shalmaneser, eight generations and a hundred years earlier. He turned against the invaders and used their attacks to take more land for himself. And for a brief period—a little under forty years—Assyria regained something like its previous luminescence.
The Phrygians, having stormed through the Hittite territory, were approaching Assyria on the northwest. In one of his earliest victories, Tiglath-Pileser beat them off. His inscriptions boast that he defeated an army of twenty thousand Phrygians (he calls them “Mushki”) in the valley of the northern Tigris: “I made their blood flow down the ravines and pour from the heights of the mountains,” he explains. “I cut off their heads and piled them like grain heaps.”2
And then he went on fighting his way northwest, heading right into the face of the approaching wave. “[I set out for] the lands of the distant kings who were on the shore of the Upper Sea, who had never known subjection,” he wrote in his annals. “I took my chariots and my warriors and over the steep mountain and through their wearisome paths I hewed a way with pickaxes of bronze; I made passable a road for my chariot and my troops. I crossed the Tigris…. I scattered warriors…and made their blood to flow.”3
For thirty-eight years, Tiglath-Pileser fought. An expanding list of cities, conquered by the king, sent taxes and laborers to the Assyrian palace and suffered under the rule of Assyrian governors.4 Among them was Carchemish; Tiglath-Pileser had taken it (according to his own inscriptions, anyway) “in one day.”5 Other cities gave up without a fight, their kings greeting Tiglath-Pileser’s approach by coming out and falling down to kiss his feet.6 Tiglath-Pileser himself travelled all the way to the Mediterranean coast, where he went dolphin-hunting on a spear-boat rowed by his men.7 The pharaoh of Egypt—one of the eight Rameses—sent him a crocodile for a present, which Tiglath-Pileser took back to add to his game preserve in Assur.8 He built shrines and fortresses and temples, each proclaiming that at long last, Assyria had another great king.
Down to Assyria’s south, Babylon also saw the rise of a great king.
Babylon and its surrounding lands had been ruled by nobodies ever since Burnaburiash, who had corresponded with Tutankhamun two hundred years earlier. Within three or four years of Tiglath-Pileser’s accession up in Assur, the undistinguished line of the Second Dynasty of Isin spat out a genetic sport named Nebuchadnezzar.99
While Tiglath-Pileser fought his way west and north, Nebuchadnezzar turned east. The statue of Marduk, after all, was still in the hands of the Elamites of Susa; since its capture a hundred years before, no king of Babylon had proved himself mighty enough to get it back.100
Nebuchadnezzar’s first invasion of Elam was met by a wall of Elamite soldiers. He ordered his troops to retreat, and made a cunning plan for a second attempt. He would march his men into Elam at the very height of summer, a time when no commander with any sense would force an army to march anywhere. The Babylonian soldiers, arriving at Elam’s borders, caught the border patrols by surprise and made it to the city of Susa before anyone could raise the alarm. They raided the city, broke down the temple doors, kidnapped the statue, and departed to march in triumph back to Babylon.
Rather than waiting around for the priests of Marduk to acknowledge their debt to him, Nebuchadnezzar hired scribes to compose tales about the rescue, not to mention hymns in Marduk’s honor. Stories and songs and offerings streamed from the royal palace to the Temple of Marduk until the god stood at the top of the Babylonian pantheon; it was in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I that Marduk became the chief god of the Babylonians.9 And in a classic circular argument, Nebuchadnezzar reasoned that, since he had rescued the chief god of Babylon, the chief god of Babylon had set divine favor on him. The undistinguished beginnings of the Second Dynasty were forgotten; Nebuchadnezzar had the god-given right to rule Babylon.
UNDER THESE TWO mighty kings, Babylon and Assyria were more or less balanced in power. Sharp border spats occasionally intensified into actual battles. A couple of Assyrian frontier towns were sacked by Babylonian soldiers, and Tiglath-Pileser retorted by marching all the way down to Babylon and burning the king’s palace.10 This sounds more serious than it was. Bab
ylon lay so close to the Assyrian border that most of the Babylonian government offices had already been moved elsewhere. The city was a sacred site, but no longer a center of power. And Tiglath-Pileser, his point made, marched back home and left Babylon alone. He did not intend to provoke an all-out war. The two kingdoms were equally strong, and there were more serious threats to face.
The movement of peoples from the north and west had not stopped. Tiglath-Pileser was continually fighting border battles against roving wanderers who were rapidly becoming as pervasive as the Amorites had been, almost a thousand years before. These people were Western Semites who had lived in the northwest of the Western Semitic lands, until pushed onwards by the influx of people from farther west. The Assyrians called them Aramaeans, and by Tiglath-Pileser’s own accounts, he made something like twenty-eight different campaigns to the west, each aimed at beating back Aramaean invasions.
Nor were Babylon and Assyria immune from the famine and drought, the crop failures and sickness plaguing the rest of the known world. Court records describe the last years of Tiglath-Pileser’s reign as desperate and hungry, a time when the Assyrian people had to scatter into the surrounding mountains to find food.11
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