82 There is an ongoing debate about this. Amenhotep III’s mother, Mutemwai, cannot be absolutely identified with Artadama’s daughter, but there are strong arguments in her favor (for one, she was not Tuthmosis IV’s chief wife).
83 See chapter 15, Chapter Eleven.
84 See chapter 28, Twenty-Three.
85 The 1446 date is based on a straightforward reading of 1 Kings 6:1, which claims that 480 years passed between the Exodus and the building of Solomon’s temple (c.966). Other suggestions for the pharaoh of the Exodus are Rameses II (chapter 34), whose massive building programs provide a good match for the tasks given to the Israelites in slavery, and his successor Merneptah (chapter 38), who is the first pharaoh to make explicit reference to the Israelite nation as such; his victory stele from 1207 reads “Israel is devastated, her seed is no more, Palestine has become a widow for Egypt” (quoted in Peter Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, p. 157). It is actually difficult to see how this quote might line up with a massive departure of the Israelites from Egypt, even though it does testify to the early existence of the Israelites as a recognized people.
86 For at least a century, the theory that Akhenaten trained Moses in monotheism and then set him loose in the desert has floated around; it still pops up occasionally on History Channel specials and PBS fund-raisers. This has absolutely no historical basis, and in fact is incredibly difficult to square with any of the more respectable dates of the Exodus. It seems to have originated with Freud, who was certainly not an unbiased scholar in his desire to explain the origins of monotheism while denying Judaism as much uniqueness as possible.
87 It is from this point that historians date the Assyrian “Middle Kingdom.”
88 The salutations in the letters found at Akhenaten’s city (the “Amarna letters”) do not always make clear which king is writing to which king; in this case, Assur-uballit names himself, but simply calls the pharaoh Great King of Egypt. Because of this ambiguity, and because absolute dating of all of these ancient monarchs is impossible (we can only line them up against each other, and then only when they address each other by name), slightly different reconstructions of the relationship between the countries are possible.
89 The destruction was so complete that it is only with great difficulty (and uncertainty) that we can even reconstruct Akhenaten’s reign, so details of his rule vary from historian to historian.
90 You might wonder why, considering the double break in bloodline after Tutankhamun (and possibly before him, since his lineage is not at all clear), Manetho does not begin a new dynasty with either Ay or Horemheb. The short answer to this is that the general chaos at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty wreaked havoc not only on the succession itself, but on its later records. Ay took over some of Tutankhamun’s monuments as his own; Horemheb did the same to Ay; and the two best-known versions of the Egyptian king list skip straight over Tutankhamun and Ay and go straight to Horemheb. He appears as the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty primarily because he claimed that his wife was a sister of Akhenaten’s chief wife, which (barely) qualified him as an heir through the female line; and because he did his best to wipe out all traces of Akhenaten, Tut, and Ay, adding their years of reign to his own so that king lists engraved under his patronage go straight from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. Later, though, he is occasionally listed as the founding pharaoh of the Nineteenth instead of the last of the Eighteenth. Or you may not have wondered this at all.
91 Most archaeologists assign the first five layers of occupation (Troy I–V) to the years between 3000 and 1900 BC. Troy VI stood on the site between 1900 and 1300 BC and was flattened by an earthquake; Troy VIIa was built on the ruins, but burned down (possibly as a result of siege) around 1240 BC. Troy VIIb was rebuilt over the ashes, but never achieved a very high standard of sophistication and wilted away. By 1100 BC or so the site was abandoned and left unsettled for four hundred years. The Greeks built a city on the site around 700 BC, well after the development of the Trojan War epic tales, and called it Ilion; archaeologists call Ilion Troy VIII. The Romans took the Greek city over in the first century BC (Troy IX, the city’s last major occupation).
92 J. Lesley Fitton notes, “A complex literature covers the date of the final destruction at Knossos, and no consensus has yet been reached” (Minoans,). By any reckoning, though, Knossos had ceased to be a power center around 1450, and never regained its former importance.
93 Scholar J. A. G. Roberts points out that the sacrifices were often multiples of ten, which perhaps goes to my theory in chapter 15 that the number ten could serve as an intensifier of sorts.
94 Complicated linguistic calculations have led most scholars to agree that the hymns of the Rig Veda, first written down around 600 BC, entered the process of oral composition sometime between 1400 and 1100 BC (for a brief explanation, see Stanley Wolpert’s chapter “The Aryan Age” in A New History of India). Given this date, it is notable that even the earliest of the stories in the Rig Veda say nothing about the existence that these tribes presumably led up in the deserts of central Asia, north of the mountains; this must signify a large gap of time between the settlement along the Indus and the first of the oral tales preserved for us in the Rig Veda.
95 From the time of Tukulti-Ninurta’s great-grandfather on, the Assyrian kings began to keep detailed accounts of all military campaigns fought during each year of their reign; these provide much of our information about Assyria’s conquests at this time (the other details come from letters found at Nineveh, now in the British Museum; see Jorgen Laessoe, People of Ancient Assyria, for a fuller description of the nature of the source material).
96 The chronology is difficult, but Tukulti-Ninurta is probably the king called Nimrod in Gen. 10:10: a mighty hunter and warrior whose kingdom included Babylon, Erech, Akkad, and Nineveh, the same expanse as that claimed by Tukulti-Ninurta for Assyria. Weirdly enough, this Hebrew version of the name of the Assyrian great king has become an English synonym for a foolish and ineffectual man (“What a nimrod!”). The only etymology I can find for this suggests that, thanks to some biblically literate scriptwriter, Bugs Bunny once called Elmer Fudd a “poor little Nimrod” in an ironic reference to the “mighty hunter.” Apparently the entire Saturday-morning audience, having no memory of Genesis genealogies, heard the irony as a general insult and applied it to anyone bumbling and Fudd-like. Thus a distorted echo of Tukulti-Ninurta’s might in arms bounced down, through the agency of a rabbit, into the vocabulary of the twentieth century.
97 The technique of “counting by hand” was varied, once or twice, in earlier battles, when the soldiers apparently decided to cut off penises and bring them for accounting instead (making for one particularly interesting relief, in which a scribe is comparing the hand-count with the penis-count to see if they agree).
98 It seems that most of the Chinese and Indian history that we’ve covered to this point would also fall within a dark age, but the term tends to be used only when written records have been kept and then trail off, rather than for times before written accounts are widely used.
99 This is Nebuchadnezzar I, who is less well known than his namesake Nebuchadnezzar II; it is the latter king (c.605–561 BC) who captured Jerusalem, rebuilt Babylon, and (according to tradition) built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for his homesick wife.
100 See chapter 38.
101 Wen and Wu appear as Wenwang and Wuwang in the Pinyin system; “Wang,” or “king,” becomes the suffix of all royal Zhou names. I have used “King Wen” and “King Wu” instead.
102 Ancient Chinese chronicles mingle history and philosophy to an extent that makes them difficult to use as sources for a traditional historical narrative. Perhaps the oldest Chinese text is the philosophically oriented I ching (Pinyin Yi jing, Book of Changes). The bulk of it is traditionally ascribed to the founder of the Shang Dynasty; valuable commentaries were added to it during the Warring States Period (475–221 BC). The next continuous Chinese texts available to us come from the tim
e of Confucius (551–479 BC). The Shi jing (Classic of Poetry) contains305 poems collected (according to tradition) by Confucius, who is also credited with the first chronological Chinese history, the Ch’unch’iu (Pinyin Chun qiu, or Spring and Autumn Annals); this history covers events from 722 BC until just before the end of Confucius’s lifetime. Sometime between 475 and 221 BC, an anonymous commentator added additional notes to the Ch’un-ch’iu; these are known as the Tso chuan (Pinyin Zuo zhuan). In the fourth century BC, the Shu ching (Pinyin Shu jing, also known as the Shang shu or Official History), came into circulation; it was a compilation covering history from the days of the Sage Kings down to the end of the Western Zhou Period. In 124 BC, these “Five Classics” (the I ching, Shi jing, Shu ching, and Ch’un-ch’iu, plus a text dealing with rites and rituals called the Li ching) were placed together as a central program for the training of Chinese scholars and became known collectively as the Wu ching. Sima Qian, writing between 145 and 85 BC, used all of these as sources.
Other useful sources for China’s ancient history include the so-called Bamboo Annals (Zu shu jinian), copies of Eastern Zhou records from the years 770 to 256 BC; and the Guanzi, a collection of anonymous historical essays written (probably) between 450 and 100 BC and put together into one book by the scholar Liu Xiang in 26 BC.
Finally, historical information can be found in the “Four Books” (Si shu) published around AD 1190. The Four Books are a collection that includes two chapters from the Li ching, published separately and attributed directly to Confucius; the writings of Mengzi, the most famous disciple of Confucius; and a collection of Confucius’s sayings called Lun yu and generally known in English as the Analects.
103 The Zhou Dynasty is generally divided into two. The first half, the period when the Zhou capital city was in the western part of the kingdom, is known as the Western Zhou and stretched from c.1100 to 771 BC.
104 The scholar Li Xueqin points out that Confucius calls the whole town Chengzhou, a name which other histories occasionally use. Chengzhou was technically the name of the entire city, which consisted of the twinned towns Loyang and Wangcheng; Wangcheng was the “king’s town,” the western area of the city where the later king P’ing and his successors resided. (See Li Xueqin, Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations,) For clarity’s sake I have chosen to use Loyang throughout.
105 The Mahabharata is a massive work, the longest known epic poem in any language; its shortest version has eighty-eight thousand verses. It developed over a long period of time and exists in several versions; plus it contains multiple myths, fables, and philosophical digressions which are unrelated to the main narrative. For the purposes of this history, I have used the free translation made by Chakravarthi V. Narasimhan as vol.71 of the “Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies” project and published separately by Columbia University Press as The Mahabharata: An English Version Based on Selected Verses. Other translations may differ in their presentation of the story’s details.
106 As the tale is told in the Mahabharata, the queen mother has a little secret of her own: Vyasa is actually her son, born to her before her match with the king of Kuru, and then sent secretly away. As the story unwinds, she reveals the circumstances of his birth: when she was only a young girl, another wise man cornered her on a boat while she was crossing a river and “prevailed over” her, after promising her that she would still be a virgin afterwards, a useful pickup line unfortunately available only to magicians. (The queen mother also adds, apropos of nothing, “Till then my body had emitted a revolting odour of fish, but the sage dispelled it and endowed me with the fragrance that I now have”—a detail which we should perhaps leave unexplored.)
107 Although the details of the war may be mythical, there is archaeological proof for the spreading dominance of one particular clan or ruling group over the others. Right around 900 BC or so, the traditional date for the great war, the simple pottery which seems to have been native to Hastinapura and the surrounding areas was replaced by a much more sophisticated kind of ware: PGW, or painted grey ware, thrown on a wheel and painted with patterns and flowers. Slightly later, a similar but distinctive pottery, called Northern Black Polished Ware, appeared: this NBPW overlapped the center of the PGW area, and extended a little farther to the south and much farther to the east. (See John Keay, India: A History,, and Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India.) These pottery remains suggest that two related but different sets of settlers came in from the outside and settled in native territory, and that one of the settler groups then took over territory that belonged to the other. This is not so different from the tale told by the Mahabharata.
108 There were actually thirteen tribes of Israelites: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, Manasseh, Benjamin, Dan, Asher, Gad, and Naphtali. Technically, the twelve sons of Jacob—Abraham’s great-grandsons—were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Gad, Asher, Joseph, Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali. However, Reuben lost his position as first-born by sleeping with his father’s concubine Bilhah, the mother of his half-brothers Dan and Naphtali. Instead, his father Jacob decided to recognize Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, as clan leaders; in this way, his deathbed blessing still encompassed twelve “sons” and their families. Despite this, Reuben’s clan retained its position as a Hebrew tribe. The number twelve is maintained by two different strategies: when the tribes are named for the purposes of recruiting soldiers or distributing land, the tribe of Levi is left out, since its men were all called to be priests and so neither fought nor owned land; and when all the tribes are reckoned up by ancestors, Levi is included but the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh are counted as half-tribes, the “descendants of the sons of Joseph.” (See Num. 1:20–53.)
109 “Israel,” the name by which the Hebrew nation was known once it had settled into Canaan, was the new name given to Jacob by the angel of the Lord when they wrestled at the stream of Peniel; it meant He struggles with God.
110 Like the Exodus, the Conquest has been assigned widely varying dates across a span of centuries. Like the Exodus, the Conquest has also been rejected entirely by some scholars, who prefer to interpret the archaeological evidence as indicating a gradual invasion carried out by various small groups of Hebrew invaders. Since the evidence is inconclusive, the debate will continue; the account in Joshua is the clearest guide we possess to the establishment of an Israelite kingdom in Canaan.
111 1000 BC, around the time of David’s rise, is the conventional beginning of the Iron Age in the ancient Near East. Anthropologists have suggested that knowledge of ironworking spread eastwards from Mycenae along the sea routes, during the days of the Dorian invasion. Colin McEvedy notes that this is “compatible with…the Bible’s story of the Philistines’ attempt to keep the Israelites in a position of military inferiority by forbidding them to manufacture any sort of iron tools” (The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History,).
112 The tallest man in history was Robert Wadlow, who topped out at eight feet, eleven inches. As of this writing, the tallest man living is Leonid Stadnik of Ukraine, who stands eight feet, four inches and is still growing (thanks to a pituitary disorder). Nine feet is an unlikely height, though, probably an approximation; in a day when the average Israelite man probably stood five and a half feet high, seven feet would have been staggeringly huge.
113 In the rhetoric of Near Eastern politics, the identity of the Jebusites has become a charged issue: Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, claimed descent from the Jebusites (identified as a people originally from Arabia) and insisted that David, the first great Jewish king, took the city from his people, the rightful owners, by force. (Arafat’s claim is documented by Eric Cline in Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel, among other places.) Israeli politicians responded by holding festivals celebrating the founding of Jerusalem by David (Cline).
114 Historians date the “New Assyrian Empire,” Assyria’s last and most powerful incarnation, to the
reign of Ashurnasirpal II.
115 Right around the time of Jezebel’s murder, the king of Tyre, Jezebel’s grandnephew, had to fight off various challenges to this throne. He ended up by purging the royal family of all possible competitors. According to the tradition set down well after the fact by the Greek historian Timaeus (c.270 BC), one victim of the purge was his brother-in-law; his sister, Jezebel’s grandniece Elissa, managed to escape her brother’s assassins and fled across the Mediterranean, along with a loyal band of followers. They landed on the coast of North Africa in 814 and founded a Phoenician colony there, the city of Carthage. Elissa, under the Greek version of her name—Dido—later became a central character in Virgil’s epic tale, the Aeneid. Although most of this story is probably myth, it does reflect some very contemporary realities: unrest in the royal family of Tyre may have been related to Jezebel’s death; the unrest may have also had something to do with the looming threat of Shalmaneser III’s successor on the eastern horizon; and the story of Jehu shows that the purging of a royal family was a common occurence in ancient Near Eastern palaces.
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