One source of trouble was a condottiere of unknown origin named Piyamaradu. Around 1250 BC he was the subject of a letter of complaint from the Hittite ruler to the king of Ahhiyawa, whom he now regarded as a friend following earlier disagreement about who should exercise influence over a place called Wilusa, a name that recalls the alternative Greek name for Troy, Ilios, or, originally, Wilios.7 Evidently, the coastline of Asia Minor was divided among a bewildering mass of petty kings who were sometimes loyal to the Hittites but occasionally sheltered under the protection of the king of Ahhiyawa: there was Alaksandu, king of Wilusa, whose name sounds suspiciously similar to Alexander (Alexandros), the alternative name given for Helen’s seducer Paris. Another condottiere who possessed a hundred chariots and many footsoldiers was the ‘man of Ahhiya’ Attarssiya, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, Atreus; he seems to have been aiming his small army at Cyprus, whose ownership was a matter of interest to both the Egyptians and the Hittites.8 Neither of these names is proof of Homer’s veracity; but somewhere there was a store of Anatolian names on which he or earlier tellers of tales drew. Having in the past opposed the Hittites, King Alaksandu of Wilusa entered into a treaty with them; Wilusa was one of the four lands of Assuwa, whose rulers often adopted different policies towards the Hittites and, by extension, towards the Mycenaeans, but which had supplied armies at Kadesh. Another entity within the region of Assuwa bore the name Taruisa, a name reminiscent of Troy.9 Everything about the description of Assuwa indicates that it lay in the far west of Anatolia; and it is clear that both Wilusa and Taruisa stood near the site of Ilios/Troy. A poem from the Hittite capital, written in Luvian in the sixteenth century BC, refers to ‘steep Wilusa’; and the same epithet was used by Homer to describe Ilios. Possibly Wilusa and Taruisa were one city or two neighbouring cities that at some stage shared a ruler, rather as Homer’s Agamemnon was king of Argos as well as Mycenae; but Hisarlık was certainly Homer’s Ilios and Virgil’s Troia.
There is no reason to doubt that the Mycenaeans and the Anatolians fought wars for the possession of the lands and towns of western Asia Minor. The Trojan War was a later memory of these conflicts, which were collapsed into a single campaign aimed at one of several cities targeted by the Greeks. While some historians have stressed the implausibility of a ten-year siege, the reality was that this was not a war of one season or of ten but of many dozens of seasons, fought intermittently and punctuated by periods of peace recorded in the Hittite diplomatic correspondence. Generally, it was not a war between the great kings of Mycenae and of the Hittites, for much of the fighting was conducted by ambitious mercenary captains, who changed sides to secure their best advantage; there is no reason to suppose they were loyal to their own ethnic group. It was low-level, endemic conflict; but occasionally it resulted in major clashes, as when the Hittites felt obliged to assert their dominion over Miletos. The prosperity of Ilios/Troy was not undermined by these troubles; indeed, Troy VI risked drawing the attention of greedy conquerors because it sat astride the trade routes running from the Mediterranean into Anatolia, carrying metals, textiles and, very importantly, horses.
Troy VI was destroyed by another agency than human greed. Troy stands in a zone prone to violent earthquakes. In about 1250 BC, the south walls were thrown outwards and part of the east wall collapsed completely, as a powerful earthquake tore the city to pieces. Debris from the collapse of the buildings reached a depth, in some places, of a metre and a half.10 The main circuit did, however, remain intact.11 Whatever happened to the lower town, of which so little is known, it is plain that after these events the old elite no longer inhabited grand houses in the upper town. New houses were built atop the rubble of Troy VI, packed closer together to support a larger population at least within the citadel, and within these houses the Trojans sank storage vessels (pithoi), as they had never done in the past; so they were conscious of the need to build up their stocks in what seem to have been times of adversity. The decline in imports of Mycenaean pottery shows that trade connections had become weaker. Troy had passed its peak. But it was not alone. Mycenae was in difficulties; the lower town suffered an attack around 1250, and the citadel had to be strengthened; a wall was built across the isthmus of Corinth in the hope of keeping out the attackers, though whether these attackers were the kings of other cities within the Mycenaean world or invaders from outside is unclear.12 By the end of the thirteenth century, watchtowers had been built along the coasts to alert the palace dwellers to invaders; even so, most of the great Mycenaean centres, including Tiryns and Pylos, had been ravaged by about 1200. At Pylos, sacrifices were offered to the gods as disaster loomed; a man and a woman mentioned on the Linear B tablets among a list of sacrificial beasts were probably intended for human sacrifice (a practice remembered in the Greek legend of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia). The damage reached the coasts of the Levant: the king of Ugarit sent his troops to serve the Hittites, and while they were away foreign fleets mustered off the Syrian coast; the king wrote a desperate letter on a clay tablet to warn his ally the king of Cyprus, but the letter was never sent – over 3,000 years later, it was found still waiting to be baked in the kiln, and within days or possibly hours the great trading centre at Ugarit was demolished, never to rise again.13 The town of Alalakh, which lay a little way inland, close to the modern Turkish–Syrian border, was destroyed in 1194; the city never recovered, but its port, at al-Mina, was refounded, and Mycenaean wares have been found there from before and after the destruction of the mother-city.14 Tossed between pro-Hittite and pro-Egyptian factions, the kingdom of Alalakh was always at political risk. The Hittite capital deep in the Anatolian interior at Boğazköy was destroyed at the same period, though this may have been the result of internal crises. Still, collapse at the centre meant that the Hittites were incapable of protecting their Mediterranean dependencies. And, despite the warnings from Ugarit, Cyprus suffered terribly; its towns were demolished – this was followed by the arrival of Greek refugees or invaders, bringing their archaic linear script and an early form of Greek. On Crete, part of the population moved inland to inaccessible points high above the island, at Karphi and Vrokastro.
And then, around the date assigned by the classical author Eratosthenes to the fall of Troy (1184), Troy was destroyed again, and this time the city went up in flames; the skeleton of one unfortunate Trojan who was trying to flee has been found beneath the debris of Troy VIIa.15 Thus, if the Greeks did destroy Troy at this stage, their victory occurred when their own towns had also passed the peak of their prosperity. Rather than a clash between Mycenae rich in gold and the wealthy horse-tamers of Troy, the fall of Troy VIIa was a battle between declining powers. Nor can it be proved that the destroyers were the Greeks acting together under their Great King or wanax Agamemnon; it is just as probable that the destroyers were a mixed rabble of exiles and mercenaries of Greek and other origins. They could have been the people who also attacked Mycenae and Pylos, or armed refugees from Mycenae and Pylos. Seen from this perspective, the ‘fall of Troy’ was a gradual process, beginning with the wars between the Hittites and their surrogates and the Greeks and theirs; the calamity of the destruction of Troy VI weakened the capacity of the city to resist, even, apparently, to feed itself (witness the pithoi); the seizure of the citadel around 1184 left further massive damage; and thereafter Troy entered into a steady decline. That raises fundamental questions about what was happening in the eastern Mediterranean at this time: whether the disruptions that occurred during the Late Bronze Age marked a sharp break with the past, or whether decline, which undoubtedly occurred, was more gradual. The evidence from Crete and Troy of greater efforts to store food hints at frequent famines, setting peoples on the march towards lands richer in supplies. Moreover, ‘decline’ can mean many things: the loss of political unity as great empires dissolved; a reduction in trade as demand withered; a lowering of the standard of living not just among the political elite but across most of society. Once again the
question revolves around invaders of uncertain identity and takes us to the boundaries between legend and history.
II
This was a period when talented soldiers could make careers in the armies that were fighting for control of the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean; if no one wanted their services, they could turn themselves into proto-Viking raiders and seize what they wanted. In an inscription found at Tanis, Ramesses II claimed to have destroyed people known as the Shardana who had pounced on Egypt out of the sea, but before long they were integrated into his armies, and they were present at the great battle of Kadesh in 1274. In one papyrus, from 1189 BC, Ramesses III claimed grandiloquently to have turned those who raided his kingdom into ashes, and then admitted that he had resettled vast numbers of them in strongholds.16 Excavation finds indicate that some Shardana were directed to the Bay of Acre, where they guarded the royal road through Canaan on Pharaoh’s behalf. They were poachers turned gamekeepers. The Shardana raiders were skilled with sword and spear; they wore distinctive horned helmets.17 While a welcome was extended to tough Shardana warriors, other groups were viewed with more suspicion: the apiru or habiru were seen as troublesome desert wanderers, occasionally employable as mercenaries; their name is possibly cognate with the term ‘Hebrew’, but it was not applied just to one small Semitic nation.18 It is no surprise that poorer peoples – nomads, refugees, exiles – were attracted by the wealth of Egypt and sought to acquire a share of it. Their desperation to do so was enhanced by the deteriorating economic conditions in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean; it would be surprising if Cretans and Anatolians had not gone looking for land, employment and new opportunities.
From the late thirteenth to the mid-twelfth century BC, at the time that Troy VI and VIIa were destroyed, Lower Egypt was beset by enemies from many directions. The first threat came from the lands of the western peoples. A great multitude of Libu, or Libyans, led by their king, Meryry, moved eastwards in the late thirteenth century, bringing with them whole families, flocks of animals, their gold, silver and furniture: ‘they spend their day roaming the land and fighting to fill their bellies daily; they have come to Egypt to seek food for their mouths’, as Pharaoh Merneptah proclaimed in a long inscription preserved in the temple at Karnak. They came with their North African allies the Meshwesh and with foreign mercenaries. They had arrived on the edges of the richest country in the world, and they intended to stay; if the Egyptians would not welcome them, they would force themselves into their kingdom. This was more than Merneptah could tolerate. In April 1220 his troops fought a lengthy and tough battle against the Libyans and their allies in the western Delta region; in the end King Meryry was soundly defeated and fled back to his homeland, ‘leaving his bow and quiver and sandals on the ground behind him’. Merneptah claimed to have killed over 6,000 Libyans, and at least half that number of their allies.19 Yet this was only the beginning of a cycle of invasions which were not so much raids as attempted migrations; within a few decades other groups would arrive with their ox-carts, this time from the east. The Sea Peoples who have attracted so much attention from historians of this period were only one element in much wider and larger population movements in which long-term migrants outnumbered opportunistic mercenaries, and in which Land Peoples outnumbered Sea Peoples.
The Libyans knew where to turn for help, and King Meryry secured the services of several foreign contingents from ‘the countries of the sea’, to cite one inscription. One group who arrived was the Lukka, Anatolians who gave their name to Lycia (though this does not prove they had already settled in that precise area); they had been making a nuisance of themselves as pirates and soldiers since at least the fourteenth century. There were some Shardana as well as other peoples: the Egyptians claimed that 2,201 Ekwesh, 722 Tursha and 200 Shekelesh died in the battle with Meryry.20 Merneptah was now confident that he had solved the region’s problems, and proudly recorded his violent pacification not just of the territory stretching west to Libya but of lands and peoples to the east, asserting that ‘Israel is desolated and has no seed’ (the first reference to Israel in an Egyptian document, and, he clearly hoped, the last); his uncompromising peace encompassed the land of Canaan as well, which he had ‘plundered with every ill’; he had taken control of Ashkelon and Gezer. At last, he said,
men can walk the roads at any pace without fear. The fortresses stand open and the wells are accessible to all travellers. The walls and the battlements sleep peacefully in the sunshine till their guards wake up. The police lie stretched out asleep. The desert frontier-guards are among the meadows where they like to be.21
He certainly employed an able propagandist. But there is no reason to believe his boast about a general peace, any more than his boast about Israel. Whatever peace he had achieved lasted only a very short while. Within thirty years, in 1182 BC, Pharaoh Ramesses III faced a new invasion from the west, but this time the Libyans could not muster their northern allies from across the sea. Still, the invading army was even more formidable than in the days of Merneptah: if the Egyptians slew 12,535 of the enemy, as they claimed, the Libyan army may well have exceeded 30,000 men, excluding dependants.22 Egyptian reliefs portray a campaign in which some invaders are now part of the Egyptian army: there are Shardana, with their horned helmets; soldiers with feathered head-dresses which recall designs on small objects from twelfth-century Cyprus; kilted soldiers whose garments look similar to those worn by the Shekelesh on carvings elsewhere.23
This was, if Ramesses is to be believed, a great victory; but peace remained elusive: the northern peoples mobilized, in about 1179 BC (and the Libyans attacked again in 1176, losing over 2,175 Meshwesh warriors). A lengthy inscription from the temple at Medinet Habu set out the Egyptian version of events; what is remarkable is the picture of convulsions taking place not just on the Mediterranean shores of Egypt but across a much wider region:
the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms. Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alasiya [Cyprus] were cut off.
They turned the land into a desert, so that it was ‘like that which has never come into being’, and then from Syria and Canaan they advanced on Egypt itself.24 The Egyptians were right to insist that this plague affected not just themselves but their old foes the Hittites, whose land-based empire disintegrated at this point. The peoples who invaded Egypt were the Peleshet, the Tjekker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen and the Weshesh, all united together; ‘they laid their hands upon the lands to the entire circuit of the earth’. The image is intended to recall an invasion of locusts. The invaders came by both land and sea, and so they had to be confronted on the Mediterranean shores of Egypt and on its eastern frontier. The land battle brought the Egyptians and their Shardana auxiliaries face to face with charioteers mounted in Hittite style (three warriors to a vehicle); the invaders were thus capable of mobilizing considerable resources, including large numbers of expensive horses. Like the Libyans, they were also accompanied by women and children, travelling in large ox-carts.
Those who came by sea found themselves confronted with stockades and burning pyres: ‘they were dragged ashore, hemmed in and flung down on the beach’.25 Yet elsewhere in the Egyptian accounts the invaders are seen entering the mouths of the river channels running through the Delta; and there were some warships in Egyptian service which aimed to drive the attackers towards the shore, where they could be trapped in range of Egyptian archers. The Egyptian ships appear from the reliefs to be adapted river vessels, while the invaders’ boats are similar to those of Syrian traders; all the vessels carry sails, though they would have depended on a combination of sail and oar-power. The ships of the Sea Peoples were decorated at bow and stern with birds’ heads, a feature which can be seen on a twelfth-century Mycenaean pot from the island of Skyros. A persistent feature was attributed to the Peleshet, and sometimes to the Denyen, Tjekker and Shekelesh: as well as kilts, the Peleshet wore he
lmets topped with what look like feathers, somewhat like high crowns. The strength of the invaders – defeat in Egypt notwithstanding – came not from their navies but from their armies: they were by and large infantry troops, fighting with javelins and thrusting swords, and these weapons proved more efficient on the battlefield than the expensive but often fragile chariots of the Hittites and Egyptians. The round shields of the Shardana were well suited for close combat. The invaders did not yet have iron weapons, although the Hittites had already begun to produce iron goods in a small way. What they had was discipline, determination and (literally) a cutting edge. An image of these fighting men is preserved on a late Mycenaean vase, known as the Warrior Vase, which shows a squad of soldiers equipped with javelins, round shields, greaves and kilts; on their heads are the horned helmets typical of the Shardana and their allies.26 Pharaoh showed some wisdom in employing Shardana, because it meant that he had the means to resist invaders with similar weapons and battle tactics.
If it were possible to identify the peoples mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions and papyri, a much clearer idea of the turmoil in the Mediterranean could be gained. Modern sceptics fly from any attempt to identify the peoples mentioned in the documents, arguing (as with the Ahhiyawa in the Hittite documents) that a few consonants are not sufficient evidence, and that names in any case migrate even more easily than peoples.27 But the number of similarities between the names in the Egyptian records and those known from Homer, the Bible and other later sources is too great for haphazard coincidence: one or two similarities might be coincidence, but more than half a dozen constitute evidence. The Denyen recall the Danawoi (Danaoi, Danaans), a term Homer sometimes used for the Greeks encamped at Troy; they also recall the Danites, a maritime people living near Jaffa, according to the books of Joshua and Judges, who evidently joined the covenant of Israel after the other eleven tribes.28 These peoples scattered; in the ninth century there was a ‘king of the Dannuniyim’ at Karatepe in southern Turkey.29 It has already been seen that we encounter D-r-d-n-y, Dardanians, on Egyptian inscriptions. The Tjekker sound similar to the Teucrians, Anatolian neighbours of the Dardanians, some of whom settled on the coast of what is now northern Israel, where Wenamun encountered them. Some scholars have seized on rough similarities in sound to assign Meryry’s allies the Shekelesh to Sicily, the Ekwesh to Ahhiyawa, making them into Mycenaeans, and the Tursha (T-r-s-w) to Tuscany, assuming an identity with the Tyrsenoi or Etruscans five centuries later. These labels described peoples, tribes or places of origin, but by the time they had been rendered into hieroglyphics they lost their vowel sounds, and they are very difficult to reconstruct.30 The overall impression is that by 1200 the eastern Mediterranean was being plagued by fluid and unstable alliances of pirates and mercenaries, able occasionally to form large enough navies and armies to pillage centres such as Pylos and Ugarit, possibly, indeed, to conduct a campaign against Troy which resulted in the fall of Troy VIIa. Sometimes they must have been attacking their own homeland, from which (to judge from later Greek legends) many a hero had been exiled. Sometimes the sack of their homeland led to an exodus of fighters who sought to recover their fortunes by attacking Cyprus, Ugarit or even the Nile Delta. Among them it is possible to identify the people of Taruisa, the area next to or fused with Wilusa. For that, and not the much later Etruscans, best explains the name Tursha; in other words, the Trojans were both Sea Peoples and victims of the Sea Peoples.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 8
