Iron is the hardest metal man has yet produced with his own hands. Eventually, every village throughout the Near East and the Far East will have its own iron foundry, and iron will become the metal of the people. Farmers will use iron tools, including scythes, hammers, axes, hoes, and plows to work heavy clay soils.
Iron farm and wood implements from around the first BCE
But given these violent times, iron will have its most immediate impact on warfare. Iron weapons will transform the “who” and “how” of warfare, taking armed conquest out of the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful and giving it to small farmers, shopowners and craftsman for the first time.
Ancient Egyptian inscriptions depict the feared invaders of the Iron Age as a cross between pirates and refugees. Coming from places as far away as the Balkans, southern Italy, Sicily, Greece, or Palestine, many carried their women and children in tow, suggesting a forced mass migration more than an arbitrary bid to conquer. Wherever they came from, whoever they were, whatever drove them from their homes, these “Sea Peoples” left devastation in their wake. Over the course of a decade, they would demolish every important city in Macedonia and the Hittite Empire, modern Syria.
Four hundred years before they faced the invasion of the Sea Peoples, the Hittites had been on the other end of the invaders’ sword. Around 1600 BCE, tribes of Indo-Europeans, including the Hittites, migrated from the Eurasian steppes, first into Persia and then into Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. The Indo-Europeans had two major advantages against the civilized peoples of the ancient world: horses and war chariots. By the fourth century BCE, the Hittite empire was Egypt’s major rival in the Near East.
The thriving Hittite city of Ugarit on the southern coastline of modern Syria was among the first and hardest hit by the Sea Peoples. Around 1190 BCE, the marauders utterly destroyed this ancient cosmopolitan city. Surviving clay tablets, known as “letters from the oven”—because they were written by scribes (and left not fully baked) on the eve and days after Ugarit’s destruction—allow us to visualize the city’s final hours through the eyes and unheard pleas of those living through its horror.
THE DESTRUCTION OF UGARIT
KING AMMURAPI OF UGARIT, SURROUNDED BY HIS wife, advisers and scribes, is in the House of the Evens, an inner chamber of his fortressed palace. Pacing the stone floor, Ammurapi repeats a message read to him off a clay tablet received from his overlord, Hittite king Suppiluliuma of Anatolia: “The enemy advances against us, and there is no number. . . . Our number is . . . Whatever is available, look for it, and send it to me.”
Ammurapi is stunned by this desperate appeal for help from the most powerful king of the southeastern Mediterranean. Suddenly, he is all too aware of the imminent threat he, too, faces from this new enemy of whom he has heard scarcely believable reports over the past few years.
His chief military adviser begs him not to send their ships and armies away at such a dangerous time. What if the marauders come to Ugarit first? Ammurapi shakes his head, saying he must respond to his overlord—or risk his wrath later. Surely King Suppiluliuma will defeat the Sea Peoples with Ugarit’s ships and men—and make their own defense unnecessary.
Another clay tablet, bearing a letter Ammurapi wrote subsequently to his father-in-law, the ruler of Alashiya (modern Cyprus), indicates that the Ugarit King acquiesced to his neighbor’s request, sending most of his fleet to aid in Anatolia’s defense. Unfortunately for Ammurapi, the Sea People promptly conquered Alashiya and then turned their flotilla in his direction. As his adviser had warned, the city of Ugarit had virtually no military defenses left to fend them off. This letter offers the king’s sober assessment of the brutal attack that left his city in ruin.
My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came; my cities were burned, and they did evil things to my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots are in the Hittite country. . . . Thus the country is abandoned. May my father know it; the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage on us.
By the time they had finished their conquests, the seafaring invaders had demolished all the major population centers of Cyprus and Hattusas, the Hittite capital. The fact that these once formidable Bronze Age cities could be taken down by marauders whose total force, according to Ammurapi, traveled on just seven ships, shows both the vulnerability of these kingdoms and the aggressive capabilities of the Sea Peoples.
In another undelivered tablet addressed to someone named Zrdn, Ammurapi provided more gruesome details of the city’s demise. “Our food on the threshing floor is burned and also the vineyards are destroyed,” he wrote. “Our city is destroyed and may you know it.”
The city of Ugarit was never rebuilt.
AFTER ITS FALL, THE SEA PEOPLES set sail for Egypt. Their first Egyptian target was Medinet Habu, near Luxor, the site of the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramses III, ruler from 1198 to 1166 BCE. In Transcriptions still visible on the temple walls provide an after-the-fact record of the enemy invasion—celebrating the successful defense of the city by the Pharaoh’s army. Ramses’ account of the battle shows a great civilization routing a barbarian force, but Egypt’s victory over the invaders was by no means assured. In fact, the Egyptian state would never fully recover from the assault their elite army waged against a grossly underestimated upstart force known as the Sea Peoples in 1175 BCE.
ATTACK OF THE SEA PEOPLE
IT IS DAWN IN A COASTAL VILLAGE ON THE MOUTH of Egypt’s Nile Delta. A boy of around ten and his grandfather are crouched next to their fishing boat, inspecting nets before they set off. The aged man holds a sharp stick with a large eye threaded with string in one hand, a net in the other.
In the distance, residents of the village and its surrounding farms are starting their chores—crushing grain, feeding farm animals—unaware that their lives are about to be savagely disrupted.
The boy finishes his inspection and tosses the net into the boat. His grandfather is still hunched over his net, repairing a large hole, so the boy leans against the side of the boat to rest, closing his eyes for a brief return to dreamland before he must put all his attention on the day’s work. When he opens his eyes a moment later, he is startled by a strange sight. There, just off the coast, a line of unfamiliar boats approaches. Confused, the boy turns to his grandfather to ask who they might be. He fails to notice that one of the boats has already reached land—and its occupants have disembarked.
Making their way up the beach, occasionally dropping back to hide behind other moored boats and equipment, a dozen heavily armed warriors, some wearing face paint and horned helmets, advance. By the time the boy and his grandfather see them, it is too late.
One of the brutes grabs the boy by the back of his neck and holds a machete against his throat. The old man jumps to his feet and waves his netting tool in the air, railing at the invader to let go of his grandson and to come after him instead. Seeing that he has become the brute’s new target, he yells at the boy, telling him to run to the village and warn the others. The child obeys and darts away, a look of terror on his face; his last image is of his beloved grandfather falling to the sand in a pool of his own blood.
As the boy flees down the beach, he gets a closer look at his attacker’s grounded boat. He’s surprised to see women and children on board. Thinking of his mother and sisters still at home, he runs as fast as his legs can carry him from the beach through the outlying streets, hoping to reach his home in time. He shouts out warnings to the few people he encounters, pointing behind him.
Reaching the center of the village, the boy stops and looks quickly in every direction, dismayed to see more men resembling those on the beach. They fan out ahead of him, carrying torches and leaving homes ablaze in their wake. One marauder grabs a young Egyptian woman and forces her, screaming, into a house, pulling the door shut behind him. A wave of nausea comes over the boy when he sees two more brutes use their blades to slash down two men attempting to defend their home and families. He thinks of his g
randfather and fights back tears.
From where he stands, the boy looks to the northeast and sees that his own neighborhood is engulfed in flames. Black smoke pours up above the rooftops into the sky. He steels himself against the thought of his family’s fate.
Remembering a small shed used for storing surplus grain, not far away, he turns and speeds in the opposite direction. He is relieved to find the shed unlocked and half full of grain sacks. The boy crouches behind a pile, but still feels exposed, so he lies down in a fetal position, pulling several sacks of wheat down on top of him.
With his hands over his ears to block out the screams and cries that are getting louder and more desperate from the street, the boy doesn’t hear the heavy footsteps outside. By the time he smells the smoke and pushes the sacks off, the shed is already engulfed in flames, and he is trapped.
He prays to Isis for his safe journey into the afterlife.
Ultimately, the pharaoh of the time, Ramses III, rallied a strong defense and triumphed over the invaders, but Egypt never recovered. Economic problems created social unrest, including the first documented labor strike in history. The king’s successors lost control of the country. In 1069 BCE, the central government collapsed.
While the Sea Peoples savaged the civilizations of the Near East, foreigners called Dorians invaded and destroyed the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization of Greece. Their arrival marked a step backward from civilization. Major cities were destroyed or suffered a substantial decline in population. Greek society reverted to small-scale farming and animal herding. Trade withered. The art of writing vanished for roughly five hundred years.
Who were these Dorians? They were thought to be another branch of the Sea People. According to their own mythology, the Dorians were descendants of the mythical hero Hercules, and had returned to southern Greece to reclaim their rightful inheritance. Unlike the raiders who attacked the Hittites, the Dorians stayed, settling first in central Greece and then moving into the Peloponnesus and along the coast of Asia Minor. They soon divided into smaller groups, including the Spartans, who would develop some of the most advanced military tactics the world had ever known.
FOR THE POPULATIONS RIMMING the Mediterranean Sea, recovery from the catastrophes of 1200 BCE was slow. If the invasions of the Sea Peoples in the Near East and the Dorians in the Aegean marked the end of the ancient world, they also provided the opportunity for something new to grow. Beginning around 1000 BCE, new, smaller states proliferated along the Mediterranean coast, created by survivors, refugees, and rebels at the edges of the empires; thus were born the city-states of Israel, Rome, Phoenicia, and Greece.
Map of Mediterranean, showing city states: Rome, Athens, Sparta, Phoenicia, and Israel
View of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece
In a demonstration of how geography influences culture, the mountainous landscape and scattered islands of Greece gave birth to independent city-states. Some, like Athens, were smaller Mycenaean cities that escaped destruction by invaders because they were not particularly important. Others, like Sparta, were colonized by the Dorian invaders. For the most part, the city-states were built around an urban center on a defensible hill. This acropolis—literally, a “high city”—became the political, administrative, and religious center for the surrounding countryside.
Like the Sumerian city-states before them, the Greek city-states were politically independent and linked by a sense of common identity as Hellenes. Residents were bound together by language, religion, and a group of cultural institutions that were shared by all the city-states, most notably the oracle at Delphi and the Olympic Games.
Greek citizens considered themselves “politically free,” in contrast to the “bound barbarians” of the Eastern empires—particularly Persia, ruled by a tyrannical god-king. A council of elders, elected by citizens from both the city and its surrounding territory, governed most of these states.
Who was eligible to be a citizen and participate in public life, and just what citizenship meant, differed from one city to the next. As a rule, though, land ownership and participation in the city’s defense were the defining factors. Since landowning peasants were the backbone of the Greek city-states, most of a city’s adult males were often citizens. Slaves, landless peasants, resident foreigners, and women were not. Over time, two city-states came to dominate the Hellenic world: Athens and Sparta. Yet despite their common culture, they were organized on fundamentally different principles.
Athens is best known for creating the first template for democracy out of the council structure of the Greek city-state. Like other Greek city-states, Sparta was ruled by a council elected by its male citizens. Unlike other Greek city-states, Spartan society was based on a rigid class system that divided the population into a tiny group of “citizens” and a much larger group of “helots.” Helots were owned collectively by the Spartan state. They had no political rights. Like medieval serfs, they were tied to the land and owed a portion of every harvest to their Spartan overlords. Individual helots could win their freedom or even become Spartan citizens for acts of bravery, but it didn’t happen often. By the fifth century BCE, roughly two hundred thousand helots supported about ten thousand citizens. Periodic revolts by the helots were a fact of Spartan history.
The army, created to protect Sparta from attacks from without and helot uprisings from within, was the central institution of Spartan society. To ensure a strong army, weak or deformed infants were exposed to the elements and left to die by order of the state. Male Spartans were raised by the state in common barracks from the age of seven. Their first task was to weave a mat from river reeds; it would be their mattress for the rest of their lives. They were assigned to units, subjected to harsh discipline, and educated in a curriculum designed to turn them into perfect soldiers of a warrior state. By age twenty, Spartan males had become part of a fearsome, disciplined fighting force. Those who entered the ranks of the most elite warriors wore armor made of expensive bronze.
Much like today, access to natural resources and superiority in manipulating them were key in securing power and advantage. The Spartans had a definite advantage over any army they might face: they controlled the richest iron mines in the region, and their metalworkers used them to produce a huge armory of lethal weapons. Spartan soldiers were armed with iron spears and swords capable of piercing bronze and leather armor. These arms would become critical in their next battle.
As different as they were in the fifth century, arch rivals Athens and Sparta were ultimately forced to unite against the threat of annihilation posed by a common enemy: the mighty Persian Empire to their east. Had these city-states not come together to resist this imperial invasion, thereby preserving the seed of democracy planted in Athens, we can never know whether the idea of rule “of the people, by the people” would have re-blossomed in the Roman Republic and taken hold in Colonial America.
Relatively untouched by invasions by the Sea People, the inland nation of Persia took advantage of the disruptions in the Mediterranean and expanded unchecked to engulf two million square miles from India to Greece. Its borders contained fifteen million people, making it the greatest empire the world had yet seen. When the Persian Empire began to covet lands to the west, it came in direct conflict with the “politically free” Greek city-states to whom the Persians were “bound barbarians.”
Armed conflict between Persians and Greeks began during the reign of Persian king Cyrus the Great, who conquered the Greek provinces of Ionia in 546 BCE. Always accommodating to the beliefs of conquered peoples, Cyrus granted the Greeks self-government for their internal affairs. Nonetheless, the Ionian provinces gave the Persians constant trouble. In 499, the unrest in Ionia escalated into revolt, supported by a small fleet of ships from the city-state of Athens. It took the Persians five years to suppress the Ionian revolt. Then they turned their attention toward the larger Greek city-states.
The first stage of the Persian Wars, or Greco-Persian Wars, occurred in 490 BCE, when the Athe
nians fought the Persians alone: seventy-two hundred infantrymen from the Athenian militia against Persia’s twenty-five thousand professional soldiers. Amazingly, the Athenians won, thanks to a surprise maneuver on their part and a slow response from the Persian commanders.
The Persians tried again ten years later. King Xerxes led a huge army across Anatolia and into Greece, supported by a fleet of twelve hundred warships. The Persian army was so large that it traveled slowly, giving the Greeks time to prepare. The war began badly for the Greeks. They made their first attempt to stop the Persians at Thermopylae, a narrow pass between the mountains and the sea. The effort failed, but it was the Greeks’ last major defeat.
The Persian Wars were not just a battle between empire and democracy; they were also a contest between two very different kinds of warfare. From the beginning, the Persian army had been based on elite corps of armed horsemen and accurate archers. The Greek army depended on infantry, armed with long spears and two-edged swords. Each city-state had its own militia, made up of citizen soldiers, called hoplites, after the round shields they carried. The shield was a critical element in the Greek battle tactic known as the phalanx. Heavily armed soldiers stood in long, closely packed lines several ranks deep. Each man’s shield covered his own left side and the right side of the man to his left. The densely packed lines moved forward in step to the sound of a flute. The formation was difficult to turn; it was equally difficult for an opposing army to stop as long as the formation held. If the enemy penetrated the formation, it became little more than a mob.
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