Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World

Philip Matyszak

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780500775394
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The ancient world saw the birth and collapse of great civilizations. In mainstream history the Classical world is dominated by Greece and Rome, and the Biblical world is centred on the Hebrews. Yet the roughly four-and-a-half thousand years (4000 bcad 550) covered in this book saw many peoples come and go within the brawling, multi-cultural mass of humanity that occupied the ancient Middle East, Mediterranean and beyond. While a handful of ancient cultures have garnered much of the credit, these forgotten peoples also helped to lay the foundations of our modern world. This guide brings these lost peoples out of the shadows to highlight their influence and achievements.

Forty-five entries span the birth of civilization in Mesopotamia to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, offering an alternative history focusing on the names we arent familiar with, from the Hurrians to the Hephthalites, as well as the peoples whose names we know, such as the Philistines and the Vandals, but whose real significance has been obscured. Each entry charts the rise and fall of a lost people, and how their culture echoes through history into the present. Important ancient artefacts are illustrated throughout and fifty specially drawn maps help orientate the reader within this tumultuous period of history. Philip Matyszak brings to life the rich diversity of the peoples founding cities, inventing alphabets and battling each other in the ancient world, and explores how and why they came to be forgotten.

Part One

The First Civilizations

Early States in Mesopotamia and Egypt

The Akkadians

The First Empire Builders

The Amorites

‘Founders’ of Babylon

The Canaanites

Israel Before the Israelites

The Elamites

The Empire Before Persia

The Hittites

Masters of Anatolia

The Hyksos

Invaders of Egypt

The Sea Peoples

Riders of the Storm

What exactly is civilization? Essentially it’s where we find large-scale societies, often cities and states organized hierarchically, with rulers (usually together with priests and a warrior caste) controlling labourers and craftsmen to direct the flow of wealth, establishing inequality. Civilization is certainly about decent roads and sewers, but it is also about taxation and social order, advances in technology – critically weaponry – and, more often than not, the moving of ‘lesser peoples’ out of the way of ‘progress’.

This story begins when humans in Mesopotamia first learned to live together in large numbers. It is on the whole their ideas which spread westwards, changing and being changed by the peoples encountered along the way. Our story ends with waves of migratory peoples invading Europe from the north and east. Yet these invaders did not destroy civilization. Instead they were absorbed into it, just as the first empire-builders were absorbed into Sumeria all those thousands of years ago.

When we look at the early history of Mesopotamia – in ancient Greek literally the land ‘between two rivers’ and covering modern-day Iraq and parts of Syria – and the Levant, the first impression is of confusion and chaos. Cities seem to rise and fall in a heartbeat, and people with strange names briefly flicker on and off the stage of history. It is hard to keep track of even major civilizations, let alone peripheral tribes and nations.

There are two reasons for this. First, in these early days Mesopotamia was a confusing place, and the lands to the north and west of it even more so. Cities were brand new, and civilization was just beginning to get to grips with urbanism. Basic principles such as administration, law codes and record-keeping were being developed from scratch. Nor were the innovators in these early cities allowed to get on with their work without disturbance. Large settlements attracted waves of migrants, mostly from the north. Newcomers, whether arriving peacefully or as armed invaders, had to be integrated into the already complex mix of cultures existing in the region.

The second reason why this period seems so chaotic is because of the ‘telescoping’ perception of history. ‘Ancient history’ happened long ago, and we tend to imagine that it all happened more or less at once. Even people who are familiar with the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) may be surprised to learn that when he saw the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, they were already half as old as they are now. Herodotus also describes the city of Babylon. One of its kings had a passion for archaeology. It takes a moment to adjust to the fact that the ruler of a civilization so old that archaeologists today are delighted to discover any relics of its existence was himself interested in digging up evidence of earlier civilizations. The artefacts he unearthed were even more ancient when he found them than the ruins of his own civilization are today.

Finally, our understanding of the first civilizations is constantly evolving as archaeologists and scientists make new discoveries. Textbooks published just a few decades ago are already in need of substantial revision. So it’s no wonder that ancient Mesopotamia can seem such a perplexing place. And even in ancient Egypt, where we seem to have a more focused picture of the trajectory of civilization, there are still interludes of relative chaos that historians call ‘intermediate periods’ – a technical term for ‘times when we have no clue what was going on’. Therefore, in this earliest era, it is even more necessary than usual to establish our forgotten peoples in a framework of time and place.

It is no accident that civilization first emerged along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, and a short time later along the Nile in Egypt. In Mesopotamia crops only flourished thanks to irrigation, a project which required large numbers of people to work together. Such organized efforts not only fed the labourers who created and maintained the irrigation canals, but also generated an agricultural surplus that could feed the hungry mouths in the first cities. Likewise in Egypt, labour was centrally organized to exploit the soils enriched by the annual flooding of the Nile.

Thus in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, geographical circumstances allowed dominating elites to harness the power of collective activity, propelling the growth of the first cities, states and empires. Climate change seems to have been a trigger too: a steep decline in sea levels after 3500 BC reduced the flow of the great rivers, forcing an intensification of canal building. The cities best able to exploit scarce resources came out on top through a combination of strength and sophistication. Uruk, well-positioned beside the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, became the first known city in the world in around 3500 BC. At its height, Uruk, capital of the Sumerian civilization, occupied an area twice the size of Classical Athens, and as many as 50,000 people may have lived within its walls.

To manage an increasingly complex economy, the Sumerians invented the world’s first writing system. This was cuneiform – a script of wedge-shaped symbols produced by pressing a stylus cut from reed into soft clay tablets. Archaeologists are eternally grateful for the fact that these clay tablets are almost indestructible, particularly when baked hard in one of the many conflagrations that plagued early cities. As a result, tens of thousands of records covering thousands of years have survived, documenting the details of the successive states and empires of the Middle East.

A Semitic-speaking people, the Akkadians established the world’s first empire, which they ruled from the lost city of Akkad. The Akkadians dominated not just the Sumerian city-states in the south but all of Mesopotamia for 150 years, before fading from view around 2190 BC.

Thereafter the main pattern of Mesopotamian power politics is one of rivalry between two new centres of authority. Babylon (originally an Akkadian stronghold) in the south and Assyria in the north established competing empires after 1800 BC. It was a little-known, semi-nomadic people from Syria, the Amorites, who put Babylon on the road to empire, particularly under Hammurabi, the city’s famous law-giver.

By now new centres of power had emerged at the western and eastern peripheries of the Middle East. The Hittites in Anatolia became strong enough to sack Babylon in 1595 BC, while the Elamites of the western Iranian highlands were a constant thorn in the side of the lowland Mesopotamians. (They also took a turn at conquering Babylon, briefly, in 694 BC.)

By comparison with the often bewildering flux of states and empires in Mesopotamia, the waxing and waning of Egyptian civilization to the south seems deceptively straightforward. The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt after 3100 BC resulted some 600 years later, during the Old Kingdom, in the building of the pyramids of Giza – a spectacular manifestation of the power of a highly centralized state. Yet the Egyptians were not immune to disruption from invaders. Around 1650 BC they were almost overwhelmed from the north by the mysterious Hyksos, and suffered the ignominy of foreign domination for the next century. The Egyptians eventually threw the invaders out, but sensibly retained their innovations in agriculture and weaponry.

The new Egyptian royal dynasty established the New Kingdom around 1550 BC. This became a fully-fledged empire, launching regular campaigns north into the Levant and south into Nubia to expand Egypt’s borders. This military exercise brought the Egyptians, led by Ramesses the Great, into conflict with the Hittites, most notably at the so-called ‘first battle in history’ at Qadesh in Syria, around 1274 BC. It appears that the Egyptians came second in this confrontation – though that was not how Ramesses recorded it, carving monumental images of his glorious victories on temple walls across the country.

The lands these powers fought over in the Levant had been occupied by the Canaanites for millennia. But, with what historians know as the Bronze Age collapse of around 1200 BC, it was the elusive Sea Peoples who extinguished the Hittites and threw Egypt into chaos. The battles between Sea Peoples and the communities they targeted were more savage but no less intense than the debates among modern scholars who attempt to determine where the Sea Peoples came from, or what drove them.

What is certain is that the Sea Peoples were the harbingers of a so-called Dark Age that endured for 300 years, until the states and empires of the new Iron Age emerged, transforming humanity once more.

c. 2334 BC – 2190 BC

The Akkadians

The First Empire Builders

Naram-sin, mighty king, the king of Akkad,

king of the four corners of the earth

Who glorifies Ishtar and Amunitum….

Whose ancestor Sargon defeated Uruk,

and freed the people of Kish

Shaving off the hairstyles [of slaves] and

breaking their shackles.

Tablet of Naram-Sin

The Akkadians achieved a series of firsts that set the template for the great states that were to follow. They founded the world’s first empire, ruled over by the first god-king, and established the first professional military force.

Sargon, founder of the first empire

The people called the Akkadians were one obscure tribe among many in the huge and diverse melting pot that was Upper Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. But Akkadian history really begins with a king called Sargon the Great (r. c. 2334–2279 BC). How Sargon transformed these obscure peoples into rulers of an empire that stretched from the headwaters of the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf is uncertain. Sargon’s origins are – literally – the stuff of myth. It is claimed that his mother was a priestess, and whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Introduction: Resurrecting a Forgotten World
• Part One: The First Civilizations
• Part Two: From Assyria to Alexander
• Part Three: The Coming of Rome
• Part Four: The Fall of Rome in the West
• Epilogue
• Further Reading
• Sources of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright