Bronze Age Syria: Cradle of Cities

Introduction to Bronze Age Syria

0:00Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe.

0:30More than 4,000 years ago, a powerful king looks over his capital. His kingdom stretches far and wide, but challenges are always on the horizon. Other kingdoms seek an end to his city's dominance. Now this king's name is Erkab-Darmu, and he's the ruler of the city of Ebla in Syria. We know him today from clay tablets unnerved at that very site, documenting some of the earliest known diplomacy from anywhere in the world,

1:00including the first ever, get this, the first ever recorded peace treaty, agreed between Erkab-Darmu's kingdom of Ebla and a recently defeated challenger. It's an amazing window, one of many, into Syria's Bronze Age story. Sandwiched between titan powers like Egypt, the Hittites, Babylon and Assyria, for thousands of years, Syria was far more than just a highway for invading armies. It was a powerhouse in its own right.

1:33Vibrant Syrian cities like Ebla and many more rose, fell and shaped ancient history, leaving behind some of the richest archives ever discovered. It's a story of intercity rivalries, of far-reaching trade networks, foreign invasions and some of the earliest known diplomacy on Earth.

Meeting Dr Amanda Padani

1:53Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And today, I'm delighted to be rejoined by my good friend, Dr. Amanda Padani, Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic University. Amanda is here to discuss all the things Bronze Age Syria.

2:23Amanda, it's such a pleasure to have you back on the show. It's lovely to be here, and in person. And in person, once again, exploring the Bronze Age. Not our favourite person, Ayn Azir, this time. If we can get a reference to him, maybe, but we'll see. He lived in the wrong part of the world. Because the part of the world we're talking about is Syria. Yes. And Syria in the Bronze Age, it can often be called the crossroads, but it's so much more than that. At the same time, it really was the beating heart of the Bronze Age world. It was, and it gets overlooked. But there was, because Syria was right, as you say, in the middle of everything.

2:56And it was a region that was very closely connected to Mesopotamia, but it's also very closely connected to the Mediterranean and to Anatolia. And it was the centre of some really major kingdoms. You know, I have to say, one of the things that's often struck me is that had archaeologists excavated in Syria first, rather than in Mesopotamia first, one could imagine them thinking of Syria as the centre, as the place, the cradle of civilisation. They wouldn't have quite been right, because, of course, the south is a little bit earlier,

3:28the cities are a little bit bigger. But because the studies began with Mesopotamia, Syria was sort of seen as a peripheral area. But it really was not in any way peripheral. It was really central, as we now know. And should we also be thinking of this as a, maybe using the term cradle is a bit too much, but I'll use it nonetheless, a cradle of cities, but they're all kind of independent. They all have their own amazing cultures as well that you can see in the surviving archaeology. Absolutely, yes. And throughout this time period, as in southern Mesopotamia,

3:59you go from having kingdoms to larger territorial states and back to kingdoms again. And it has some really important centres, but also some fabulous archaeological finds that give us so much information.

Timeline and languages of the region

4:14And when mentioning, when we talk about Bronze Age Syria, just how large a period of time are we talking about? It's a long period. I think we would sort of start for what we know in this region, around 3000 BC, and it would go all the way up to 1200, approximately, so a very long time. And do we have a lot of source material to learn more about the people and the cities and the lifestyle throughout all of this period? We do. Less for the very early periods. We don't have much written material at all.

4:46But as soon as you get to about 2400 BC, there's plenty of written evidence. And then all the way up to the end of the Bronze Age, there are particular sites where there have been thousands of cuneiform tablets that have been found. So it's cuneiform. That's the main writing script that you have there. Yes, they're writing cuneiform on clay tablets as in the South. The writing system is the same. They were even using the same languages. So Akkadian, which was spoken and written in the South, Sumerian, which was spoken and written in the South, were both written in the North,

5:17although we know that the languages were slightly different. But they did use Sumerian and Akkadian for their writing system, yeah. And the people themselves who are living in Syria, I've got two names in particular here. I've got Amorite and I've got Hurrian. I mean, what do we mean by these terms? Yes. Okay. So Amorites are a little bit hard to define because the term comes from the Bible. There was a group of people in the Bible referred to as the Amorites. And in Mesopotamia, these people are referred to often as Amuru,

5:48which is obviously a related term, means the West. And then there's a language that is defined as Amorite. That's the name modern scholars have given to it, which is a West Semitic language. It was the language of some people who moved into Mesopotamia. Hammurabi's dynasty was Amorite. There was a gradual movement. It wasn't an invasion. They arrived over time from apparently the West. And there are a lot of people with Amorite names in Syria. But whether they thought of themselves

6:20as a particular group is unclear. It's not that they, they define themselves by their tribes. And this is again, different from Southern Mesopotamia. The Syrian people, especially around the old Babylonian period, 2000 to 1500 or so, it's very clear that they thought of themselves primarily as members of a particular tribe. And those tribes were what we would call Amorite tribes. But I don't think they would have recognized a shared sort of Amorite identity,

6:50even though they spoke a shared Amorite language. The Hurrians, a completely unrelated language. So again, it's a language group rather than an ethnic group. So people who spoke Hurrian, Hurrian is unrelated to Sumerian or Akkadian or Amorite. It's a very different language. It's incredibly hard to learn. Apparently, I've never tried. Very, very few people read Hurrian. But they didn't write it very much, which is actually convenient for us because the Hurrian speakers and the Amorite speakers

7:21almost always used Akkadian to write in. So we know about their languages from their names. We know from a few texts in Hurrian that were written. But largely, even though they had these Hurrian names and apparently they spoke Hurrian, they didn't write it. So for historians, that makes life a little bit easier. So some cities and some powers in Bronze Age Syria, as I'm sure we'll explore, will be largely using the name Amorite when talking about them or that's how they're referred to. But others, and largely later on during the Bronze Age,

7:53that's when you see more Hurrians. Actually, no, the Hurrians are very, very, very ancient. They're very ancient. So even one of the earliest sites, a site called Urkish, that's a Hurrian site. So there's lots of coexistence between the two. Oh, and that's true throughout Mesopotamian history. The many different languages spoken in the same region and the bilingualism, there's an enormous amount of bilingualism where people could speak both and they could communicate with one another. And sometimes even within a family, and this is kind of remarkable. So we always assume

8:24that someone's personal name represents their language, right? So if they have an Amorite personal name, presumably they were speaking Amorite at home. But you have a family with a father with an Akkadian name and he gives one of his sons an Amorite name and maybe the other son a Hurrian name. So there's a lot of either intermarriage going on or a lot of, there's just a lot of sort of cross-pollinization of this culture. And both are using the same Cunair form scripts to do both languages, which is what I love. You can find a Cunair form tablet from Syria that is in Amorite

8:55and then another Cunair form tablet which is in Hurrian. I love that. Not any in Amorite. Amorite, they just didn't write. It's so weird. They didn't write their own language. They wrote in Akkadian. They wrote in Akkadian. Even though they were, it was true of the later people called the Kassites in Mesopotamia. They just didn't write in Kassite. They would write in Akkadian even though we know they were speaking Kassite. They went to school and they learned, in a way perhaps like Latin in the Middle Ages, you learned Akkadian in school and it's what you wrote in even though you might not be speaking it all the time.

9:27Fair enough. Yeah.

The early kingdom of Ebla

9:28Well, let's go back to the early Bronze Age and I appreciate we know less about this period. But do we have a sense at least of what Syria looked like at the beginning? Is this when we see the emergence of states, the emergence of these independent cities? Yes. The most prominent one is Ebla, the one that we know the most about. And it's a really large state compared to the southern Mesopotamian states. In southern Mesopotamia, there were kingdoms like Ur and Lagash that in terms of their physical size were considerably smaller than Ebla. Ebla controlled a large area

10:00of northwestern Syria. And it was a really flourishing kingdom. kingdom, it had a whole dynasty of kings. We know their names. Only the very latest ones do we have their archives because the way with Kuneiform, the frustration with Kuneiform is that one tends to have a lot of documents from the most recent period. And then as you go back in time at that site, you have fewer and fewer.

10:31And in the case of Ebla, as with so many sites that are well preserved, the palace burned at the end. And that preserved all of the tablets that were current at the time. But they did recycle Kuneiform tablets. So if they weren't baked, you could reuse the clay and it was very fine clay and so they would reuse it. And it meant that fewer and fewer texts were kept after a few hundred years. You know, unless they had been baked, in which case there's nothing you can do to recycle them. You find fewer of them. So for the latest period at Ebla, up to about

11:022300 BCE, we have a ton of material. And then we know about its earlier history from what those kings remembered and what they recorded. About their forefathers. About their forefathers. But it's much less clear what was going on earlier. But clearly there had been a kingdom there for a very long time, maybe from 2900 or so.

11:25There was another kingdom to the west called Mari, even in the time of Ebla, that was its major neighbor. There was another kingdom called Nagar. So these kingdoms divided Syria between them and they had these very complicated relationships in that sometimes they were allied. And we know that very, very early on they were writing treaties, they were creating alliances, they were taking vassals. And then later, those same kingdoms

11:55would go to war. So there was a period of warfare between Ebla and Mari. And those, the records are interesting because we don't have a single royal inscription at this time. In the south, the kings would say, I, so and so, have done all these fabulous things. In the north,

12:12if they wrote them, we haven't found them in this period. So there's no royal inscription from Ebla in which a king says, you know, I, Irkab Damo, did this, that, and the other. So a lot of it is reconstructed from letters. There are some political letters that were written, but especially from administrative texts. So they would keep track of sort of the amount of gold that was going out or the amount of silver that was going out for various purposes. And sometimes they were for at a time when a treaty was being drawn up. And so they would mention

12:42the treaty that was being drawn up. And then we would know that there, obviously this treaty with Mari was taking place. Did these early Syrian cities like Ebla, Mari, and so on, you mentioned like gold and silver, did they have their own luxury resources or was this a result of extensive trade networks that they already had? It was trade networks. Gold and silver are not native to Syria, but they had vast quantities of it. And it seems to have largely been coming from Anatolia. Right. So Turkey today. Turkey today. And they were trading largely,

13:13as far as one can tell, in textiles. So they had, and this is the classic Mesopotamian story, is that, and Syria is the same way, they had vast herds of sheep. The king of Ebla at one point lists 80,000 sheep in his herd. And so they had access to really fine wool and there were different grades of wool and different colors of wool that had particular status attached to them. And then they would have armies of weavers who would be working to make what must have been just spectacular textiles.

13:46And they don't survive, so we can't see them. But the amount of time spent on them, the amount of attention to how they were stored. They were stored in a treasury, so they must have been very, very valuable. And whenever someone from Ebla was, for example, going to visit a distant king, they would be given this sort of set of textiles to take to that person or to be as a gift. Kind of a gift, a diplomatic gift. It must have been absolutely gorgeous,

14:16but it must have been months of work and incredibly fine. And those then were the ways that the Eblaites were able to bring in the very valuable gold, silver, other precious stones and so forth that they needed. And do we think that was really the source of their power? I guess we don't know, but do we think that commercial might was a key factor as to why Ebla became so powerful, so prominent, that by the time we get to those later kings that we'll explore. It does seem to be

14:46one of the top dogs, fighting and being able to hold its own against other big cities in Syria at that time. Yes, it does. I think it's one of the reasons. Another reason is that Syria is a very rich agricultural area and they had grain, of course, but also olives and vines grew in the region of Ebla and olive oil and wine were always valuable and they don't grow in the south. You can't grow vines and olives in southern Mesopotamia. And so if they wanted wine or if they wanted olive oil, those were going to be coming from the region of Syria.

15:18And so that must have been a major source of funds for them as well. And we can imagine in these cities, places like Ebla, I don't know if we can use the kingdom yet, but maybe regional powers? We can use kingdoms? I think so. I mean, because they have this list of kings that goes back so far, almost certainly there were kings at the same time you first have kings in the south, which is around 2900. So it seems as though kingship developed probably simultaneously in Syria and in Mesopotamia. And so these kings, we don't know much about them,

15:48but we do know that they were, it was a very stable dynasty and that those kings were venerated for hundreds of years after their reign. So they're venerated and we know about them. But obviously, if it's a rich in agriculture place, was the majority of their population we should still be imagining out in the countryside, the farmers, you know, the vineyard owners and the olive groves and all of that. The everyday people are out there and we don't know as much about them in the surviving records.

16:19We just know that they must have been a key part of this economy. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, their entire economy is based on agriculture and on herding, very much on herding as well. with the sheep and goats. And then, as you say, there must have been enormous numbers of people. We know the names of a lot of villages and towns in Ebla. We don't know where they were because they haven't been excavated, but it's certainly, you know, we know that that was, that people lived out there. They weren't all in the cities and they were tremendously important to the economy, of course, yes.

16:50Talking about cities, before we focus on this figure of Erkab Damu, Erkab Damu, very interesting, great stories here. Big cities in Syria today, one might think of Damascus or Aleppo and the like. Do they also have their origins around this time? They do and unfortunately, we don't know much about them, even though, of course, they were very important cities even in the ancient world because there's a modern city on the top and when you have a modern city, you can't excavate under it. You know, you can't.

17:21And there's so many important layers between modern times and 2500 BCE. It would be inconceivable to be able to get down to the level that you would want to because it would be destroying so much on the way down that is equally important, you know, to the history of Syria. And so most excavations happen on sites that were abandoned quite a long time ago, very long time ago, because then you don't have intervening layers

17:51between the ancient world and the present. And one of the great things about Ablo when it was found is that the Bronze Age material was right there, right near the surface and so it meant that it was possible to excavate quite widely in this period rather than just getting maybe, you know, if it went all the way down through, I don't know, if you were digging a subway or something in Damascus or Aleppo, you would find things just in such sort of a limited area and in so little context. No, exactly. Medieval stuff or, you know, Roman stuff. I think Damascus is one of the most continually inhabited cities in the whole

18:23world. Yes, yes. But it's amazing to think that maybe the kings of Ebla and Mari were also having negotiations with the king of Damascus or Aleppo as well. Yes. No, they were. We know they were because the other kings wrote about them. Oh. So, especially Aleppo, which was called Halab, its king was considered in the later period, the most powerful of the kings of the time. King of Yamhad was the name of his kingdom. And we don't know about him from his own kingdom at all. We just have these references by other kings knowing which

18:53tells us, oh my gosh, if it were possible to excavate the Bronze Age palace at Aleppo, that would be extraordinary. That would be pretty cool, isn't it? Impossible.

Early diplomacy and treaties

19:03Well, let's focus on some of these negotiations, these interactions between kings and their subjects because early Bronze Age Syria, I know it's not quite the dawn of diplomacy, it probably stretches even earlier, right? But this is when you first get, with Ebla and its archives, evidence of diplomatic treaties almost 5,000 years old. And who is this king who is at the center of so many of these treaties? Well, Irkab Damu, he was the king of Ebla at really towards the end of the time that

19:33it was an important kingdom. And as you say, there must have been diplomacy before his time, but the very earliest evidence we have in Syria and some of the very earliest anywhere is a letter that was written in the time of Irkab Damu, not by him, but by his high official, who was writing to the high official of another kingdom called Hamazi, which as far as we can tell was so far away. I mean, it was in potentially Iran. I mean, it's unclear

20:03exactly where it was, either northern Iraq or Iran. And the two officials were writing to one another, obviously on a regular basis. And the official from Ebla was saying, you and I are brothers, meaning the two officials. And he says, and our kings are also brothers. I mean, I'm completely paraphrasing here. But this term brother meant that they were allies because for the rest of the Bronze Age, anytime someone says, I'm your brother, you are my brother,

20:34it meant not that they were actually related, but that they were both allied and equal. Right. It's that equal footing idea when treated with hierarchies. Because if they were less important, it would be son. You are my son. I'm your father. That's a sort of vassal-king relationship. So these two were equals. They were in contact. And then they list the things that they're sending as gifts and the things they expect to receive in return. And this idea of sending luxury gifts was central to diplomacy throughout the

21:05Bronze Age again. And then the fact that there's a letter that's being sent, again those were central, and that there's a person being sent as the ambassador. So those three components which are in this letter, you've got an ambassador being sent, you've got a letter being sent, and you've got gifts being sent, mean that this is already the established rule. This is how you get along with your allies. You keep in close contact, you send letters, and you expect gifts, and you give elaborate gifts. And it was so, the

21:36reason I said that this is not brand new, it's not as though they're trying to say, well, how should we get along? What should we do? This is a system that's clearly already in place. And even though this letter is our first evidence for it, it suggests that, even before they were writing, they were doing the same thing. They were just sending oral messages rather than written messages. Gosh, that oral tradition beforehand. And so this becomes standard practice for all the kings of Syria at that time, Mesopotamia, maybe even down into the Levant and into Egypt as well with the early pharaohs. Absolutely.

22:06Once Egypt becomes part of the system. Once Egypt becomes part of the system. Which takes a while. But yes, and I think then, and then also the other thing in Irkab Damu's reign is that we have a treaty, actual peace treaty. It's not between equals, it's between Irkab Damu and a lesser king. So is this the oldest known peace treaty in the world? It's the oldest known and it's the treaty of Abarsal. Take it away. And I think what's so surprising is how early it is. You know, it's 2300

22:37BCE, very, very early. And it lays out all of the agreed aspects of the relationship between the two kings, one of whom is definitely inferior to Irkab Damu. He's not an equal. But, for example, there's a wonderful section about how you treat each other's messengers. And so there's a section that says if your messenger arrived, you after 10 days, no, if the messenger arrives in your court and you keep him for more than 10 days, you have

23:07to feed him. So it's sort of like he'll come with enough rations to be able to support himself. But if you keep him waiting for your reply, you've got to feed him. You've got to feed him. And so that, again, really confirms that this is a relationship that is so established. They know what messengers do. They know the average time you're going to keep them. They want them to come home quickly. And therefore, you have this established yes, okay, I will support your messenger. I'll make sure he gets the food he needs or whatever if I'm making him stay

23:39for longer than he was anticipated. Amazing stuff. And I think what's so inspiring about this is that we often emphasize warfare when we talk about the ancient world and all the battles. And there certainly were battles and there were wars. But I think it's really interesting to find that they had a structure for avoiding war or for negotiating war if it was going to happen that is as early in the records as the writing about warfare is. And I think that tells

24:10you that this is not a sort of wild west of crazy, you know, just violence. It's a place where people really wanted orderliness. There was an aspect to the Syrians and the Mesopotamians where they liked structure. They liked things to follow certain rules. And you can see it in their treaties, you can see it in the letters. And later you can see it in letters where they say, you're not following the rules. I hate to mention this,

24:41but you are not following the rules and you need to follow the rules because that's how we coexist. Really interesting. And so that treaty in particular, with that sub-ruler, well, with the ruler that is not as powerful or Ur-Khab-Damu evidently looks down upon, has sought peace with Ur-Khab-Damu. And Ur-Khab-Damu said, okay, I will accept peace because, as you say, there's that return to stability. And Ur-Khab-Damu, he's won and now he's being realized as the top dog of that neighboring city of Abbasal, wherever it is.

25:11Abbasal, right. And this sort of relationship of a king with his vassals became a very standard relationship in Syria. So you have a king on the level of Ur-Khab-Damu who's ruling a major kingdom, but within that kingdom, he has a number of sort of sub-kings, vassal kings, who owe him tribute, who owe allegiance. And in return, they get to live in a fairly stable situation where they're not going to be being attacked. They're part of the system.

25:44And each of the kings in this period, all the way through most of the Bronze Age, that was the case. They would have vassal kings that they owed things to. And in fact, later, there are vassal kings who, there's an example of a vassal king who feels he just can't afford the kind of gifts he's supposed to be giving his king and he's sort of trying to negotiate, is there some way of avoiding you? And must I always provide you with all of this? But it was part of the system. You did provide those gifts and you had to. Look after the messengers, provide the gifts, and more

26:14as we'll cover.

The fall of Ebla and rise of Mari

26:32So Ebla seems to be pretty dominant in those early centuries of Bronze Age Syria. But that dominance doesn't last. What happens? Well, Ebla was destroyed. We know this because there's a layer of destruction right where the, at the end of, at the time, Virkha Damu and his immediate successor. And who destroyed Ebla is the interesting question. Because there's a king, very famous king, named Sargon of Akkad, who claims to have destroyed Ebla.

27:02This is the time of Sargon. And what some argue is the creation of the first empire. But it's probably more likely that it was Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, who was actually responsible for the destruction. But given the dates and so forth, and Naram-Sin also claimed to have destroyed Ebla. And he ventured all the way to Syria from Akkad, which is Iraq. In central Iraq. Central Iraq, yeah. But unfortunately, he didn't sort of put a stamp on it and say Naram-Sin was here. So we know that it was destroyed right around that time, almost very likely to have been by the

27:32Akkadian Empire. And after that period, it was never quite as dominant as it had been in the early Bronze Age. We can only speculate, but could it potentially have been a message or, you know, Ebla was the biggest city that resisted the army of the Akkadians. And so they send a message, we're now going to raise your city, as you see time and time again. But I guess you will never know. No, I know. And one can't sort of make stuff up, but it would be nice to have a little bit more information. One can theorize about it. We can theorize, yes, exactly.

28:04But of course, with all these amazing kind of independent cities in Syria, if Ebla falls, does another take its place? Or do we see an evolution in how these city-states function, how powerful they become as we move on into the next stage, almost

Shamshiadu and his sons

28:19the Middle Bronze Age? We do. There's a phase there. All through this time, Mari had been an important, that was its neighbor. I mean, very distant neighbor, but they did share a border. And sorry, where's Mari and Ebla in regards to Syria today? Mari is in the east. It's very close to the Iraqi border. Right. On the Euphrates River. On the Euphrates River. Okay, yeah. And so the capital cities were a very long way apart, but they did correspond. They did go to war. And Mari survived. Mari continued to be occupied at a time when Ebla was pretty much

28:50abandoned. So through this time, Mari was, it was a reasonably important place. But prior to Mari's period of really, the period we know very well at Mari, it too was conquered by a king named Shamshiadu. And Shamshiadu was based at another Syrian site that he called Shubat Enlil, modern Terleilan. And so for a while, Mari and the entire

29:20northern Syrian region was under the rule of this kingdom, a very short-lived kingdom, but very powerful kingdom of Shamshiadu. And Shamshiadu did something which didn't actually work out very well for him. But he had such a big kingdom, he decided to divide it in three parts. Oh, wow. So that he would put two of his sons in regional capitals as viceroys, and then he would be the great king at Shubat Enlil. And his older son was at a site called Ekalatum. His name was Ishma Dagan. And his younger son was at Mari, and

29:51his name was Yachma Adu. And Yachma Adu was one of the most incompetent, perhaps, kings. And that's saying something. It is really, really saying something. And the only reason we know this is because his father wrote to him constantly, sort of trying to get him to get his act together. And Shamshiadu would send notes, you know, these very, very long letters saying, is there no beard on your chin? Are you not a man?

30:21Can you not be more like your older brother? Leave the man alone. If he can't grow a beard, I mean, that's... It was so cruel. And then he would... At one point, Yachma Adu brought in... There was a lot of diplomatic marriage, and Yachma Adu had a marriage arranged for him by his father to a very important princess. And apparently he hadn't given her a room in the palace that he was planning on housing her somewhere else. And his father was like, what is wrong with you? She needs to be in the palace.

30:51And mostly, though, he was berated for things like he just wasn't interested in the military. His brother was a very strong military leader, Ishmael Dagan. And he would say, you know, you just are relaxing among the women and drinking wine, and you need to get your act together. Boromir wouldn't have done this kind of thing. I'm sorry, I'm getting Denethor vibes of Boromir and Faramir and Lord of the Rings, which does down Faramir too much. But I know what you mean. Kind of the disappointing younger son idea. And he makes him sound as though he was absolutely incompetent.

31:22My sense from the letters is that Yachma Adu, he loved music. He had a chief musician. His banquets always had music. He was accused of spending, you know, too much time at banquets. But one has the sense that he was someone who wasn't incompetent. I sort of maligned him there a little bit. I think he just wasn't particularly interested in the military. And he had an interest in the arts.

31:49And so he was ruling at Mari officially as its king, but with a lot of micromanagement from dad. And in fact, when he wrote to his father, he would say, basically, dear dad. He didn't address him the way that most people would. But his term for him was sort of much more personal. But they too, at that kingdom, Sham Shiaudu died in 1776, which is very easy to remember because it's in America, but 1776 BCE.

32:20And after his death, his older son took over and turned out not to be as brilliant as his father. There's a very famous letter that was sent to the older son by the king of a kingdom named Khadna, which was on the coast of Syria. I think we may have talked about this letter before, but he sent a letter saying, I sent you beautiful horses and you sent me tin in exchange. He said, this is not appropriate.

32:51You need to send me something that is as valuable as these amazing horses I sent you. So Ishmael Dagan seemed to have had a bit of a, not an ear for diplomacy. He didn't have the sort of sense of what was the right thing to do. And he dropped in status over time. So he was no longer considered to be the equal of Hammurabi of Babylon, who was Sham Shiaudu's contemporary. And he became very worried about his position in the hierarchy.

33:22He was sort of like, I'm still a great king. And they were like, no, I'm not so much. And then Mari was lost to him. We don't know what happened to Ishmael, his brother, but the local dynasty managed to retake Mari. And so the king who came to the throne in Mari was named Zimri Lim. So before we get to Zimri Lim, I just love this story of Sham Shiaudu and his kids and evidently not being happy with the younger son ruling Mari.

33:53But the fact that this younger son is then overthrown or he loses control, maybe actually his dad was trying to say, look, you need to focus on, turn on, because otherwise this might happen to him. Evidently he didn't. And I know maybe we can be a bit too harsh in this guy, but at the same time, it seems like his dad knew how things were meant to be and his son wasn't doing this right. And then that's what happens. Yes, yes. I think that's probably true. He was not clearly cut out

34:24for the kind of role his father wanted him to fulfill. And yes, he must have known that the dynasty that had previously ruled Mari was in exile, but they were eyeing that throne. Exactly. And if there's discontent with the ruler, as evidently there must have been, maybe other cities didn't like it and thought, well, we're going to support the exile party because this new king is not doing things right. Once again, hypothetical, theoretical. Well, but I think there's something to that because the people he was ruling were longtime subjects of the dynasty of Mari

34:55and presumably didn't particularly appreciate having what they would have seen as a foreign king ruling over them. And so it's not surprising that Zimri Lim was able to take the throne when he did.

Zimri Lim and court life at Mari

35:08And what's so interesting about Zimri Lim, we know more about his court than almost any other period of the Bronze Age anywhere. And he only was on the throne for 13 years. Wow. Just a blip. And if it wasn't for the excavations and the tablets that were found there, he would just be a name. You know, we wouldn't talk about him and have so many books and articles and so on about Mari. But because his palace after 13 years was also destroyed and those tablets were burned very thoroughly

35:40and there are thousands of them. Let's not reveal who burned it yet. We'll get to those. We'll get to him. But yes. But that means that his entire court correspondence, and this is what is so cool, unlike at Ebolo, where there's a few letters, but not many, at Mari, thousands of the letters, the documents that were found were letters because that was an archive that was burned when the palace burned. And so we know the names of his officials, we know their quirks, we know all about all of his wives, we know about all the gossip

36:11within the palace and so forth. And it really is like this window onto what court life was like and personalities. So these tablets, do they give insights into daily life at Mari or is it more, as you say, is it more royal court life? Well, it's court life because that's where the tablets were found. But court life was also, there was an impact on court life by what was going on outside. And of course, they went out of the court. There's some wonderful letters

36:43of traveling officials, you know, experiencing all the places that they were visiting. There was one time when Zimmerlim took his entire court all the way to the Mediterranean. Oh, wow. Just incredible journey for months. And so those give us insights into the wider world outside the palace as well. But it is a time that is just fascinating. And the French archaeologists who excavated and the French asseriologists who've read all of the documents

37:13and published them have done an extraordinary job. They are so good at getting everything out and published and available and online. And so as a historian, it's just incredible to have this material that is available and so detailed. And often I think one gets just a tiny sliver of just, even in the Kingdom I Study, which is slightly later than this, you'll get a few tablets and you can just kind of piece together a little bit.

37:43This person was related to this person. They lived here. They had this particular worry at one particular time. But in Maori, you know so much about them. And that's lovely. And that's why this time period in the 18th century BC of all the cities, of all the powers in Syria at that time, we have a focus on Maori. But let's also not kid ourselves. Maori was in the eastern part of Syria. It was a very big regional power at that time. It was. You mentioned Katnir earlier in the west and Yam had around Aleppo.

38:15So those are the kind of two other big kingdoms at the time. Yes. But Maori is in the east and it's bordering a power at that time that is very much on the rise and the figure that we have covered in the past. Yes. Who is this figure? This is Hammurabi. This is Hammurabi. So Zimri Lim and Hammurabi were allies. They're best buds. Absolutely. They're bros. Yep. They sent letters back and forth to each other's courts. They sent gifts. They sent ambassadors. Hammurabi even sent his sons to stay at Maori at one point.

38:48They shared a border after Hammurabi had started expanding his empire.

38:55But throughout Zimri Lim's time, Hammurabi was the major power in the south. And yes, they supported each other militarily. So when Hammurabi needed troops, Zimri Lim sent troops to support him, there are wonderful letters describing what it was like to visit Hammurabi's court. And so these are letters that the Maori officials would write back to Zimri Lim and tell them what was going on. And some of them make you see Hammurabi as a very sort of deliberative person, but Hammurabi could also

39:26be very angry. And there were some details about banquets and where one was seated at Hammurabi's banquet. And the Maori officials feeling a little bit annoyed that some people were seated at better seats than they were. And it was all about who was in good stead with Hammurabi and who was on the outs and they were reading into the seating charts and they were looking at were they getting the right robes and all this stuff. Human nature through time, you know, since sedentary civilizations began,

39:56how does a great man, you know, show his rule over other people host a feast and where they put those people at a feast, isn't it? You see that again and again. Yeah, it's astonishing how familiar that is. And even Hammurabi at one point, because the Maori ambassadors or envoys were saying, why did these people get robes and we didn't get robes? And Hammurabi says something like, I don't want to hear any more about robes. You know, just leave me alone. And he was obviously above it all and somebody else had to deal with these issues of the robes for the ambassadors.

40:27So Hammurabi and Zimri Lim, they seem to be best buds. Maori's having the time of its life with this Babylonian superpower support. Once again, it doesn't last. What happens?

Hammurabi and the destruction of Mari

40:38Yes, the surprising thing, and it really seems to come out of nowhere, is that Hammurabi marched north and destroyed Maori. Backstabs his bro in Maori. Absolutely. And it's so puzzling that it's really hard to imagine what was behind it because they really had been allied. And then Hammurabi names a year after the breaking the wall of Maori. And then we know that the Maori palace was indeed destroyed. And we know that

41:09when they looked at the archives, it was clear that Hammurabi's people actually went into the archives and took some of the most important documents out because they are not there when they should be. So he went through and very systematically sort of dismantled the archive. Seems to have given people plenty of warning because it seems to have been abandoned by the time he destroyed the palace. So it's almost as though he was somehow negotiating, like, you all leave, I'll take your documents

41:40and then I'm going to burn your palace. It's just the strangest thing. There's one scholar, Jack Sasson, who has proposed that what might have happened was that possibly Zimri Lim died and the people of Maori actually invited Hammurabi to sort of rule temporarily in order for them to figure out. Zimri Lim had no adult sons and so it certainly would have been a succession crisis. He could have bequeathed his kingdom to Hammurabi as well. Yes, possibly or something that perhaps initially Hammurabi came in peace

42:11and then gradually became more of a conqueror. It's just very, very weird. But yes, Hammurabi seems to have destroyed Maori, almost certainly did. And then the central power moved north to a site called Terka which is the site that I'm, actually, my research has been based on. So Terka is interesting. So this is quite a short rise of this city that then comes to prominence but amazing archaeology from this site in regards to the connections it had.

42:42Yes. The earliest, well not the earliest levels, the earliest levels at Terka are early Bronze Age but there is a layer at Terka from the time of Maori because it was a regional it was a regional center. It was the center of a province of Maori, the capital. It had a governor who lived there named Kibri Dagon and his administrative structure has been excavated so there's a connection to the material from Maori at Terka. But after that at Terka there was a separate

43:12little kingdom that seems to have been called Hana that took over much of what Maori had ruled and I say little it wasn't little it was the border that Hammurabi defined was at Maori he didn't conquer Terka apparently at least not for long so Terka for a while was independent then we know that the son of Hammurabi some decades later did conquer Terka apparently but didn't seem to be able to hold on to it maybe but what is fascinating

43:43is we have this little neighborhood at Terka where there are local kings named they have their local year names we have the little shrine with other scholars as well we've reconstructed the families that lived there and so where you were asking about what was life like outside of the palace at Terka we have these really lovely insights into what life was like for the average people and that's exciting to see and then that kingdom Hana continued

44:15for hundreds of years and we don't know enough about it we have an enormous number of kings remarkably that we have the names of we know that those kings ruled but perhaps as vassals of other states probably at some point as vassals of Mitanni probably also vassals of Babylon at some point but the kingdom of Hana continued all the way up into the middle Assyrian period which is a long time

Terka and long-distance trade

44:43Gosh

Terka and long-distance trade

44:44Indonesian cloves is that really a thing? Yes well no they were this is one of the crazy things at Terka was that as they were excavating a private house not even a big private house a man named Puzerum owned some properties we know about the fields he owned because his contracts for buying those fields are in his house there's a courtyard and then there's a pantry and in the pantry there are a lot of pots and again the house seems to have burned or parts of the house burned

45:14resulting in it being abandoned and in one of these pots they found cloves the spice and this is absolutely the furthest west that cloves are known for hundreds of years after that because they come from Indonesia and the fact that they were found there suggests that there was a wider trade network than had ever been conceived really for this early period and yet they're in isolation it's not as though then they found an entire sort of I don't know

45:44amphora of cloves just a couple of them and there's nothing written to suggest that Indonesian traders were making it that far so almost certainly they were being traded over a very long distance one sort of leg at a time it wasn't that somebody was traveling the whole distance but it's so intriguing absolutely through those you know many many different sailors and trade ships that almost certainly would have been part of that you have for more than 3,500 years ago at this site in a private house in Syria clothes that

46:15originally came from Indonesia that is such an amazing fact it is it really is and I think it's it's almost like the tip of an iceberg of one talks about the Silk Road later but certainly there was much more long distance trade than we normally think of we know for example that they were getting lapis lazuli the bluestone from the Hindu Kush mountains because that's the only place you can get it and it had been coming to Mesopotamia until 6,000 years at least by you know at least by 6,000 BCE

46:46rather so 8,000 years ago they were bringing lapis lazuli to the Middle East were they using decent copper merchants from the Persian Gulf in that area in Dillman to bring up copper in Sicilia as well did we get a little air Nazi we can bring back his name yes no it is true that that is one of the paths that certainly lapis lazuli would have taken was not necessarily always over land but down through the Indus Valley and along the coast and up through the Persian Gulf so yes that I could

47:17imagine air Nazi being involved this is his time period yeah it is his time period but could he also brought copper up to some copper sought after by maria and all those places yes absolutely yes they were over time the copper sources from the south began to be used less and by the late bronze age they were getting their copper from Cyprus but at this point probably still getting it from the south yes very good Hammurabi Zimri Lim and Aenadzir what a trio well let's move on as we get to the late bronze age I've got on my notes first of all it seems like

47:48there's a dark age in the 16th century we know much less about this is the craziest thing there's so many documents from Hammurabi's time from the rest of his dynasty there's plenty from Ebla beforehand as well 1595 the kingdom in Babylon came to an end and there's some debate eight years one way or another but around 1595 BC and then the documentation

48:18simply stops everywhere it's uncanny it's sort of as if when we say dark ages people say well nothing is a dark age and it wasn't dark in the sense that it was bad or backward or something it was just we don't know about it there are a few kingdoms that do seem to have continued to produce documents Hana the one I study is one of them the sea land in the south there are documents from this period there too just in most the sea land yeah that's what they called it the kingdom of the sea land it was around or in the very far south

48:48there are documents from the sea land from this century so it did exist I mean it's not that we need to for a while people thought perhaps it's a missing century because we've just got the chronology wrong and that we should just move all the dates up or down rather but no it was the 1500s did exist there's just not very much from them and then you get

The great kingdom of Mitanni

49:28a new kingdom that comes to the forefront and is this the biggest kingdom to date in Syria what is this? it is yes it's the first really great kingdom Mitanni Mitanni and it was considered an equal of new kingdom Egypt it was an equal of Babylonia it was an equal of the Hittite kingdom in what is now Turkey and the Mitannian kingdom is so frustrating because we know from all of its neighbours how powerful it was but within Syria

49:58its capital city hasn't yet been excavated it's kind of like is it Akkad which hasn't been found yes exactly we know I mean almost certainly it's at the site of Telfaqariya which is in Syria and they have excavated higher levels at Telfaqariya and ever since the Syrian civil war of course excavations have stopped its ancient name was Washukhani and Washukhani must have been an immensely fabulous big capital city of a major major kingdom

50:28but because we don't have the excavations there we only have documents from around the kingdom that refer to the kings and then we have the letters that the the kings of Mitanni wrote to the king of Egypt which were found in Egypt which again reflect that it was an important powerful place but frustratingly we have you know if you imagine what we know about Zimri Lim and then you think what do we know about these many powerful kings there was a king named Saush Tatar

50:59who was remembered for generations afterwards as the great founder of Mitanni and he conquered the regions from the coast all the way into northern Iraq but I mean we have his cylinder seal and we have a couple of documents that have his name in them but we only have the sort of memory of him in later records as being such an important person and really very very little about his own reign As you mentioned with Ebla when those later kings refer back to their forefathers but you have

51:30the later sources that mention these people at the beginning who as you say it seems a big event you know the kingdoms we've already mentioned like Katana Yam had obviously Mari no longer but Ebla is kind of there's still an Ebla place and they all come under Mitanni's sway and also at this time is get to the late Bronze Age this is a time when you have those big powers like the Hittites to the north and New Kingdom Egypt and I'll start thinking of names like Kadesh and Thutmose III Napoleon of Egypt and all of those big battles Ramesses II and the like

52:00but the Mitanni are there as well and they hold out as their own powerful kingdom when you've got the Hittites and the Egyptians kind of both vying for control in that area as well in fact I think Mitanni may well have been really kind of responsible for the ultimate peace that broke out between the five major kingdoms because It's a war of five kingdoms is it? Yeah the Egyptian kings were trying to expand northwards in the New Kingdom

52:32and so for example Amenhotep II was fighting in the Levant he's fighting north he's fighting against the Mitanni and in his ninth year it suddenly stops so we no longer have these wars of aggression initially he was earlier there were gifts from the other kingdoms that came to Thutmose III where he was received it's almost as though they were sending him gifts to try and bring him

53:02into the diplomatic world because that's what you do you send gifts he took it as tribute he describes it as they all were cowering before me and sending tribute but Mitanni didn't send tribute at that point because they had been attacked by him and then in the time of the later king Amenhotep II all of a sudden all of this stops the war stops he's no longer attacking Mitanni and the next thing we hear they're intermarrying they are creating peace treaties and so even though we don't have documents actually from Amenhotep II's

53:34time it's almost certainly that's the moment where it's almost as though the Egyptians and the Mitannians thought they could conquer each other because they were the absolutely biggest fish in the pond where they were and then they encounter at a great distance from their homeland the Egyptians this powerful army and they're not going to be able to conquer them and they're not going to be able to bring them into Egyptian control or even into the sphere of influence and so they then adopted the Mesopotamian diplomatic system

54:04and the crazy thing is they adopted it wholesale they were willing to write an Akkadian they were willing to send their ambassadors to send the gifts all of that stuff that started in Ebla the Egyptians bought into and they didn't change it and so the whole system all of these five powers that you mentioned and Cyprus which was another great power not great territorial power it was a very rich power because they had copper so much copper on Cyprus which was something everybody needed

54:35they they were at peace with one another and they started intermarrying and that was also part and I should have mentioned this when we were talking about Ebla because even in the time of Ebla one of the aspects of a diplomatic relationship was that you married one another's daughters and the kings would send a daughter to marry and this wasn't these daughters then became quite active involved people in diplomacy they weren't just sort of an object you sent

55:05which is the way it's sometimes portrayed they really did have their messengers traveled back and forth they sent gifts themselves to their fellow wives and so forth but Egypt that's one thing the Egyptian king wouldn't do is he wasn't willing to send his daughters to marry anybody else he would take other daughters so the Egyptian in time of Amunhotep III the court just filled up with foreign princesses from all over but he wouldn't send his daughters out it was an Egyptian point of pride

55:35that Egyptian princesses never married anybody so that was the one sticking point and so he said peace of the five kingdoms and so I forgive my ignorance so the five kingdoms are Egypt Mitanni Hittites Babylonia and Cyprus and Cyprus okay so no Assyria at this time not yet no Assyria is currently subject to Mitanni at this point got it it had been conquered by Saustatar and so it was within the Mitannian kingdom and the king that we know the most about from that period the Mitannian king is a man named Tushrata Tushrata okay

56:05and Tushrata is I find him kind of a delightful character he's he's he's constantly telling the Egyptian king in his letters how much he loves him now the other kings were not they didn't do this they didn't talk about love very much but Tushrata was you know my brother whom I love and who loves me your father loved you my father you know there's so much love in there and but I he's loving life it is he's not holding back he isn't he's very affectionate on the other hand

56:36I have a feeling and I published an article about this that perhaps in Mitanni the term love in Hurrian had a different connotation than the term love in Akkadian and he was writing in Akkadian because so were the Egyptians they wrote to one another in Akkadian and which Egyptian pharaoh is this that he's writing to well he starts out writing to Amunhotep III right and then he dies and then he's writing to Akkadian so Akkadian and Hotep III are looking at these things who is this guy just sending me love letters again and again so I think it might possibly have been a translation glitch

57:06in that words have different meanings and different languages but I think also what was going on is Tushrata was getting a little bit worried he was feeling that perhaps he wasn't viewed as highly as he would like to be and there may have been a little bit of groveling going on that he really really really wanted the Egyptian king to love him because he was worried that he would not support him if the Hittites were getting a little bit aggressive and that if the Hittites attacked as ultimately they did that he wouldn't get the help from Egypt and that may have been

57:37part of his pleading oh dude please love me please love me there was one time when the Egyptian king was supposed to send him gold statues solid gold statues of himself of Tushrata and he they didn't show up and then Amunhotep the third who had promised these gold statues died and Akhenaten didn't send the statues which he should because his father had agreed to send them and then he sent wooden statues with plated gold oh Tushrata was mad

58:07he was furious he was like this will not do Mitanni's yeah don't piss off the Mitannians no I wish I could ask so many more questions I have a couple yeah Tushrata is that a South Asian name as well does that have is that an Indian is there an Indian connection to the Mitanni this is the very strange aspect Mitanni and kings did have names that make sense in Sanskrit in Sanskrit okay but it isn't necessarily the case that there was any actual direct contact

58:38between South Asia and Mitanni because this is so early it could be that there was a group of people who were traveling and who ended up in Mitanni and became some sort of influence there the reason I'm hesitant is that all of the Mitannian kings that we know of had Hurrian names at birth and they took these Indo-Aryan names as they're called when they took the throne but they spoke Hurrian they didn't speak Sanskrit they were

59:10so the nobody's ever quite figured out what's going on there but you'll read some things where it says oh you know it was an Indian dynasty ruling Syria there's no evidence of that but the names are curious and I hope someone figures out somehow what the connection is because it'd be very interesting but at least by Tushrata's time the language that he spoke and the name he had at birth were both Hurrian he was a local guy so Mitanni is a big power in Syria you know from much of the late Bronze Age with its chariots

59:41and it could rival New Kingdom Egypt and the Hittites and so on how long does it endure is this the last great power of Bronze Age Syria it is they survived until a time when they had a time of weakness Tushrata was in fact assassinated by one of his own sons oh wow and after that the kingdom split between a side that supported Assyrian independence so the region of Assyria in the east and the Hittites were trying to take advantage of you know trying to take control of the western part of Mitanni

1:00:11and there was a king who went to the Hittite palace and he appealed to the king there whose name was Supaliliuma and he asked Supaliliuma to please help him fight for his capital city to fight for Mitanni and Supaliliuma agreed but he said only if the Mitannian king agreed to be the vassal of the Hittite king so although that king was able to ultimately take the throne he was an inferior to the Hittite king he was no longer a great king in that situation

1:00:42and then later the Assyrians who did take control of their own region the middle Assyrian kings right in the late Bronze Age towards the end of the late Bronze Age they became very powerful and expanded their kingdom to include most of what had previously been Mitanni so you have it divided up between the Hittites in the west and the Assyrians in the east and you don't have then a local power that is controlling Syria gosh we've only just scratched the surface I know Ebla Mari

1:01:12Katna Yamhad and what is the place called Turka of course and Mitanni didn't get on to Ugarit but you know that's kind of another end kind of a little bit that big trading port at the time of the collapse but what a story it is I mean there's so much that happens in Syria you know over more than the millennia during that time that really does make it the epicenter of this this emerging diplomatic world this Bronze Age world of cross cultures and trade and negotiations

1:01:43and warfare and all that and Syria and its many cities and its various kingdoms are right at the heart of it they are they are and I think from their perspective they lived in the center of the universe you know obviously as every culture I think has that feeling don't tell the Babylonians that no exactly but their sense was everything revolved around them and all these cultures came to them you know through trade through diplomacy they would have been I think surprised to think that initially they were seen as peripheral

1:02:13they were very rich they had this enormously productive land they had the resource of the herds of sheep and they had the olive oil and wine that they could trade it seems as though glass was probably invented in Mitanni it seems as though some of the earliest glass in the world was from that region it's possible that chariots came from Mitanni although that's very contested but the two-wheeled spoke chariot that was a really really important war machine

1:02:43at the time certainly was used in Mitanni very early whether it was invented there or not but yes these were powerful powerful kingdoms and we know a lot about them because except for Mitanni we have so many documents that survived from from Ebla and from Mari and also later from Magarat as you mentioned so it's a region of the world that I think deserves more attention and I'm so pleased you decided to ask me about it because it's been absolutely brilliant Amanda last but certainly not least you have written books all about

1:03:15the ancient near eastern world we've got one right behind you Weavers Scribes and Kings a new history of the ancient near east and you have written an earlier one that focuses more on Bronze Age Syria and the things we've discussed today Yes that's Brotherhood of Kings and in Brotherhood of Kings it really does focus on Syria the first section of the book is about Ebla the second part about Mari and the last part about Mitanni and their role in international trade and international diplomacy which I think was so so crucial Amanda it just goes to me to say what a pleasure thanks so much

1:03:45for coming back on the show Thank you so much

Concluding thoughts on ancient Syria

1:03:47for having me

Concluding thoughts on ancient Syria

1:03:48Well there you go there was Professor Amanda Padani talking all about the cradle of cities that was Bronze Age Syria what a story I really hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as I did recording it Now if you want to learn more about this vibrant period of the Bronze Age near east then do go and check out our previous episodes with Amanda on the Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings and another on Hammurabi King of Babylon We'll put links

1:04:17to both of those episodes in the show notes we'll see you in the next