Bronze Age Syria: Cradle of Cities

Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Hittites usually dominate the story of the Bronze Age. But Syria was home to some of the region's most powerful cities and kingdoms and helped forge the ancient Mediterranean world. Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Amanda Podany to uncover this lost cradle of cities, from the wealthy trading hub of Ebla to the royal intrigues of Mari and the rise of the mysterious Mitanni. How did these cities and kingdoms build their wealth and forge alliances with distant rulers and what can their remarkable archives reveal about the trials and tribulations of everyday life in the Bronze Age Near East? MORE The Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000661242255 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/04pzQXvdVwFVWIN72mFyLm?si=lqA82PFXSxGJXCO71tFWJA Hammurabi: Rise of the Babylonians Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000590227902 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0at7iI7c89bv45SnkPm4vr?si=3uN0xVFXQN20SAqTQ5V3Vg The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch HERE https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Presented by Tristan Hughes. Editor is Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Joseph Knight and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even MORE Ancients? Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS ad-free, early access podcasts AND exclusive subscriber-only Ancients episodes. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 2:18Tristan Hughes?

  More 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 Damu 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, including the first ever, get this, the first ever recorded peace treaty agreed between Erkab Damu's kingdom of Ebla and a recently defeated challenger.

• 3:00Tristan Hughes?

  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. Vibrant 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. Welcome to the ancients.

• 3:44Tristan Hughes?

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

• 4:13Tristan Hughes?

  Amanda, it's such a pleasure to have you back on the show.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  It's lovely to be here and in person.

• 4:17Tristan Hughes?

  And in person, once again, exploring the Bronze Age. Not our favorite person, Enazir, this time. If we can get a reference to him, maybe, but we'll see.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  He lived in one part of the world.

• 4:27Tristan Hughes?

  Because the part of the world we're talking about is Syria.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:30Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  It was, and it gets overlooked. There was, because Syria was right, as you say, in the middle of everything. And 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 center 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 center, as the place, the cradle of civilization. They wouldn't have quite been right, because of course, the South is a little bit earlier. The cities are a little bit bigger. But it, because it began its, the studies began with Mesopotamia,

• 5:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:31Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yes. And throughout this time period, as in southern Mesopotamia, you go from having kingdoms to larger territorial states and back to kingdoms again. And it has some really important centers, but also some fabulous archaeological finds that give us so much information.

• 6:02Tristan Hughes?

  And when mentioning, when we talk about Bronze Age Syria, just how large a period of time are we talking about?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  It's a long period. I think we would sort of start from what we know in this region around 3,000 B.C. And it would go all the way up to 1,200 approximately. So a very long time.

• 6:20Tristan Hughes?

  And do we have a lot of source material to learn more about the people and the cities and the lifestyle? You know, throughout all of this period?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  We do. Less for the very early periods. We don't have much written material at all, but as soon as you get to about 2,400 B.C., there's, 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.

• 6:47Tristan Hughes?

  So it's cuneiform, that's the main writing script that you have there?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Yes, they're writing in 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, although we know that the languages were slightly different, but they did use Sumerian and Akkadian for their writing system, yeah.

• 7:12Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  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, which is obviously a related term, means the West. And then there's a language that is defined as Amorite. It's, 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, it's gradual movement. It wasn't an invasion. They arrived over time from apparently the West.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  And there are a lot of people with Amorite names in Syria. But whether they thought of themselves as 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, 2,000 to 1,500 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, even though they spoke a shared Amorite language. The Hurrians, a completely unrelated language.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  So again, it's a language group rather than an ethnic group. So people who spoke Hurrian. Hurian is unrelated to Sumerian or Akkadian or Amorite. It's a very different language, incredibly hard to learn. Apparently, I've never tried. Very, very few people read Hurian, but they didn't write it very much, which is actually convenient for us because the Hurian speakers and the Amorite speakers almost always used Akkadian to write in. So we know about their languages from their names. We know from a few texts in Hurian that were written. But largely, even though they had these Hurian names and apparently they spoke Hurian, they didn't write it. So it's, for historians, that makes life a little bit easier.

• 9:27Tristan Hughes?

  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, largely later on during the Bronze Age, that's when you see more Hurian.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Actually, you know, the Hurians are very, very, very ancient in the region.

• 9:45Tristan Hughes?

  They're very ancient, okay.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  So even one of the earliest sites, a site called Urkish, that's a Hurian site.

• 9:51Tristan Hughes?

  So there's lots of coexistence between the two.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  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 that 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 a Akkadian name and he gives one of his sons an Amorite name and maybe the other son a Hurian 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, this culture.

• 10:36Tristan Hughes?

  And both are using the same cuneiform script to do both languages, which is what I love. You can find a cuneiform tablet from Syria that is in Amorite and then another cuneiform tablet, which is in Hurian. I love that together.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:52Tristan Hughes?

  They wrote in Akkadian.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Even though they were, it was true of the later people called the Kasites in Mesopotamia. They just didn't write in Kasite. They would write in Akkadian, even though we know they were, they were speaking Kasite. They, 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.

• 11:14Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:15Tristan Hughes?

  Um, well, let's go back to the, to the early Bronze Age and I appreciate we know less about this period. But do we have a sense, or at least of what, what Syria looked like at the beginning? Is this when we see, you know, the emergence of states, the emergence of these independent cities?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  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 of western, northwestern Syria. And it was a, it was a really flourishing kingdom. It had a whole dynasty of kings. We know their names. We, only the very latest ones do we have their archives. Because the way with cuneiform, the, the frustration with cuneiform is that

• 12:10Speaker 03

  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. And 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 cuneiform tablets. So they, if they weren't baked, you could reuse the clay and it was very fine clay. And so they would reuse it and meant that fewer and fewer texts were kept after a few hundred years. You know, that unless they, they had been baked, in which case there's nothing you can do to recycle them, you, you find fewer of them. So for the latest period at Ebla, up to about 2300 BCE, we have a ton of material.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  And then we know about its earlier history from what those kings remembered and what they recorded.

• 13:01Tristan Hughes?

  About their forefathers.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  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. There 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, they would, those same kingdoms would go to war. So there was a period of warfare between Ebla and Mari.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  And those, the records are interesting because we don't have a single royal inscription at this time. In the south, they would, the kings would say, I so and so have done all these fabulous things. In the north, if 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 Irkabdamu 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 the treaty that was being drawn up.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And then we would know that there, obviously this treaty with Mari was taking place.

• 14:35Tristan Hughes?

  Did these, 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, of extensive trade networks that they already had?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:55Tristan Hughes?

  So Turkey, Turkey today.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Turkey today. And they were trading largely, as 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. And they don't survive, so we can't see them.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:01Tristan Hughes?

  Kind of a gift, a diplomatic gift.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Must have been absolutely gorgeous, but it must have been, you know, months of work and incredibly fine. And those then were the ways that the, the Eblaites were able to bring in the very valuable gold, silver, other precious stones and so forth that they, they needed.

• 16:19Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:32Tristan Hughes?

  You know, it is, it does seem to be one of the top dogs, you know, fighting and being able to hold its own against other big cities in Syria at that time.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. I think it's one of the reasons. The, well, another, 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. So if they wanted wine or if they wanted olive oil, those were going to be coming from the region of Syria. And so that must have been a major source of, of funds for them as well.

• 17:10Tristan Hughes?

  And we can imagine then these cities, places like Ebla, I don't know if we can use the kingdom yet, but maybe regional powers? We can use kingdoms?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  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 they, you first have kings in the south, which was around 2900. So it seems as though kingship developed probably simultaneously in, in Syria and in Mesopotamia. And so these kings, we don't know much about them, but 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.

• 17:46Tristan Hughes?

  So they're venerated and we, 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, 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. We just know that they must have been a key part of this.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yes. Yeah, the, the 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, we know that that was, that people lived out there. They, they weren't all in the cities. And they were tremendously important to the economy, of course, yes.

• 18:38Tristan Hughes?

  Talking about cities, before we focus on this figure of Irkabdamu?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Irkabdamu.

• 18:43Tristan Hughes?

  Irkabdamu, 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?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  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, and there's so many important layers between modern times and 2500 BCE.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  It would be inconceivable to be able to get down to the level that you would you would want to, because it would be destroying so much on the way down that is equally important, you know, to the 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 between the ancient world and the present. And one of the great things about Ebla 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

• 20:00Speaker 03

  find things just in such sort of a limited area and in so little context.

• 20:05Tristan Hughes?

  No, exactly. Medieval stuff or, you know, Roman stuff. And I think Damascus is one of the most continually inhabited cities in the whole world. 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.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Yes, no, they were. We know they were because the other kings wrote about them. So especially Aleppo, which was called Halab, it was its king was considered in the later period, the most powerful of the of the kings of the time, King of Yamhad, it 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 tells us, oh, my gosh, I wish, if it were possible to excavate the Bronze Age palace at Aleppo, that would be extraordinary.

• 20:49Tristan Hughes?

  That'd be pretty cool, isn't it?

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Impossible.

• 20:50Tristan Hughes?

  Well, 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 you have, 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 centre of so many of these treaties?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Well, Irkab Damu, he was the king of Ebla at, really towards the end of the time that it 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 Hamasi, which as far as we can tell was so far away. I mean, it was in potentially Iran. I mean, it was, it's unclear exactly where it was, either northern Iraq or Iran. And the, the

• 21:57Speaker 03

  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, it meant, not that they were actually related, but that they were both allied and equal.

• 22:28Tristan Hughes?

  Right. It's that equal footing idea when treating with hierarchies.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Because if they were less important, it would be son. You are my son, I'm your father. That's, that's the sort of vassal king relationship. But, 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 in, throughout the Bronze Age again. And, and the, and then the fact that there's a letter that's being sent, again, those were central, and that there's a, 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

• 23:14Speaker 03

  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 reason 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.

• 23:43Tristan Hughes?

  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 Levant and into Egypt as well with the early pharaohs.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Once, once Egypt becomes part of the system.

• 23:56Tristan Hughes?

  Once Egypt becomes part of the system.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Which takes a while. But, but yes, and I think then, and then also, the other thing in Irkab Damu's reign is that we have a treaty, an actual peace treaty. It's not between equals, it's between Irkab Damu and a lesser king.

• 24:13Tristan Hughes?

  So is this the oldest known peace treaty in the world?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  It's the oldest known, and it's the treaty of Abbasal.

• 24:18Tristan Hughes?

  Take it away.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  And I think what's so surprising is how early it is, you know, it's 2300 BCE, 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, 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 arrives after 10 days, and, and no, if the messenger arrives in your court and you keep him for more than 10 days, you have to 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.

• 25:03Tristan Hughes?

  You've got to feed him.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  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, I will support your messenger, I'll make sure he gets the food he needs or whatever, if I'm making him stay for, for 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

• 25:43Speaker 03

  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, writing about warfare is. And I think that tells you that this is not a sort of Wild West of crazy, you know, just violence. It's a place where people really wanted, they wanted orderliness. They were, 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

• 26:26Speaker 03

  not following the rules. You know, I hate to mention this, but you are not following the rules, and you need to follow the rules, because that's how we coexist. Really interesting.

• 26:35Tristan Hughes?

  And so that treaty in particular, with that sub ruler, well, with the ruler that is not as powerful, or Irkab Damu evidently looks down upon, has sought peace with Irkab Damu. And Irkab Damu said, okay, I will accept peace, because as you say, there's that return to stability. And Irkab Damu, he's won, and now he's being realized as, as the top dog over that neighboring city of Abbasal, wherever it is.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Abbasal, 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 Irkab 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, that, you know, they have, they're part of the system. And 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

• 27:39Speaker 03

  they, 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 know, like, must I always provide you with all of this? But it was part of the system. You, you did provide those gifts, and you had to.

• 28:00Tristan Hughes?

  Look after the messengers, provide the gifts, and, and more as we'll cover.

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• 28:49Speaker 05

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• 29:20Speaker 06

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• 29:50Speaker 02

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• 30:40Tristan Hughes?

  So Ebla seems to be pretty dominant in those early centuries of Bronze Age Syria, but that dominance doesn't last. What happens?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Well, Ebla was destroyed. We know this because there's a layer of destruction right where the, at the end of, at the time of Bir Kaddam 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.

• 31:09Tristan Hughes?

  This is the time of Sargon, okay, and what some argue is the creation of the first empire.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. But it's probably more likely that it was Sargon's grandson Narum Sin, who was actually responsible for the destruction. But given the dates and so forth, and Narum Sin also claimed to have destroyed Ebla.

• 31:25Tristan Hughes?

  And he ventured all the way to Syria from Akkad, which is Iraq.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Right, in central Iraq, yeah. But unfortunately, he didn't sort of put a stamp on it and say Narum Sin was here. So we know that it was destroyed right around that time, almost very likely to have been by the Akkadian Empire. And after that period, it was never quite as dominant as it had been in the, in the early Bronze Age.

• 31:47Tristan Hughes?

  We can only speculate, but could it potentially have been a message? Or, you know, Ebla was the biggest city that resisted the riot, you know, 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.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  No, I know. And one can't sort of make stuff up, but it would be nice to, to have a little bit more information.

• 32:07Tristan Hughes?

  One can theorise about it.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  We can theorise, yes, exactly, exactly.

• 32:11Tristan Hughes?

  But 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 the Middle Bronze Age?

• 32:27Speaker 03

  We do. There's a phase there. All through this time, Mari had been an important, that was its neighbour, I mean, very distant neighbour, but they did share a border.

• 32:36Tristan Hughes?

  And so where's Mari and Ebla in regards to Syria today?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Mari is in the east. It's very close to the Iraqi border.

• 32:43Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  On the Euphrates River.

• 32:44Tristan Hughes?

  On the Euphrates River, okay, yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  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 abandoned. 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 Shamsi Adu. And Shamsi Adu was based at another Syrian site that he called Shubat Enlil, modern Tel Aviv. And so for a while, Mari and the

• 33:27Speaker 03

  entire northern Syrian region was under the rule of this kingdom, a very short-lived kingdom, but very powerful kingdom, of Shamsi Adu. And Shamsi Adu 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.

• 33:43Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  So that he would put two of his sons in regional capitals as viceroy's, and then he would be the great king at Shubat Enlil. And his older son was at a site called Ekhalatum, his name was Ishma Dagan. And his younger son was at Mari, and his name was Yasma Adu. And Yasma Adu was one of the most incompetent, perhaps, kings.

• 34:08Tristan Hughes?

  And that's saying something, let's be fair.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  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, and Shamsi Adu would, would send notes, you know, these very, very long letters saying, is there no beard on your chin? Are you not a man? Can you not be more like your older brother?

• 34:30Tristan Hughes?

  Leave the man alone. If he can't grow a beard, I mean, it's a...

• 34:33Speaker 03

  It was so cruel. And then, and he would, at one point, Yasma Adu brought in, there was a lot of diplomatic marriage, and Yasma 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, and his father was like, what is wrong with you? She needs to be in the palace. And mostly, though, he was berated for things like, he just wasn't interested in the military. His brother was a very strong military leader, Ishma 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. And so...

• 35:16Tristan Hughes?

  Boromir wouldn't have done this kind of thing. I'm sorry, I'm getting Denethor vibes of Boromir and Faramir in Lord of the Rings, which does down Faramir too much, but I, I know what you mean. Kind of the disappointing younger, younger son idea.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And he makes it sound as though he was absolutely incompetent. I, my sense from the letters is that Yasma Adu, he loved music. He had a chief musician. He, his banquets always had music. He was accused of spending, you know, too much time at banquets. But, but one has the sense that he was someone who wasn't incompetent, I, 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. And, and so he, 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, he didn't address him the way that most

• 36:10Speaker 03

  people would. He was, his term for him was a sort of, much more, more personal. But they too, that kingdom, Shamsi Adu died in 1776, which is very easy to remember, because it's in America, you know, 1776 BCE. And 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 Khatna, which was in, on the coast of Syria. I think we may have talked about this letter before, but he, he sent a letter

• 36:50Speaker 03

  saying, I sent you beautiful horses, and you sent me tin in exchange. He said, we don't, you know, this is not appropriate. You need to send me something that is as valuable as these amazing horses I sent you. So Ishma Dagan seemed to have had a bit of a, not an ear for diplomacy. He didn't, 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 Shamsi Adu's contemporary. And he became very worried about his, his position in the hierarchy. He was sort of like, I'm still

• 37:30Speaker 03

  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 Yasma Adu, 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.

• 37:50Tristan Hughes?

  So before we get to Zimri Lim, I just love this story of, you know, Shamsi Adu and his, his kids, and evidently not being happy with, with the younger son ruling Mari. But, but the fact that this younger son is then overthrown, or he loses control, maybe actually, his dad was, was trying to say, look, you need to, you need to, you know, focus, you need to focus on, turn on, because otherwise this might happen to him. Evidently, he didn't. I know, maybe, maybe we, we can be a bit too harsh on 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.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I think that's probably true. He was not clearly cut out for the kind of role his father wanted him to, to fulfil. And yes, he must have known that the dynasty that had previously ruled Mari was in exile, but they were eyeing that throne.

• 38:41Tristan Hughes?

  Exactly. And if, if there's discontent with the ruler, as evidently must have been, maybe other cities didn't like it and thought, right, we're going to support the exile party, because this new king is not doing things right. Once again, hypothetical, theoretical.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Well, but I think, I think there's something to that, because the people he was ruling were longtime subjects of the dynasty of Mari, and presumably didn't particularly appreciate having a, 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, when he did. And 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.

• 39:25Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Just a blip, just a, and if it wasn't for the excavations and the tablets that were found there, he would just be a, a name. You know, we wouldn't, we wouldn't, 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, and there are thousands of them.

• 39:49Tristan Hughes?

  Let's not reveal who burnt it yet. We'll get to that.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  We'll get to him.

• 39:52Tristan Hughes?

  But yes.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  But that means that his entire court correspondence, and this is what is so cool, unlike at Ebla, where there's a few letters but not many, at Mari, thousands of the letters, the, 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 the, all the gossip within the palace and so forth. And it really is like, this window onto what court life was like and...

• 40:27Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Well, it's court life, because that's, that's where the tablets were found. But court life was also, you know, 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 of travelling officials, you know, experiencing all the places that they were visiting. There was one time when Zimri Lim took his entire court all the way to the Mediterranean.

• 41:00Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Just incredible journey for months. And so those give us insights into the wider world outside the, the palace as well. But it is a time that is just fascinating. And the, the French archaeologists who excavated, and the French Assyriologists who've read all of the documents and 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, the kingdom I study, which is slightly later than this.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  You'll get a few tablets and you can just kind of piece together a little bit. This was person was related to this person, they lived here, they had this particular worry at one particular time. But in Mari, you can just, you know, you you know so much about them and that's lovely.

• 42:02Tristan Hughes?

  And that's why this time period in the eighteenth century B C. Of all the cities, of all the powers in Syria at that time, we have a focus on Mari. But let's also not not kid ourselves. Mari was in the eastern part of Syria. It was a very big regional power at that time.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  It was.

• 42:18Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned Katnir earlier in the West and Yamhad around Aleppo. Those are the kind of two other big kingdoms at the time.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:25Tristan Hughes?

  But Mari 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.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:36Tristan Hughes?

  Who is this figure?

• 42:36Speaker 03

  This is Hammurabi, yes.

• 42:38Tristan Hughes?

  Hammurabi.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  So Zimri Lim and Hammurabi were allies.

• 42:41Tristan Hughes?

  They're best buds.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 42:43Tristan Hughes?

  They're bros.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  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 Mari at one point. They they were, they shared a border. After Hammurabi had started expanding his empire, he was, but but throughout Zimri Lim's time, Hammurabi was the major power in the south. And they, yes, they 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 Mari officials would write back to Zimri Lim and tell them what was going on.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  And some of them make you see Hammurabi as a very sort of deliberative person, but but Hammurabi could also be very angry. And there were some details about banquets and where one was seated at Hammurabi's banquet. And the Mari officials feeling a little bit annoyed that some people were seated at better seats than they were. And, you know, it was all about who was in good stead with 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?

• 43:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you see, human nature through time, you know, since sedentary civilizations began. How does a great man, you know, show his rule over other people?

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 44:06Tristan Hughes?

  Host a feast and where they put those people at the feast, isn't it? You see that again and again.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's astonishing how how familiar that is. And and even Hammurabi at one point, because the the Mari ambassadors were or envoys were saying, why did these people get robes and we didn't get robes? And and Hammurabi says something like, I don't want to hear any more about robes, you know, just leave me alone. He was, he was obviously above it all and somebody else had to deal with these issues of the robes for the ambassadors.

• 44:34Tristan Hughes?

  So Hammurabi and Zimri Lim, they seem to be best buds. Mari's having the time of its life with this Babylonian superpower support. Once again, no, doesn't last. What happens?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Yes, the surprising thing, and it really seems to come out of nowhere, is that Hammurabi marched north and destroyed Mari.

• 44:55Tristan Hughes?

  Backstabs his bro in Mari.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and it's so puzzling that it's 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 Mari. And then and then and then we know that the Mari palace was indeed destroyed. And we know that when 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 and very systematically just sort of dismantled the archive. Seems to have given people plenty of warning because there were, it it seems to have been abandoned by the time he destroyed the palace.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  So it's almost as though he was somehow negotiating, like you all leave, I'll take your your documents and 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 Mari actually invited Hammurabi to sort of rule temporarily in order to, for them to figure out, Zimri Lim had no adult sons. And so it certainly would have been a succession crisis.

• 46:10Tristan Hughes?

  He could have bequeathed his kingdom to Hammurabi as well.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yes, possibly, or something that perhaps initially Hammurabi came in peace and then gradually became more of a conqueror. It's just very, very weird. But yes, Hammurabi seems to have destroyed Mari, almost certainly did. And then the central power moved north to a site called Terka, which is the site that I'm, actually, my my research has been based on.

• 46:38Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Yes, 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 Mari because it was a regional, it was a regional centre. It was the centre of a province of Mari, 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 Mari at Terka. But after that, at Terka, there was a separate little kingdom that seems to have been called Hana that took over much of what Mari had ruled. And I say little, it wasn't little, it was the the border that Hammurabi defined was at Mari. He didn't conquer Terka apparently, at least not for long.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  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 is we have this little neighbourhood at Terka where there are local kings named. They have their local year names, they, we have the little shrine. I've with other scholars as well, we've reconstructed the families that lived there. And so where you were asking about, you know, what was life like out of, outside of the palace? At Terka, we have these really lovely insights into what life was like for the the average people. And that's that's exciting to see.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  And then that kingdom, Hana, continued for hundreds of years. And it's, 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 that, the the kingdom of Hana continued all the way up into the Middle Assyrian period, which is, it's a long time.

• 48:50Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, Indonesian cloves, is that really a thing?

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Yes, well, no, they were, they were, that, this is one of the the crazy things at Terka was that as they were excavating, a private house, not even a big private house, a man named Puze Rum 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, resulting in it being abandoned. And in one of these pots, they found cloves, the the spice.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  And this is absolutely the furthest west that cloves are known for hundreds of years after that because they had, 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, amphora of cloves, just, 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 travelling the whole distance, but it's so intriguing.

• 50:08Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. Through those, you know, many, many different sailors and trade ships, that almost certainly would have been part of that. You have from more than 3,500 years ago, at this site, in a private house in Syria.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:21Tristan Hughes?

  cloves that originally came from Indonesia. That is such an amazing fact. I love it.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  It is, it really is. And I think it's, it's almost like the tip of an iceberg of. When 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 Laszlo, 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 for 6,000 years, at least by, you know, at least by 6,000 BCE, rather, so 8,000 years ago, they were bringing Lapis Laszlo to the Middle East.

• 50:58Tristan Hughes?

  Were they using decent copper merchants from the Persian Gulf in that area and dealmen to bring up copper into Syria as well?

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Did we get a little Aonazia?

• 51:05Tristan Hughes?

  We might have done. We can, we can, we can, we can bring back his name.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Yes. No, it is true that that is one of the paths that certainly Lapis Laszlo would have taken was not necessarily always over land, but down through the Endes Valley and along the coast and up through the Persian Gulf. So yes, that I could imagine Aonazia being involved. This is his time period.

• 51:27Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, it is his time period, but could he also brought copper up to some of his copper sought after by Marien and all those places?

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Copper was, yes, absolutely. Yes, they, they were, over time, the copper sources from the south began to be used less and in by the late Bronze Age, they were getting their copper from Cyprus. But at this point, probably still getting it from the, from the south.

• 51:46Tristan Hughes?

  Very good. Hammurabi, Zimri Lim and Aonazia.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 51:50Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's move on as we get to the late Bronze Age. I've got in my notes, first of all, it seems like there's a, there's a dark age in the 16th century we know much less about.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  This is, this is the craziest thing. They were, there's so many documents from Hammurabi's time, from the rest of his dynasty, there's plenty.

• 52:09Tristan Hughes?

  From Ebla beforehand as well.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Ebla beforehand, 1595, the kingdom in Babylon came to an end. And 15, there's some debate eight years one way or another, but, but around 1595 B.C. And then the documentation simply stops everywhere. It's, 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 sealand in the south, there are documents from this period there too.

• 52:49Tristan Hughes?

  The where the sealand?

• 52:50Speaker 03

  The sealand. Yeah, it's, that's what they called it, the kingdom of the sealand. It was around or in the very far south. There are documents from the sealand 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, but, or down rather. But no, it was the, the 1500s did exist. There's just not very much from them.

• 53:24Speaker 06

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800 Granger, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 53:54Speaker 05

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody listen up. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 54:39Tristan Hughes?

  And then you get a new kingdom that comes to the forefront. And is this the biggest kingdom to date in Syria?

• 54:45Speaker 03

  It is. Yes. It's the, it's the first really great kingdom, Mitanni.

• 54:50Tristan Hughes?

  Mitanni.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  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 Mitanni and Kingdom is, is so frustrating because we know from all of its neighbors how powerful it was. But within Syria, its capital city hasn't yet been excavated.

• 55:13Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, whatever. It's kind of like, is it Akkad or what, which hasn't been found?

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. We know, I mean, almost certainly it's the site of Telfa Karia, which is in Syria, and they have excavated higher levels at Telfa Karia. And ever since the Syrian civil war, of course, excavations have stopped. It's an ancient name was Wasykani. And Wasykani must have been an immensely fabulous, big capital city of a major, major kingdom. But 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

• 55:58Speaker 03

  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, who 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. We have a couple of documents that have him, 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.

• 56:37Tristan Hughes?

  As you mentioned with like with Ebla, when, when those later kings refer back to their forefathers, but that's, you have the later sources that mention these, these people at the beginning, who, as you say, it, it seems a big event, you know, the, 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.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:57Tristan Hughes?

  And also at this time is get to the late Bronze Age. Now, 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, you know, Thutmose III, Napoleon of Egypt and, and all of those big battles that, and Ramses II and the like. But the Mitanni are there as well, and they hold out, you know, 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.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  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

• 57:33Tristan Hughes?

  It's a war of five kingdoms, is it?

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. The, the Egyptian kings were trying to expand northwards in the New Kingdom. And so, for example, Amenhotep II was fighting in the Levant, he's fighting north, gets to Mitanni. And in his ninth year, it suddenly stops. So we no longer have these wars of aggression. Initially, he was, earlier, there were, there were gifts from the other kingdoms that came to Thutmose III, where he was received, he, it's almost as though they were sending him gifts to try and bring him into the diplomatic world, you know, because that's what you do. You send gifts. He took it as tribute. You know,

• 58:20Speaker 03

  he describes it as they all were cowering before me and sending tribute. But Mitanni didn't send tribute at that point because they were the, 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 time, it's almost certainly that's the moment where it's almost as though the Egyptians and the Mitanni's 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, and

• 59:03Speaker 03

  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. And the crazy thing is, is they adopted it wholesale. They were willing to write in 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, so much copper on Cyprus, which was, you know, something everybody needed.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  They they were at peace with one another and they started into marrying. 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, which is the way it's sometimes portrayed. They really did have an, their messengers travelled 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

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  his daughters to marry anybody else. He would take other daughters. So the Egyptian in time of Amenhotep 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 that Egyptian princesses never married anybody. So that was the one sticking point.

• 1:00:52Tristan Hughes?

  So, and so he said peace of the five kingdoms. And so I forgive my ignorance, so the five kingdoms are Egypt, Mitanni, Hittites.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Babylonia and Cyprus.

• 1:01:01Tristan Hughes?

  And Cyprus. Okay, so no Assyria this time.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Not yet. No Assyria is currently subject to Mitanni at this point.

• 1:01:07Tristan Hughes?

  Got it.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  It had been conquered by Sowshdatar and so it was within the Mitanni kingdom. And the king that we know the most about from that period, the Mitanni king, is a man named Tushrata.

• 1:01:16Tristan Hughes?

  Tushrata, okay.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  And Tushrata is, I find him kind of a delightful character. He's, he's, he is 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-

• 1:01:42Tristan Hughes?

  He's loving life.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  It is, yes.

• 1:01:44Tristan Hughes?

  He's not holding back.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  He isn't. He's very affectionate. On the other hand, I have a feeling, and I published an article about this, that perhaps in Mitanni, the term love in Hurian had a different connotation than the term love in Akkadian. And he was writing in Akkadian because, so with the Egyptians, they wrote to one another in Akkadian.

• 1:02:01Tristan Hughes?

  And which Egyptian pharaoh is this he's writing to?

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  Well, he starts out writing to Amenhotep III.

• 1:02:05Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  And then he dies and then he's writing to Akhenaten.

• 1:02:07Tristan Hughes?

  So Akhenaten and Amenhotep III are looking at these things, who is this guy just sending love letters again and again and again?

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  So I think it might possibly have been a translation glitch in that, you know, words have different meanings in 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, and that's, that may have been part of his, his pleading, oh, do please love me, please love me.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  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 Amenhotep III, 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. He was furious. It was like, this will not do.

• 1:03:22Tristan Hughes?

  Mitanni's, yeah, don't piss off the Mitannians.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:03:26Tristan Hughes?

  I wish I could ask so many more questions. I, I have a couple.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Tristan Hughes?

  Tushrata, is that a South Asian name as well? Does that have, is that an Indian, is there an Indian connection to the Mitanni?

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Okay, this is the very strange aspect. Mitanni kings did have names that make sense in Sanskrit.

• 1:03:43Tristan Hughes?

  In Sanskrit, okay.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  But it isn't necessarily the case that there was any actual direct contact between South Asia and Mitanni, because this is so early. It could be that there was a group of people who were travelling and who ended up in Mitanni and became some sort of influence there. The reason I'm hesitant is that all of the Mitanni kings that we know of had Hurian names that, at birth, and they took these Indo Aryan names, as they're called, when they took the throne. But they spoke Hurian. They didn't speak Sanskrit. They were, so the, nobody's ever quite figured out what's going on there.

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  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, 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, the name he had at birth were both Hurian. He was a local guy.

• 1:04:48Tristan Hughes?

  So Mitanni is a big power in Syria, you know, from much to the late Bronze Age with its chariots and 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?

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:05:08Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  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. And there was a king who went to the Hittite palace and he appealed to the king there, whose name was Suppiluliuma. And he asked Suppiluliuma to please help him fight for his capital city, to fight for Mitanni. And Suppiluliuma agreed, but he said only if the Mitanni 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, in that situation.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  And then later, the Assyrians, who did take control of their own region, the middle Assyrian kings, right at the, in the late Bronze Age, towards the end of the late Bronze Age, they became very powerful and expand, 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.

• 1:06:19Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, we've only just scratched the surface.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  I know, there's so much.

• 1:06:23Tristan Hughes?

  Ebla, Mari, Katna, Yamhad, and what was the place called? Turka.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Oh, Turka, yes, yes.

• 1:06:30Tristan Hughes?

  Of course, in the 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, 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 epicentre of this, this emerging diplomatic world, this Bronze Age world of, of cross cultures and trade and negotiations and warfare and all of that. And Syria and its many cities and its various kingdoms are right at the heart of it.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  They are, they are. And I think from their perspective, they lived in the centre of the universe, you know, obviously, as every culture, I think, has that feeling about it.

• 1:07:09Tristan Hughes?

  Don't tell the Babylonians that, yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  No, exactly. But their sense was everything revolved around them and, 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. They were very rich. They had this enormously productive land. They had the resource of, of the herds of sheep and they, 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.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  But the two wheeled spoke chariot that was a really, really important war machine at 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 Ugarit, 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-

• 1:08:21Tristan Hughes?

  It's been absolutely brilliant, Amanda. Last but certainly not least, you have written books all about the 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.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Yes, that's Brotherhood of Kings. And in, in Brotherhood of Kings, I, it really does focus on, 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.

• 1:08:54Tristan Hughes?

  Amanda, it just goes to me to say, what a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:09:04Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Amanda Podany 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 to both of those episodes in the show notes.

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