The Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean

c. 1350 B.C.A club of great kings

In the fourteenth century B.C. the eastern Mediterranean was governed by a handful of monarchs who knew one another by letter. The pharaoh in Egypt, the Hittite king at Hattusa in the highlands of Anatolia, the kings of Mitanni on the upper Euphrates, of Kassite Babylon and of rising Assyria addressed each other as brother, as equals; the petty kings of Canaan and Syria addressed the pharaoh as his slave, from the dust at his feet. We know this because a peasant woman digging at Tell el-Amarna in 1887 found the archive of Akhenaten’s short-lived capital: some three hundred and fifty clay tablets in Babylonian cuneiform, the diplomatic language of the age. In them kings beg for gold, complain that the last shipment was underweight, negotiate marriages, and demand the return of runaway subjects. It is the oldest surviving international correspondence, and it reads like the correspondence of any age.

The Mycenaean kings are not in the Amarna file, but they are in the world it describes. Mycenaean pottery of this period turns up from Sicily to Syria and down the Nile. Egyptian tomb paintings show Aegean envoys. And the Hittite archives speak of a king of Ahhiyawa, a sea-power to the west that meddled on the Anatolian coast. Most scholars read Ahhiyawa as the Achaeans, Homer’s name for the Greeks, though a few have refused the identification; the tablets do not say where the king lived.

1274 B.C.Kadesh, and the first peace treaty

The great powers fought as well as wrote. Egypt under the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties held Canaan and pressed north into Syria; the Hittites under Suppiluliuma I destroyed Mitanni and pressed south. In 1274 B.C., by the usual reckoning, Ramesses II met the Hittite king Muwatalli II at Kadesh on the Orontes with the largest armies of the age, thousands of chariots on each side. Ramesses covered the walls of his temples with the story of how he was ambushed, fought alone when his divisions fled, and won. The Hittite records claim the victory for their side, and the fact that Egypt afterwards held nothing north of Damascus suggests they were nearer the truth.

Fifteen years later the two powers made peace, and both copies of the treaty survive: in hieroglyphs on the walls of Karnak, and on a clay tablet from Hattusa. Each king swears to the other’s gods, promises not to invade, promises to send back fugitives, and binds his heirs. Ramesses married a Hittite princess to seal it. It is the earliest peace treaty whose text we possess, and the two great kings kept it until both their kingdoms were gone.

c. 1320 B.C.The cargo of a single ship

The wealth of this world lay in bronze, and bronze needed copper and tin, which no kingdom had together. Off Uluburun on the southern coast of Turkey a ship went down about 1320 B.C. carrying ten tons of Cypriot copper in ox-hide ingots and a ton of tin, together with glass ingots, ebony from Africa, ivory, ostrich eggs, terebinth resin in Canaanite jars, Baltic amber, a gold scarab of Nefertiti, Mycenaean swords and seals, and the weights of merchants from at least three countries. One cargo touched the products of a dozen lands. The Mycenaean palaces lived on this traffic: their smiths, the Pylos tablets show, were issued bronze by the palace and owed it back in finished goods. When the ships stopped coming the palaces would have nothing to give out.

c. 1300–1180 B.C.Troy

On a mound called Hisarlik above the plain of the Hellespont, Schliemann dug in the 1870s for Homer’s Troy and found a city, or rather nine cities one on top of another. Wilhelm Dörpfeld and then Carl Blegen sorted the layers. The sixth city, with sloping limestone walls and great towers, was the grandest, and was wrecked about 1300 B.C., by an earthquake in Blegen’s view; the seventh, a poorer rebuilding in which the houses crowd against the walls and storage jars are sunk beneath the floors as if for a siege, burned about 1180 B.C., with arrowheads and unburied dead in its streets. Blegen was sure that this was Homer’s Troy and that Agamemnon burned it. Others have been less sure. The Hittite texts know a Wilusa in the north-west of Anatolia whose king was troubled by Ahhiyawa, and Wilusa may be Homer’s Ilios; the identification is likely but not proved.

Whatever happened at Hisarlik, the Iliad is not a record of it. The poem was composed, in the form we have, about five centuries later, by a poet or poets who knew nothing of Linear B or of the chariot warfare they describe; the Greeks themselves reckoned the fall of Troy at about 1184 B.C. by genealogies that cannot bear the weight. This site treats the Trojan War as what it is: a Greek memory that a real city on a real strategic strait was once besieged and burned, and that the kings of Mycenae were the sort of men who might have done it.

c. 1250–1200 B.C.Kings behind higher walls

In the last generation of the palaces the kings were afraid. At Mycenae and Tiryns the walls were extended and thickened and passages cut so that wells lay inside the fortifications. At Athens a stair was driven down through the rock of the Acropolis to a spring. The Pylos tablets of the palace’s final year list watchers posted along the coast and rowers assigned to ships; the interpretation is disputed, but the palace was counting its men. At Hattusa the last kings fought a rebellious cousin’s line at Tarhuntassa, wrote to Ugarit demanding grain for a famine, and sent their fleet to fight at Cyprus. Ramesses II’s successor Merneptah repelled Libyans who came with sea-borne allies. The system that had exchanged gold and princesses for two centuries was under a strain from every side at once, and it was about to break together.