The Ancient World

“I freed those here who suffered unseemly enslavement and feared the tempers of their masters.  I did this by harnessing force and justice together with power, and I carried through my promises.  I wrote statues alike for those of high and of low social status, fitting straight justice for each.  If someone other than I had taken the goad, some ill-intentioned and greedy man, he would not have been able to control the people.  For had I been willing to do what pleased the opposing party then, or what the others planned for them, this city would have lost many men.  That is why I made a stout defense all round, turning like a wolf among many hounds.”  – Solon of Athens

The leaders of Rome, Carthage and Greece relied on strength, wisdom and cunning to navigate the turbulent political waters of the early sixth century Mediterranean.  The delicate balance struck by Solon allowed Athena to prosper, while also unleashing the popular forces that would define the city’s future.

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“So they took the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah in the land of Hamath, and he pronounced judgment on him.  Then the king of Babylon killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. And he killed all the princes of Judah in Riblah.  He also put out the eyes of Zedekiah; and the king of Babylon bound him in bronze fetters, took him to Babylon, and put him in prison till the day of his death.” – Jeremiah 52 

After eliminating the last Assyrian holdouts, King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon warred against Egypt over control of the Levant.  Repeated Judean defiance resulted in the sacking of Jerusalem.  Cyaxares of Medea found his Anatolian designs curtailed by the powerful kingdom of Lydia.

“But when earth had covered this generation also, Zeus the son of Cronos made yet another, the fourth, upon the fruitful earth, which was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth.  Grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them, some in the land of Cadmus at seven- gated Thebe when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and some, when it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helen’s sake: there death’s end enshrouded a part of them.  But to the others father Zeus the son of Cronos gave a living and an abode apart from men, and made them dwell at the ends of earth. And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods…” – Hesiod, Works and Days

During the eighth and seventh centuries BC, the Archaic Greeks struggled with tyranny, warfare and social division.  But their creativity in matters of art, politics, warfare and religious practice foreshadowed the coming brilliance of the Classical Age.

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“Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?  Whence shall I seek comforters for thee?” – Nahum 3:7

Ashurbanipal spent the end of his reign establishing a library of Mesopotamian knowledge and culture.  Twenty years after his death, internal discord and powerful enemies combined to seal the fate of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

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In the mid-seventh century BC, Nubia and Assyria struggled for control over Egypt before the kingdom regained independence under the pharaoh Psamtik I.  King Gyges of Lydia drove the Cimmerians from western Anatolia and sent Greek mercenaries to reinforce the pharaoh’s armies.  Ashurbanipal spent decades warring against the Empire’s enemies, including his older brother in Babylon, but his total destruction of the ancient kingdom of Elam sowed the seeds of Assyria’s downfall.

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“The city and its houses, from its foundations to its walls, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire.  The wall and outer wall, temple-tower of brick and earth, temples and gods, and many as there were, I razed and dumped into the Arahtu-Canal.  Through the midst of the city I dug canals, flooded its site with water, and the very foundations thereof I destroyed.  I made its destruction more complete than by a flood.  That, in days to come, the site of the city, its temples and gods, might not be remembered, I completely blotted it out with floods of water, and made it like a meadow.” – Sennacherib of Assyria

In the early seventh century BC, Sennacherib wrestled with Judean defiance, Urartian resurgence and Elamite invasion, but his destruction of the ancient city of Babylon led to his demise.  His son, Esarhaddon, warred against the Nubian pharaoh Taharqa to extend Assyrian domination into lower Egypt.

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In the west, Phoenician mastery of the Mediterranean was challenged by widespread Greek colonization.  Rome’s first kings established the boundaries and institutions of the early state.  In the Near East, Sennacherib was confronted with the return of a Chaldean usurper to the Babylonian throne.

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“Then the King of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it for three years.  In the ninth year of Hoshea, the King of Assyria took Samaria.” – II Kings 18:4

Toward the end of the eighth century BC, the Kushite priest-kings of Napata reunified Egypt under Nubian rule.  Sargon II continued to extend Assyrian domination over the Near East, even as Elamite armies bolstered Chaldean resistance in Babylonia.  And a desperate gambit by King Hoshea resulted in the destruction of the ancient state of Israel.

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“And Pul, the King of Assyria, came against the land.” – II Kings, 15:19

In 745 BC, Tiglath-pileser III reformed the administrative and military structure of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and led the armies of Assur in a virtually-unbroken string of regional conquests.

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During the first half of the eighth century BC, Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria all struggled against the forces of entropy and decline.  In the absence of the Aramean threat, Israel and Judah resumed their perpetual struggle.  Urartu expanded its regional influence at the expense of a weakened Assyria.