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documents or archaeological remains. In Iran, the Middle Elamite exuberance of power that enabled it to conquer Babylon and carry off such key monuments in the history of art as the Law Code of Hammurabi and the Stele of Naram Sin also dwindled into obscurity at the end of the 12th century. In Mycenaean Greece fortresses like Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae itself were violently destroyed, and the palace at Knossos on Crete likewise. In the Levant generally there was widespread devastation, most vividly illustrated in the ruins of Ugarit, where five millennia of settlement terminated in a massive—and archaeologically rich—destruction level.
A dramatic decline in literacy, material wealth, and the size of political units followed these catastrophes. Memories of this transformational era are reflected in accounts of the Trojan War and the Israelite conquest of the promised land. The 12th and 11th centuries are not a completely “Dark Age,” but they were in fact a period in which more continuity was lost than in many of the dark ages that preceded it. In traditional terminology, this is the beginning of the Iron Age, although iron itself is initially almost nonexistent in the archaeological record.
What caused this upheaval? As with all great historical development, there is no shortage of speculation, and little generally accepted fact.1 On the most superficial level, there appears to have been some sort of systems collapse, where damage to one polity released forces that damaged others. The very interrelationships that ordered the civilized world effectively transmitted disorder. Ancient historical sources finger outside invaders as the triggering factor, but modern historians find this explanation insufficient, since barbarians like the Kaska are always a potential threat and generally no match for more complex societies unless something is going wrong with them internally. Climate change, technological change, and even earthquakes have been suggested as prime movers.
THE CONCEPT OF AN IRON AGE
In this context, it is useful to revisit the somewhat antiquated concept of the Iron Age, not just to refute the once popular view that discovery of “the secret of iron” precipitated the end of the Bronze Age by giving barbarians more power, but to evaluate the importance of metallurgical technology in reshaping societies in the following centuries. As with many other broad and influential ideas that shaped the direction of archaeological research, a clear statement of the underlying theory was presented by V. Gordon Childe in the 1930s. The gist of his argument was as follows: Once the smelting technology is mastered, iron tools and weapons are cheap to make. Iron ores are common and although some locations are better than others for brining ores and the timber to smelt them together, there is never any possibility of monopolizing the production of iron or the distribution of objects made of it. Bronze, on the other hand, is always something of a luxury and a metal controlled by elites, since sources for its components, copper and tin, are restricted and must be brought together by long-distance shipment. The introduction of iron was thus a democratizing force in society, improving the tools available to non-elites for the first time since the Neolithic. The new economic and military power imparted to these
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lower and more populous social strata thus demanded new and more broadly embracing forms of leadership, social control, and ideological propagation. One may trace such things as the spread of the alphabet, the emergence of proselytizing religions, and eventually democracy itself back to the influence of iron.
As with all grand ideas, the devil here is in the details. Childe was inclined to see transformations in the human condition as “revolutions” and in his day the archeological record was thin enough to allow the notion of a very abrupt change from bronze to iron as the dominant blade technology. Certainly when one compares the palace-based Bronze Age societies of the 13th century with those of the 8th-century Iron Age the contrasts are striking, but one must cover a lot of time to get from one to the other, and the role of iron technology in bringing about the changes is problematic. Iron existed as a luxury metal in the Bronze Age, and it did not appear in any quantity, or in the kind of utilitarian objects that would effect Childe’s “revolution,” until the 10th century.
Anatolia is certainly one of the regions of the world in which the changes at the end of the Bronze Age were most dramatic. Recent archaeological research is refining our understanding of both the continuities and discontinuities of the transformation. At the site of Bog˘ azköy, for example, there is just enough occupation in the period after the site was destroyed as an imperial center to track a pattern of change through pottery in the Early Iron Age, between the fall of the Empire and the Phrygian reoccupation of the site in the 9th century BC. In the first of three stratigraphic phases covering the 12th through the 10th centuries, there is a great increase in the amount of handmade pottery compared to the Empire, but wheelmade pottery still makes up a quarter of the sherds. Some of the forms of the vessels look very much like their imperial predecessors, but their surfaces are more polished. In the second and third phases, wheelmade pottery disappears and light colored fabrics are sometimes decorated with red painted geometric designs. There is new crude ware, poorly fired in a reducing atmosphere to create a dark gray appearance. These vessels sometimes have horseshoe or knob-shaped handles. In the Middle Iron Age, that is beginning in the 9th century, there is a substantial new settlement on Büyükaya, using a new type of pottery in which a matt-brown paint predominates.2 These later wares are associated with the Phrygian domination of the area, which will be discussed in Chapter 10, but also appear in southern Anatolia where the Phrygians were never a major population element. In short, what appears to be happening in the area around Bog˘ azköy is not an invasion from the west, but the evolution of local traditions.3
At Kilise Tepe, a site which had flourished in the “Lower Land” during the imperial period, one sees a transformation parallel to that which took place at Bog˘ azköy. The standardized wares associated with the Hittite Empire on the plateau go out of use, and are replaced by red painted wares reminiscent of pre-imperial conditions in the area. The forms and styles of these “revivals” are not the same as the ones that appear in the north or elsewhere in Anatolia, but the replacement of broadly distributed “imperial” forms by local ones is clearly a product of the same loss of political centralization.4
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ASSYRIA AND THE HISTORY OF THE NEO-HITTITE PRINCIPALITIES
In the world of the early Iron Age, one group of polities made direct claims to the legacy of the Hittite Empire: At various sites in the Taurus Mountains, Cilicia, and northern Syria principalities distinguished by the use of Luwian hieroglyphic writing flourished from the beginning of the 12th until at least the end of the 8th centuries BC (Figure 8.1). It was their hieroglyphic texts that led scholars of the 19th century to posit the existence of the Hittite Empire in the first place, although most of them were actually written after the Hattusa had been destroyed. The designation “Hittite” for these monuments and state must also be used with qualification. We now know that the language in question was a dialect of Luwian, not Hittite, so the increased prominence of hieroglyphic writing in the Iron Age can be argued as both continuity and discontinuity with the Empire. It is, in fact, emblematic of what was going on generally. These “Neo-Hittite”, “Syro-Hittite” or “Late Hittite” principalities, as they are variously called,5 gather
Figure 8.1 Map of Neo-Hittite sites
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up some of the old elements of the defunct empire and represent them in quite new and different ways.
There are roughly a dozen political entities to be considered under these rubrics, and within and among them diversity is the watchword. To classify them collectively either as city-states or tribally controlled territories is inappropriate, and most of the known detail of their political history relates to confused and unstable dynastic succession. Starting from the north, moving down the Euphrates, then across Syria and returning to the Anatolian Plateau, the kingdoms exhibiting some degree of Hittite influence were Melid (Malatya), Kummuh, Carchemish, Bit Adini, Bit Agusi, Hamath, Patina/Unqi, Sam al, Que, Hilakku, Tabal, and Gurgum. It is important to recognize, however, that another people, the Arameans, became prominent in the southern part of this area in the course of the Iron Age and their language ultimately came to dominate the Near East south of the Taurus Mountains. Aramean and Neo-Hittite elements are so thoroughly mixed in the societies of Syria and Anatolia in the Iron Age that drawing a firm line between Aramean and Luwian cultural entities is problematic, if not pointless. Their interactions are poorly understood and in many cases the principalities themselves appear to have been composed of different population elements.
The available textual and archaeological sources for history of these principalities do not permit us to produce a coherent chronological narrative. With archaeology, part of the problem stems from what may be the most interesting product of this cultural complex—monumental sculpture. Because they offered large and curious objects of art that could be exported to museums, Neo-Hittite sites were dug in the very early days of archaeology when little attention was given to recording contextual information. The nuts and bolts of modern archaeology such as pottery sequences, domestic remains, intrasite/intersite relationships and so forth were neglected. More recent research is making progress in this area, but there is a vast amount to time and space to cover. In this sphere, Anatolian and Syro-Palestinian archaeology blend together without sharp delineation, and the character of the Hittite survival cannot be treated without reference to the Arameans linguistically, and Syria geographically.
A second complicating factor is that the textual record of the Neo-Hittites themselves is very incomplete, and not rich in historical information. They did not make use of cuneiform, or, more to the point, clay as a writing material. Most of what survives are monumental inscriptions on stone, and these have very limited functions such as commemorating buildings and validating local dynasties. In some cases, they enable us to put together genealogies of several generations for a given principality, but otherwise they are quite provincial in their outlook. A few incised lead strips excavated at Assur and Kululu establish that Luwian hieroglyphs were indeed used for letters and purposes other than monumental display and seal legends, but the bulk of this kind of writing must have been on perishable materials and is thus unavailable to us.
The history of the Neo-Hittite states, and indeed Iron Age Anatolia generally, cannot be written without a discussion to the Neo-Assyrians, whose power came to embrace almost the whole of the Near East. While the center of gravity of their vast empire was in northern Iraq and the Neo-Hittite area was but one theater in a program of conquest which also included
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Babylonia, Iran, the Levant, and Egypt, Assyrian records are our primary source of information on the broad outlines of the chronology of the Neo-Hittite states. They are also central to the study of Urartu, which is treated in the next chapter. Thus a digression on Neo-Assyrian history is in order.
Assyria’s rise as a military power in the Late Bronze Age and its threat to the Hittite Empire in Syria were noted in the previous chapter. This phase is known as the Middle Assyrian period, and in the crisis years at the beginning of the 12th century, the power of Assyrian monarchs declined, rather than collapsing completely as it did with the Hittites. The succession of kings continued, although the rulers were inconsequential figures and seem to have lost control of northern Syria. At the end of the 12th century, Assyrian fortunes were briefly revived by a remarkable ruler, Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1077), whose annals composed on clay prisms provide the first the first information on Iron Age Anatolia and the Neo-Hittite world. Crossing the Euphrates to campaign in Syria, he was also the first king to mention the Arameans. He received tribute from Ini-Teshub of Carchemish, whom he regarded as the king of Hatti.6 He also makes intriguing references to the Kaska, who now appear in the upper Tigris area, and a kingdom called Mushki, which was later to be a major power in Anatolia, usually associated with the Phyrgians (see Chapter 10). Tiglath-Pileser’s widespread conquests were a one-reign tour de force in this phase of Assyria’s history, however. Two more centuries passed before another Assyrian monarch was to reach the Neo-Hittite area.
The Neo-Assyrian empire was established on a more solid basis in the reigns of Assurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) and Shalmaneser III (858–824 BC). The former again received tribute from Carchemish as he marched to the Mediterranean, and the latter struck repeatedly at a coalition of north Syrian principalities that included many Neo-Hittite states as well as places that we associate with Aramean leadership. Shalmaneser also captured the key site of Til Barsip on the east bank of the Euphrates, converting it into a stronghold which was to serve as a key Assyrian provincial center for the duration of the Empire. Effective as these conquests were, they appear to have temporarily exhausted the Assyrians. In the last quarter of the 9th century and the first half of the 8th, the powers of the Assyrian central government again went into retreat. Former Assyrian governors, such as Shamshi-ilu, whose inscriptions have been found at Til Barsip, picked up some of the slack in this period. Interestingly, if there is a candidate for the historic Assyrian queen Semiramis whose name and legends survive in classical literature and modern opera, it is Shamurramat, the mother and wife, respectively, of two of the more obscure Assyrian kings of this period.
The reign of Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727) inaugurated the final phase of expansion into the Neo-Hittite areas, and in subsequent reigns, particularly Sargon II’s (722–705 BC), most of the Aramean and many of the Neo-Hittite states were absorbed into the Neo-Assyrian Empire, losing their cultural identity. Sargon himself fell on a battlefield in Anatolia, but the Assyrian hold on Syria was now firm. By the end of the 8th century, the traditions inaugurated by the Hittites in central Anatolia were dead, even in the southern areas to which they had migrated in the Iron Age.
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