## Highlights ### Agreements about Messengers > The abarsal treaty shows that messengers traveled regularly from ebla to abarsal, presumably bringing letters from their king. such a messenger was expected to stay in abarsal for around ten days before being released to home. the messengers would consume their own provisions at their own king's expense for ten days, but if the abarsal king wanted them to stay longer, he had to support them and provide food: “ arriving messengers will stop as long as ten days and will eat their travel provisions. but if you want them to stay (longer), you (abarsal) will give them travel provisions. > > this suggests that there was a well - established set of expectations and behaviors with respect to other kingdoms. Interesting that these are the times suggested. ### How Families Were Viewed > The gods echoed those of human families. one's own family was, of course, the first bastion of social order, and the mesopotamians and syrians always wanted life to be orderly. their idea of chaos was a world in which sons dis obeyed their fathers, or brothers turned against one another. in one poem a curse read " may brother not recognize his brother. " > > This viewpoint dominated their towns and kingdoms. the term for father in akkadian, the relationships marked by friendship and equality: an ahum could be a col. league, a fellow member of a tribe, or a business partner. so when irkab - damu of ebla thought of his counterpart in hamazi - a man who, like himself, ruled a kingdom, to whom he sent letters and expensive presents, and from whom he expected letters and presents in return - it was as a brother. s among people saw in their parents models for the other authority figures that semitic language of northern mesopotamia , was abum, but it was used for other men as well. an expert in any field was known as abum by his subordinates. the sheikh, someone who oversaw the activities of a town in much the same way that a father might supervise his wife and children, was a big gerabum still. even the most distant and powerful leader - one whom most of his subjects had never seen - styled himself as abum of his vassals and projecting family relationships onto larger and larger arenas, the whole state came to be viewed as an extended household, with the king at its head. > > expectations of behavior within the family, such as obedience to one's parents, extended to one's superiors. fatherhood came to stand in for any hierarchical relationship; the man in the higher position was the father, the lower man was his son. but irkab - damu was neither the " father ” nor the " son " of the king of hamazi. their relationship as “ brothers " had its own set of expectations. the akkadian word for brother, ahum, had another meaning as well: " arm " or " side. " '? and, fittingly, the mesopotamians saw a brother as someone who would reliably be at one's side. where a father inspired awe and respect, a brother was ideally an equal, a reliable partner, and a true friend. here, too, the term expanded beyond real biological connections to encompass many servants. This is a really interesting look at how states came to be set up, growing out of the idea of family and clan and tribe: they're take not as different as people like to imagine them. Lots of fodder here for an article pointing that out. ### writing emerged around the same time as state-level warfare > some of these interactions were, noupons certainly fought one another long before anyone invented a writing system to record the fact. but the stakes were higher once a city - based government could arm and organize its men to launch an attack on a neighboring community. city dwellers in syria and mesopotamia began protecting themselves behind fortifi cation walls at right around the same time that writing was invented Interesting that there is this connection between writing and armies but it makes sense. Add to the warfare note. --- ### portrait of a Syrian town in the Bronze Age. > A thousand years before the reign of tushratta of mittani, another powerful kingdom had thrived in syria. it provides the earliest evidence for the type of diplomacy that had become so routine by tushratta's time. the kingdom was centered in the city of ebla, which during the reign of king irkab - damu was about as prosperous as a syrian town could be in the twenty - third century bce. its 15,000 or 20,000 inhabitants must have thought that they lived in the best place on earth.'past the city wall that encircled ebla were groves of olive trees and vineyards. the city produced wine from the grapes and oil from the olives. and beyond that were lush fields growing barley, which was made into bread and beer, and stands of flax, which produced linen. the eblaites lived not far from the steppes, where they could often see, in the distance, groups of sheep from their city's vast herd of over 80,000. these resources contributed to ebla's main source of wealth: elaborate textiles of linen and wool that were made by hundreds of spinners, weavers, and embroiderers. not everyone worked in the textile business, though. the people of ebla held many other jobs as well. many of them were farmers, while others made pots, baked bread, brewed beer, or took on innumerable other responsibilities that helped the city run smoothly. thousands of them received pay, in the form of rations, directly from the king himself, so that, in one way or another, most of the households in ebla were closely tied to, or even dependent on, the palace. this seems to have been normal for the time; kings required their subjects to work for them in many different ways. ### Near East diplomatic system does not have an unbroken line to modernity > The diplomatic system developed in the ancient near east was forgot ten for millennia; there's no collection of marble busts of ancient kings in the entrance hall to the united nations in honor of their contribution to the history of humankind, no requirement that children study the ancient peace treaties as founding documents, the way they might study the magna carta or the united states constitution. there's a good reason for this: we can find no direct link between the ancient practice of diplomacy and that used today. but it is edifying, even inspiring, to know that, right from the earliest centuries of civilization, ancient kings and statesmen of distinct and different lands were often willing, even eager to find alternatives to war and to see one another as brothers rather than enemies. Similar to my point about why we don't learn about Phoenicia. But yes it's a nice counter to the whole "ugh ancients just fight all the time and are so barbaric we're better" thing. Thesis: people are fundamentally people throughout history. ### Syria was a clearinghouse for the Far East trade and diplomacy. > The place is syria, which was at the geographic heart of ancient near eastern civilization. anyone traveling by land from anatolia (modern turkey) to egypt or vice versa had to journey through syria; the same was true of any. one traveling from mesopotamia (modern iraq) to the mediterranean coast, or from mesopotamia to anatolia or egypt. ships from cyprus and the aegean docked in syria, so syria's cities and kingdoms were open to influences from across the near east and beyond, and its peoples incorporated those influences into their own culture. perhaps for this reason, syria played a crucial role in the spread of diplomacy and the creation of an international community. for a few of the centuries covered in this book, the history of syria is less well known than those of its neighbors because of a shortage of docu mentation, so there are some unavoidable gaps in this story. for much of the time, however, the record is abundant and vivid. the surrounding lands of babylonia, assyria, hatti, canaan, egypt, and cyprus had trade or diplomatic contacts with syria and with one another at various times and will show up often in the narrative. more distant lands like greece, crete, nubia (sudan), dilmun (bahrain), magan (oman), meluhha (the indus valley), afghanistan, and even southeast asia and china sometimes played a role as well. I didn't realize Syria was such a clearinghouse for the far east trade and diplomacy. ### the scope, reach & rules of Far Eastern diplomacy One thing might have made them proud. although they had no word for diplomacy, these kings, their contemporaries, and their ancestors had helped invent it. what the kings forged, as they saw it, was a relationship of friends brothers across hundreds of miles. this brotherhood included not only the kings of egypt and mittani but the other great powers of babylonia (in modern iraq) and hatti (modern turkey) as well. they did not use the term “ brother " lightly. these men saw one another as family and expected the kind of loyalty that real brothers would show to one another. their ambassadors could expect to travel safely and regularly to one another's capitals. the kings followed for mal rules of interaction and shared a set of strategies to work out disagree ments. they negotiated peace treaties, agreed to uphold them, and (for the most part) abided by them. and their efforts paid off with the exchange of luxury goods that each king wanted from the others. they also became relatives in a concrete way as marriages were negotiated and concluded between their royal dynasties. the kings agreed to communicate in a single language - akkadian, the language of mesopotamia - even when (as in the case of tushratta writing to amenhotep iii) it was the native language of neither the sender nor the recipient. this fact attests, perhaps, to how important writing had become in the creation of alliances, in spite of the illiteracy of the kings (only scribes could read and write). kings sometimes referred to hearing the words of a letter read from a tablet or to confirming that a messenger had spoken the words as they were written; it was important to them to have the written record of the message. any one of the great powers of the time could have tried to take over the others through warfare, but diplomacy usually prevailed and provided a respite from bloodshed. instead of fighting, the kings learned from one another, and cooperated in peace. ### Egyptian archival rules > Some egyptian official wrote on the back on me gyptian hieratic script, giving the date on which the tablet had been received he then must have taken tushratta's letter and filed it in the king's archive pom, stored in a basket or jar. most of the documents stored in the palace vere written in the egyptian script and language on papyrus scrolls, which lave long since disintegrated, but international letters, written on clay in uneiform script and baked hard, didn't decompose. years later, when the egyptian capital city was moved north to amarna, omeone must have packed up the tablets that constituted the royal corresponlence - letters not just from mittani but from many kings — and moved them o the new palace. this city, known at the time as akhetaten, was the capital Useful for temple of the archivists; create a synthesized note for mesopotamian and egyptian letter writing correspondence and archives > Keliya leaves the presence of the king and surveys his tablet. is the writ ing neat enough? does he need to recopy it? this time, perhaps not. he takes the tablet to the archive room to prepare it to be baked. royal letters must be treated in the kiln before they are carried, not just left out in the sun to dry. the baking process gives the smooth tablet a slight shine and the hardness of a brick. it is now unlikely to be damaged on its long journey. This might be useful for the Temple of [[The Archivist]]. ### Differences between Egyptian and Syrian princesses > But some of the features of international diplomacy would have appealed to amenhotep ii. the mittanian ambassador no doubt got the pharaoh's attention when he told the pharaoh that, if he agreed to the alliance, he would marry daughters of each of his “ brother ” kings. this wouldn't have sounded like a signal of equality to the pharaoh. his father thutmose iii had been mar ried to three canaanite princesses and perhaps to a minoan princess as well; a harem of foreigners was a sign of strength. what better way to show his subjects that he was the lord of these supposed allies than to present a parade of women arriving from the foreign powers, like so much living tribute? and of course each of the women would arrive with a huge dowry. but amenhotep ii must have made one thing perfectly clear from the start: he would never reciprocate by sending his own daughters to marry his allies. a later pharaoh put it succinctly: “ from time immemorial no daughter of the king of egypt] is given to anyone. What did egyptian daughters of the pharaoh do, then, if not engage in diplomatic stuff? Just marry their brothers? Lounge? ### Bronze Age Trade in the Far East > And whereas ea - nasir seems to have worked for the temple in ur, the assyr ian traders were independent entrepreneurs, beholden neither to their king nor to a particular temple. the southern cities were, by now, powerfully domi nated by their kings, but power in ashur had traditionally been held by the city itself, as a collective authority. this gave entrepreneurs an opportunity to work much more autonomously than would have been possible in babylonia. the trade network between ashur and anatolia was the work of a number of businessmen who had found, in creating this connection, a clever way to obtain silver and gold, which were highly valued back home in mesopotamia. one could pay for most things with pieces of silver; they could be cut off a coil (perhaps wrapped around a man's wrist) and weighed by a merchant against a set of standard weights. even though coinage wasn't invented until a thou sand years after this, the silver was used as money. Add to economy. ### Interesting Figures: Kirum & Tushratta I learned about the plight of Kirum, daughter of Zumri-Lim, who married Hays-Samu, a violent treacherous ass. She threatened to kill herself if her father didn't come get her, and the king eventually divorced her. Would probably make a good, albeit tragic, short story. Also interesting is the story of Tushratta, whose brother was assassinated; the assassin ruled as his regent, but Egypt apparently prevented the assassin from killing him too and ruling outright. Tushratta was required to cut off contact with Egypt but killed the assassin when he was old enough. ### Role of powerful women in Bronze Age Levant > a king could also dedicate a daughter to a god as a priestess. the role of such a woman was important, too; she was obligated to pray to the gods for the health and prosperity of her father and his kingdom. the more daughters a king had, the better. zimri - lim had at least two sisters and eleven daughters, and many of them, perhaps almost all, played these roles. the women selected for diplomatic marriage would have been married young, probably only in their teens, but they were not viewed simply as a particularly valuable gift, as some have suggested. in a sense, upon marriage they joined the diplomatic corps. not surprisingly, the negotiations leading up to a royal marriage took time and involved high officials, though the vassal king receiving the bride might not have met his wife until after the wedding ceremony. ### Role of gift-giving in Bronze Age Levant > Just as the kings saw matching gifts as a sign of affection, so too did aver age people. one woman complained to her sister that she had not yet received a present from her, even though the woman had offered to send her sister five logs. she sent a messenger to the sister and wrote, “ send by him one hundred locusts and food worth one - sixth of a shekel of silver. in this i will see your sis terly attitude toward me. " 66 (locusts were considered to be a delicious delicacy.) as with the kings, these women expected that siblings who lived apart would send regular gifts, and took the absence of these gifts as a snub. a large number of personal letters between siblings written during the time of hammurabi's dynasty pertain to just this issue. this happens to be the era for which we have the most personal letters, but the same was probably true in other eras as well. ### Wealth of [[Bronze Age]] [[India]] > The extent and wealth of the land of meluhha were on a different scale alto gether. stretching along the indus river, this civilization, which flourished from around 2600 bce, was on a par, in terms of its sophistication, with those of mesopotamia and egypt at the same time. in fact, the land of meluhha was much more extensive than either — it stretched over double the area of either mesopotamia or egypt — and the well - planned cities were grand and orderly.48 the largest of these, harappa and mohenjo daro, have been extensively exca vated. they were built of baked bricks on top of platforms designed to protect the cities from floods, with wide, arrow - straight streets, well - engineered drain age systems, and plenty of evidence of an impressively organized government. the meluhhan people had a writing system that they used for writing short inscriptions on stone seals. they probably also used it to write on other, less stable materials, which have long since disintegrated. unfortunately, their writing system has not yet been deciphered (and those short inscriptions might include little more than names), so we know very little about the people, their government, their religion, or their culture. Useful for harrapa and India. ### Sacral Queenship in [[Bronze Age]] Iraq > From 1922 to 1934, sir leonard woolley, an englishman given to wear. ing a felt hat and sports jacket while excavating in the blazing heat of souther iraq, dug at ur, and it was his good fortune to find the cemetery. among all the graves, sixteen stood out. they were the tombs, apparently, of royalty, both men and women. these kings and queens (if that is what they were) were not buried alone. in a macabre discovery, woolley found that each was accompa nied by youthful attendants, in some cases dozens of them, presumably there to serve their lord or lady in the afterlife. the attendants wore fine jewelry and ornaments, and each had been put to death at the time of the burial, killed by a sharp blow to the head. 15 one of the tombs even included wagons and oxen, all outfitted as though ready to carry their master whenever he called. this was a surprise; human sacrifice was not mentioned in mesopotamian documents and no later examples are known of this type of mass sacrifice in a royal tomb. on the other hand, very few other royal tombs have been found in mesopota mia, not even robbed ones. Relates to the article I'm working on for [[2022.01.26a broken heart syndrome and human sacrifice customs]]. Interesting here that it's for women too. ### p233 Mesopotamian princesses had more power than Egyptian ones > What was life like for foreign princesses living in the courts of their fathers' allies? It's tempting to imagine that they had the same kinds of responsibilities that the princesses of Mari had taken on four hundred years earlierwriting to their fathers about affairs of state and helping their husbands in an administrative capacity-but the truth seems to have been somewhat different, at least in Egypt. Although life for the foreign wives of the pharaoh was no doubt luxurious, their position in the court was not as exalted as their fathers probably hoped. Tadu-Hepa must have had to find her way among all the wives and concubines and all their attendants at court, and it is possible that she rarely saw the king. Add to [[marriage]] moc and use for [[The Diplomacy of Marriage]] article. ### p237 Travel in the Bronze Age Meditteranean region > The Mycenaean ambassadors probably looked forward to seeing their homeland again. They anticipated seeing the golden hills in the distance, the sun-parched grass looking like soft carpet between rocks. Patches of olive trees and vines surrounded small harbor towns of blocky houses painted white and blue. The cargo ship would pull in at one of these towns, sailing between smaller boats that stayed close to shore. Oarsmen manned such boats, rowing belowdecks while travelers sat in comfort beneath striped canopies, talking and watching dolphins that swam alongside. The sailors on the cargo ship would set down one of their many stone anchors when they reached port, and the Mycenaean ambassadors would go ashore on the last leg of their journey home. Messengers might have been waiting to greet them and to help them transport the greeting gifts from Cyprus to their king. ### p266 The Amarna Age, 1400 - 1300 BCE. Hittites. > Hatti had a long history by now. It had been about 250 years since the Hittite king Mursili I had led the Hittite troops against Babylon, and about 400 years since Assyrian merchant colonies had flourished in Anatolian cities. Even then, the Anatolian cities had been very old; Hatti was an ancient and rich civilization. > > The heart of the kingdom was the region of the central Anatolian plateau, home to many Hittite cities. It was a place of extremes, with blazing hot, dry summers and intensely cold winters. Blizzards could blow in wrap the thick stone and brick walls of the temples and palaces in snow, confining the people to their homes. But the winter days could also be dry though bitterly cold. > > Hattusa, the capital, was in an area of rocky steppe, with deep craggy valleys and high city walls protecting it from the incursions of the enemies nearby to the north, the Kaska people. The sky over Hattusa was often a clear blue flecked with white clouds, the mountains to the south a gray purple line on the horizon. Forests surrounded the capital back then, though the forests are gone now, and the Hittites used the oak and pine timber in their buildings. > > A lot of wood was also certainly used up in keeping fires going in the hearths all winter, though it must have seemed to the Hittites that their forests could never be exhausted. Seven springs provided an ample supply of fresh water for the city. > > In some ways, though, Hattusa was an odd choice for the capital. It was at the far northern edge of the Hittite empire, and cut off from easy access to much of the land, even within Anatolia, by high hills and mountains. The city seems to have looked north, rather than south. And yet it suited the kings well enough; they ruled from Hattusa for centuries. > > Excavators have been working at Hattusa for over a century, since 1900, and have unearthed palaces, temples, houses, streets, and the city's vast and well-designed fortification system. ### p288 Why the Hittites invaded Egypt > The next part of the "Deeds" text is broken. We know, though, that Suppiluliuma selected his son Zannanza to marry the Egyptian queen and to become pharaoh. This could not have been a secret; Mursili II doesn't mention any attempt to hide the forthcoming marriage. Perhaps the lands even drew up a treaty. A later text presents the request for a king as coming not from the queen but from the whole people: "When the Egyptians became frightened, they came and actually asked my father for his son for kingship."75 The same text suggests that the prince had an Egyptian escort, saying that “they took him off" to Egypt, “they" being the Egyptians. Perhaps, like the princesses who had married pharaohs in the past, Zannanza was accompanied by Egyptian troops and carried gifts with him-the bride-wealth for his new queen. > But something went terribly wrong. When Mursili's text resumes, Zannanza had been killed and Suppiluliuma was devastated. "He began to lament for [Zanna]nza, [and] to the god[s...] he spoke [th]us: 'O gods, I did [them no h]arm, [yet] the people of Egy[pt d]id [this to me]." His animosity about the attack on Kadesh was reignited, and he ranted that "they have (also) [attacked] the frontier of my land." Suppiluliuma seems to have believed that it was the Egyptian people as a whole who had killed his son, not a particular faction. The tl;dr on this (fascinating) section is that a failed attempt at marriage treaty led to war between the Hittites and Egyptians. There were no male heirs in Egypt, so the queen was trying to marry a Hittite prince, but they were at eat with the Hittites and a faction assassinated the prince. ### It varies which group is considered higher status: the group that provides "foreign" wives, or "receives" them. Throughout the amarna period, the egyptian kings still refused to send daughters to their allies; they would only agree to receive them. ** tushratta doesn't seem to have questioned the arrangement - he never asked for an egyptian princess in return when he sent tadu - hepa. the pharaoh must have bragged to his egyptian officials that all the apparently lesser kings had sent their daughters to marry him as a sign of their submission to him, but tushratta and the babylonian kings (and others, no doubt) could brag, in turn, that they were the fathers - in - law of the pharaoh. anthropologists have studied this phe nomenon in many cultures, and it is generally more common, when women marry outside of their social group, for the group that provides the wives (the mittanians and babylonians, in this instance) to be considered superior to the group that receives wives.59 but the pharaoh didn't view things this way, as far as he was concerned, the women were a form of tribute. fortunately, all the kings could therefore see themselves as having " won, " according to the values societies in the marriage negotiations with egypt. ### Syrian princesses probably weren't viewed as mere commodities. > it's not clear that the pharaohs would have agreed that their land and those of their allies had become " a single country " as a result of the royal marriages, but this, even more than a greed for gold, was evidently foremost in the minds not just of tushratta but of other kings who arranged marriages for their daughters. in surviving sources that mention marriages between the royal houses of hatti and mittani, between hatti and babylonia, between babylonia and assyria, and between babylonia and elam, such material concerns as the size of the dowry or the bridal gift were rarely even mentioned. if royal wives really were just commodities to be traded, one would expect to see the women discussed in terms of their value. instead, they continued to play a part in creating (or trying to create) unity between the two states. in a later treaty with mittani that included the marriage of his daughter, the hittite king sup piluliuma expressed this idea clearly (though by this time, mittani's status had diminished - this was not a treaty between equals): " prince shattiwaza shall be king in the land of mittani, and the daughter of the king of hatti shall be queen in the land of mittani..., in the future... the hittites shall not do evil to the mittanians, (the mittanians) shall not do evil to the hittites. " the royal couple became the living symbol of the treaty between the two states.