Egypt had survived the attacks of the so-called Sea Peoples around 1200 BC but had since strongly declined in power. Shortly before 1000 BC, it even broke apart into a northern and a southern part. Following this, Libyan mercenary chiefs, Nubian and Ethiopian princes, and the high priests of the god Amun succeeded each other as dominant powers in the land until the Assyrian conquest. Despite all this, a sense of unity was maintained during this period by the idea of a sort of theocracy of Amun, as if the god himself governed the land and the various kings were merely his subordinates. It was also a period in which all kinds of magical religious beliefs and practices spread, and the worship of cats, crocodiles, monkeys, and other sacred animals became very popular. The subjugation by Assyria was short-lived, around 690-670 BC. A new dynasty, the 26th, arose from the resistance to these foreign overlords that from its seat in Sais in the Nile delta would transform Egypt once more into a great power.
The Canaanites, inhabitants of present-day Israel and South Syria, in the last years of the 2nd millennium BC were forced to cede parts of their country to the Aramaeans. Of the many Aramaean principalities that sprang up, the kingdom of Damascus in South Syria would prove to be the strongest. In the same period, the Philistines, who had arrived together with the Sea Peoples from the area of the Aegean Sea, settled along the coast from Gaza to Ashkelon. The indigenous Canaanites managed to maintain their independence only in the coastal cities of modern-day Lebanon. There, in the 1st millennium BC, Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos created a new and flourishing civilization. It was their inhabitants, whom the Greeks called Phoenicians, who as seafarers in the beginning of the 1st millennium BC dominated a large part of the Mediterranean and spread Near Eastern culture westward by founding, as has been mentioned earlier, Carthage and other colonies.
In this politically fragmented but culturally highly developed eastern border of the Mediterranean, a new kind of script developed: the alphabet. Already from the 2nd millennium BC we have examples of a form of alphabetic writing in inscriptions from the Sinai and in texts on clay tablets from northern Syria, while shortly before 1000 BC the alphabet as a script of 22 signs, most of them being consonants, was known in Byblos. In comparison with Egyptian hieroglyphs or with the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, an alphabetic script was far easier to read and to write, and would ultimately revolutionize written communication. From its presumably West Semitic origins, the alphabet spread rapidly in various closely related forms like the Aramaic, the Hebrew, and the Phoenician. From the latter, at some time between 900 and 750 BC, the Greeks would derive, with just a few adaptations, their form of the alphabet. People wrote on wood, stone, ceramic, leather, metal, or, in the Egyptian tradition, on papyrus. And it was in the shape of easily transported papyrus scrolls that the book began to spread throughout these parts of the world. Although books would for a long time to come remain the precious property of only a few, and although the writers were at first mainly scribes in the service of temple or palace, the appearance of the book would in the end have unforeseen consequences. Books written in an alphabetic script circulated more widely, and their contents had a more profound influence than any text written in the older scripts.
The history of the Israelites provides an example of the influence that religious ideas could exert when put into writing. The stories about the history of the Israelites as told in the Hebrew Bible—that is, the Old Testament of the Christians, written down, presumably not before the 4th century BC—are largely legendary. It is certain, however, that in the 9th and 8th centuries BC there existed two small states, Israel and Judah, of which the former was undoubtedly the more important. But whether they had split off from a previous unitary state that had been the realm of King David and his son and successor Solomon is still debated. In fact, even more strongly debated is the whole of Israelite history before these kings: the time of the so-called Judges, and before that the period of Moses and of the exodus of the people from Egypt. This oldest period of the history of Israel, which traditionally began with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is from a historical point of view unknown. Of the greatest importance, however, was the idea of the Covenant, that is, the mutual bond between a people and its god that found expression in the vicissitudes of the Israelite nation as told in their legendary and semi-historical records. It was an idea that was not unknown elsewhere in the Near East but was most consequentially worked out in Israel. The god of Israel was supposed to have already promised the land to Abraham, to have given laws to Moses, and to have promised that in the future he would always come to the help of his people. When calamities, such as the attacks by other peoples, occurred, these were interpreted as divine punishments for acts of disobedience by the people. That, too, was in the Near East not a completely new idea, but among the Israelites it was time and again formulated anew by the prophets, who in both Israel and Judah reminded kings and priests of the Covenant, foretelling disaster or happiness as divine punishment or reward. From the late 8th century BC, many prophecies were put into writing, and from then on they could be consulted and re-read in future situations as texts of warning or consolation. To this was added another idea that, again, had some parallels in neighboring states: the notion of a high god or the tendency to consider one god to be supreme, to whom all other gods, including the gods of neighboring peoples, were inferior. Among the Israelites this even led to the suppression of the cults of gods other than their
Yahweh. The Yahweh-alone-movement was well under way, but had not yet achieved its goals when in 722 BC the state of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians and the elite of its population deported to Assyria, there to disappear, absorbed no doubt by the other populations of Mesopotamia.
In the little state around Jerusalem, where Israelites of the tribes of Judah (hence, Jews) and Benjamin lived, the movement just mentioned continued after 722 BC. The worship of Yahweh alone, and that too only in his one temple in Jerusalem, became here, in part again as a consequence ofthe preaching ofprophets, the norm. To this was added a growing set of rules and prescriptions concerning daily life that were attributed to the legendary lawgiver Moses. After the fall of Assyria, however, this small state of Judah in its turn got involved in the power politics of the Near East. When the Neo-Babylonian Empire at around 600 BC followed the example of the Assyrians and extended its power to the west, Judah was threatened, beaten into submission, and after an audacious attempt at resistance in 587 BC wiped off the map by the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem. Again, the elite of the conquered nation were deported, this time to Babylon. However, in this case the exiles preserved their religious and national identity. In Babylon, all sorts of religious customs and rules, and probably various prophecies and other traditions, were put into writing and became the basis for the later Hebrew Bible. At the same time, Jewish religion developed into a pure monotheism, that is, the existence of other gods was denied in favor of the one Yahweh as the sole God, the creator of the world and the director of human history. World history, it was believed, occurred solely for the benefit of the followers of this one God. When the Persians under King Cyrus conquered Babylon (539 BC) and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, this was interpreted as God’s intervention. Likewise, it was held that He would in the future intervene again and bring His chosen people to unheard of wealth and power. That happy situation would be brought about by a new king or the “Anointed One” (Hebrew: hammasiach, “the Messiah”). Thus, when in the course of the 5th and 4th centuries BC the temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt, there developed under the generally mild sovereignty of the Persian king, of whose empire the land of Judah had become a part, a remarkable religion centered around the worship of one God in one temple and inspired by a number of sacred books (law codes and prophecies). It was a religion that tied its followers to a whole range of holy prescriptions and rules of life (principally, food regulations, circumcision, and the Sabbath as the day of rest on the seventh day of the week) and strengthened them in the expectation of a great future that would be brought about by God Himself. This was a set of ideas that would have a profound influence in subsequent centuries, ultimately shaping to a large extent Christianity and Islam.
World History
