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252 days ago: The Hittites. Part 4.
Society
Legal System
The Hittites greatly modified the system of law they inherited from the Old Babylonians. The most extensive literature that the Hittites have left us is, in fact, decrees and laws.
These laws were far more merciful than the laws of the Old Babylonians, perhaps because the Hittites were less concerned about maintaining a rigid, despotic central authority. While you could lose your life for just about everything under the Old Babylonian system of laws, including getting rowdy in a tavern, under the Hittites only a small handful of crimes were capital crimes. Even premeditated murder only resulted in a fine – a large fine, to be sure, but far preferable than losing your head. They modified the role of the monarch in that they gave the king ownership of all the land under his control.
Previously, under the Sumerians and Amorites, private property was allowed and the monarch only owned his own private property. Individuals were allowed control over land, which belong to the king, only by serving in the king’s army. So the bulk of the population became tenant farmers.
Religion
The Hittites adopted many of the gods of the Sumerians and Old Babylonians. The odd thing about the Hittites, though, is that they seemed to have recognized that all gods were legitimate gods. Whenever they conquered a people, they adopted that people’s gods into their religious system.
As far as history is concerned, this has tremendous consequences for the history of the Hebrews. The Assyrians seem to have adopted the same tolerance towards other religions, which allowed the Jewish faith to persist after the Jewish state was decimated by the Assyrians. And the Assyrians seem to have adopted the same tendency to adopt the gods of conquered people, so the Assyrian conquerors of Palestine adopted the Hebrew god, Yahweh, into their religion. This eventually led to the only major religious schism in Hebrew history, the schism between Jews and Samaritans. There are still Samaritans alive today.
254 days ago: The Hittites. Part 3.
The New Kingdom
With the reign of Tudhaliya I (who may actually not have been the first of that name; see also Tudhaliya), the Hittite Empire reлmerges from the fog of obscurity. During his reign (c. 1400), he again allied with Kizzuwadna, vanquished the Hurrian states of Aleppo and Mitanni, and expanded to the west at the expense of Arzawa (a Luwian state).
Another weak phase followed Tudhaliya I, and the Hittites’ enemies from all directions were able to advance even to Hattusa and raze it. However, the Empire recovered its former glory under Suppiluliuma I (c. 1350), who again conquered Aleppo, reduced Mitanni to tribute under his son-in-law, and defeated Carchemish, another Syrian city-state. With his own sons placed over of all of these new conquests, Babylonia still in the hands of the Kassites, and Assyria only newly independent with the crushing of Mitanni, this left Suppiluliuma the supreme power broker outside of Egypt, and it was not long before even that country was seeking an alliance by marriage of another of his sons with the widow of Tutankhamen. Unfortunately, that son was evidently murdered before reaching his destination, and this alliance was never consummated.
After Suppiluliuma I, and a very brief reign by his eldest son, another son, Mursili II became king (c. 1330). Having inherited a position of strength in the east, Mursili was able to turn his attention to the west, where he attacked Arzawa and a city known as Millawanda in the coastal land of Ahhiyawa. Many recent scholars have surmised that Millawanda in Ahhiyawa is likely a reference to Miletus and Achaea known to Greek history, though there are a small number who have disputed this connection.
Battle of Kadesh
Hittite prosperity was mostly dependent on control of the trade routes and metal sources. Because of the importance of Northern Syria to the vital routes linking the Cilician gates with Mesopotamia, defense of this area was crucial, and was soon put to the test by Egyptian expansion under Pharaoh Rameses II. Although his own inscriptions proclaimed victory, it seems more likely that Rameses was turned back at the Battle of Kadesh by the Hittite king Muwatalli, successor to Mursilis II. This battle took place in the 5th year of Ramses (c 1275 BC by the most commonly used chronology).
Downfall and Demise of the Empire
After this date, the power of the Hittites began to decline yet again, as the Assyrians had seized the opportunity to vanquish Mitanni and expand to the Euphrates while Muwatalli was preoccupied with the Egyptians. Assyria now posed equally as great a threat to Hittite trade routes as Egypt had ever been. His son, Urhi-Teshub, took the throne as Mursili III, but was quickly ousted by his uncle, Hattusili III after a brief civil war. In response to increasing Assyrian encroachments along the frontier, he concluded a peace and alliance with Rameses II, presenting his daughter’s hand in marriage to the Pharoah.
The “Treaty of Kadesh”, one of the oldest completely surviving treaties in history, fixed their mutual boundaries in Canaan, and was signed in the 21st year of Rameses (c. 1258 BC).
Hattusili’s son, Tudhaliya IV, was the last strong Hittite king able to keep the Assyrians out of Syria and even temporarily annex the island of Cyprus. The very last king, Suppiluliuma II also managed to win some victories, including a naval battle against the Sea Peoples off the coast of Cyprus. But it was too late.
The Sea Peoples had already begun their push down the Mediterranean coastline, starting from the Aegean, and continuing all the way to Philistia—taking Cilicia and Cyprus away from the Hittites en route and cutting off their coveted trade routes. This left the Hittite homelands vulnerable to attack from all directions, and Hattusa was burnt to the ground sometime around 1180 BC following a combined onslaught from Gasgas, Bryges and Luwians. The Hittite Empire thus vanished from the historical record.
By 1160 BC, the political situation in Asia Minor looked vastly different than it had only 25 years earlier. In that year, the Assyrians were dealing with the Mushku pressing into northernmost Mesopotamia from the Anatolian highlands, and the Gasga people, the Hittites’ old enemies from the northern hill-country between Hatti and the Black Sea, seem to have joined them soon after. The Mushku or Mushki had apparently overrun Cappadocia from the West, with recently discovered epigraphic evidence confirming their origins as the Balkan “Bryges” tribe, forced out by the Macedonians.
A large and powerful state known as Tabal had occupied the region south of these. Their language appears to have been Luwian, related to Hittite, but usually written in hieroglyphics instead of cuneiform. Several lesser city-states extending from here to Northern Syria also used Luwian, although they are sometimes known as “neo-Hittite”. Soon after these upheavals began, both hieroglyphs and cuneiform were rendered obsolete by a new innovation, the alphabet, that seems to have entered Anatolia simultaneously from the Aegean (with the Bryges, who changed their name to Phrygians), and from the Phoenicians and neighboring peoples in Syria.
Ironically, the language of the Lydians, spoken in the West of Asia Minor until the 1st century BC, was apparently a linguistic descendant of Hittite, and not Luwian. This and the fact that one of Lydia’s kings known to the Greeks bore the Hittite royal name Myrsilis (Mursilis) may indicate that this state was the purest cultural and ethnic continuation of the former Hittites. The last trace of this language persisted until the 5th century AD, according to some Church Fathers, when it was known as the tiny dialect of Isaurian, spoken in only one or two villages.
The Neo-Hittite Kingdoms
Although the Hittites disappeared from most of Anatolia after c.1200 BC, there remained a number of so-called Neo-Hittite kingdoms in northern Syria. The most notable Neo-Hittite kingdoms were those at Carchemish and Milid (near the later Melitene). These Neo-Hittite Kingdoms were gradually conquered by the Assyrians, who conquered Carchemish during the reign of Sargon II in the late 8th century BC, and Milid several decades later. Timeline
To be continued…
255 days ago: The Hittites. Part 2.
History
The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their empire, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East.
Around 2000 BC, the region centered in Hattusa, that would later become the core of the Hittite kingdom, was inhabited by people with a distinct culture who spoke a non-Indo-European language. The name “Hattic” is used by Anatolianists to distinguish this language from the Indo-European Hittite language, that appeared on the scene at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and became the administrative language of the Hittite kingdom over the next six or seven centuries. As noted above, “Hittite” is a modern convention for referring to this language. The native term was Nesili, i.e. “In the language of Nesa”.
The early Hittites, whose prior whereabouts are unknown, borrowed heavily from the pre-existing Hattian culture, and also from that of the Assyrian traders – in particular, the cuneiform writing and the use of cylindrical seals.
Since Hattic continued to be used in the Hittite kingdom for religious purposes, and there is substantial continuity between the two cultures, it is not known whether the Hattic speakers – the Hattians – were displaced by the speakers of Hittite, were absorbed by them, or just adopted their language.
The early history of the Hittite kingdom is known through tablets that may first have been written in the 17th century BC but survived only as copies made in the 14th and 13th centuries BC. These tablets, known collectively as the Anitta tex, begin by telling how Pithana the king of Kussara or Kussar (a small city-state yet to be identified by archaeologists) conquered the neighbouring city of Nesa (Kanesh). However, the real subject of these tablets is Pithana’s son Anitta, who continued where his father left off and conquered several neighboring cities, including Hattusa and Zalpuwa (Zalpa).
The Hittite Old Kingdom
The founding of the Hittite Empire is usually attributed to Hattusili I, who conquered the plain south of Hattusa, all the way to the outskirts of Yamkhad (modern-day Aleppo) in Syria. Though it remained for his heir, Mursili I, to conquer that city, Hattusili was clearly influenced by the rich culture he discovered in northern Mesopotamia, and founded a school in his capital to spread the cuneiform style of writing he encountered there.
Mursili continued the conquests of Hattusili, reaching through Mesopotamia and even ransacking Babylon itself in 1595 BC (although rather than incorporate Babylonia into Hittite domains, he seems to have instead turned it over to his Kassite allies, who were to rule it for the next four centuries). This lengthy campaign, however, strained the resources of Hatti, and left the capital in a state of near-anarchy. Mursili was assassinated shortly after his return home, and the Hittite Empire was plunged into chaos. The Hurrians, a people living in the mountainous region along the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers took advantage of the situation to seize Aleppo and the surrounding areas for themselves, as well as the coastal region of Adaniya, renaming it Kizzuwadna (later Cilicia).
Following this, the Hittites entered a weak phase of obscure records, insignificant rulers, and reduced area of control. This pattern of expansion under strong kings followed by contraction under lesser ones, was to be repeated over and over again throughout the Hittite Empire’s 500-year history, making events during the waning periods difficult to reconstruct with much precision.
The next monarch of any note following Mursili I was Telepinu (ca. 1500 BC), who won a few victories to the southwest, apparently by allying himself with one Hurrian state (Kizzuwadna) against another (Mitanni). His reign marked the end of the “Old Kingdom” and the beginning of the lengthy weak phase known as the “Middle Kingdom”, whereof little is known. One innovation that can be credited to these early Hittite rulers is the practice of conducting treaties and alliances with neighboring states; the Hittites were thus among the earliest known pioneers in the art of international politics and diplomacy.
To be continued…
256 days ago: Civilizations Through Out Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia was invaded and conquered many times. It was the prize to be won with its fertile valleys and surrounding rivers. In the Bible, Mesopotamia is referred to as Aramahaharaim (Ceram 214). In Greek, Mesopotamia means “between the rivers” (“Mesopotamia”1). Aramahahaim lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and is now located in present day Iraq and eastern Syria (“Mesopotamia” 1). People that lived in this fertile valley of prosperity are referred to as “Semites.” Their influences set a foundation for western civilizations (Caldwell 29). Mesopotamia was a flourishing area that attracted many settlers, present day explorers, and archeologists.
Mesopotamia had many invasions because its natural boundaries did not provide any form of protection. This also led to “Cultural Diffusion.” The migrants were mostly Indo-Europeans from between the Black and Caspian Seas (“Mesopotamia”1). The rivers had much appeal in this area because they could provide fish and a proper irrigation system could be formed (Mesopotamia 1). Although the rivers were a blessing, their floods were very fierce and erratic (Mesopotamia 1). The Land between rivers was divided into two regions. The upper region was called Akkad, which was a fertile plane, and the lower region was called Sumer, which was made up of swamps. The winters were short and rainy and the summers were long and hot (“The Geo od Meso”23).
The first known civilization in Mesopotamia was Sumeria. The civilization began in 3500BC and the people migrated from the region of the Black and Caspian Seas (The Sum Civil 1). Their literature was nearly always religious or a record of the king (Sum Cult and Sci Ach 1). The Sumerians also developed the first form of writing: cuneiform. In Latin it means, “wedged form” (Robinson 61).
The tools used to write cuneiform were a clay tablet and wedge shaped stylus (Sum Cult and Sci Ach 1). The Sumerians believed in many gods such as: Enlil, Anu, Enki, Ishtar, and many more (Sum Cult and Sci Achiev 1). This civilization also had many scientific achievements such as: the inventing the wheel, basing their mathematical scale on the numeral sixty, developing some of the earliest forms of algebra and geometry, and mapping many constellations (Sum cult and Sci Achiv 1). They were also artistic and expressed their religion through their art. Painting and sculpture were the main medians, and many places were created using their amazing architectural abilities. The Ziggurat was the first great architectural structure of their time (Sum Cult and Sci Achiv 1).
The Sumerian social class was broken down into three parts: the upper, class, which were the nobles, priests, government officials, and warriors, the middle class (the freeman’s class), which was made up of merchants, traders, and artisans, and the lower class, which consisted of serfs and slaves (Sum Cult and Sci Achiv 1). The Sumerian civilization was put to an end when the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers flooded around 1600BC (Sum Cult and Sci Achiv 1). The Akkad and Sumer began to take over Mesopotamia around 2350BC and after the flood, Akkadian ways began to replace the Sumerian (The Sum Civil 1). King Sargon, “The Great,” founded the empire of Akkad and was liable for their converting Mesopotamia to the Akkadian customs (Mesopotamia 1). Sargon ruled from 2360Bc-2305; one of his great achievements was he unified the two regions of Mesopotamia (Ceram 303). His men were originally nomadic tribesmen that wandered the deserts (Robinson 67). The Gutians gained parts of land in Mesopotamia during this time period but were gone by 2281BC (Mesopotamia 1). Around 2000BC the Babylonians overthrew the Akkains.
The Babylonians were also known as the Amorites. Hammurabi ruled them from 1792-1750BC (The Sum Civil 1). He built the city of Babylon and wrote the first written law code. The law code contained 2821 laws, was based on justice, but was not fair between social classes (Sum Cult and Sci Achv 1). Hammurabi was the greatest of all the Amorite kings, but was overthrown by the Hittites.
The Hittite citizens subjugated Mesopotamia from 2000-1200BC (“The Hittite and Pheos” 1). They migrated from an area now known as present day Turkey, the Anatolia Peninsula (The Hittie and Pheos 1). Suppilulimas was the only recorded king during this empire. He ruled from 1380-1340BC. Suppilulimus along with the Hittites were branded as warriors and spent most of their time trying to expand their empire (“The Hittite and Pheos” 1). They were remembered for their advance in iron used for weapons of war. Their civilization was ended abruptly by the Assryians in 1200BC (Hooker 2).
The Assyrians were originally from the upper Tigris River valley in the Armenian Mountains (“The Assyr. And Chad” 1). The Assyrians, like the Hittites, were considered war-like and ferocious. There were four great rulers though out the Assyrian empire: Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Ashurbanipal. Tiglahth-Pileser III ruled form 746-727
BC; he was thought to be the founder of the Assyrians. Sargon II ruled from 721-705BC; he expanded the empire to it greatest size. Sennacherib ruled from 705-681; he created the capital of Nineveh and crushed Babylon and Jerusalem. Ashurbahipal ruled from 669-626BC; was the last recorded king and was remembered as a cruel and war-like person. The Assyrians established the first postal system to encourage communications. Assyria fell to its knees when numerous tribes united and formed an alliance to destroy it (“The Assyr and Chad” 1).
Many civilizations and rulers continued to pass through Mesopotamia, but the greatest ruler of Mesopotamia was Neberchanezzar. He ruled from 604-561 and created the “hanging gardens,” one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Neberchadnezzar is also a character mentioned in the Bible.
He was a magnificent ruler of the Chaldeans, but was defeated by the Persians around 561BC(Robinson 78&74). In 330BC, the Persians were over run by Alexander the Great of Greece (“The Pers. Emp” 1).
Some of the greatest civilizations developed in the Fertile Crescent, of Mesopotamia. These civilizations developed cuneiform, the wheel, mapped constellations, the first law code, Ziggurats, and many other contributions in art, science, math, literature, and weapons of war. The constant invasions show the desirability of this area. The successes of these civilizations laid the foundations for cultures that followed. The land between rivers is still important today as archaeologist keep uncovering the secrets from the past.
Author: Ashley Tucker
Bibliography:
Calwdwell, Wallace Everett.The Ancient World. New York: Rinehart and Company, 1955.
Ceram, C. W., and Alfred Knoph. Gods, Graves, and Scholars. New York: Borzoi Books, 1970.
Hooker, Richard. “Mesopatamia Timeline.” Internet.WSU, 1993.
http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~murray/classes/ah/timeline.htm. October 16, 2000
“Mesopotamia.” Internet. Microsoft Corporation, 1997-2000.
http://encarta.msn.com/find/concise.asp?ti=OLE4E00. October 12, 2000.
“The Persian Empire.” Internet. November 13,200.
Robinson, James Harvey and James Henry Breasted. Earlier Ages. Boston: Gin & Company, 1951.
“The Geography of Mesopotamia.” Internet. November 13, 2000.
257 days ago: The Hittites. Part 1.
Archaeology – Tablets – Language
Ruins of Hattusa (Lion’s Gate)
The first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the Assyrian colony of Kultepe (ancient Karum Kanesh), containing records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a certain “land of Hatti”. Some names in the tablets were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but clearly Indo-European.
Language
Hittites seemed to have spoken a language from the Indo-European language family, which includes English, German, Greek, Latin, Persian, and the languages of India. Hittite tablets were excavated from the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital Hattusa located near the modern Turkish town of Boghazkoy about 210 kilometers east of Ankara. Scientific excavation of these ruins by a German expedition began in 1906. About 10,000 clay tablets script were recovered. Although some were written in the Akkadian language and could be read immediately, most were in an unknown language, correctly assumed to be Hittite.
Within ten years the language had been deciphered, and a sketch of its grammar published. Gradually, the international community of scholars, led by the Germans, expanded the knowledge of the language. The number of common Hittite words that one could translate with reasonable certainty increased steadily. Glossaries published in 1936 by Edgar Sturtevant (in English) and in 1952 by Johannes Friedrich (in German) admirably served the needs of their contemporaries. Yet today, seventy-five years after the decipherment, there still exists no complete dictionary of the Hittite language.
History
Conventional Chronology:
- Old Hittite Kingdom (1750 – 1500 BC) Hattusa becomes the capital
- Middle Hittite Kingdom (1500 – 1450 BC)
- New Hittite Kingdom (Empire) (1450 – 1180 BC): Suppiluliumas I conquers Syria; Muwatalli attacks Egyptians (Kadesh)
Biblical Hittites
References to a people whose name is transcribed into English as “Hittites” (or sometimes “Hettites”) are found throughout the Hebrew Bible. These Biblical references to the Hittites are summarized below. It should be noted that the corpus of the Hebrew Bible was probably compiled in its near-final form between the 7th and 5th centuries BC, during or after the Babylonian exile, as related in the Book of Ezra, with a further revision in the Masoretic text occurring some time between ca. 200 BC and 100 AD, as inferred from textual analysis of the Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, and other sources.
The Traditional View
Given the casual tone in which the Hittites are mentioned in most of these references, Biblical scholars before the age of archaeology traditionally regarded them as a smaller tribe, living in the hills of Canaan during the era of the Patriarchs. This picture was completely changed by the archaeological finds that placed the center of the Hatti/Hattusas civilization far to the north, in modern-day Turkey. Because of this perceived discrepancy and other reasons, some Biblical scholars reject Sayce’s identification of the two people, and believe that the similarity in names is only a coincidence. In order to stress this distinction, E. A. Speiser called the Biblical Hittites Hethites in his translation of the Book of Genesis for the Anchor Bible Series.
The Mainstream View
On the other hand, the view that the Biblical Hittites are related to the Anatolian Hittites remains popular. Apart from the coincidence in names, the latter were a powerful political entity in the region before the collapse of their empire in the 14th-12th centuries BC, so one would expect them to be mentioned in the Bible, just in the way that the HTY post-Exodus are. A stone lion relief found a Beth Shan, near the Sea of Galilee, dated to about 1700 BC, has been interpreted as confirming this identification, since lions are often pictured in Hittite art. Moreover, in the account of the conquest of Canaan, the Hittites are said to dwell “in the mountains” and “towards the north” of Canaan – a description that matches the general direction and geography of the Anatolian Hittite empire, if not the distance.
Modern linguistic academics therefore propose, based on much onomastic and archaeological evidence, that Anatolian populations moved south into Canaan as part of the waves of Sea Peoples who were migrating along the Mediterranean coastline at the time in question. Many kings of local city-states are shown to have had Hittite and Luwian names in the Late Bronze – Early Iron transition period. Indeed, even the name of Mount Zion may be Hittite in origin.
Other Views
Some people have conjectured that the Biblical Hittites could actually be Hurrian tribes living in Palestine, and that the Hebrew word for the Hurrians (HRY in consonant-only script) became the name of the Hittites (HTY) due to a scribal error. Others have proposed that the Biblical Hittites were a group of Kurushtameans. These hypotheses are not widely accepted, however.
It is also possible that the Biblical HTY refers to two distinct people at different times; e.g. a local tribe before Exodus, and the Anatolian empire after Exodus.
To be continued…
257 days ago: The Sumerians. Part 2.
Science and Mathematics
All this administration of agriculture required much more careful planning, since each farmer had to produce a far greater excess of produce than he would actually consume. And all the bureaucratic record keeping demanded some kind of efficient system of measuring long periods of time. So the Sumerians invented calendars, which they divided into twelve months based on the cycle of the moon. Since a year consisting of twelve lunar months is considerably shorter than a solar year, the Sumerians added a “leap month” every three years in order to catch up with the sun. This interest in measuring long periods of time led the Sumerians to develop a complicated knowledge of astronomy and the first human invention of the zodiac in order to measure yearly time.
Sumerian Religion
We know very little about the early Semitic religions, but the Semites that invaded Mesopotamia seem to have completely abandoned their religion in favor of Sumerian religion. Sumerian religion was polytheistic, that is, the Sumerians believed in and worshipped many gods. These gods were incredibly powerful and anthropomorphic, that is, they resembled humans. Many of these gods controlled natural forces and were associated with astronomical bodies, such as the sun. The gods were creator gods; as a group, they had created the world and the people in it. Like humans, they suffered all the ravages of human emotional and spiritual frailties: love, lust, hatred, anger, regret. Among the gods’ biggest regrets was the creation of human life; the Sumerians believed that these gods regretted the creation of human life and sent a flood to destroy their faulty creation, but one man survived by building a boat. While the destruction of the earth in a great flood is nearly universal in all human mythology and religion, we can’t be sure if the Semites had a similar story or took it over from the Sumerians. This is, of course, a question of contemporary significance: according to Genesis, the originator of the Hebrew race, the patriarch Abraham, originally came from the city of Ur.
Although the gods were unpredictable, the Sumerians sought out ways to discover what the gods held in store for them. Like all human cultures, the Sumerians were struck by the wondrous regularity of the movement of the heavens and speculated that this movement might contain some secret to the intentions of the gods. So the Sumerians invented astrology, and astrology produced the most sophisticated astronomical knowledge ever seen to that date, and astrology produced even more sophisticated mathematics. They also examined the inner organs of sacrificed animals for secrets to the gods’ intentions or to the future. These activities produced a steady increase in the number of priests and scribes, which further accelerated learning and writing.
Sumerian religion was oriented squarely in this world. The gods did not occupy some world existentially different from this one, and no rewards or punishments accrued to human beings after death. Human beings simply became wisps within a house of dust; these sad ghosts would fade into nothing within a century or so.
Law
Among the inventions of the Sumerians, the most persistent and far-reaching was their invention of law. While all cultures have some system of social regulation and conflict resolution, law is a distinct phenomenon. Law is written and administered retribution and conflict resolution. It is distinct from other forms of retribution and conflict resolution by the following characteristics:
Administration
Law is retribution that is administered by a centralized authority. This way retribution for wrongs does not threaten to escalate into a cycle of mutual revenge. Sumerian law sits half way between individual revenge and state-administered revenge: it is up to the individual to drag (quite literally) the accused party into the court, but the court actually determines the nature of the retribution to be exacted.
Writing
Law is written; in this way, law assumes an independent character beyond the centralized authority that administers it. This produces a sociological fiction that the law controls those who administer the law and that the “law” exacts retribution, not humans.
Retribution
Law is at its heart revenge; the basic cultural mechanism for dealing with unacceptable behavior is to exact revenge. Unacceptable behavior outside the sphere of revenge initially did not come under the institution of law: it was only much later that disputes that didn’t involve retribution would be included in law.
Although we don’t know much about Sumerian law, scholars agree that the Code of Hammurabi, written by a Babylonian monarch, reproduces Sumerian law fairly exactly. Sumerian law, as represented in Hammurabi’s code, was a law of exact revenge, which we call lex talionis. This is revenge in kind: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life,” and reveals to us that human law has as its fundamental basis revenge. Sumerian law was also only partly administered by the state; the victim had to bring the criminal to court. Once there, the court mediated the dispute, rendered a decision, and most of the time a court official would execute the sentence, but often it fell on the victim or the victim’s family to enforce the sentence. Finally, Sumerian law recognized class distinctions; under Sumerian law, everyone was not equal under the law. Harming a priest or noble person was a far more serious crime than harming a slave or poor person; yet, the penalties assessed for a noble person who commits a crime were often far harsher than the penalties assessed for someone from the lower classes that committed the same crime.
This great invention, law, would serve as the basis for the institution of law among all the Semitic peoples to follow: Babylonians, Assyrians, and, eventually, the Hebrews.
Author: Richard Hooker
Technorati tags: Sumerians, Civilization, Mesopotamia, Science, Mathematics, Religion, Law
258 days ago: The Sumerians. Part 1.
Among the earliest civilizations were the diverse peoples living in the fertile valleys lying between the Tigris and Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, which in Greek means, “between the rivers.” In the south of this region, in an area now in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a mysterious group of people, speaking a language unrelated to any other human language we know of, began to live in cities, which were ruled by some sort of monarch, and began to write. These were the Sumerians, and around 3000 BC they began to form large city-states in southern Mesopotamia that controlled areas of several hundred square miles. The names of these cities speak from a distant and foggy past: Ur, Lagash, Eridu. These Sumerians were constantly at war with one another and other peoples, for water was a scarce and valuable resource. The result over time of these wars was the growth of larger city-states as the more powerful swallowed up the smaller city-states. Eventually, the Sumerians would have to battle another peoples, the Akkadians, who migrated up from the Arabian Peninsula. The Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they spoke a Semitic language related to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. When the two peoples clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control over the city-states they had so brilliantly created and fell under the hegemony of the Akkadian kingdom which was based in Akkad, the city that was later to become Babylon.
But that was not the end of the Sumerians. The Akkadians abandoned much of their culture and absorbed vast amounts of Sumerian culture, including their religion, writing, government structure, literature, and law. But the Sumerians retained nominal control over many of their defeated city-states, and in 2125, the Sumerian city of Ur rose up against the Akkadians and gained for their daring control over the city-states of southern Mesopotamia. But the revival of Sumerian fortune was to be short-lived, for after a short century, another wave of Semitic migrations signed the end of the original creators of Mesopotamian culture.
But history sometimes plays paradoxical games and human cultures sometimes persist in strange ways. For the great experiment of the Sumerians was civilization, a culture transformed by the practical effects of urbanization, writing, and monarchy. While the Sumerians disappear from the human story around 2000 BC, the invaders that overthrew them adopted their culture and became, more or less, Sumerian. They adopted the government, economy, city-living, writing, law, religion, and stories of the original peoples. Why? What would inspire a people to deliberately adopt foreign ways? For whatever reason, the culture the later Semites inherited from the Sumerians consisted of the following:
Monarchy
The Sumerians seem to have developed one of the world’s first systems of monarchy; the early states they formed needed a new form of government in order to govern larger areas and diverse peoples. The very first states in human history, the states of Sumer, seemed to have been ruled by a type of priest-king, called in Sumerian, a ; among their duties were leading the military, administering trade, judging disputes, and engaging in the most important religious ceremonies. The priest-king ruled through a series of bureaucrats, many of them priests, that carefully surveyed land, assigned fields, and distributed crops after harvest. This new institution of monarchy required the invention of a new legitimation of authority beyond the tribal justification of chieftainship based on concepts of kinship and responsibility. So the Sumerians seemed to have at first justified the monarch’s authority based on some sort of divine selection, but later began to assert that the monarch himself was divine and worthy of worship. This legitimation of monarchical authority would serve all the later peoples who settled or imitated Mesopotamian city-states; the only exception were the Hebrews who imitated Mesopotamian kingship but construed the monarchy not as a divine election but as disobedience to Yahweh, the Hebrew god.
Writing
The principal character of Sumerian government was bureaucracy; the monarchy effectively held power over great areas of land and diverse peoples by having a large and efficient “middle management.” This middle management, which consisted largely of priests, bore all the responsibility of surveying and distributing land as well as distributing crops. For city living greatly changes the human relation to food production: when people begin to live in cities, that means a large part of the human population ceases to grow or raise its own food, which means that all those people who do grow and raise food need to feed all those who don’t. This requires some sort of distribution mechanism, which requires the greatest of all inventions of civilizations, the bureaucrat. And to make sure that the entire mechanism works, the newly urbanized needs to invent a tool to make the bureaucrat’s life easier: record-keeping. And record-keeping means writing in some form or another.The first writings, in fact, were records—tons of records: stone tablets filled with numbers recording distributed goods. These early writings (besides the numerals) were actually pictures, or rough sketches, you might say, of the words they represented; this early Sumerian writing was pictographic writing. The Sumerians would scrawl their picture words using reeds as a writing instrument on wet clay which would then dry into stone-hard tablets, which is very good because it’s hard to lose your records if they are big old heavy tablets. (And more permanent: when all the paper in all the books you see around you has gone to dust and ashes, the Sumerian tablets will still bear mute witness to the hot days when farmers brought grain to city storehouses and bureaucrat-priests parceled out food to their citizens while scratching on wet clay with their reeds) Eventually, the Sumerians made their writing more efficient, and slowly converted their picture words to a short-hand consisting of wedged lines created by bending the reed against the wet clay and moving the end closest to the hand back and forth once. And thus was born a form of writing that persisted longer than any other form of writing besides Chinese: cuneiform, or “wedge-shaped” (which is what cuneiform means in Latin) writing.
To be continued…
Technorati tags: Sumerians, Civilization, Mesopotamia, Monarchy, Writing
259 days ago: European Pyramid
Archaeologists working in Bosnia are coming to accept local descriptions of a two thousand foot high hill in the vicinity of Visoko, northwest of Sarajevo, as a Bronze Age pyramid.
Archaeologists working in Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina, about 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, discovered what might prove to be a European pyramid four times taller that the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Bosnian archaeologist Semir Osmanagic, in an interview with the Associated Press, cautioned against jumping to conclusions, but preliminary investigations suggest some ancient culture, perhaps the Bronze Age Illyrian people, carved a natural hill into a pyramidal shape. The hill is 2,120 feet high and, according to Osmanagic, has “all the elements” of an artificial structure: “four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex.”
Once the hill was shaped, it appears to have been faced with concretelike blocks made from an “unnatural mixture of gravel.”
Local residents long have referred to the hill as a pyramid, but no archaeologist seriously seems to have considered the possibility that the hill was in any way artificial until recently.
via Never Yet Melted
Technorati tags: Archaeology, Europa, Pyramid, Bosnia
259 days ago: Egyptian Numerals
The Egyptians had a writing system based on hieroglyphs from around 3000 BC. Hieroglyphs are little pictures representing words. It is easy to see how they would denote the word “bird” by a little picture of a bird but clearly without further development this system of writing cannot represent many words. The way round this problem adopted by the ancient Egyptians was to use the spoken sounds of words. For example, to illustrate the idea with an English sentence, we can see how “I hear a barking dog” might be represented by:
“an eye”, “an ear”, “bark of tree” + “head with crown”, “a dog”.
Of course the same symbols might mean something different in a different context, so “an eye” might mean “see” while “an ear” might signify “sound”.
The Egyptians had a bases 10 system of hieroglyphs for numerals. By this we mean that they has separate symbols for one unit, one ten, one hundred, one thousand, one ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and one million.
Here are the numeral hieroglyphs:
To make up the number 276, for example, fifteen symbols were required: two “hundred” symbols, seven “ten” symbols, and six “unit” symbols. The numbers appeared thus:
276 in hieroglyphs.
Here is another example:
4622 in hieroglyphs.
Note that the examples of 276 and 4622 in hieroglyphs are seen on a stone carving from Karnak, dating from around 1500 BC, and now displayed in the Louvre in Paris.
As can easily be seen, adding numeral hieroglyphs is easy. One just adds the individual symbols, but replacing ten copies of a symbol by a single symbol of the next higher value. Fractions to the ancient Egyptians were limited to unit fractions (with the exception of the frequently used 2/3 and less frequently used 3/4). A unit fraction is of the form 1/n where n is an integer and these were represented in numeral hieroglyphs by placing the symbol representing a “mouth”, which meant “part”, above the number. Here are some examples:
Notice that when the number contained too many symbols for the “part” sign to be placed over the whole number, as in 1/249 , then the “part” symbol was just placed over the “first part” of the number. [It was the first part for here the number is read from right to left.]
We should point out that the hieroglyphs did not remain the same throughout the two thousand or so years of the ancient Egyptian civilisation. This civilisation is often broken down into three distinct periods:
Old Kingdom – around 2700 BC to 2200 BC
Middle Kingdom – around 2100 BC to 1700 BC
New Kingdom – around 1600 BC to 1000 BC
Numeral hieroglyphs were somewhat different in these different periods, yet retained a broadly similar style.
Another number system, which the Egyptians used after the invention of writing on papyrus, was composed of hieratic numerals. These numerals allowed numbers to be written in a far more compact form yet using the system required many more symbols to be memorised. There were separate symbols for
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90,
100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900,
1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000
Here are versions of the hieratic numerals:
With this system numbers could be formed of a few symbols. The number 9999 had just 4 hieratic symbols instead of 36 hieroglyphs. One major difference between the hieratic numerals and our own number system was the hieratic numerals did not form a positional system so the particular numerals could be written in any order.
Here is one way the Egyptians wrote 2765 in hieratic numerals:
Here is a second way of writing 2765 in hieratic numerals with the order reversed:
Like the hieroglyphs, the hieratic symbols changed over time but they underwent more changes with six distinct periods. Initially the symbols that were used were quite close to the corresponding hieroglyph but their form diverged over time. The versions we give of the hieratic numerals date from around 1800 BC. The two systems ran in parallel for around 2000 years with the hieratic symbols being used in writing on papyrus, as for example in the Rhind papyrus and the Moscow papyrus, while the hieroglyphs continued to be used when carved on stone.
Author: J J O’Connor and E F Robertson
Technorati tags: Egypt, Mathematics, Numerals, Hieratic, Hieroglyph
260 days ago: Mayan mathematics. Part 3.
Mayan Numerals.
Almost certainly the reason for base 20 arose from ancient people who counted on both their fingers and their toes. Although it was a base 20 system, called a vigesimal system, one can see how five plays a major role, again clearly relating to five fingers and toes. In fact it is worth noting that although the system is base 20 it only has three number symbols (perhaps the unit symbol arising from a pebble and the line symbol from a stick used in counting). Often people say how impossible it would be to have a number system to a large base since it would involve remembering so many special symbols. This shows how people are conditioned by the system they use and can only see variants of the number system in close analogy with the one with which they are familiar. Surprising and advanced features of the Mayan number system are the zero, denoted by a shell for reasons we cannot explain, and the positional nature of the system. However, the system was not a truly positional system as we shall now explain.
In a true base twenty system the first number would denote the number of units up to 19, the next would denote the number of 20’s up to 19, the next the number of 400’s up to 19, etc. However although the Maya number system starts this way with the units up to 19 and the 20’s up to 19, it changes in the third place and this denotes the number of 360’s up to 19 instead of the number of 400’s. After this the system reverts to multiples of 20 so the fourth place is the number of 18×20 2, the next the number of 18×20 3 and so on. For example [8;14;3;1;12] represents
12 + 1×20 + 3×18 x 20 + 14×18 x 20 2 + 8×18 20 3 = 1253912.
As a second example [9;8;9;13;0] represents
0 + 13×20 + 9×18 x 20 + 8×18 x 20 2 + 9×18 x 20 3 =1357100.
Both these examples are found in the ruins of Mayan towns and we shall explain their significance below.
Now the system we have just described is used in the Dresden Codex and it is the only system for which we have any written evidence. In [4] Ifrah argues that the number system we have just introduced was the system of the Mayan priests and astronomers which they used for astronomical and calendar calculations. This is undoubtedly the case and that it was used in this way explains some of the irregularities in the system as we shall see below. It was the system used for calendars. However Ifrah also argues for a second truly base 20 system which would have been used by the merchants and was the number system which would also have been used in speech. This, he claims had a circle or dot (coming from a cocoa bean currency according to some, or a pebble used for counting according to others) as its unity, a horizontal bar for 5 and special symbols for 20, 400, 8000 etc. Ifrah writes [4]:
Even though no trace of it remains, we can reasonably assume that the Maya had a number system of this kind, and that intermediate numbers were figured by repeating the signs as many times as was needed.
Let us say a little about the Maya calendar before returning to their number systems, for the calendar was behind the structure of the number system. Of course, there was also an influence in the other direction, and the base of the number system 20 played a major role in the structure of the calendar.
The Maya had two calendars. One of these was a ritual calendar, known as the Tzolkin, composed of 260 days. It contained 13 “months” of 20 days each, the months being named after 13 gods while the twenty days were numbered from 0 to 19. The second calendar was a 365-day civil calendar called the Haab. This calendar consisted of 18 months, named after agricultural or religious events, each with 20 days (again numbered 0 to 19) and a short “month” of only 5 days that was called the Wayeb. The Wayeb was considered an unlucky period and Landa wrote in his classic text that the Maya did not wash, comb their hair or do any hard work during these five days. Anyone born during these days would have bad luck and remain poor and unhappy all their lives.
Why then was the ritual calendar based on 260 days? This is a question to which we have no satisfactory answer. One suggestion is that since the Maya lived in the tropics the sun was directly overhead twice every year. Perhaps they measured 260 days and 105 days as the successive periods between the sun being directly overhead (the fact that this is true for the Yucatán peninsular cannot be taken to prove this theory). A second theory is that the Maya had 13 gods of the “upper world”, and 20 was the number of a man, so giving each god a 20 day month gave a ritual calendar of 260 days.
At any rate having two calendars, one with 260 days and the other with 365 days, meant that the two would calendars would return to the same cycle after lcm(260, 365) = 18980 days. Now this is after 52 civil years (or 73 ritual years) and indeed the Maya had a sacred cycle consisting of 52 years. Another major player in the calendar was the planet Venus. The Mayan astronomers calculated its synodic period (after which it has returned to the same position) as 584 days. Now after only two of the 52 years cycles Venus will have made 65 revolutions and also be back to the same position. This remarkable coincidence would have meant great celebrations by the Maya every 104 years.
Now there was a third way that the Mayan people had of measuring time which was not strictly a calendar. It was an absolute timescale which was based on a creation date and time was measured forward from this. What date was the Mayan creation date? The date most often taken is 12 August 3113 BC but we should say straightaway that not all historians agree that this was the zero of this so-called “Long Count”. Now one might expect that this measurement of time would either give the number of ritual calendar years since creation or the number of civil calendar years since creation. However it does neither.
The Long Count is based on a year of 360 days, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is just a count of days with then numbers represented in the Mayan number system. Now we see the probable reason for the departure of the number system from a true base 20 system. It was so that the system approximately represented years. Many inscriptions are found in the Mayan towns which give the date of erection in terms of this long count. Consider the two examples of Mayan numbers given above. The first
[8;14;3;1;12]
is the date given on a plate which came from the town of Tikal. It translates to
12 + 1×20 + 3×18 x 20 + 14×18 x 20 2 + 8×18 x 20 3
which is 1253912 days from the creation date of 12 August 3113 BC so the plate was carved in 320 AD.
The second example
[9;8;9;13;0]
is the completion date on a building in Palenque in Tabasco, near the landing site of Cortés. It translates to
0 + 13×20 + 9×18 x 20 + 8×18 x 20 2 + 9×18 x 20 3
which is 1357100 days from the creation date of 12 August 3113 BC so the building was completed in 603 AD.
We should note some properties (or more strictly non-properties) of the Mayan number system. The Mayans appear to have had no concept of a fraction but, as we shall see below, they were still able to make remarkably accurate astronomical measurements. Also since the Mayan numbers were not a true positional base 20 system, it fails to have the nice mathematical properties that we expect of a positional system. For example
[9;8;9;13;0] = 0 + 13×20 + 9×18 x 20 + 8×18 x 20 2 + 9×18 x 20 3 = 1357100
yet
[9;8;9;13] = 13 + 9×20 + 8×18 x 20 + 9×18 x 20 2 = 67873.
Moving all the numbers one place left would multiply the number by 20 in a true base 20 positional system yet 20×67873 = 1357460 which is not equal to 1357100. For when we multiple [9;8;9;13] by 20 we get 9×400 where in [9;8;9;13;0] we have 9×360.
We should also note that the Mayans almost certainly did not have methods of multiplication for their numbers and definitely did not use division of numbers. Yet the Mayan number system is certainly capable of being used for the operations of multiplication and division as the authors of [15] demonstrate.
Finally we should say a little about the Mayan advances in astronomy. Rodriguez writes in [19]:-
The Mayan concern for understanding the cycles of celestial bodies, particularly the Sun, the Moon and Venus, led them to accumulate a large set of highly accurate observations. An important aspect of their cosmology was the search for major cycles, in which the position of several objects repeated.
The Mayans carried out astronomical measurements with remarkable accuracy yet they had no instruments other than sticks. They used two sticks in the form of a cross, viewing astronomical objects through the right angle formed by the sticks. The Caracol building in Chichén Itza is thought by many to be a Mayan observatory. Many of the windows of the building are positioned to line up with significant lines of sight such as that of the setting sun on the spring equinox of 21 March and also certain lines of sight relating to the moon.
Article by: J J O’Connor and E F Robertson
Technorati tags: Maya, Civilization, Mathematics, Mayan Numerals