THE LEVANT

The Amarna letters

The Amarna letters constituted a collection of diplomatic exchanges that was originally stored at Amarna. the New City built by Akhenaten to honor and support Aten, the god of both sun and sky.  (The Amarna letters are now distributed among museums and other collections, where they wound up after the Amarna depository had been ransacked by treasure hunters.)

These archives of diplomatic exchanges were essentially the diplomatic archives of Akhenaten, but why were these the only such documents that have been found?  (The clay tablets on which they were written in cuneiform writing, were virtually indestructible.)  Most likely. Ay had wanted to expunge every shred of the innovations that had been introduced, so the Egyptians had let it be known that all future diplomatic correspondence should be written in modified Egyptian hieroglyphics, as before.

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The modified Egyptian hieroglyphics were designed for communications between Egypt and other nations.  In particular, communications between Egypt and the Levant were in a version that was designed to record messages in the Semitic language that was predominately used in the Levant at that time.  This was, in turn, to be ancestral to the later Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek and Roman systems of writing.

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The Phoenicians simplified the system further, so that it contained only consonants (no words, as such) and the Greeks added vowel sounds.  The Hebrew system of writing was more directly descended by the version that was used in diplomatic exchanges.

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The Amarna letters, between Akhenaten's administration and foreign nations, were written in cuneiform on clay tablets. Most of them were from the kings of city-states that were clients of Egypt and sought Egypt's help in some regard.  Those from Levantine city-states were written in a Canaanite dialect of the Akkadian language, in the format that ancient Akkadians had used.  This cuneiform format had been invented by the still more ancient Sumerians and adapted by the Akkadians for their own quite different language.  The Canaanite dialect that was used in many of the Amarna letters, was in turn ancestral to the Phoenician language and also to Hebrew.

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Many of the Amarna letters were from further afield, from places that are today in Turkey, Iraq or Cypress.  Some were from the generally hostile Assyrians or from Hittite kings.

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The Hebiru

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We learn from the Amarna letters that the Hebrews that came out of Egypt with Moses were not the only ones in existence; but the others, known as Hebiru by those who wrote to the Pharoah concerning them, were illiterate nomads who wandered throughout much of the Middle East and caused trouble wherever they went.  The stories that could have been told by these wandering nomads were lost to history, because they were illiterate.

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The rulers of Shechem, Jerusalem and especially Byblos asked the Pharoah (Akhenaten) to send an Egyptian army to help fight off the marauders, and rulers of the Mitanni and Babylonian Empires also complained about the Hebiru in their letters to the Pharoah.  (This, of course was long before Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt.)

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Eventually, the Hebiru joined with Joshua in his assault on Jericho,  We don't know how many people Moses led out of Egypt, but they were certainly not numerous in comparison with the Hebiru that they found waiting for them in the Levant.  We tend to exaggerate the role played by the Hebrews from Egypt, because we know so little about the much more numerous Hebiru.

The Hebiru, although they probably spoke a Semitic language, were primarily descended from nomadic animal herders who had driven their herds of animals south through Anatolia and switched from their Indo European language to the Semitic language that predominated in the Levant, where they continued their nomadic lifestyle.  We know they were predominantly descended from Indo European nomads because they mostly had light complexions. brown or blond hair and blue or green eyes, and it is no wonder that they had wanted to worship a golden calf!

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Ancient city

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Jericho is the oldest fortified city in the world.  Mesolithic hunters (stone-age people) used the site 11,000 years ago, and then about 10,000 years ago their descendants built massive walls to protect their community from marauders like the Hebiru.  They also built a massive stone tower, perhaps so they could see the marauders coming.

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They fed a growing population of perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 people by growing grass -- wheat and barley.  These crops needed to be irrigated, and the irrigation system that they constructed may have been the largest that the world had yet seen.

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The original population had been indigenous, descendants of the hunter-gatherers who had inhabited the site earlier, but about 9,000 years ago some outsiders arrived.  They obviously knew about growing crops like barley and wheat, so they might have come from northern Syria.  They were part of an early wave of migrating farmers, spreading out from the earliest agricultural settlements.

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These outsiders chased out the indigenous people and took their place, but they only stayed for about 1,000 years.  Why did they go?  They were probably chased out by animal herders like Abraham, or their crops were destroyed by animals belonging to the herders.

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For the next 1,000 years there was very little occupation of any kind at the site, most likely because the animal herders knew nothing about agriculture -- or cared nothing about it.  They probably ate mostly just the meat and fat from slaughtered animals, plus whatever vegetables their women gathered, but they did not process and cook grass seed because they made no pottery, nor did they carve stone vessels that were suitable for cooking grass seeds.  Consequently, they were very mobile, and frequently moved to fresh pasturage along with their animals.

Then, about 8,000 years ago the site was again occupied; but the houses that were built on top of the old city were very primitive, compared with those that had been built there thousands of years earlier earlier.  The new occupants were most likely descendants of animal herders whose women had begun to grow and process crops.  The site had most likely been selected for building the city because springs were located there and the ruins of the old city made it unsuitable for growing crops,   Of course the women made crude pottery.  They could not have cooked the grass seeds without it.  However, the irrigation system was gone, so the harvests must have been very poor and unreliable.

Over the next few thousand years the site was intermittently occupied by similar groups of people who had decided to supplement their diets with grass-seed mush.  Each of the occupying groups would eventually be chased out by animal herders who wanted to let their animals graze on the grass that surrounded the destroyed city walls.  This probably happened most frequently during dry periods when it was difficult to find good pasturage on the countryside, and herders found it necessary for the animal herders to drive their animals onto the fields that surrounded Jericho.

About 5,000 years ago new city walls were built and Jericho again became a permanent city.  Then Joshua showed up with his army of marauders who, like earlier animal herders, wanted to pasture their animals rather than grow crops.

After penetrating the city walls Joshua's followers slaughtered the inhabitants of the city and systematically destroyed the city and its walls as God had instructed them to do.  Of course, it was unnecessary for God to command the slaughter of the inhabitants -- The animal herders knew full well that the inhabitants would continue to contest ownership of the fields if they were not slaughtered.  Ironically, some of Joshua's own followers, or their descendants thereupon took up farming and claimed ownership of the fields.

Joshua's followers were nomadic animal herders were nomadic animal herders; men owned and managed the animals, which constituted the wealth of their society.  But as these people settled the region that surrounded Jericho their women began to make pottery and to gather grass seeds.  The men in this society then saw the utility of supplementing their diets with cooked grass seeds so they moved back into the ruins of Jericho and began to rebuild it.

Joshua and Abraham

I might note that things had changed since Abraham's time:  Abraham had not found bountiful  fields of grain in the southern Levant, watered by an extensive irrigation system, nor did he have to destroy any cities -- Jericho and other cities in the region were already in ruins when Abraham arrived there.  There is no evidence that Abraham's followers did any agricultural work at all, although they might have harvested seeds of grasses that grew of their own accord.

By the way, like most of the people who came to the southern Levant from the region which is known to us as northern Syria, Abraham may not have been of Semitic origin.  His family came from Ur Kasdim, in what is known to us as northern Mesopotamia, near the modern city of Mosul.  Not from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur.

Joshua's army

Joshua's army consisted primarily of people who were light-complexioned with blue or green eyes intermediate to light hair color and, as in the description of the Promised Land as a "land of milk and honey", lactose tolerance.  These characteristics were the result of their Steppe ancestry.  Whereas the original farmers of Anatolia 

-- those who initiated nomadic herding as a way of life had these characteristics, possibly because they covered their bodies almost entirely and consistently cooked their food, making them susceptible to a Vitamin D shortage at times.  It is also possible that they might have picked up genes for pale complexions from Homo neanderthalensis.

Being nomads, many people with Steppe ancestry had joined with the nomadic bands of the Hebiru, and at the same time had exchanged their ancestral Indo-European languages for the Semitic language that was commonly used in the Levant.  Patriarchy, pastoralism, metallurgy and chariot use were elements of their culture, and their military prowess matched that of the Canaanites.