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.

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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, so they were very mobile, and moved to fresh pasturage along with their animals.

Then, about 8,000 years ago the site was again occupied; but the houses were very primitive, compared with those that had been built earlier.  The new occupants were most likely descendants of animal herders whose women had begun to grow and process crops.  The women also made crude pottery, and used it to cook and serve grass seed mush.  The harvest must have been very poor, because the irrigation system was gone.

Over the next few thousand years the site was intermittently occupied by similar groups of people who 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.

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

Joshua and Abraham

After penetrating the city walls Joshua's followers slaughtered the inhabitants of the city and systematically destroyed the city and its walls, as per God's instructions and their own inclination -- they were nomads, and they saw no value in cities and city walls.  The city's inhabitants could not have survived without their fields of grain, and an army of starving dispossessed city dwellers could not have been allowed to live.  Moreover, if the city itself had not been destroyed, its very existence would have been an enticement for "civilized" people to invade the region.

What Joshua and his followers were interested in was the countryside:  The women, being modern women, were probably interested in harvesting the grain fields and the men, of course, were interested in the extensive pastures.  Ironically, these nomads almost immediately began settling into villages, and then the wealthier among them, as well as  the artisans and others who served them, moved back into the ruins of Jericho and began to rebuild it.

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.  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 Syria, and not from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur,  He was more likely of Hurrian ancestry.

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 in combination with admixture with western and northern hunter gatherers -- they found many farmers but few hunter gatherers in southern Europe.

Some of the hunter gatherers from the far north had had fair complexions, but this was reinforced by the hard times that were often endured after joining the Hebiru, who often did not own enough animals to feed their people and were constantly at war with other peoples, as detailed in the Amarna letters.  (No wonder they had wanted to worship a golden calf!)

Being nomads, many people with Steppe ancestry, after combining with hunter gathers, moved back to the east and south and joined forces with bands of marauders known as the Hebiru who had carried their Steppe culture with them but exchanged their ancestral Indo European languages for Semitic language.  Patriarchy, pastoralism, metallurgy and chariot use were elements of their culture, and their military prowess matched that of the Canaanites.