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Homecoming at Mycenae, exodus from Crete

According to legend the Greeks built a wooden horse in which a team of Greek warriors were concealed.  The Trojans took the horse into the city, and The heroes who emerged from the horse at night opened the gates of the city.  It was all over.

That isn't exactly how it happened.  The whole region was in the midst of a drought, and there was insufficient food in the city.  Under these conditions the defenses gave way and the city was sacked.  It was all over, and nobody had planned for it.

Troy had been the richest city in Anatolia -- it had collected a toll on every ship that passed between the eastern Mediterranean.

 Sea and the Black Sea.  Consequently, transport of the booty took precedence, and the Mycenaean army had to return home in small boats, as we see in the story of the Odyssey.

The returning soldiers, returning in their small boats naturally expected a glorious and triumphal homecoming.  But instead, they returned to silence and starvation.  Mycenae was also in the midst of a drought.  Especially with the homecoming of the troops, there was no food to be found.

The returning veterans knew what to do:  They scoured the countryside for food, as they had done throughout their years in the countryside around Troy.  This meant that tax collectors of Mycenae were unable to collect taxes in the form of foods, and the entire population was soon starving.  As had happened in Troy while it had been under siege, defenses gave way amid the shortage of supplies, and starving people streamed into the inner city and sacked it.

The drought lasted so long that Mycenae never recovered, and the palace complex continued to deteriorate because taxes could not be collected.  Ultimately the palace complex itself became no better than a small village, and the Mycenaean world, deprived of its titular head, fell apart into its constituent parts.

Drought conditions had also come to Crete and to other islands of the Aegean Sea, and this had led to rebellion and refusal to pay taxes.  It also prompted Cretans, who were by then Mycenaean Greeks themselves, to build boats designed for naval combat, similar to those that their ancestors had built and to set sail, looking for someplace better.

These Cretan adventurers raided the Egyptian Delta region, prompting the Egyptians to send an army against them.  After a few encounters with the Egyptian army they decided they would rather fight with the Egyptian army rather than against it, so they hired themselves out as mercenaries.

The Cretans had come with their families; they were not satisfied to fight other people's wars, so they kept looking for a place where they could settle, and they invaded the island of Cyprus and conquered several cities there.  From there they moved on to the Levant, where they conquered the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath and Gaza.  We know them from the Bible as the Philistines, whose champion, Goliath was slain by David.

Still other Mycenaean warriors never returned from the siege of Troy but instead sailed down the coast from Troy or laid siege to Hittite cities, contributing to the slow decline of the Hittite Empire.  The northernmost Canaanite cities, which later constituted Phoenicia, seem to have emerged unscathed, but these Trojan warriors captured other cities along the coast where they established the Kingdom of Hathor, which was later conquered by the Israelites under the leadership of Deborah.

The Greek Dark Age

Since the Linear B script had been in use only on Crete and in Mycenae itself, the Mycenaean world entered into a Dark Age for the next two or three hundred years, until a new written form of the Greek language emerged, based on the Greek alphabet.

Chaos in the Mycenaean world had opened up opportunities for an agricultural community that had retreated to the mountainous region northwest of Greece to move back into their former territories.  They moved south into the Peloponnesus.

Their ancestors had not been an arm of the Yamnaya, as had the ancestors of the Mycenaean Greeks.  Rather, their early ancestors had migrated from Anatolia and then were pushed out of the Greek mainland by the Yamnaya.  The ancients knew that they had previously occupied the Peloponnesus and characterized their move there as a "return" rather than an invasion.

Ironically, the Spartans were among those who returned to the Peloponnesus.  We might find it difficult to recognize Sparta as an agricultural community.  Their conflicts with Mycenaean Greeks had induced them to segregate a male population into a highly trained military unit.  In the course of time, this military arm of their society came to consider agricultural workers, male and female, as slaves.

Hittite Empire collapses, Phrygians take their place

The climate was drier than usual near the end of the Trojan war, and while the climate improved thereafter, the Anatolian Plateau gradually became drier in the ensuing centuries.  This spelled doom for the Hittite Empire, whose support was linked with taxation of grain and other agricultural products -- but the economy slowly shifted from the growing of grain to the raising of livestock.  The Hittite Empire slowly collapsed as farmers were replaced by more nomadic peoples, such as the Kaskas, who raised pigs and served as mercenaries.

The Phrygians, who were were originally nomadic herders of livestock, eventually took over the region that had been ruled by the Hittites.  Long before the Phrygians had come into contact with the Hittites the Phrygians had been great traders, musicians, metal workers and wood carvers. Phrygian women made garments by spinning, weaving and sewing, and also were famous for their wool rugs.  Even from very ancient times, when they had first separated from the Greeks (like Gypsies from other South Asians) Phrygians had been famous among Greeks and Romans for their loud and energetic music which always had striking sequences of quarter tones.  They gave their name to a minor scale with a flat second tone -- it is called, in musical terminology, the Phrygian Mode.

Phrygian kings, in addition to being rulers, were themselves traders and industrialists.  They established factories in which large numbers of women worked together to make woolen garments and rugs.  The kingly ventures were so profitable that it was said of one Phrygian king -- by the name of Midas -- that everything he touched turned to gold.

The Phoenicians and the rise and fall of Israel

The northernmost Canaanite city-states seem to have been unscathed by the passage of Mycenaean warriors through the region and later became a major mercantile power in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and they founded a string of outposts to resupply their merchant ships and facilitate trade throughout the Mediterranean Sea.  They adopted an obscure Sinaitic script and simplified it, and this script inspired Syriac script, Arabic script and the Greek alphabet.  The latter replaced the Linear B script that had been lost with the coming of the Greek dark age.

Again and again the Hebrews struggled to be masters of their own fate, but  they were frustrated by a series of conquering empires, including the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Roman Empire.

Etruria and Rome

About the time that Carthaginians took over part of Sardinia and Sardinians were headed toward domination by Rome the Etruscan culture on the Italian Peninsula developed out of the earlier Villanova culture.  The Etruscan civilization did not have a unitary government, but consisted of a number of city states, and one of those city states, perhaps attracted by salt mines near the mouth of the Tiber River, made the mistake of subjugating Romans to their rule and teaching them the arts of war and shipbuilding.  Subsequently, the Romans shook off their Etruscan king and set to work at conquering Etruscan city states that were so busy fighting each other that they neglected to deal with the upstart Romans.  The Romans conquered and sacked Etruscan city states until all of Etruria came to accept the superiority of Rome.

The Romans obviously despised the Etruscans, whose women ruled their households and whose men often spent their nights observing the stars and spent days and nights looking for omens of every kind.  Etruscan men were excellent seafarers, but Romans made better husbands, so Etruscan women were probably happy when Romans came marching into their cities and took over -- and Etruscans quickly forgot their own language.

Tombstones are virtually the only place where the Etruscan language can be found today, so linguists are reduced to reading tombstones, and know very little about the language -- in spite of the fact that Etruscans had taught the Romans to read and write.

One peculiarity about the study of the Etruscan language is that the word for "father" does not appear on tombstones, and linguists do not know what it was.  This avoidance of the word that identifies a genetic father may be related to the deeply superstitious nature of the Etruscans and also to the proclivity of Etruscan men for going off to sea.  In other words, if a man is identified as a child's father, he may go off to sea -- such a belief might lead people to speak the word only in whispers, and this habit of avoidance could then become a sort of culturally sanctioned obsessive-compulsive syndrome.

When Romans came marching into Etruria, the Etruscan language quickly disappeared, no doubt because the Romans made Etruscans ashamed of their own language.  Since it was shameful to use the Etruscan language in the presence of Romans, and Romans were everywhere, women no doubt avoided teaching any fragment of the language to their children, and perhaps children were punished for using the language.

Etruscans had, at least early on, considered Romans to be barbarians, and Romans had perhaps accepted that judgement, and this enabled the Romans to learn many things from the Etruscans, including the engineering skills needed for the construction of arches and other structures and about military tactics, weaponry and military organization.  Even after the Roman conquest of Etruria the Romans continued to consult with Etruscans, on occasion, particularly with regard to divination and the interpretation of omens -- Etruscan priests were quite knowledgeable about such things.

Reconstructing grammar from tombstones

As the Etruscans became assimilated to Roman customs and adopted the language of the conquerors, they quickly forgot their own language.  One if the few places where the Etruscan language can still be found is tombstones.  One peculiarity of these inscriptions is their repetitious nature.  Words, phrases and sounds are repeated, and the repetition of word endings, representing the sounds with which the words end, is making it very difficult for linguists to decipher the language, because word ending are basic to the grammatical structure of the language, and Etruscans who composed the text on the tombstones often changed the word endings so as to come up with a string of like word endings.  These endings are often ungrammatical, but the linguists are so unfamiliar with the language that they don't know which endings are grammatically correct and which are not.

There may be some connection between the repetitious nature of tombstone texts, including repeating word endings, and the exotic pronunciations and styles that priests often use when performing their ceremonies.

As with Egyptian tombs, Etruscan tomb decorations often seem to express desires for the afterlife.  For instance, banqueting scenes were often painted on the walls of tombs, and side-by-side figures were sometimes carved in a sarcophagus that contained only one body.  The former may have indicated a man's desire to party with his friends, and the latter might have reflected a woman's desire to be rejoined with her husband in the afterlife.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

While the Romans were busy extinguishing almost every vestige of the originally superior Etruscan culture, the Neo Assyrian Empire and the Neo Babylonian Empire were dividing the twelve tribes of Israel between them.  The Neo Assyrian Empire took the lion's share and scattered them throughout their empire, making it impossible for the captives to maintain a separate identity, but the Neo Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar, after conquering both the Philistines and the Israelites, transported elite Israelites and settled them alongside elite Philistines in Babylon, which was Nebuchadnezzar's capital city.

By the time the Philistine elite had arrived in Babylonia they had discarded their Mycenaean Greek language in favor of the Semitic language of their neighbors, the Israelites.  They had also begun using the script that their neighbors were using, and even elements of their religion, although they did not practice animal sacrifice, as did the Israelites.  Along with elements of their neighbors' religion they had adopted the Israelites' story of history including the Exodus as their own story because, being illiterate, they had little historical memory of their own.  They did not recognize themselves in the stories that the Israelites told about ancient battles between Israelites and Philistines.

When the Philistine elite were joined in Babylon by the Israelite elite the two foreign communities blended together almost seamlessly.  They could not practice animal sacrifice in their Babylonian Exile, so they accepted the Philistine version of Judaism, which was the seed from which grew the new religious structure of Diaspora Jews.

As the exile community melded and became one, in opposition to the Neo Babylonians, they did not know what to make of an ancient ziggurat in the center of the city.  This huge structure was basically an artificial mountain with a solid core of sun-dried bricks and faced with a layer of fired bricks.  The captive Israelites could only see it from a distance because The ziggurat  was surrounded by a complex of temple and palace buildings, but they could see that it was covered with greenery, because weeds had established their roots in the mud bricks, so they called it the "Hanging Gardens" of Babylon,

The writers of the Torah and other religious writings knew very well that the greenery was just weeds, but stories of these gardens were carried far and wide by the Diaspora, and descriptions of these fabulous gardens in the midst of a sterile city became more and more fabulous with the retelling, until they became the basis for one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Instead of extinguishing the Jewish culture the Babylonian Captivity simply transformed it and jump-started the Diaspora.  The newly transformed Israelite culture then existed side-by-side with the old culture of animal sacrifice.  In the end the success of the Diaspora, along with the Romanization of the old sacrificial culture, gradually extinguished the culture of ritual animal sacrifice.

The Bantu expansion

The original speakers of a proto-Bantu language occupied a small territory in the Benue River Valley near the border between present-day Nigeria and Cameroon.  Oil palms, African yams cowpeas and groundnuts--the latter a plant related to peanuts -- grew in the area, and the original Bantus began to heavily depend on these native plants for food, and therefore began to cut away weeds and undergrowth to encourage their growth.

As the climate of Africa dried, becoming much drier than it is today, strips of savanna opened up in the rainforest to the south, and the Bantus moved into them, bringing their food plants along with them -- in that sense, they were then agriculturalists.  Surprisingly, they also began to smelt iron.  Perhaps they invented the process during their early efforts to make pottery.  This was about the time of the beginning of the iron age in Anatolia.

The soft iron that they made could easily be pounded into any shape, and they started to make digging tools out of Iron, and these tools made it easier to cultivate their simple crops.  As Africa continued to dry the Bantus continued to spread southward through Central Africa and beyond.

As some of the Bantus were spreading southward some were migrating to the east, along the belt of oil palms that stretched across Africa, and these eastern Bantus established themselves firmly in three clusters of villages:  in what is now Zambia, in western Kenya and in eastern Kenya.  These eastern Bantus, however had no iron technology.

As the eastern Bantu population increased in size and spread in every direction their dialects diverged from each other until the eastern Bantus spoke a plethora of languages, as did the western Bantus.

The eastern and western Bantus came together, somewhere south of the mountains of Zimbabwe, and then the eastern Bantus acquired Iron technology from the western Bantus who had invented it.

The eastern Bantus not only acquired the technology but improved it, by inventing carbonized steel, whose stiff blades were ideal for loosening the soil for planting crops and for chopping out weeds that stole moisture from crops, and the Bantu population grew even faster.

Carbonized steel was also ideal for making knives and weapons.  Eventually, Bantu blacksmiths and craftsmen used carbonized steel, along with hardwood from the assegai tree, to make spears tipped with knife blades.

Power struggle in southern Africa

Khoisan warriors, by contrast, used stone-tipped weapons.  Their ancestors had lived in the rich hunting grounds of eastern and southern Africa since antiquity but had been pushed out of the best part of eastern Africa by cattle herders.

The speech sounds of Khoisan languages included click sounds that were reminiscent of the percussive signals that may have once served as a lingua franca for people throughout Africa, being simpler and more easily transmitted over long distances than spoken languages.  Linguists, as well as geneticists, have proposed that the Khoisan population has been stable since antiquity, whereas human populations elsewhere have been in turmoil.

The spears that the Bantu craftsmen produced, using wood from the assegai tree firmly attached to carbonized steel blades were themselves called assegai, and they had been designed specifically to deal with the Khoisan, who tried to prevent Bantu farmers from invading their lands.  But the long stone-tipped spears of the Khoisan were no match for the assegai except on hilly ground (which was usually unsuitable for agriculture); and the Khoisan were forced to retire to dry and hilly lands to the north and west of their favorite hunting grounds.

The Justinian Plague in Africa

The story of the Bantu expansion would not be complete without mention of a dark episode that disrupted it but did not derail the Bantu drive to succeed.  This disruptive episode occurred when a deadly disease known to historians as the Justinian Plague struck the Roman Empire and then went on to strike the Bantus in Africa.  

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When grain shipments to feed Roman soldiers arrived at African ports, the grain was accompanied by rats, fleas and bubonic plague.  The flees, along with the Plague bacillus, were then passed on to rats that were native to Africa, and the disease then spread throughout Africa, especially to Bantu villages, where food was kept in close proximity to where people lived. The hunter-gatherers of Africa were less affected because they were less inclined to store food in their homes, and they had less food to store.

The plague was also devastating for the Roman Empire because Romans also liked to store food in close proximity to where they lived, and both the Roman Empire and the Bantus as a group of related peoples recovered and went on with their business,

The final end of the Roman Empire

While the Bantus were busy taking over Africa the Arabs were busy taking over the Middle East, and while not all Arabs today are descendants of the Arabs who had come out of Arabia on a mission to convert the world to Islam the followers of Mohammed did manage to convert the Roman Empire, and more, to their religion.

But it could be argued that the conversion of the Roman Empire to Islam as the conversion of its primary language from Hellenic Greek to Arabic (or to Turkish, in Anatolia) was not the end of the Roman Empire, any more than its conversion to Christianity (from pagan worship of Roman Gods) marked its end. What really marked its end was World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire, the fourth iteration of the original Roman Empire, was broken into its constituent parts after choosing to join the losing side.  (The first iteration had been headed by the Roman Republic.  Successive iterations gave way to rule by pagan Roman Emperors, Christian Roman Emperors, and finally by rulers who styled themselves as sultans.)

After the Ottoman version of the Roman Empire Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire were broken up by the victors after World War I, the nation states of Europe were all unitary entities except for relatively tiny Switzerland, which was organized into cantons -- ironically, the Swiss had Napoleon to thank for that.  Even the Soviet Union and the United States, although named as if they were unions of states, undeniably became unitary nations after their respective civil wars.

Transition from Christianity to Islam

About 1299 AD or a little prior to that seeds were sown from which a new Roman Empire was to arise as the old one slowly died.  About that time a local Turkish Emir by the name of Osman I led an army through passes that led from his territory at the western edge of the high plateau of central Anatolia to the fertile plains controlled by what was left of the Roman Empire.  His own lands, prior to that time, had consisted of the same dry lands that had been occupied by ancient Phrygia, and this was the first step in bringing Muslim rule to the Roman Empire.

He and his successors continued to expand their territories, mostly at the expense of the Roman Empire.  As this alternate Roman Empire grew in size, it did so primarily by subsuming the elites who had previously served as the sinews of the old Roman Empire.  And these elites, particularly those in the European portion of the original Roman Empire, continued to think of themselves as Romans, although most of these elites became Muslims.

This rival empire grew to be larger than the original Roman Empire, but in 1402 it was divided into three parts as a result of infighting between claimants to the throne.  The ruler of the  European part - significantly - called his realm Rumelia, Land of the Romans.

The division was cured eleven years later, and as this rival empire continued to grow the domain that was centered at Constantinople shrank to a small part of Anatolia -- it was no longer even an empire although it still pretended to be one.

As this rival empire took over the parts of its predecessor the new rulers found it convenient to use the same bureaucracy that they had inherited.  Often the same people were put in charge, only requiring that their new servants should accept the Islamic faith.  Consequently the new empire that emerged was much like the old, and when Mehmed I Conquered Constantinople itself he rightly claimed the title Caesar of Rome.

The elites of this new Rome called themselves Romans and people in neighboring Islamic states also referred to them as Romans.  Only Europeans stubbornly called them Turks.  It's like calling Englishmen Druids.

This new Roman Empire (known to Europeans as the Ottoman Empire) joined in World War I on the side of the Central Powers of Europe -- Germany and the Austro Hungarian Empire.  This was a bad move because the Central Powers were ultimately defeated.  The victors then broke up the "Ottoman" Empire into its parts.

The initial breakup and its aftermath

Like all phases of the Roman Empire, and like all institutions (and human beings) the Ottoman Empire had its faults, and these faults were blamed on those who led the Empire at its apex -- the Turks.  So, as the Empire was divided among the "nations" that composed it, the borders were drawn in such a way that the Turks would be able to control only a small and poor part of Central Anatolia, which was the base from which the descendants of a Turkish tribal leader had begun their rise to great power.  Elsewhere, the Turks would be outnumbered by others -- mainly Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and "Levantines".  (The latter were primarily descendants of earlier generations of people who had run commercial enterprises in the Empire -- the quintessential "Romans" in the new Roman Empire.)

What ensued was essentially a revolt by Turkish tribesmen and those who identified with them against the conditions agreed to by the Ottomans for the demise of their empire.  These "Young Turks" then strove to  regain territory that the Ottomans had given away.  The Turks established their base at Ankara, in central Anatolia, and battled with Greeks in western Anatolia, with Armenians in eastern Armenia, and with the French in the south.  The French had taken on the chore of overseeing creation of Arab states south of Anatolia, and the territory allotted to Arabs and Kurds had intruded into parts of Anatolia.

The battle ebbed and flowed, and Greeks to the west seemed at first to have the upper hand but the Turks ultimately drove the Greeks back toward the western coast.

Smyrna

While Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) was the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna, a cosmopolitan city on Anatolia's western coast, had been the heart and soul of the New Rome that had risen to replace the old.  And what happened there grimly illustrates the determination of the Turkish tribesmen to reclaim what they felt had been stolen from them.  When their armies reached the western coast the ferocity with which they went about destroying this city and its cosmopolitan inhabitants shows the disdain of the Turkish tribesmen for this thriving city and its inhabitants.  They seemed intent on destroying as much of it as they could, so that it could not serve as a nucleus for any part of the state that they wanted to create.

The destruction of Smyrna marked the final end of the Roman Empire.  It remained only for the  further expulsion of minorities from Anatolia.  This included the expulsion of large numbers of Greeks from western Anatolia and a large number of Armenians from eastern Anatolia.

Another important minority, especially in Smyrna, were the "Levantines".  These were primarily descendants of earlier generations of merchants, mostly of European origin, who had run commercial enterprises in the region.  Many of them were very wealthy until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the destruction of Smyrna, where many of them were based.  The takeover of Anatolia by the Turks and of other regions by Arabs, as well as the war itself and destruction by fire, were accompanied by the stoppage of commerce which was the lifeblood of the Levantines.  Many of them, even bankers and owners of large enterprises, were left destitute.

What happened in Smyrna is emblematic of what happened in the wider Roman world, but perhaps we should view the episode philosophically:  Destruction of the old is perhaps necessary in order to make way for rebirth.