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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 in Troy. 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, so 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 an 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, and 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 was busy conquering most of the tribes of Israel and scattering them throughout the Empire, and the Neo Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar was busy conquering  both the Philistines and the Israelites.  The Neo Assyrians transported the entire population of northern tribes of Israel, scattering them throughout their empire, but the Neo Babylonians transported only the elites of the conquered peoples, who included the Philistines and the southernmost tribes of Israel.

By this 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 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 that had tumbled into ruins and was so overgrown with weeds that the exiles called it the "Hanging Gardens" of Babylon.

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 could 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  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 plague was 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 the Muslim religion, they did manage to convert much of the Middle East, south Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as parts of Africa.  Moreover, they conquered Anatolia and eventually Constantinople itself, which had been at the heart of the Roman Empire for over a thousand years.

But it could be argued that this wasn't really the end of the Roman Empire -- it had simply transformed it into a Muslim Empire which was, again, centered in Constantinople (renamed Istanbul).  What really marked the demise of the Roman Empire was World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire, the fourth iteration of the original Roman Empire, headed by the Roman Republic, gave way successively to rule by pagan Roman Emperors, then by Christian Roman Emperors, and finally to Muslim rulers who styled themselves as sultans.  This new version of the Roman empire came to an end after it joined in an alliance with Germany and the Austro Hungarian Empire against France, England, America and of course Russia.  (Germany, Russia and Austria had erased Poland from the map by dividing it among themselves in unequal parts but it was resurrected after World War I.)

Although the Chinese Empire struggled on until it was finally replaced by People's Republic of China, the Ottoman Empire (if I may contradict myself) and the Austro Hungarian Empire were the last of the great Empires of the Western World.  After that, the nation states of Europe were all unitary entities, except for relatively tiny Switzerland, which continued its own unique organization into cantons -- ironically, the Swiss had Napoleon to thank for that.  Even the Soviet Union and the United States were named as if they were unions of states but the inoperative nature of their names was demonstrated by the outcomes of their respective civil wars.

Transition from Christian to Muslim religion

About 1299 or earlier the seeds were sown from which a new Roman Empire was to arise as the old one died.  About this 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, and indeed the elites of their growing empire, particularly those in the European part, still called themselves Romans, even though they were no longer ruled from Constantinople and they had become Muslims.

By 1402 this rival empire was larger than the Roman Empire itself, but it was divided into three parts by infighting between claimants to the throne and 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 the domain that was centered at Constantinople shrank to a small part of Anatolia -- it was no longer an empire.

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 Muslim 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 neighboring Muslims 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 Germany and Austria.  This was a bad move because the Central Powers were ultimately defeated, and then the victors broke up; the "Ottoman" Empire into its constituent parts.  The major part, of course, was Anatolia, and this gave the "Young Turks" exactly what they wanted.  The Young Turks, who had embraced their ancient tribal identity, gained control in the chaos that followed the breakup of the Empire, and many "foreigners" -- who had considered themselves to be Romans -- were then expelled from Anatolia.  It's as if Irish citizens of the United States were sent back to Ireland because they were not of British ancestry.

It was impossible to expel the Kurds, because they controlled large parts of Anatolia in the southern and south-eastern mountainous regions, and they had no homeland of their own, and moreover they wanted to claim parts of Anatolia as their own homeland.  this set the stage for further troubles.

Ironically, when the Ottoman Turks had taken over Anatolia some of the other minorities had disguised themselves as Turks by adopting Turkish as their first language.  These joined with the real Turks in promoting expulsion of other minorities.