1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (21 page)

THE END OF AN ERA:
THE TWELFTH CENTURY BC

T
his is the moment for which we have been waiting: the climax of the play and the dramatic beginning of the end to three hundred and more years of the globalized economy that had been the hallmark of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. The twelfth century BC, as we will see in this final act, is marked more by tales of woe and destruction than by stories of trade and international relations, although we can begin on the high note of the latter.

T
HE
D
ISCOVERY OF
U
GARIT AND
M
INET
EL
-B
EIDA

Chance is said to favor the prepared spirit, but in some cases even the unprepared spirit is so favored. For it was an accidental discovery by a peasant, presumably untutored in the ways of archaeology, that led to the discovery of the city and kingdom of Ugarit, located on the coast of north Syria. In 1929, the reported finding of a tomb at Minet el-Beida Bay brought French archaeologists to the area. Excavations quickly revealed the ruins of a port city, now referred to as Minet el-Beida. Eight hundred meters farther inland, within a modern mound called Ras Shamra, the capital city of Ugarit was brought to light soon afterward.
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Both Ugarit and Minet el-Beida have been under almost continuous French excavation ever since, first by Claude Schaeffer from 1929 onward and, most recently, from 1978 to 1998, by Marguerite Yon. Since 1999, a joint Franco-Syrian team has conducted the excavations.
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These, all together, have revealed the remnants of a functioning, busy, and
prosperous commercial city and port, which were suddenly destroyed and abandoned soon after the beginning of the twelfth century BC. Within the ruins, products from all over the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean have been found; a warehouse in Minet el-Beida, for example, still held eighty Canaanite storage jars. Unfortunately, these were found in the 1930s, so rigorous scientific analyses of the contents were not conducted.
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Within the private houses and the royal palace at Ugarit, a number of important archives have been recovered since the 1950s, documenting the economic activities of several merchants, as well as of Ugarit’s royal family. The letters and other items in these archives were written on clay tablets, as was usual in the Bronze Age, but in this case tablets were found inscribed with different languages: sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Hittite, sometimes Egyptian, and sometimes other less widely used languages, such as Hurrian.

Additionally, there was one other language that scholars had never previously seen. It was deciphered fairly rapidly and is now called Ugaritic. It used one of the earliest alphabetic scripts yet known—except that there were actually two alphabetic scripts in the texts, one with twenty-two signs like the Phoenician alphabet and the other with an additional eight signs.
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These Ugaritic texts, of which there is now such a large corpus that they have spawned a cottage industry of modern scholarship known as Ugaritic studies, include not only the archives and correspondence of the merchants and the king, but also examples of literature, mythology, history, religion, and other elements belonging to a thriving civilization aware of its own legacy. The result is that we can reconstruct the city of Ugarit from its ruins and can reconstitute as well, from its texts, the daily life and belief systems of its inhabitants. For example, it is clear that they worshipped a pantheon of deities, among whom El and Baal figured prominently. And we know the names of their kings, from Ammistamru I and Niqmaddu II, whose letters to Amenhotep III and Akhenaten are in the Amarna archive in Egypt, to the very last king, Ammurapi, who ruled in the first decade of the twelfth century BC. We also know that the kings of Ugarit married princesses from the neighboring polity of Amurru, and probably also from the larger kingdom of the Hittites, in dynastic marriages complete with dowries that were
quite literally fit for a king, though at least one of these marriages ended in a bitter divorce that dragged on in the courts for years.
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E
CONOMIC AND
C
OMMERCIAL
C
ONNECTIONS OF
U
GARIT AND
I
TS
M
ERCHANTS

The citizens and kings of Ugarit carried on lively trade relations throughout the lifetime of the city. It was clearly an international entrepôt, with ships of many nations arriving in the harbor of Minet el-Beida. It may have owed allegiance to Egypt during the first half of the fourteenth century BC, but was definitely a vassal of the Hittites from the second half of that century onward, after Suppiluliuma conquered the area, ca. 1350–1340 BC. Texts at the site, found in the various archives, most of which date to the last half century of the city’s existence, document connections between Ugarit and numerous other polities both large and small, including Egypt, Cyprus, Assyria, the Hittites, Carchemish, Tyre, Beirut, Amurru, and Mari. Most recently, the Aegean has been added to this list as well.
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The tablets also specifically mention the exportation from Ugarit of perishable goods, including dyed wool, linen garments, oil, lead, copper, and bronze objects, especially to the Assyrians, located far to the east in Mesopotamia, as well as extensive trade connections with Beirut, Tyre, and Sidon on the Phoenician coast.
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Objects imported from the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia have been found at Ugarit itself, including Mycenaean vessels, a bronze sword inscribed with the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, hundreds of fragments of alabaster jars, and other luxury items.
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These, and other more mundane goods, such as wine, olive oil, and wheat, reached Ugarit through the efforts of merchants like Sinaranu, whom we met earlier in these pages, whose ship went to Crete and back during the mid-fourteenth century BC. We know that the Ugaritians were sufficiently well-off financially to send the Hittites tribute each year, consisting of five hundred shekels of gold, dyed wool, and garments, in addition to gold and silver cups for the Hittite king, queen, and high officials.
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We now know of other Ugaritic merchants who were active later—at the time of the destruction of Ugarit at the beginning of the twelfth
century—thanks to additional tablets, many of which have been found in recent decades within their houses, and some of which have changed our understanding of the city’s probable end.
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One such house is known as the “House of Yabninu,” located near the southern part of the royal palace. The house itself has still not been completely excavated, but is already known to have covered at least one thousand square meters, so Yabninu must have been a reasonably successful merchant. The sixty or more tablets that were discovered within the ruins of this house are thought to have originally been kept on the second floor, and include documents written in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and the as-yet-undeciphered language known as Cypro-Minoan, chiefly used on the island of Cyprus but also found inscribed on vessels at Tiryns on the Greek mainland. The texts written on the tablets, as well as the imported objects found within the house, document that Yabninu’s mercantile activities included connections with Cyprus, the Levantine coast farther to the south, Egypt, and the Aegean.
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Another set of tablets was found within the so-called House of Rapanu, which was excavated in 1956 and 1958. The tablets, more than two hundred of them, were quickly studied and then published a decade later, in 1968. They indicate that Rapanu was a scribe and high-ranking adviser to the king of Ugarit, most likely Ammistamru II (ca. 1260–1235 BC). Rapanu was apparently involved in some sensitive negotiations at the highest levels, as the contents of the archive indicate. The texts include a number of letters exchanged between the king of Ugarit and the king of Cyprus (Alashiya), written at the time that the Sea Peoples threatened both. There are also letters exchanged with the king of nearby Carchemish and with the more-distant Egyptian pharaoh; the latter set are concerned with some sort of incident involving Canaanites on the Levantine coast.
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One of the letters deals with trade in oil between Ugarit and Cyprus. It is from Niqmaddu III, the penultimate king of Ugarit, and was sent to the king of Alashiya, whom he calls his “father,” referring to himself as “your son.”
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Unless the Ugaritic king had married a Cypriot princess, which is not out of the question, it seems that the use of the word “father” follows the general terminology of the time in attempting to establish a familial relationship, while at the same time acknowledging either the superiority or the relative age of the king of Cyprus over the king of
Ugarit. Another of the letters in this house has already been mentioned: the one describing the coming of enemy ships to Ugarit, which Schaeffer thought had been found in a kiln, being baked before its dispatch to the king of Cyprus. We will discuss this text further below.

Some of the most recently discovered tablets are those in the so-called House of Urtenu. This residence was initially uncovered by accident in the southern part of the site during the construction of a modern military bunker in 1973. The archaeologists were allowed to dig through the spoil heap created by the digging of the bunker, which incidentally destroyed the center of the house, and found a number of tablets, all of which have now been published. The newer tablets have come from the careful excavations of 1986–1992, which have also been published, and of 1994–2002, which are currently being studied. Overall, there are more than 500 tablets in this archive—134 were found in 1994 alone—with some texts written in Ugaritic but the majority in Akkadian. The correspondence includes letters from the kings of Egypt, Cyprus, Hatti, Assyria, Carchemish, Sidon, Beirut, and possibly Tyre.
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One of the oldest was apparently sent by a king of Assyria, probably Tukulti-Ninurta I, to a king of Ugarit, perhaps Ammistamru II or Ibirana, and concerns the battle in which Tukulti-Ninurta and the Assyrians defeated Tudhaliya IV and the Hittites.
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As one of the excavators has pointed out, the tablets indicate that Urtenu was active at the beginning of the twelfth century BC, and that he had a high social status. He was apparently an agent in a large commercial firm run by the queen’s son-in-law, which had commercial dealings with the city of Emar in inland Syria, as well as with nearby Carchemish. He was also involved in negotiations and trade deals with the island of Cyprus, among other long-distance trade ventures.
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In fact, the five letters found in the house that were sent from Cyprus are extremely important, for they include—for the first time ever—the name of a king of Bronze Age Cyprus: a man known as Kushmeshusha. There are two letters from this king, as well as two letters from senior governors of the island and, intriguingly, a letter from an Ugaritic scribe who was actually living in Cyprus at the time. These five letters now join the other four from Alashiya that had previously been found in Rapanu’s house.
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There are two additional letters in the house that contain references to two “Hiyawa-men,” who were reportedly waiting in the Lukka lands (later known as Lycia), in southwestern Anatolia, for a ship to arrive from Ugarit. The letters were sent to Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, by a Hittite king, probably to be identified as Suppiluliuma II, and one of his top officials. These are the first known references to Aegean people in the Ugarit archives, for “Hiyawa” is undoubtedly related to the Hittite word “Ahhiyawa,” which, as we have seen, is taken by most scholars to mean the Mycenaeans and the Bronze Age Aegean.
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Fig. 9. Royal letters in Urtenu’s archive at Ugarit (illustrative rather than exhaustive; nodes = individuals sending or receiving letter(s); edges/lines = pairs between whom letter(s) sent; size of circles = number of letters; created by D. H. Cline).

There is also a letter from Pharaoh Merneptah of Egypt, responding to a request from the king of Ugarit—either Niqmaddu III or Ammurapi—for a sculptor to be sent, so that a statue of the pharaoh could be created and set up in the city, specifically in front of a temple to Baal. At the same time as the pharaoh denies this request in the letter, he gives a long list of luxury goods that were being sent from Egypt to Ugarit. The goods were being loaded onto a ship destined for Ugarit, he said, and included more than a hundred textiles and pieces of clothing, plus assorted other goods such as ebony wood and plaques of red, white, and blue stones.
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Again, we should note that almost all of these goods are
perishable and will not have survived in the archaeological record. It is a good thing that they are mentioned in this text, therefore; otherwise we might never have known that they once existed and were exchanged between Egypt and Ugarit.