CORE OBJECTIVES

COMPARE the varied processes by which territorial states formed and interacted with each other in Egypt and Southeast Asia.

Territorial States in Southwest Asia

Climate change and invasions by migrants also transformed the societies of Southwest Asia, and new territorial kingdoms arose in Mesopotamia and Anatolia (modern-day Iraq and Turkey, respectively). Here, as in Egypt, the drought at the end of the third millennium BCE was devastating. Harvests shrank, the price of basic goods rose, and the social order broke down. In southern Mesopotamia, cities were invaded by transhumant herders (not chariot-driving nomads) who sought grazing lands to replace those swallowed up by expanding deserts. A millennium of intense cultivation, combined with severe drought, brought disastrous consequences: rich soil in the river basin was depleted of nutrients; salt water from the Persian Gulf seeped into the marshy deltas, contaminating the water table; and the main branch of the Euphrates River shifted to the west. Many cities lost access to their fertile agrarian hinterlands and withered away. Mesopotamia’s center of political and economic gravity shifted northward, away from the silted, marshy deltas of the southern heartland.

As scarcities mounted, transhumant peoples began to press in upon settled communities more closely. Mesopotamian city dwellers were scornful of the rustic migrants, whom they called Amorites (“westerners”), invading their cities. While these transhumant herders may have been western “foreigners” to those living in the urban centers of Mesopotamia, they were not strangers. These rural folk had wintered in villages close to the rivers to water their animals, which grazed on fallow fields. In the scorching summer, they retreated to the cooler highlands. Their flocks provided wools, leather, bones, and tendons to the artisan-based industries of the urban centers of Mesopotamia. In return, the herders purchased crafted products and agricultural goods. They also paid taxes, served as warriors, and labored on public works projects, but had few political rights within city-states.

Around 2000 BCE, Amorites from the western desert joined allies from the Iranian plateau to bring down the Third Dynasty of Ur, which had controlled all of Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran for more than a century. These Amorites and their allies founded the Old Babylonian kingdom, centered on the southern Mesopotamian city of Babylon, near modern-day Baghdad. Other territorial states arose in Mesopotamia in the millennium that followed, sometimes with one dominating the entire floodplain and sometimes with multiple powerful kingdoms vying for territory. As in Egypt, a century of political instability followed the demise of the old city-state models. Here, too, pastoralists played a role in the restoration of order, increasing the wealth of the regions they conquered and helping the cultural realm to flourish. The Old Babylonian kingdom expanded trade and founded territorial states with dynastic ruling families and well-defined frontiers. Pastoralists also played a key role in the development of territorial kingdoms in Anatolia.

Hammurabi’s Code is inscribed on a stone shaft. A carving of two people is above the inscription. — **Hammurabi’s Code** The inscription on the shaft of Hammurabi’s Code is carved on a diorite stele in the Akkadian language using a beautiful and orderly rendition of cuneiform script. At the top of the stele, which is more than 7 feet tall, the seated sun god, Shamash, bestows authority on Hammurabi, illustrating the point of the code’s prologue and epilogue, which describe Hammurabi’s god-given authority.

Mesopotamian Kingship

The new rulers of Mesopotamia changed the organization of the state and promoted a distinctive culture, as well as expanding trade. Herders-turned-urbanite-rulers mixed their own nomadic social organization with that of the once-dominant city-states to create the structures necessary to support much larger territorial states. The basic social organization of the Amorites, out of which the territorial states in Mesopotamia evolved, was tribal (dominated by a ruling chief) and clan based (claiming descent from a common ancestor). Over time, chieftains drew on personal charisma and battlefield prowess to become kings; kings allied with the merchant class and nobility for bureaucratic and financial support; and kingship became hereditary.

Over the centuries, powerful Mesopotamian kings expanded their territories and subdued weaker neighbors, inducing them to pay tribute in luxury goods, raw materials, and manpower as part of a broad confederation of city-states under the kings’ protection. Control over military resources (metals for weaponry and, later, herds of horses for pulling chariots) was necessary for dominance. The ruler’s charisma also mattered. Unlike the more institutionalized Egyptian leadership, Mesopotamian kingdoms could vacillate from strong to weak, depending on the leader’s personality.

The most famous Mesopotamian ruler of this period was Hammurabi (r. 1792–1750 BCE). Continuously struggling with powerful neighbors, he sought to centralize state authority and to create a new legal order. Using diplomatic and military skills to become the strongest king in Mesopotamia, he made Babylon his capital. He implemented a new system to consolidate power, appointing regional governors to manage outlying provinces and to deal with local elites. Like the Egyptian pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, Hammurabi was shepherd and patriarch of his people, responsible for proper preparation of the fields and irrigation canals and for his followers’ well-being. Balancing elite privileges with the needs of the lower classes, the king secured his power. Hammurabi’s Code, with its “eye-for-an-eye,” if/then, reciprocity of crime and punishment, is an example of this balancing act. Its compilation of 282 edicts outlines crimes and their punishments. The laws dealt with theft, murder, professional negligence, and many other matters of daily life. The laws make it clear that governing public matters was man’s work and upholding a just order was the supreme charge of rulers. Whereas the gods’ role in ordering the world was distant, the king was directly in command of ordering relations among people. Accordingly, the code elaborated in exhaustive detail the social rules that would ensure the kingdom’s peace through its primary instrument—the family. The code outlined the rights and privileges of fathers, wives, and children. The father’s duty was to treat his kin as the ruler would treat his subjects, with strict authority and care. Adultery was harshly punished, resulting in the drowning of the adulterous wife and her lover, unless the husband or king intervened.

The code also divided the people in the Babylonian kingdom into three classes: “free persons,” “dependents,” and “slaves.” Each class had an assigned value and distinct rights and responsibilities. While its eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth reciprocity is remarkable, the code also made it clear that Babylonia was a stratified society, in which some persons (and eyes and teeth!) were more valued than others. Punishments for offenses were determined by the status of the committer and that of the one who suffered. The code itself was inscribed in the last years of Hammurabi’s reign, after his conquests had created a larger state, and represented a way to celebrate the king’s achievements.

A terra-cotta plaque of Gilgamesh and his sidekick, Enkidu.; Fragmentary tablets of baked clay covered in writing which tells part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. — **Gilgamesh in Image and Text** *Left:* This terra-cotta plaque is one of the few visual depictions of Gilgamesh (on the left wielding the knife) and his sidekick, Enkidu. It illustrates one of the episodes in their shared adventures, the killing of Humwawa, the monster of the Cedar Forest. The style of the plaque indicates that it was made during the Old Babylonian period, between 2000 and 1600 BCE. *Right:* The text of the Gilgamesh epic was preserved on tablets of baked clay, like the now-fragmentary tablets shown here, which were found in the seventh-century BCE library of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The *Epic of Gilgamesh* had enduring appeal for those in Mesopotamia, who passed the story along for millennia, first orally, then in images like the one here, then in text.

POWER AND CULTURE Mesopotamian rulers commissioned public art and works projects and promoted institutions of learning. To dispel their image as rustic foreigners and to demonstrate their familiarity with the region’s core values, new Mesopotamian rulers valued the oral tales and written records of the earlier Sumerians and Akkadians. Scribes copied the ancient texts and preserved their tradition. Royal hymns portrayed the king as a legendary hero of quasi-divine status.

Heroic narratives about legendary founders, based on traditional stories about the rulers of ancient Uruk, legitimized the new rulers. The most famous tale was the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest surviving works of literature. Originally composed more than a millennium earlier, in the Sumerian language, this epic narrated the heroism of the legendary king of early Uruk, Gilgamesh. This epic is probably best known for the passage in which Gilgamesh seeks out advice from Utnapishtim, the survivor of a terrible flood, in a story that resonates with that of Noah from Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures. Utnapishtim’s flood story, however, is just one part of Gilgamesh’s epic, which describes the title character’s rivalry and, later, friendship with Enkidu and his quest for immortality after his friend Enkidu’s death. Preserved by scribes in royal courts through centuries, the epic offers an example of how the Mesopotamian kings invested in cultural production to explain important political relations, unify their people, and distinguish their subjects from those of other kingdoms.

TRADE AND THE RISE OF A PRIVATE ECONOMY Another feature of the territorial state in Mesopotamia was its shift away from economic activity dominated by the city-state and toward independent private ventures. Mesopotamian rulers designated private entrepreneurs rather than state bureaucrats to collect taxes. People paid taxes in the form of commodities such as grain, vegetables, and wool, which the entrepreneurs exchanged for silver. They, in turn, passed on the silver to the state after pocketing a percentage for their profit. This process generated more private economic activity and wealth, and more revenues for the state.

Mesopotamia was a crossroads for caravans leading east and west. Peace and good governance allowed trade to flourish. The ability to move exotic foodstuffs, valuable minerals, textiles, and luxury goods across Southwest Asia won Mesopotamian merchants and entrepreneurs a privileged position as middlemen. Merchants also used sea routes for trade with the Indus Valley. Before 2000 BCE, mariners had charted the waters of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf, and much of the Arabian Sea. And during the second millennium BCE, shipbuilders figured out how to construct larger vessels and rig them with towering masts and woven sails—creating seaworthy craft that could carry bulkier loads. Shipbuilding required wood (particularly cedar from Phoenicia) as well as wool and other fibers (from the pastoral hinterlands) for sails. Such reliance on imported materials reflected a growing regional economic specialization and an expanding sphere of interaction across western Afro-Eurasia. The benefits and risks of trade in Mesopotamia are evident from royal edicts of debt annulment (to help merchants who had overstretched) and formalized commercial rules governing taxes and duties. In trade and other exchanges, Mesopotamia became a crucial link between Egypt, Anatolia, and southwestern Iran. Centralized control of the region facilitated a thriving trade in such precious commodities as horses, chariots, and lapis lazuli, which was exchanged for gold, wood, and ivory.

The Old and New Hittite Kingdoms (1800–1200 BCE)

Chariot warriors known as the Hittites established territorial kingdoms in Anatolia, to the northwest of Mesopotamia. Anatolia was an overland crossroads that linked the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Like other plateaus of Afro-Eurasia, it had high tablelands, was easy to traverse, and was hospitable to large herding communities. During the third millennium BCE, Anatolia had become home to numerous communities run by native elites. These societies combined pastoral ways of life, agriculture, and urban commercial centers. Before 2000 BCE, peoples speaking Indo-European languages began to enter the plateau, probably coming from the steppe lands north and west of the Black Sea. The newcomers lived in fortified settlements and often engaged in regional warfare, and their numbers grew. Splintered into competing clans, they fought for regional supremacy. They also borrowed extensively from the cultural developments of the Southwest Asian urban cultures, especially those of Mesopotamia.

In the early second millennium BCE, the chariot warrior groups of Anatolia grew powerful on the commercial activity that passed through their region. Chief among them were the Hittites. Hittite lancers and archers rode chariots across vast expanses to plunder their neighbors and demand taxes and tribute. In the seventeenth century BCE, the Hittite leader Hattusilis I unified these chariot aristocracies, secured his base in Anatolia, defeated the kingdom that controlled northern Syria, and then campaigned along the Euphrates River. His grandson and successor, Mursilis I, sacked Babylon in 1595 BCE. The Hittites ultimately built their capital at Hattusa, in central Anatolia, complete with massive walls, a monumental gate with lions carved into it, multiple temples and granaries, and a palace. Near Hattusa, the rock-cut sanctuary of Yazilikaya contains reliefs of gods and goddesses marching in procession, as well as images of Hittite kings.

A relief sculpture of Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their three daughters. — **Akhenaten and Aten** Akhenaten, one of the correspondents in the Amarna letters that reveal so much about international diplomacy among the community of major powers, also forged a revolutionary, if short-lived, change in Egyptian religion. His elevation of the sun disk, Aten, to supreme authority displaced the long-standing power of the god Amun-Re and his priestly elite. On this relief carving, the sun disk, Aten, beams down on Akhenaten and his family with rays that end in hands holding ankhs, the Egyptian symbol for life. This intimate scene depicts Akhenaten lovingly cradling his young daughter across from his wife, Nefertiti, who holds their other two daughters.

Two centuries after the successes of Hattusilis I, the Hittites enjoyed another period of political and military success. In 1274 BCE, they fought the Egyptians at the Battle of Qadesh (in modern Syria), the largest and best-documented chariot battle of antiquity. Both sides claimed victory. The treaty that records reciprocal promises of nonaggression by the Egyptians and Hittites nearly fifteen years after the battle is the oldest surviving peace treaty, and a replica of it is displayed at the United Nations. Soon after Qadesh, the Egyptian forces withdrew from the region. Hittite control—spanning from Anatolia across the region between the Nile and Mesopotamia—was central to balancing power among the territorial states that grew up in the river valleys.

A Community of Major Powers (1400–1200 BCE)

Between 1400 and 1200 BCE, the major territorial states of Southwest Asia and Egypt perfected instruments of international diplomacy. A cache of 350 letters, referred to by modern scholars as the Amarna letters after the present-day Egyptian village of Amarna, where they were discovered, offers intimate views of the interactions among the powers of Egypt and Southwest Asia. The letters include communications between Egyptian pharaohs and various leaders of Southwest Asia, including Babylonian and Hittite kings. Powerful rulers referred to one another as brothers, suggesting not only a high degree of equality but also a desire to foster friendship among large states. Trade linked the regimes and was so vital to the economic and political well-being of rulers that if a commercial mission was plundered, the ruler of the area in which the robbery occurred assumed responsibility and offered compensation to the injured parties.

Because trade was so important, the leaders of these powers settled their differences through treaties and diplomatic negotiations rather than on the battlefield. Each state knew its place in the political pecking order. It was an order that depended on constant diplomacy, based on communication, treaties, marriages, and the exchange of gifts. As nomadic peoples combined with settled urban polities to create new territorial states in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia, and as those territorial states came into contact with one another through trade, this diplomacy was vital to maintaining the interactions in this community of major powers in Southwest Asia.

Amorites: Name, which means “westerners,” used by Mesopotamian urbanites to describe the transhumant herders who began to migrate into their cities in the late third millennium BCE.
Hammurabi’s Code: Legal code created by Hammurabi (r. 1792–1750 BCE). The code divided society into three classes—“free,” “dependent,” and “slave”—each with distinct rights and responsibilities.
Hittites: An Anatolian chariot warrior group that spread east to northern Syria, though they eventually faced weaknesses in their own homeland. Rooted in their capital at Hattusa, they interacted with contemporary states both violently (as at the Battle of Qadesh against Egypt) and peacefully (as in the correspondence of the Amarna letters).

Territorial States in Southwest Asia

Mesopotamian Kingship

The Old and New Hittite Kingdoms (1800–1200 BCE)

A Community of Major Powers (1400–1200 BCE)

Glossary