The biggest threat to it and indeed to the whole Syrian and
Levantine coast-and for that matter, to the southern Anatolian coast, Cyprus,
and the Egyptian Delta-came from the sea. Throughout the Late Bronze Age, and
in many earlier and later periods as well, the eastern Mediterranean was a
dangerous place for travel. That was partly because of the natural hazards of
sudden storms, which left many a merchant ship and other vessels at the bottom
of it. But also because of piracy. In the mid-14th century, Akhenaten had
written to the king of Alasiya (= Cyprus or part thereof) complaining about the
seabooting activities of the notorious Lukka people operating from bases on the
southern Anatolian coast and attacking cities on the shores of Egypt. He
accused the Alasiyan king and his subjects of complicity in the attacks. The
Alasiyan king objected strongly. His cities too, he declared, had suffered
annual raids by pirates. We also hear of raids upon the Egyptian coast by
buccaneers called Sherden, in the reigns of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II. And
in the last years of the Late Bronze Age, what was almost certainly another
pirate group, called `the Shikila who live on boats’, appears in a letter sent
by a Hittite king (probably the last one, Suppiluliuma II) to a Ugaritic king
(probably the last one, Ammurapi). The letter shows deep interest in these
boat-people. Its author had learnt that a citizen of Ugarit called Ibnadushu
had been captured by them, but was subsequently released or escaped his
captivity. He requested that Ibnadushu be sent to Hatti for debriefing, with
the promise that he would be returned home safely afterwards. The Great King
was understandably anxious to find out more about the size and the movements of
pirate operations in the eastern Mediterranean. Largely, it must be, because of
the serious threat they posed to the safety of transport ships in the waters of
this region and the increasingly vital role these ships were playing in the
struggle `to keep alive the land of Hatti’.
Ugarit’s final days provide a microcosm of the forces of
upheaval and destruction that engulfed much of the Near Eastern world in the
late 13th and early 12th centuries. For the Syrian coastal kingdom, the dangers
came particularly from the sea. Ammurapi kept a squad of coastwatchers on
constant alert, scanning the horizon. Then came the news he most feared: enemy
ships had come into view just off his kingdom’s shores and were heading
directly for the capital. Ammurapi wrote to the Carchemish viceroy,
Talmi-Teshub, begging for assistance. Perhaps out of pique for Ugarit’s earlier
lack of cooperation, but more likely now because he had no choice, Talmi-Teshub
wrote back offering nothing but advice: `As for what you have written to me:
“Ships of the enemy have been seen at sea!” Well, you must remain
firm. Indeed for your part, where are your troops, your chariots stationed? Are
they not stationed near you? No? Behind the enemy, who press upon you? Surround
your towns with ramparts. Have your troops and chariots enter there, and await
the enemy with great resolution.’ In other words, you’re on your own. Make the
best of what resources you already have. These were little enough. We have
noted that Ammurapi had responded positively to a Hittite demand to send his
troops and chariots to Hatti, even though what he sent was considered
inadequate and second-rate. And after a second demand was made of him, by
Suppiluliuma II, he had sent his fleet to the coast of Lukka in south-western
Anatolia- for reasons scholars are still debating. We can understand the
desperateness of Ammurapi’s appeal to the viceroy.
It was to no avail. Ammurapi was left defenceless. With part
of his land forces and all his navy elsewhere, he had no chance of repelling
the seaborne marauders now rapidly descending upon his kingdom. He wrote to the
king of Alasiya, with whom he seems to have had close ties, describing how
critically dangerous his situation was: `My father, the enemy’s ships have been
coming and burning my cities and doing terrible things in my country. All my
troops and chariots are in the land of Hatti, and all my ships are in Lukka. My
land has been left defenceless!’ Though the letter’s precise date is uncertain,
its words of despair and abandonment could have been among the very last
Ammurapi put to tablet. Indeed, so sudden was the final enemy onslaught upon
his kingdom that letters ready for despatch from the capital never left it.
They were found by archaeologists in the house of a scribe called Rapanu –
graphic evidence in themselves of the city’s sudden, violent end. Ammurapi’s
royal seat, centre of one of the most prosperous kingdoms of Late Bronze Age
Syria, was looted and abandoned. There was no Iron Age successor. Ugarit would
never rise from its ashes.
Its destruction belongs within the context of the general
waves of upheavals and devastations that brought the Late Bronze Age
civilizations to an end in both the Aegean and the Near Eastern worlds.
Environmental catastrophes (earthquakes, prolonged droughts, and the like), new
waves of invaders from the north, the collapse of central administrations,
disruption of international trading links, and economic meltdown (to give a
modern ring to our tale) have all been suggested as factors contributing to the
disintegration of the Bronze Age world. These possibilities will no doubt
continue to be debated by scholars, inconclusively and endlessly. But Egyptian
records, supported to some extent by archaeological data, specifically
associate the devastations with large groups called `peoples from the sea’, a
motley conglomerate of marauders who travelled by land as well as by sea as
they swept across and destroyed much of the Near Eastern world early in the
12th century. Already in the reign of the pharaoh Merneptah (1213-1203), groups
of invaders called Sherden, Shekelesh, Lukka, Ekwesh, and Teresh had attacked
the coast of Egypt.
Merneptah managed to repel the intruders, but their attacks
on Egypt were merely a prelude to the invasions of the eastern Mediterranean
countries during Ramesses III’s reign (1184-1153). On the walls of his funerary
temple at Medinet Habu at Thebes in Uppper Egypt, Ramesses graphically records
the trail of ruin left by these peoples: `The foreign countries made a
conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered
in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Qode,
Carchemish, Arzawa and Alasiya on, being cut off at one time. A camp was set up
in one place in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that
which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while
the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset,
Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands
upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and
trusting: “Our plans will succeed!”
These invasions were not simply or even primarily military
operations. They involved mass movements, both by land and by sea, of peoples
who were most likely the victims rather than the causes of the disasters that
brought about the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations. Displaced from
their homelands, they had sought new lands to settle, taking on a marauding
character as they did so. What happened to them after they were beaten off by
Ramesses III? Some like the Shekelesh, the Sherden, and the Teresh may have
gone west, perhaps to Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy. A proportion of the Sherden
may have stayed on in Egypt, becoming mercenaries in the pharaoh’s armies.
Another group, the Peleset, almost certainly became the people well known from
biblical sources as the Philistines.
The Philistines
`An uneducated or unenlightened person; one indifferent or
hostile to culture.’ Thus the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the
term `Philistine’ as we use it today. In so doing, it provides a classic
example of the powerful influence the Bible has exercised on Western
civilization’s vocabulary and ways of thinking. The Philistines figure
prominently in biblical tradition as the archetypal enemies of the early
Israelite rulers. Their origins can be firmly linked to the historical record,
for their ancestors, called the Peleset in Egyptian records, were among the Sea
Peoples who pillaged their way through much of the Near Eastern world before
being stopped by the pharaoh Ramesses III. In Egyptian reliefs from Ramesses’
reign, the Peleset are depicted wearing tasselled kilts and what appear to be
feathered headdresses. After the Sea Peoples’ break-up and dispersal, these
proto-Philistines finally settled in south-western Palestine, on that part of
the southern coastal plain that came to be called Philistia. Five cities, the
so-called Philistine Pentapolis, provided the focal points of Philistine
civilization. They were Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, Gaza, and Gath.
It is not surprising that the Philistines, the Israelites’
arch-enemies and a people who in their victories could be as brutal and
destructive as any of their contemporaries, should get a bad press in our
biblical sources. But to portray them as crude, uncivilized barbarians really
flies in the face of the facts. The material remains of their civilization
provide ample evidence that they were a highly cultured people, with advanced
architectural, engineering, and technological skills, and a high level of
attainment in the arts and crafts. It was perhaps partly their refined,
urban-based civilization that roused the moralistic ire of the Israelites.
Especially those Israelites who had led an ascetic existence in the
hill-country of Palestine before descending on the plains, where they sought a
more secure, settled way of life. In the process, they came into conflict with
the Philistines.
Canaanites
These were the unfortunate occupants, in biblical tradition,
of the `Promised Land’, the land vouchsafed by God to the Israelites after
their return from Egypt, as recorded in the biblical story of the Exodus. It
lay in the region covered in part by modern Israel and Lebanon. With the
go-ahead given by God, the returning Israelites virtually obliterated the
Canaanites to provide themselves with their own living space, bringing them, as
a consequence, into contact and conflict with the Philistines. In a broad
sense, the term `Canaanite’ is sometimes used to refer to all the ancient
peoples of the Levant, up to the last decades of the 4th century bc. But these
peoples were divided into a number of tribal groups, city-states, and kingdoms,
each of which developed its own political and social structures, and a number
of its own distinctive cultural traits. They identified themselves, and were
almost always identified by others, not as Canaanites but by the names of the
specific tribal and political units to which they belonged. This explains why
in the ancient sources `Canaanite’ is rarely used as a generic designation for
them, outside the Bible. The first clearly attested use of the term occurs in
the 18th-century archives of Mari on the Euphrates, and there are occasional
references to Canaan and Canaanites in later Bronze Age texts; for example, we
have seen that Canaan was the place of exile of Idrimi, later king of Alalah,
while he was on the run after fleeing his city Aleppo. Canaanites were among
the prisoners-of-war deported to Egypt by the 15th-century pharaoh Amenhotep
II, and in the following century, Canaan appears several times in the Amarna
letters. Subsequently Canaanites are attested in biblical sources as the
pre-Israelite occupants of the `Promised Land’. Some scholars have argued that
the Israelites themselves, despite their `biblical’ loathing for every aspect
of Canaanite culture, were in fact a sub-branch of the Canaanite peoples who
withdrew to the Palestinian hill-country during the unsettled conditions in
Syria-Palestine and elsewhere at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
