Chapter 2: Gods and Empires in the Ancient Near East
Chapter Summary
By the second millennium BCE, the Sumerians had ceased to exist, having been assimilated by Sargon and the Akkadians. Over time, the Sumerian legacy was transmitted to other areas in Anatolia and the Levant. At the same time, the Babylonian king Hammurabi, learned that writing can be used as a weapon. Elevating Marduk as patron deity of Babylon, Hammurabi went on to unite his people under his code of laws. In Egypt, political weakness and division was underscored by a series of invasions from the Nubians and the Hyksos. Although Egypt never suffered large-scale invasion, their world had somehow become much smaller, and they now became aware, that their world was not the center of the cosmos, as they had once believed. The Hyksos invasion also prompted a radical departure in leadership during the period of the New Kingdom. A new type of nobility appeared -- an aristocracy of military commanders. Meanwhile, Egyptian pharaohs such as Akhenaten attempted to elevate their own position of power and influence by reformulating the pantheon of Egyptian gods.
In the early Iron Age, came the states of the Phoenicians, Philistines, Assyrians, Persians and Hebrews, which inhabited the eastern Mediterranean, an area known as the Levant. While some of these kingdoms were aggressive colonists, such as the Phoenicians and Assyrians, two of them, the Hebrews and Persians, fashioned new religious outlooks that were to have nothing short of an amazing impact on the future development of western society.
Although very little is known about the origins of the Persians, we do know that they occupied the western half of Asia Minor and spoke an Indo-European language. They were also intent on creating a large empire: having assimilated the Assyrians, Cyrus quickly took Mesopotamia while his son, Cambyses, conquered Egypt in 525 B.C.E. As to be expected, such acts of conquest had broad ramifications for the further assimilation of "foreign" cultures. By the middle of the 5th century, Persian encroachment upon mainland Greece ended in utter failure. The Persian were responsible for developing a new universal religion called Zoroastrianism, a dualistic religion that had close affinities with the ideas of the Hebrew prophets. The point here is that Zoroastrianism did not develop in a vacuum, nor did its influence begin and end in Persia. The international synthesis mentioned in the previous chapter made it possible for Zoroastrianism to influence the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions.
The Hebrews also fell under the sway of Near Eastern influences. We should not be surprised by this since the Near East was its place of origin. The Jews lived in a polytheistic world -- even after Yahweh had been proclaimed the supreme God, he was so in a world inhabited by many other gods. The prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were perhaps most responsible for turning Hebrew monolatry into a rigid monotheism. And few people can deny the influence of Hebrew monotheism and ethics on the development of Near Eastern culture, nor on the development of yet another universal religion that appeared during the golden age of Rome -- Christianity.
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