The World

* The division of early history into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages was devised in 1825 by the Danish historian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. Sub-Saharan Africa did not experience a prehistoric Bronze Age: tools were made of stone. Then they were made from iron. For some, the sudden influx of iron-working technology supports the argument that the technology reached Africa from outside the continent. But more recently it has been argued that iron-working technology developed independently in one or more centres, possibly Nok (Nigeria) or Kush (Sudan).

* The Israelites immigrated to Canaan from servitude in Egypt many centuries earlier – according to the Bible. Contrary to the biblical story of conquest, it is likely they conquered some local peoples and intermarried with others.

The Nubian Pharaohs and Great Kings of Ashur: House Alara versus House Tiglath-Pileser

THREE QUEENS: JEZEBEL, SEMIRAMIS AND ATHALIAH

In 853 BC, at Qarqar in northern Syria, the kings of Israel and ten other kingdoms prepared to fight the most powerful monarch of his day, Shalmaneser III of Assyria, who was advancing to destroy them.

Ashur was an old city founded around 2600, home of the god Ashur, worshipped in his ziggurat tower and temple, where Assyrian kings were crowned. For a long time, Assyria was just a minor city state in a region dominated by Akkad and Babylon, but around 1300 its kings, descended from the semi-mythical Adasi, started to conquer northern Iraq. After its expansion had been checked by Hatti and Babylon, Assyria – Assurayu in Assyrian (a dialect of Akkadian) – exploited the predations of the Sea Peoples to shatter both powers: Shalmaneser routed the king of Hatti, whose empire was fatally undermined by the attacks of Kassite nomads; Hattusa was abandoned. The Assyrian king captured the Babylonian king, on whom he ‘trod with my feet upon his lordly neck as a footstool’, and then struck at the kingdom of Elam (Iran), invading Arabia, seizing entrepôts in Dilmun (Bahrain) and Meluhha (India), calling himself King of the Upper and Lower Seas and King of Kings. After seizing power in 1114, Tiglath-Pileser I, tempted by the riches of Canaan, plundered the kingdoms of Damascus and Tyre, Sidon and Beirut, celebrating, he claimed, by harpooning a ‘seahorse’ – surely a whale – in the Mediterranean. When Assyria was crippled by the strife among his heirs, a small people in southern Canaan took the opportunity to expand their own kingdom.

Around 1000, the Israelites were united under elected kings, first Saul and then David, a warlord who made his name fighting the Philistine tribes of the coast. David, whose existence as the founder of a kingdom called the House of David is confirmed by a stele found at Tel Dan, chose a small Canaanite stronghold and shrine as his capital: Jerusalem. On Mount Moriah, David’s son Solomon built a temple to the one god idiosyncratically worshipped by the Israelites, who disdained Baal and the Canaanite pantheon of gods. There is no evidence for Solomon’s existence except the Bible,^* but there is plenty of evidence for the Jewish Temple that existed soon afterwards. The united Israelite kingdom quickly broke up: the House of David ruled the southern part, Judah – the origin of the word Jew – based around the richly endowed Jerusalem Temple that was raided by one of the Libyan pharaohs of Egypt, who mentioned it in his inscriptions. The northern half of Canaan was ruled by a larger, more formidable kingdom, Israel, built up by a general, Omri, who seized the throne, founded a new capital, Samaria, where the ivory artefacts of his splendid palace have been found, and made it a regional power, building his own temple, conquering Moab across the Jordan and marrying his son Ahab to a princess of Sidon: Jezebel.

Israel was close to the Canani^* and their rich coastal city states, like Tyre, Byblos and Acre (Lebanon/Israel), traders in purple dye, cedarwood, carved ivory and ebony (imported from Africa) and glass artefacts, united together at this time under a priest-king Ithobaal of Sidon, Jezebel’s father. Worshipping Baal, Astarte and other gods, the Canani – also known as the Phoenicians – voyaging in ships powered by rows of enslaved oarsmen, were already founding colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain (Cadiz), trading and seeking new sources of iron, tin and silver, even passing into the Atlantic to found Mogador in Morocco. In the process, they spread their written language, an alphabet of 22 consonants, just at the time the Tyrians founded their New City, Qart Hadasht – Carthage (Tunisia). Assyrian kings furnished their palaces with Canaanite ivories; Omri’s palace in Samaria was filled with the Canani’s ivory carvings and treasures.