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Other Ancient Near-Eastern Civilizations

Small Kingdoms and Large Empires: 1000-500 B.C.
After the downfall of the Egyptian and Hittite Empires, no major powerful empire appeared on
the scene for about 200 years. This relatively short time period opened a window of opportunity
for some smaller but historically very important people to achieve independence and to mark
their own long lasting imprint on human history. By far the most important among them were the
Israelites, a small group of people who created a small kingdom with the rise of Saul, David,
and Solomon sometime between 1000 to 800 B.C.
Their monotheistic belief in the One Almighty God, the creator who is ethical, just, and personal,
would forever change human history. Today, almost half of the worlds populations are
Christians and Muslims who basically continued the beliefs and concept of the original Israelites
who considered themselves descendants of the prophet Abraham. After King Davids rule, the
little kingdom of the Israelites split into two. The North, called Israel (its capital was Samaria),
survived until Assyrians wiped it out in 722 B.C. (We will discuss Assyrians later.) The South,
Judah, with its important capital Jerusalem (the seat of the kingdom), survived an attack that
destroyed the magnificent Temple of Solomon around 586 B.C. by the next regional power after
the Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians (or Chaldeans). The Babylonians under the leadership of
the infamous Nebuchadnezzar II not only destroyed the First Temple, but also captured the upper
class/religious leaders and priests and took them to Babylon, their capital. This extremely
important event known as the Babylonian Captivity had an undisputed impact not only on the
history of Judaism, but had an everlasting impact on the way Christianity and Islam came about
centuries later. Before Babylonian Captivity, the Old Testament as we know it today did not
exist. The religion of the Israelites centered mainly on the temple. There were no rabbis
(scholars), only priests and the Temple. The religion that later became Judaism was focused
mainly on rituals and not the scripture. The Jews who were transplanted into the foreign land,
Babylon, had lost the most important part of their religion, the temple. What should they do
now? They began to redefine themselves and their religion. They began to write the Old
Testament. From this time, Judaism became the religion of the book. It was transformed from
Temple orientation into Scripture orientation. If there was no Old Testament, Christianity and
Islam, which are directly based on it, would not have appeared, at least in the way that they did.
It must be noted that from this time, we can refer to the Israelites and Jews. They were the
residents of Jerusalem that survived, not including the residence of Samaria which had already
been destroyed and lost by Assyrians a couple of centuries earlier (the 10 Lost Tribes). No more
temple meant that priests were no longer needed. Scripture, especially during the centuries of
diaspora that the Jews faced, meant there was a need for the interpretation of the scripture
(Torah), which means there was a need for scholars/rabbis, and that is when Rabbinic Judaism
replaced its previous form.
Two other peoples who enjoyed relative independence during this two hundred year window of
opportunity that need to be mentioned were the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. Canaanites
were the original occupant of the land, which was taken from them by the Israelites. They were
driven out by Saul to establish the kingdom of Israel. (It is good they are no longer around! We
would have an even more complicated situation in the Middle East as far as claims go for the
land that for over a thousand years was called Palestine! ) However, Phoenicians left a

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permanent imprint on human history. They were a very advanced commercial empire and were
seafarers who moved throughout the Mediterranean Sea and had contacts with others around it.
They invented the alphabet. As opposed to the more complicated and less clear symbolic writing
of the previous civilizations of Sumerians and Egyptians in which symbols represented words,
the great advantage of an alphabetic system (or phonetic) is that you can make infinite words by
combining a limited number of symbols that represent sounds. In short, instead of symbols
representing word, symbols represent sounds, and sounds represent words. We will also talk
about Phoenicians much later during our discussion of Roman Civilization when we refer to the
Carthage Empire centered in northern Africa (were todays Tunisia is). Carthage grew out of
one little colony of Phoenicians, which survived the destruction of Assyrians.
Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonian Empires that we discussed earlier had major impacts on
human history in terms of what we discussed earlier and in relationship to the Israelites.
Assyrians were a very militaristic empire who ruled by force and by terror. Their capital was
located in what is today northern region of Iraq. The Assyrians were the first true empire that, by
conquering Egypt, put Mesopotamia and Egypt under one rule.

The Great Persian Empire: 500-300 B.C.

Although the Assyrians combined many diverse nations (from Mesopotamia to Egypt) and
therefore could be referred to as an empire, it was the Persians under their enlightened leader,
Cyrus the Great (~ 535 B.C.), who created a true empire, one that was the largest, longest
lasting, and most powerful of its time. In many ways he was very different from all other
previous leaders. He is known as an enlightened leader because he had a new vision that was
very advanced for his time. Unlike all his predecessors in the region, he did a shocking thing by
not massacring conquered people, destroying their temples, and taking their women and children
into slavery. Even more shocking, when Cyrus took over Babylon, not only he did not destroy
the Babylonians temples, he went inside and prayed alongside them, much to his religious
advisors surprise.
That degree of tolerance of other cultures opened the door for his easy conquest of many people,
from India in the east to Greece in the west; people who were fed up with violence or fear of
violence easily embraced his rule. That is the secret of his success: initiating 200 years of peace,
prosperity, and security in the region, an era known as Pax Persia.
He managed to have his name in the Old Testament as a prophet to the Jews by liberating the
Jews from Babylonian captivity and even helping to rebuild the temple for them. Of course, after
50 years or so in a foreign land, many Jews decided to stay in Babylon. The Middle Eastern/
Iraqi Jews of today are probably the descendants of the original Jews from the Babylonian
captivityprobably more so than the Jews with blue eyes and light hair who are from Eastern
European ethnic backgrounds. Cyrus divided the huge Persian Empire into 10 satrapies (states or
mini kingdoms) and called himself Shahanshah (the King of the kings). To rapidly and
effectively connect this vast empire, he created the equivalent of the pony express used in early
America. Thousands of stations with horses ready to go were spread throughout the empire to
take messages around in a relatively short span of time.

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But probably one of the most important contributions of the Persians was their religions. Like
others before them, early Persian religion involved nature worshiping and many gods. By the
time of Cyrus, most probably, Zoroastrianism (a monotheistic religion established by prophet
Zoroaster around 650 B.C. in eastern Persia) was also practiced, although there is no direct
evidence OF WHAT?. One of the main features of this religion is that it marked the first time that
the idea of God as the Lord and Wiseman in the sky was conceived. He was called
Ahuramazda (the creator god representing goodness and truth) and his antagonist was known as
Ahriman (representing evilness and lies). For the first time ever, as far as we know, the universe
was considered to be a battleground for these two cosmic forcesa confrontational dualism
characteristic of later religions of the region like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (This iss
opposed to complimentary dualism as represented by the Daoist concept of yin and yang).
Whatever our personal opinion about this understanding of the universe, it seems that is all it
started from Persia. The main teaching of Zoroastrianism contains the three simple moral
principles of good thought, good words, and good action. Zoroastrianist temples have an altar
that must always include a fire, the symbol of light and purity (cleanness). The original fire is
believed by the followers of this still living faith (in Iran and in India) to have been started by
Zoroaster himself.
Other notable influences from Persia on later religions are from Manichaeism and Mithraism.
Manichaeism, which is the view of the Persian prophet Mani, contained ideas of a strong
dualism, probably derived from Zoroastrianism but here pushed to the extreme. Mani believed
that everything physical (including the human body) is evil and everything spiritual (including
that of the human soul) is good. This extreme rejection of materialism led to the complete denial
of physical pleasures, then known as dirty and evil. One of the important followers of Mani is the
famous Christian of the 3rd century A.D., Saint Augustine. Before he converted to Christianity,
he was Manichean and not surprisingly, he introduced the doctrine of original sin into
Christianity. Mani and his followers had been massacred sometime in the 2nd century by the
Persians, accused of a sort of communism and spreading the idea of distribution of wealth and
women from the wealthy to the poor (though the last charge was probably made up to enflame
the outrage of the people against them, thus making it easier to get rid of them).
The last important religion from Persia that had some influence on Europe was Mithraism. God
Mithras represented light and truth and later was known as the as sun god. It was a very
important religion in the later Roman Empire, especially among Roman soldiers. A temple
dedicated to Mithras was recently discovered along the Hadrian Wall separating England from
Scotland, the furthest outpost of the Roman territory. The Romans celebrated the birthday of
Mithras on December 25th. When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, this day became
the birthday of Jesus.