# Syria: A Short History/4

THE ANCIENT SEMITES
The term Semite is derived from the name of Noah's eldest son, Shem, from whom the Semites were formerly assumed to be descended. In modern usage, however, the term is exclusively linguistic; a Semite is one who speaks—or spoke—any of the Semitic family of languages: Akkadian (Assyro - Babylonian), Canaanite (Amoritic and Phoenician), Aramaic (Syriac), Hebrew, Arabic and Ethiopic. Within this family the members manifest striking points of similarity, and as a group differ from other linguistic groups, the Hamitic being the nearest of kin. In all Semitic languages the basic words—such as personal pronouns, nouns denoting blood kinship, numbers and chief members of the body—are strikingly similar.
This linguistic kinship among the Semitic-speaking peoples is their principal but not their only bond. Comparisons of their social institutions, religious beliefs, psychological traits and physical features reveal impressive points of resemblance. The inference is inescapable: their common ancestors must have formed a single people speaking a single language and occupying a single region, presumably the Arabian peninsula. Whenever its population outgrew its meagre resources, the restless, half-starved desert nomads used their greater mobility and endurance to overrun the fertile fields and prosperous towns to the north. The Israelites of the Old Testament were neither the first nor the last Semites to seize and settle upon the tilled lands of Syria.
Such Semitic migrations northward were, indeed, continuous, reaching marked peaks at intervals of about a thousand years. Around 3500 B.C. such a wave spread ​north-eastward over Sumeria and all Mesopotamia, producing the Akkadians, later called Babylonians. As the Semitic invaders intermarried with their predecessors on the Euphrates and Tigris, they learned to build and live in houses, to plant and irrigate the soil and to read and write. Subsequent migrations, which went north-westward into Syria and hence will be considered at greater length, included the Amorites and Canaanites about 2500 B.C., the Aramaeans and Hebrews between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Nabataeans about 500 B.C., and finally—between A.D. 630 and 650—the Moslem Arabians, who spread the religion and culture of Islam west across North Africa to Spain and east across Persia to India and Central Asia. The modern Arabians retain the purest Semitic traits, just as Arabic has preserved the closest kinship to the mother Semitic speech, of which all the Semitic languages were once dialects.
The first major Semitic people to settle in the Syrian area was a group whose name for themselves is not known, but who were called Amorites (westerners) by the Sumerians. They presumably roamed northward from Arabia with their flocks and herds about 2500 B.C., spreading out over northern Syria, the Biqa and upper Mesopotamia in the next four centuries, and making the transition from pastoral nomadism to settled farming by the start of the second millennium. It was during these centuries that Syria, exclusive of a few pockets inhabited by Hurrians and other non-Semites, was Semitized—permanently, as it turned out.
The Amorite capital Mari, on the Euphrates below the mouth of the Khabur, has been excavated, yielding a notable trove of over 20,000 cuneiform tablets, largely in Akkadian but with characteristics reflecting the Amoritic speech of those who wrote them before 1700 B.C. They are royal archives of administrative and economic purport and mention horse-drawn chariots. Palace excavations have revealed mural frescoes and bathrooms. The Amorites not only established this state, called Amurru, and overran all Syria, ​but also ruled a large part of Mesopotamia. Of the many local dynasties they set up there, the greatest was that of Babylon, to which belonged the earliest great lawgiver of antiquity, Hammurabi. It was he who conquered Amurru and destroyed Mari, but he did not overthrow the Amorite princes of Syria, at Aleppo, at Byblus, at Harran and elsewhere.
Gradually Amorite power came to focus on central Syria, and its princes made local conquests while seeking to evade or propitiate their two aggressive neighbours—the Hittites to the north and the Egyptians to the south-west. In the fourteenth century B.C. the latter—as revealed by tablets found in Egypt at Tell al-Amarnah—lost interest in Syrian affairs, and the Hittites took over all northern and central Syria, without eliminating the Semitic inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Amorites of Palestine were encountering a new group of Semitic invaders, the Aramaeans and Israelites, who found them in control of strategic sites and hilltops.
The Amorites were tall, powerful men with black beards and prominent noses. They hardened their copper spearheads and knives by hammering, then by alloying with tin to form bronze. Although they left few inscriptions, chiefly names of places and princes, there is no doubt that they worshipped a pantheon including martial and nature gods and a fertility goddess. They set up sacred poles and pillars, built megalithic high places and practised foundation sacrifice and sacrifice of the first-born. These institutions and practices were continued by their kinsmen and successors, the Canaanites or Phoenicians.
The Canaanites and Amorites belonged to the same migration, and thus were ethnically identical until the Canaanites intermarried with the natives of the Syrian littoral and the Amorites with those of the interior. Culturally, the Canaanites came under the influence of Egypt rather than of Mesopotamia, as the Amorites did. Minor differences in religion and dialect gradually developed, but the ​real distinction remained geographical, as reflected in economic and political contrasts.
The name of the land, Canaan (in Hurrian) or Phoenicia (in Greek), refers to the purple dye which was the distinctive product of the Syrian littoral. This dye was extracted from a small mollusc and painstakingly distilled, and thus was rare and expensive. Purple robes became the mark of royal or pontifical dignity, or of great wealth, and remained so until the fall of the Byzantine empire. A scarlet dye made from insects dried and dissolved in acid was another article of Phoenician commerce, as was glass, at first of Egyptian origin but later of improved local manufacture. Ivories of exquisite workmanship and beauty, dishes and ornaments of silver and of gold, weapons and tools of bronze and of iron, cloth of wool and of linen, pottery turned on wheels and sometimes glazed with tin for special lustre—all these were manufactured by skilled Phoenician craftsmen organized in guilds, and were distributed throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician merchants.
These craftsmen and merchants occupied a medial position in Canaanite society between an aristocracy of landed nobility and chariot warriors and a working class composed of agricultural serfs, fishermen, sailors and slaves. Canaanite farming utilized tools and methods, including dry-farming and extensive terracing, not very different from those still in use, and produced the same crops: grains, olives, grapes and other fruits, beans and nuts. Domesticated animals included cows, asses, sheep, goats and pigs, as well as dogs. Fish and salt were obtained from the sea, and humble artisans prepared pottery and cloth, buttons and needles, tools and weapons, ornaments and musical instruments for local consumption.
Commercially prosperous and culturally homogeneous, Canaan was never politically unified. The rural population was sparse, with the bulk of the populace crowded into tiny strongly walled towns, each self-sufficient and autonomous. ​Certain of these—Aradus, Sidon, Tyre—were twin settlements, one on the mainland, where they traded and farmed, and the other on adjacent islets, to which they retired for defence. Other diminutive city-states lay at the foot of Mount Lebanon—Tripoli, Batrun, Byblus (modern Jubayl), Beirut—and in southern Syria—Acre, Ascalon and Gaza on the coast, Gezer, Jerusalem, Jericho and others inland. Occasionally several of these would form temporary defensive leagues when menaced by invasion, but usually each purchased immunity by payment of tribute, and concentrated on trade rather than on war. Ugarit, near Latakia, and Qadesh, on the Orontes, occasionally assumed an ephemeral leadership before 1400 B.C., and Byblus, Sidon or Tyre at times thereafter, but more often each stood, or fell, alone. Like their Amorite kinsmen they were pinched between Hittites and Egyptians and were attacked by Aramaean and Israelite invaders, as well as by Hyksos and Hurrians, but they maintained their pre-eminence until conquered by Assyria in the eighth pre-Christian century.
The basis of this prolonged prosperity was of course maritime and mercantile. The Phoenicians utilized Lebanese cedar to build ships powered by sails and oars. Their earliest sea routes were coastwise courses to Egypt and the Aegean, but they learned to navigate the open sea by the stars and established well-charted east-west trunk routes which remained their virtual monopoly. They furnished the whole Mediterranean with whatever each district lacked—timber, wheat, olive oil or wine—peddled tunny fish, glass, earthenware and other local products and developed markets for Canaanite cloth and metalwork, pitch and resin, horses and slaves. They distributed gold and incense, perfume and spices from southern Arabia, and brought back to Syria silver, iron, tin and lead from Spain, slaves and brass vessels from Ionia, linen from Egypt and lambs and goats from Arabia. Other items in Phoenician cargoes included the rose, palm, fig, pomegranate, plum and almond, which they ​disseminated over the whole Mediterranean, and the laurel, oleander, iris, ivy, mint and narcissus, which they introduced into Syria from Greece.
The Phoenicians were the first to venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the opposite promontories of the Strait of Gibraltar) into the Atlantic Ocean, though how much of this sea they traversed is not easy to ascertain. They may have reached the Scilly Isles and Cornwall to barter pottery, copper utensils and salt for tin. Their crowning nautical achievement was the clockwise circumnavigation of Africa about 600 B.C. at the direction of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho, a voyage which required more than two years.
Wherever the Phoenicians went, they built trading factories, which developed into settlements and then into colonies. Especially after the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, when they were squeezed out of central Syria by the Aramaeans and out of southern Syria by the Israelites and Philistines, did the Ganaanites turn their energies to overseas expansion. Cyprus and Cilicia, Crete and Samos, Corinth and Thrace, Malta and western Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, the whole coast of North Africa, eastern and southern Spain—all fell under Phoenician sway. Cadiz in Spain and Utica in Tunisia were founded about 1000 B.C., and the most famous of all, Carthage, about 814. With the decline of Phoenicia, brought on by Greek competition and Assyrian invasion, Carthage took over commercial and political supremacy in the western Mediterranean until its destruction in 146 B.C. by the Romans.
The Phoenicians were the middlemen of the ancient world in intellectual and cultural matters as well as in commerce. The achievements of Egypt and Mesopotamia were carried by Syrians to all the Mediterranean peoples, serving as civilizing influences. The Greeks in particular became their pupils in navigation and colonization and borrowed from them in literature and religion.
​First in significance among these borrowings was the alphabet. From a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphs presumably developed by uneducated workers in the turquoise mines of Sinai, the Phoenicians of Byblus derived a phonological script which they developed into a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two letters, thus effecting the greatest invention ever made by man. This occurred before 1500 B.C., and short Canaanite inscriptions in this alphabet date from only a century or two later, as do tablets from Ugarit written in a cuneiform version of this alphabet. Several non-alphabetic scripts were also in use in Syria during the second millennium. Such abundance of scripts indicates that the age was one of cultural pluralism and cross-fertilization in which Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Syrian ideas were freely exchanged and blended, though little of the relevant literature—written on perishable papyrus—has survived. Phoenician inscriptions died out by the time of Christ, though its Carthaginian form, Punic, was spoken until the Moslem conquest of North Africa. Meanwhile the Greeks had borrowed the alphabet before 750 B.C., inserted characters for vowels and passed it on to the Romans, through whom and the Slavs it reached all the peoples of Europe. The Aramaeans, too, had modified the Phoenician original before bequeathing it to the Arabs, Indians, Armenians, and other alphabet-using peoples of Asia.
Canaanite literature is known to us from two sources: the Hebrew Scriptures—in which lyrics, maxims and legends were embedded—and the tablets excavated at Ugarit since 1929. This material is mostly ritual and religious, representing an important portion of the lost Canaanite literature and exhibiting close parallels with the Book of Job, the Psalms and other Hebrew pieces from the common Semitic stock.
Basic in the Canaanite religion, as indicated by the meagre literary sources and the recent archaeological discoveries, was the worship of the forces of growth and ​reproduction, on which depended the very existence of an agricultural and stock-raising community in a land of limited and uncertain rainfall. This is generally true of all ancient Semitic religions. Its main features were mourning for the death of the vegetation deity Baal, rites to enable him to overcome his adversary (the god of death) and thereby to ensure enough rain to produce a new crop, and rejoicing at his resurrection and marriage to the fertility goddess Ishtar.
Associated with the idea of the periodic dying of the vegetation in the summer heat and its revival in spring, was that of the renewed vigour of the sun after its apparent defeat in winter, as embodied in the early Tammuz myth. This deity was called Adonis by the Greeks and afterwards was identified with the Egyptian Osiris. Rites in his honour included sacred prostitution, later commuted to the symbolic shearing off of women's hair, and self-castration, later reduced to circumcision, an ancient Semitic practice which was eventually abandoned by Syrians adopting Christianity. The paternal sky god and maternal earth goddess, with all lesser and localized deities, were honoured with sacrifices, with 'high places' (altars and sacred stones on hilltops), with temples, stone pillars and sacred poles or trees, with magical household images and with other symbols and rites repeatedly denounced by the Hebrew prophets.
Throughout the Amorite and Canaanite period relations between Egypt and Syria remained close. Byblus and other Syrian ports had sent cedar, wine and oils to Egypt even before the Semites had arrived, and had received in exchange gold, metalwork and papyrus. Gradually peaceful commerce led to military invasion as early as the twenty-third century and before 1600 B.C. southern and central Syria as far as Damascus and the Biqa were included in the Egyptian empire, then under Hyksos domination.
The Hyksos were a confused goulash of humanity which included Semitic Amorites and Canaanites as well as non-Semitic Hurrians and Hittites. Equipped with curving iron ​swords and horse-drawn chariots, they dominated Syria throughout the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries and conquered Egypt about 1730 B.C. They imposed on both countries a military ruling class which concentrated wealth and power in an aristocracy of chariot warriors. But they were not merely crude terrorists. They were expert metallurgists, skilled craftsmen in faience and inlaid bone and ivory, better potters and builders than their predecessors, patrons of surgery and mathematics. Expelled from Egypt about 1580 by Ahmose I, they retired into Syria, organized a federation of Semitic princes and were again defeated at Megiddo (Armageddon) in 1468 by Thutmose III. Thutmose fought continuously and successfully to break their power and reincorporate southern Syria in the Egyptian empire.
Egyptian administration of Syria aimed chiefly at preserving order and maintaining strong hold on the main highways, for which garrisons were used, and at exacting tribute handled by officials resident in key cities and by a network of travelling tax-collectors. The details of internal administration were left to native chieftains, who kept control over their own armed forces. Few Egyptians migrated to Syria, but many Syrian men and girls went to Egypt, taking with them religious ideas, artistic techniques and motifs, and such products as the tasselled lute, embroidered cloths and elegant vases.
One component of the Hyksos horde was the Hurrians (biblical Horites), a still unidentified people neither Semitic nor Indo-European in language. Under Indo-European kings they established, about 1500 B.C., a strong state called Mitanni east of the upper Euphrates, but after two centuries it was divided between the still stronger Hittites of Anatolia and the powerful Assyrians of Mesopotamia.
The Hittites were a mixture of Anatolian aborigines and Indo-European invaders who had overrun them about 2000 B.C. The facial type, represented by prominent nose ​and receding forehead and chin, was common to the aboriginal Hittites and the Hurrians. It still prevails in eastern Anatolia and among the Armenians and some Jews, and is sometimes erroneously considered Semitic. Hittites destroyed Aleppo about 1600 B.C., and plundered Babylon a few years later, but retired into Anatolia. Their main Syrian drive occurred in the fourteenth century, when Shubbiluliuma subdued and incorporated many Hyksos and Hurrians into his state. He succeeded in expelling the Egyptians, weakened by theological disputes, from their Syrian holdings, and established a stronghold at Carchemish on the Euphrates from which the Hittites dominated northern Syria. When the Hittite empire was overthrown around 1200 B.C. by invaders from the Aegean, petty native states arose in northern Syria, only to fall one by one to the expanding power of Assyria.
Mesopotamian cultural influence in Syria—whether material, like the plough and the wheel, or intellectual, like the measurement of time and of weights—had always surpassed Egyptian. Military incursions, however, from the east had been limited to occasional raids by such Babylonians as Sargon I and Naram-Sin. An Assyrian conquest in 1094 B.C. by Tiglath-pileser I proved to be premature, but Ashur-nasir-pal and his son Shalmaneser II in the ninth century did more permanent damage, which was consummated between 743 and 722 by Tiglath-pileser III and his son Shalmaneser V. Their successors Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashur-bani-pal brought all Syria and Egypt into the Assyrian empire, which itself soon fell before the Chaldaeans (Neo-Babylonians).
Map of ancient Syria
The Aramaeans were originally Arabian nomads who had moved northward and settled along the middle Euphrates before 1500 B.C. There they developed a distinct nationality and language, and gradually spread eastward into Mesopotamia and westward throughout Syria. When the Hittites destroyed Mitanni about 1450 B.C. the Aramaeans filled the vacuum, concentrating around Harran in north-eastern Syria and near Carchemish on the Euphrates. They also found their way to Babylonia, with their close kinsmen and fellow-migrants the Chaldaeans. During the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries the Aramaeans multiplied and absorbed the remaining Amorites, Hurrians and Hittites of the Orontes valley. Mount Lebanon blocked this westward movement, and Hittite and Amorite communities continued to flourish there, while on the maritime plain the Canaanite settlements remained untouched. Damascus was peopled by Aramaeans before 1200 B.C. Gradually the newcomers assimilated the culture of the Amorites and Canaanites among whom they settled, but they retained their own language. Similarly in northern Syria they adopted Hittite and Assyrian cultural traits instead of originating a distinctive Aramaean culture.
By 1200 B.C. the Aramaean movement had been concluded, and they were settled in their new homes. The principal Aramaean states were one in north-eastern Syria which endured until wiped out by the Assyrians in the ninth century, a smaller version of this with its centre at Harran, and a south-western kingdom, with its capital first on the Litani and then at Damascus. This state expanded north and east until it encroached on Assyrian territory, and ​south at the expense of Israel, but did not challenge the Phoenicians on the coastal plain, contenting itself with a firm grip on the Syrian hinterland. One ruler of Damascus, Ben-Hadad, headed a Syrian coalition of Aramaeans, Israelites and Phoenicians which in 853 b.c. blocked an Assyrian invasion. Another, Hazael, repulsed Shalmaneser III twice, in 842 and 838, and brought a large part of Transjordan into his realm, exacting tribute from Israel and Judah. The end was thus delayed for another century, but in 732 Damascus fell, after a long siege, to Tiglath-pileser III. He had the trees of its orchards cut down and its inhabitants deported, ending Aramaean political hegemony for ever.
The peaceful penetration of Aramaean commerce and culture surpassed and survived Aramaean political and military achievements. This culture, which attained its height in the ninth and eighth centuries, is but little appreciated today, even in learned circles. No modern Syrians are conscious of their Aramaean ancestry and heritage, though many Lebanese emphasize their Phoenician origins. Aramaean merchants sent their caravans all over the Fertile Crescent, monopolizing the land trade of Syria as their Phoenician cousins and rivals monopolized the maritime trade, with Damascus as the port of the desert. The Aramaeans traded in purple from Phoenicia, in embroidered cloth, linen, jasper, copper, ebony and ivory.
Aramaean merchants were responsible for spreading their language rapidly and widely. By about 500 b.c. Aramaic, originally the speech of a Syrian mercantile community, had become not only the general language of commerce, culture and government throughout the entire Fertile Crescent, but also the vernacular of its people. Its triumph over its sisters, including Hebrew, was complete. It became the language of Jesus and his people. Nor was the penetration of Aramaic confined to the Semitic area. Under Darius the Great (521-486) it was made the official ​interprovincial language of the Persian government; this rendered it until Alexander's conquest the lingua franca of an empire extending 'from India to Ethiopia'. Such a triumph on the part of a language not backed up by imperial power has no parallel in history.
With the spread of Aramaic the Phoenician alphabet, which the Aramaeans were the first to adopt, also spread and passed on to other languages in Asia. The Hebrews got their alphabet from Aramaeans between the sixth and fourth centuries. The square characters in which Hebrew Bibles are now printed developed from the Aramaic script. The North Arabians received their alphabet, in which the Koran is written, from the Aramaic used by the Nabataeans. The Armenians, Persians and Indians acquired their alphabets likewise from Aramaean sources.
In the course of time the Aramaic language split into two groups, a western which included biblical Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabataean and other dialects, and an eastern comprising Mandaic and Syriac. Syriac became, with local variations, the language of the churches of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia and was used from the third to the thirteenth centuries, when it was displaced by Arabic. It is still spoken in three villages of Anti-Lebanon, and is still used in the Maronite and other liturgies of the Syrian Christians.
The deity who received the largest measure of Aramaean worship was the storm-god Hadad, also called Rimmon (thunderer). A god of lightning and thunder, Hadad was beneficent when he sent rain which fructified the earth, maleficent when he sent floods. His consort, a goddess of generation, was worshipped under the name Atargatis, a typical Semitic earth-mother, often depicted veiled. Besides this divine couple the Aramaean pantheon comprised an assortment of minor deities, some local in character, others borrowed from neighbours. Chief among these were the sun god and moon god worshipped throughout the Semitic world.
​The Hebrews were the fourth major Semitic people—after the Amorites, Canaanites and Aramaeans—to settle in Syria. In Amorite days the centre of gravity of Syrian affairs was in the north, in the Syrian saddle; in Canaanite times it shifted to the littoral; under the Aramaeans it lay in the interior; with the Hebrews it moved to the south, to Palestine. Hebrew entrance into Canaan, as the southern part of Syria was then called, supposedly came in three ill-defined movements. The first migration had its start in Mesopotamia and was roughly contemporaneous with the eighteenth-century movement which spread the Hyksos and Hurrians over the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The second was connected with the fourteenth-century Aramaeans. The third, about which much more is known, was that from Egypt through Sinai and Transjordan under Moses and Joshua in the late thirteenth century. Canaanites formed the bulk of the population when the pioneers from Mesopotamia, the Patriarchs, came. Amorites inhabited the highlands, which were not thickly occupied by a sedentary population, thus giving the newcomers an opportunity to settle. Smaller nationalities occupied out-of-the-way places. With all these the new settlers intermarried. The result was the Hebrew people, with a composite ethnic origin consisting of Semitic, Hurrian, Hittite and other elements.
Syria's power to absorb nomadic or quasi-nomadic intruders by encouraging them to become sedentary, and inducing them to relinquish their peculiar source of power—mobility—was once more illustrated in the case of the Hebrews. Coming as wanderers, adventurers, mercenaries, footloose soldiers, the future Hebrews gradually settled among the older and more civilized population, learned from them how to till the soil, build homes, practise the arts of peace and, above all, how to read and write. More than that, the Hebrews gave up their Aramaic dialect and adopted the Canaanite one. In brief, the early Hebrews became ​the heirs of the basic features of Canaanite material culture and the continuers of many Canaanite cults, practices and religious tenets.
The pre-Patriarchal history as sketched by the Hebrew chroniclers is clearly not history. Even from the Patriarchal narrative the kernel of historical fact is not easy to extract. The Abrahamic story may reflect the earliest migration; the Israelite may reflect the second; the Mosaic is definitely historical.
The real history of the Israelites as a people thus begins with the Exodus from Egypt, an event which took place probably between 1234 and 1215. The tribesmen lingered many years in the wilderness of Sinai and the Negeb. Their leader Moses married the daughter of a priest who worshipped Yahweh (Jehovah), a North Arabian desert deity, originally a moon god, whose abode was a tent and whose ritual comprised feasts and sacrifices.
After 1200 b.c. this mixed clan of desert-born nomads appeared from the south-east, the Transjordanian desert, intent upon the occupation of the fertile land. Their number could not have exceeded 7000, and they by-passed the petty kingdoms of Edom, Moab and Ammon. In Canaan (Palestine proper) they succeeded in taking Jericho and other towns, but the so-called Hebrew conquest was largely a slow and peaceful penetration. Having secured a foothold in the cultivated land, the newcomers were reinforced by intermarriage with older elements and by adhesion of their kinsmen who had remained in the land and never migrated to Egypt. As the land was acquired it was parcelled out among the eleven tribes, leaving the priestly tribe of Levi distributed among the others to minister to their religious needs. As a consequence Judah and Benjamin became domiciled in the hilly country around Jerusalem, and the remaining tribes were established in the more fertile plains to the north. The period of settlement lasted roughly a hundred years. It was followed by a long ​struggle with the Philistines, an Indo-European people from the Aegean who had seized the south Syrian coast and gave the whole country its permanent name, Palestine. From the coastal strip they worked their way inland, capturing many Canaanite towns and disarming the populace. The numerous punitive expeditions and severe exactions of successive Pharaohs had impoverished Syria and weakened its resistance to the onslaught of desert hordes as well as sea rovers. Neither Philistines nor Hebrews would have had such success in gaining a firm foothold in the land, had imperial Egypt still been able to exercise full control over it.
What gave the Philistines special advantage over their enemies was their superiority of armour, which depended upon knowledge of the smelting and use of iron for weapons of defence and offence. Prior to their advent, Hittites had made rare use of iron, but it did not become common in Syria until the arrival of the Philistines, who jealously guarded the secrets of its processing. It was not until the time of David in the tenth century that knowledge of the complicated process was acquired by the Hebrews, as well as by the Phoenicians, who learned to utilize iron in building ships. Thus the greatest Philistine contribution was the raising of Syrian culture from the bronze stage to that of iron. Beyond that and a few traces of material culture in the form of pottery, agricultural implements and iron adzes and chisels, the Philistines left hardly a relic by which they may be remembered. As a foreign community they had no guarantee of permanency except through continued replenishment of their blood by immigration, an impossibility under the then existing conditions. Towards the end of David's reign they tend to disappear as a colony. In due course they were Semitized and assimilated, leaving very little by which their language, religion, architecture and other aspects of their higher life could be determined.
Resistance to the Philistines led to the creation of the Hebrew monarchy, with which the history of the Hebrews ​as a nation begins. Uniquely among the ancient Semites, the nation developed an intense nationalist fervour, grounded in their exclusive monotheistic religion. Their subsequent history under the kings Saul, David and Solomon, and then in the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, is well known through its biblical connections, which have also given each detail exaggerated significance and fascination, but in the history of Syria it becomes increasingly alien and peripheral. Thus for details of the complex events in Palestine, and of the subsequent vicissitudes of the Jews, the reader should refer to any of several excellent narrative treatments. Here that history can only be sketched briefly in its wider Syrian context.
The first Hebrew monarch, anointed about 1020 b.c. by the religious leader Samuel, was Saul, a tall man of weak character and gloomy disposition. He struggled vainly against the Philistines, was defeated and wounded, and finally killed himself. His successor was David (about 1004-963 b.c.), the real founder of the monarchy. He threw off Philistine suzerainty and expanded his kingdom into the largest and most powerful native state that Palestine ever produced. He captured Jerusalem and made this stronghold his capital and a sanctuary of Yahweh worship. Under David, Hebrew commerce with Tyre prospered and literature throve, especially history and the religious poetry called psalms, many of which are ascribed to the king himself.
Under David's son Solomon (about 963-923 b.c.) the Hebrew monarchy engaged in extensive mining and mercantile enterprises and in lavish building, featuring a royal palace and a great temple of Lebanese cedar. Stories of Solomon's splendour and harem are true, those of his might and wisdom are not supported by the historical record. The compulsory labour and excessive expenditure required by his ostentatious public works created popular discontent which under his successor led to the division of the kingdom ​into the petty states of Israel and Judah. The northern Hebrews were agriculturalists whose religion was basically Canaanite, and who refused to pay heavy taxes for the glory of king and temple at Jerusalem, where Yahweh was worshipped by the southern Hebrews, who were largely pastoralists. The two kingdoms became rivals, at times enemies. Internal disintegration was hastened by frequent dynastic changes and by repeated revolts and intrigues in both states, compounded by intermittent invasions by more powerful neighbours.
Israel was conquered by the Assyrian Sargon II about 721, soon after the destruction of Damascus, and many of its young men were led off into captivity. They were replaced by tribes brought in by the Assyrians from Babylonia, Syria and Arabia. The newcomers mingled with the remaining Israelites to form the Samaritans, whose mixed ethnic origins and religious tenets led to constant clashes with the Jews.
Judah, although sacked about 920 b.c. by the Pharaoh Shishonk, survived Assyrian attacks, including a siege by Sennacherib in 701, but only by becoming a submissive vassal of mighty Nineveh, paying tribute regularly. After the Chaldaean conquest of Nineveh in 612, Judah vacillated between submission to the victors and defiant alliance with Egypt against them. Nebuchadnezzar's decisive triumph over Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish in 605 ended Judah's hopes, and Jerusalem fell in 597. Zedekiah, appointed king by Nebuchadnezzar, yielded to the chronic temptation and revolted, leading to the definitive fall of Jerusalem in 586, its utter destruction by the exasperated Assyrian, and the captivity of its leading inhabitants, estimated at 50,000. Almost every important town in Judah was laid waste and so remained for centuries. By 582 Nebuchadnezzar had completed the reconquest of Judah's neighbours with the exception of Tyre, which held out under siege until 572. All Syria was thenceforth secure in Chaldaean hands.
​The culture of the Hebrews was almost entirely derived from their Canaanite precursors, whose very language and alphabet they adopted. From them they learned farming, with the accompanying fertility rites and rituals; Baal ever was a formidable rival of Yahweh among them. From them they borrowed all their ideas of religious art and architecture, of sacred and secular music, of parallelism in poetry. They copied Canaanite costumes and crafts, domestic utensils and burial customs, and every aspect of life, adding little of value even in improvements.
The sole contribution of the Hebrews to the culture of Syria and the world was, however, a stupendous one—the religious and ethical ideas embodied in the superb literary heritage of the Old Testament, which has been transmitted uninterruptedly as a living and dynamic force long after its contemporaneous literatures were lost or discarded as outmoded. The wisdom of Job and Ecclesiastes, the beauty of the Psalms and the Song of Songs, the uncompromising monotheism of Amos and Isaiah, the ethical nobility of Jeremiah and Hosea, the unprecedented objectivity of the anonymous historians who composed the books of Samuel and Kings, the narrative power of Ruth and Esther—all these are universally recognized. Their importance in cultural history rests on their absolute originality, for in each of the aspects mentioned they represented immense spiritual and intellectual advances over anything which preceded them, and, with only rare exceptions, have never been surpassed. During and after the collapse of Israel and Judah, this literature was preserved, culled, edited and commented upon by devoted scholars, surviving to rival the alphabet as Syria's gift to human progress.
The Chaldaean dominion over Syria, though catastrophic, was not enduring. Babylon fell to the Persians and Medes under Cyrus in 538 and any Jews who wished to return to Palestine were permitted to do so. The first group to return rebuilt the Temple at state expense by ​about 515, and was followed in the fifth century by other groups under Ezra and Nehemiah, who effected religious reforms and strove for ethnic purity. By this time Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the vernacular and the official language of the Jews, though Hebrew remained the sacred tongue. The Jews who stayed in Babylon and resisted assimilation were the first members of what became known as the Diaspora.
The Persian capture of Babylon signalized more than the destruction of an empire. Then and there one era, the Semitic, ended; another era, the Indo-European, began. The days of Semitic empires were gone, not to return for more than a thousand years. And when they returned, they did so under the auspices of fresh representatives—the Arabians, who had played no important role in ancient international affairs. The Persians, who ushered in the Indo-European era, belonged to the Indo-Iranian branch of the family. In their mastery over the Semitic world they were succeeded by Macedonians, Romans and Byzantines, all of whom were Indo-Europeans. The petty states of Syria and Palestine now became part of a great empire, one of the largest of antiquity. Within a quarter of a century after its birth this empire was to comprise the whole civilized world from Egypt and the Ionian cities in Asia Minor to the Punjab in India and then to begin casting covetous eyes across the Hellespont into the only civilized part of Europe. The far-flung parts of the empire were brought together by better roads than had ever existed, by a uniform stamped coinage and by an official language, Aramaic. Syria, Palestine and Cyprus formed a trans-Euphrates satrapy or province, of which Damascus was the chief city.
The Persians used Phoenician ships in the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses (529-521) and in the attack on Greece under Xerxes (485-465). The Phoenicians evidently welcomed an opportunity to deal a blow to their ancient ​maritime rivals and furnished two hundred and seven ships. In digging the canal through the isthmus to avoid the storms around Mount Athos, Phoenician engineering skill showed its excellence. In the naval battle of Salamis (480) almost the entire fleet was destroyed. The Phoenician cities began to flourish again as centres of international trade. Aradus, Byblus, Sidon and Tyre were allowed local autonomy. In the fourth century these Phoenician city-states were federated with one another and a newly created city, Tripoli, was made the seat of the federal institutions. Originally consisting of three separate settlements for representatives of Tyre, Sidon and Aradus, the city of Tripoli coalesced into one about 359 b.c., serving as regional capital and meeting-place of the Phoenician common assembly.
A revolt at Sidon in 351 spread to the rest of Phoenicia, but Sidon was burned by the Persians and the other cities capitulated. Nevertheless, Persian power was clearly ebbing, while its cultural influence left little impress except for a tendency to dualism in religion. The whole Persian period is one of the most obscure in the entire history of Syria, but certainly its civilization continued to be broadly Semitic, increasingly modified by Greek influences, as manifested in silver coins and Attic sculpture and earthenware. In the seventh century Phoenicia was still influencing Greece; in the sixth there was a rough balance; in the fifth Phoenicia was definitely on the receiving end, with Greek trading settlements appearing in Syria. For at least a century before the Macedonian conquest the coastal cities were sprinkled with Greek merchants and craftsmen.