All four Beatles have a solo in "The End", including a Ringo Starr drum solo. Starr did not like solos. McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon perform a rotating sequence of three, two-bar guitar solos. The solos begin 53 seconds into the song and end just before the final piano part. Lennon described it in his 1970 interview with "Rolling Stone": "There's a nice little bit I played on "Abbey Road". Paul gave us each a piece, a little break where Paul plays, George plays and I play." The first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, then the sequence repeats. Each has a style which McCartney felt reflected their personalities: McCartney's playing included string bends similar to his lead guitar work on "Another Girl" from the "Help!" album; Harrison's was melodic with slides yet technically advanced and Lennon's was rhythmic, stinging and had the heaviest distortion. Immediately after Lennon's third solo, the piano chords of the final line "And in the end..." begin. Then the orchestration arrangement takes over with a humming chorus and Harrison playing a final guitar solo that ends the song.
Paul and John's last guitar solos and the drum solo were used in the intro to "Get Back" in the Beatles' Love.
"The End" was at first intended to be the final track on "Abbey Road", but it is followed by "Her Majesty". In the first practice mix, "Her Majesty" followed "Mean Mr. Mustard" (on the released version of the album, "Her Majesty" begins with the excised final chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard"). According to sound engineer John Kurlander, McCartney said, "I don't like 'Her Majesty,' throw it away." Kurlander cut it out, but said, "I'd been told never to throw anything away, so after he left I picked it up off the floor, put about 20 seconds of red leader tape before it, and stuck it onto the end of the edit tape." When McCartney heard "Her Majesty" in its new position he liked it and decided that it should remain on the album.
Richie Unterberger of Allmusic said that "The End" was to be "the group's take on the improvised jamming common to heavy rock of the late '60s, though as usual the Beatles did it with far more economic precision than anyone else." John Mendelsohn of "Rolling Stone" said it was "a perfect epitaph for our visit to the world of Beatle daydreams: "The love you take is equal to the love you make.".
History of ancient Israel and Judah
Israel and Judah were Iron Age kingdoms of the old Near East. The area of time covered in this page is from the first mention of the name Israel in the archaeological record (1200 BCE) to the end of a independent Judean kingdom near the time of Jesus Christ.
The two kingdoms arose on the most eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the most western part of the Fertile Crescent, between the old empires of Egypt to the south, Assyria, Babylonia, later Persia to the north and east, Greece and later Rome across the sea to the west. The area is small, maybe only 100 miles north to south and 40 or 50 miles east to west.
Israel and Judah were from the Canaanite culture of the late Bronze Age, and were based on villages that formed and grew in the southern Levant highlands (today for the region between the coastal plain and the Jordan Valley) between c. 1200-1000 BCE. Israel became an important local power in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE before falling to the Assyrians. The southern kingdom, Judah, became rich inside the greater empires of the region before a revolt against Babylon led to it being destroyed early in the 6th century.
Judean exiles returned from Babylon early in the following Persian period, starting a Judahite presence in the province of Yehud, as Judah was now called. Yehud was absorbed into the subsequent Greek-ruled kingdoms which followed the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the 2nd century BC, the Jews went up against Greek rule and created the Hasmonean kingdom, which became first a Roman dependency and soon went under the rule of the Roman Empire.
The eastern Mediterranean seaboard - the Levant - goes 400 miles north to south from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai desert, and 70 to 100 miles east to west between the sea and the Arabian desert. The coastal area of the southern Levant, large in the south and becoming short to the north, the southernmost part has a zone of foothills, the Shephalah; like the plain this area narrows as it goes northwards, ending at Mount Carmel. East of the plain and the Shephalah is a mountainous ridge, the "hill country of Judah" in the south, the "hill country of Ephraim" north of that, then Galilee and the Lebanon mountains. To the east again lie the steep-sided valley occupied by the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the wadi of the Arabah, which continues down to the eastern arm of the Red Sea. Beyond the plateau is the Syrian Desert, separating the Levant from Mesopotamia. To the southwest is Egypt, to the northeast Mesopotamia. "The Levant thus constitutes a narrow corridor whose geographical setting made it a constant area of contention between more powerful entities".
The central and northern part of the Levantine coast was known in Classical times as Phoenicia; the southernmost portion was known to the Egyptians as Canaan, by which they seem to have meant all their Asian possessions. In the bible Canaan can mean all of the land west of the Jordan river, or, more narrowly, the coastal strip. By Classical times the name Canaan had been dropped in favour of "Philistia", "Land of the Philistines", despite the fact that the Philistines had long since disappeared. The modern name "Palestine" is derived from this. Northeast of Canaan/Palestine was Aram, later called Syria after the Assyrians, who had likewise long since vanished.
Settlement during the Late Bronze Age was concentrated in the coastal plain and along major communication routes, with the central hill-country only sparsely inhabited; each city had its own ruler, constantly at odds with his neighbours and appealing to the Egyptians to adjudicate his differences. One of these Canaanite states was Jerusalem: letters from the Egyptian archives indicate that it followed the usual Late Bronze pattern of a small city with surrounding farmlands and villages; unlike most other Late Bronze city-states, there is no indication that it was destroyed at the end of the period.
Canaan in the 13th and early 12th centuries had people of various origins, united by a common socioeconomic system of city-states administered and controlled by Egypt. Egyptian power and the Canaanite city-state system collapsed. From the collapse two new communities emerged in the 12th century BCE, the Israelites in the hill country and the Philistines in the southern part of the coastal plain. The Philistines clearly represent the arrival of a considerable number of outsiders, probably from Cyprus, with their own non-indigenous culture. The Israelites are just as clearly indigenous to Canaan: to take linguistics as just one indicator, Judahite and Israelite Hebrew of the early 1st millennium BCE group with Phoenician, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite; and within that grouping a "core Canaanite" of Israelite and Phoenician can be distinguished from a "fringe Canaanite" of Judahite, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite.
The causes of the Bronze Age collapse - which extended throughout the eastern Mediterranean - are obscure. Drought, famine and other stresses may be behind the widespread population movements of the time. Whatever the cause, several important Canaanite cities were destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age (over a period of more than a century), and Canaanite culture was gradually absorbed into that of the Philistines, Phoenicians and Israelites.