The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

It lies at hand to correlate the fall of central authority
during the First Intermediate Period in Egypt, assigned to
about 2140 BC, with the upheavals at the end of Early
Bronze Age II.
Under the 11th dynasty the unity of Egypt was restored
and the country rose to great power during the 12th
dynasty. At that time Byblos in the Levant was drawn
within the orbit of Egyptian influence, as can be deduced
from inscriptions by its rulers in Egyptian hieroglyphic and
the influence of the latter script on the indigenous Byblian
proto-Linear script. Synchronous with the rise of Egypt
under the 12th dynasty (= 20th and 19th centuries BC) was
the regular trade connection between Assyria and Anatolia
as examplified by Assyrian trading colonies or kru associated
with major Anatolian towns. The cuneiform tablets
from the kru inform us that the Assyrian merchants imported
annukum “tin” and woolen textiles in exchange for
Anatolian metals, especially silver and gold. The metal tin
played a crucial role in international trade from c. 2000 BC
onwards, when the bronze industry went over from arsenic
bronze to the much harder alloy of copper and tin for the
production of weapons and other artefacts. In response to
the introduction of cuneiform writing by the Assyrian traders,
the indigenous Anatolians – who on the basis of onomastic
evidence were to a large extent Indo-European, in
casu Hittite and Luwian – developed their own writing
system, the so-called Luwian hieroglyphic, which to some
extent follows the model of Egyptian hieroglyphic but derives
its values acrophonically from the indigenous Anatolian
vocabulary. 64 Under influence of the international tin
trade, the island Crete, which lies on a junction of maritime
trade routes, acquired great wealth and developed a
palatial civilization, 65 with a script to write down the economic
transactions basically derived from Luwian hieroglyphic
but with a more substantial Egyptian component
than the original received either through the medium of
ses of Meser, dated c. 3300 BC, which by and large coincides with
the early 3rd millennium BC date of a comparable twin catacomb
grave at Palermo in Sicily (Conca d’Oro culture) and catacomb
grave with a single chamber of the Rinaldone culture in Tuscany,
see de Vries 1976. At any rate, early Indo-European presence in
the region is indicated by the river name Jordan, based on Proto-
Indo-European *dnu- “river”, see Rosenkranz 1966: 136.
64 Woudhuizen 1990-1; Woudhuizen 2004a: appendix I.
65 Note that the Mari-texts from the reign of Zimri-lim (early 18th
century BC) bear testimony of kaptaraim “Cretans” (< Kaptara- =
Biblical Kaphtor “Crete”) involved in the tin-trade, see Dossin
1970: 99.
30
Byblos or through direct contacts with Egypt itself (see
further section 12 and appendix I).
The period of the Assyrian merchant colonies ended
in destruction, and when the smoke screen rose, a new era
had arrived. From a military point of view, a dominant factor
in this new era was formed by the war chariot, which
maintained its central position untill the end of the Bronze
Age. It is true that experiments with the chariot are already
recorded for the Karum-period, as the Anatolian king Anittas,
who ruled in the late 19th century BC and is considered
the founder of the Hittite royal house, reported his
acquisition of forty teams of horses in the course of his
capture of the town Salatiwara – teams of horses which no
doubt pulled war chariots. 66 Now, the war chariot was introduced
in the Near East by Indo-Europeans, to be more
specific speakers of Indo-Aryan, the forerunner of Indo-
Iranian. These Indo-Aryan chariot fighters, thanks to their
military superiority, conquered the Hurritic population living
along the upper Euphrates river, and established a
royal house here. At least, this course of events is deducible
from the fact that the 14th century BC text by a Mitannian
horse trainer named Kikkuli contains Indo-Aryan
technical terms, that the Mitannian royal house was characterized
by personal names with the Indo-Aryan element
ratha- “chariot”, and that the Mitannian nobility consisted
of maryannu, an Indo-Aryan indication of chariot fighters.
Next, they went on to the Levant and even further to Egypt
in the south, where they founded the royal house of the
Hyksos (= “foreign ruler”), also known as the 15th dynasty
(c. 1720-1550 BC), which was centred at Tell el-
Dab‘a/Avaris in the eastern Delta. 67 The connection of the
Hyksos with the Levant is stressed by the fact that in the
lowest levels of their capital Tell el-Dab‘a/Avaris so-called
Tel el-Jehudiya ware has been found comparable to that of
Byblos, and that, when they were finally kicked out by
Ahmose, the founder of the 18th dynasty who had organized
his own chariot force, a remnant of their regime fled
to Sharuhen on the coast south of Gaza. Yet another Indo-
Aryan conquest with the help of the chariot is that of
Babylon by the Kassites, who, in the wake of the Hittite
king Mursilis I’s sack of the latter city in 1595 BC, took
over control and founded a royal dynasty here. Finally, as
66 Drews 1988: 101-2.
67 See now Oren 1997, and note especially the warrior graves and
introduction of the horse as characteristic elements of Hyksos
culture.