# data[].attributes.headline
1225 BC—Birth of legendary Helen to King Tyndareus of Sparta and his wife Leda.

# data[].attributes.subject
1225 BC—Birth of legendary Helen to King Tyndareus of Sparta and his wife Leda.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Greek mythology, Helen of Troy, Helen, Helena, ( Ancient Greek: Ἑλένη Helénē, pronounced ), also known as beautiful Helen, Helen of Argos, or Helen of Sparta, was said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world.

# data[].attributes.headline
1251 BC—A lunar eclipse might mark the birth of Hercules.

# data[].attributes.subject
1251 BC—A lunar eclipse might mark the birth of Hercules.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1250s BC is a decade which lasted from 1259 BC to 1250 BC.

# data[].attributes.headline
1250 BC: Approximately 4,000 men fight a battle at a causeway over the Tollense valley in Northern Germany, the largest prehistoric battle north of the Alps known so far.[1]

# data[].attributes.subject
1250 BC: Approximately 4,000 men fight a battle at a causeway over the Tollense valley in Northern Germany, the largest prehistoric battle north of the Alps known so far.[1]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The battlefield of the Tollense valley ( German pronunciation: [tʰɔˈlɛnzə]) is a Bronze Age archaeological site in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the northern edge of the Mecklenburg Lake District. The site, discovered in 1996 and systematically excavated since 2007, extends along the valley of the small Tollense river, to the east of Weltzin village, on the municipal territories of Burow and Werder.

Thousands of bone fragments belonging to many people have been discovered along with further corroborative evidence of battle; current estimates indicate that perhaps 4,000 warriors from Central Europe fought in a battle on the site in the 13th century BC. As the population density was approximately 5 people per square kilometer, this would have been the most significant battle in Bronze Age Central Europe known so far and makes the Tollense valley currently the largest excavated and archaeologically verifiable battle site of this age in the world.[1]

In 1996, a voluntary conservationist reported finding a humerus bone at the Tollense riverside at low water with an embedded arrowhead made of flint.[2] Preliminary archaeological excavations began the same year around this site and further human and animal bones were found.[3] During the following years, a club made of ashwood was discovered as well as a hammer-like weapon made of sloe-wood and more bones.[4][5]

Since 2007, the area has been excavated systematically under the direction of the local State Office for Culture and Conservation, the State Office for Conservation of neighbouring Lower Saxony, and the University of Greifswald. Divers of the local Society for Underwater Archaeology carefully searched the Tollense riverbed and -bank and found more human remains.[6][7] Since 2009, the MV Ministry of Culture has supported research in the area and on the findings, joined since 2010 by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.[8] The primary focus lies on exploring the extent of the site and excavating the main site covered by about 1 m (3.3 ft) of peat. As of late 2017, 460 m 2 (5,000 sq ft) had been excavated, but the entire battlefield is estimated to be at least ten times that size.[9] Volunteers have surveyed the grounds with metal detectors, investigating mainly the dug-out material from the Tollense.[10] Greifswald's Department of Geography examined the geological make-up of the valley and determined the river's former course, and laser scanning was used to chart the terrain surface.[11] The human remains were analysed at Rostock University.

Situated in the North German plain, 120 km (75 mi) north of Berlin, the site stretches for several hundred meters on both sides of the small river. Within the plain, the Tollense meanders in a wide valley between marshy meadows and low hills. During the last millennia, the river's course has been only slightly modified. In the Bronze Age, the landscape of northern Europe was relatively open; human influence was small as the population density at that time is estimated to have been only 3 to 5 people per sq. km. The area was devoid of towns or even small villages; archaeologists believe that the inhabitants lived with their extended families on individual farmsteads. The closest known large settlement to the site of the battle at the time was more than 350 kilometers away.[12][13][14] In 2013, geomagnetic surveys revealed evidence of a 120 m (390 ft) long bridge or causeway stretching across the valley. Excavated over two dig seasons, the submerged structure turned out to be made of wooden posts and stone. Radiocarbon dating showed that although much of the structure predated the battle by more than 500 years, parts of it may have been built or restored around the time of the battle, suggesting the causeway might have been in continuous use for centuries-a well-known landmark."[15]

As of late 2017, the remains of some 140 men had been identified.[16] Most of these were young men between the ages of 20 and 40,[17] but there were also at least two women identified among 14 skeletons that were genetically tested.[18] Before March 2016, about 10,000 human and 1,000 animal bones had been found;[19] by March 2018, that number had risen to a total of about 13,000 fragments.[20] The total number of dead is estimated between 750,[21] to more than 1,000.[22] The total number of fighters might have ranged between 3,000[23] and more than 5,000,[24] assuming a casualty rate of 20-25%.[25] In one spot, 1,478 bones were found within just 12 m 2 (130 sq ft), potentially the remnants of a pile of corpses or a final pocket of resistance.[26] Radiocarbon dating indicates a timeframe between 1300 and 1200 BC, the Nordic Bronze Age.[27] As no clear traces of healing have been found on any of the wounds, the whole encounter seems to have taken place in not much more than a day.[28] A quarter of skeletons "show signs of healed traumas from earlier fights, including three skulls with healed fractures", so many trained and experienced warriors seem to have taken part.[29]

Initially, alternative explanations were considered, in part because "[b]efore Tollense, direct evidence of large-scale violence in the Bronze Age was scanty, especially in this region".[30] However, the location in a swamp and the lack of any ornaments or pottery made a cemetery unlikely (as local preference at the time was for dry ground). Furthermore, the victims were mostly male and between 20 and 40 years of age, killed by a variety of weapons and wounds; therefore mass human sacrifice seemed unlikely.[31][32]

Spears, clubs, swords, knives, sickles and arrows were used during the battle. Many of the skulls (of which over 40 were found) show signs of battle wounds, with a bronze arrowhead found in one of them.[33] By late 2017, about 50 bronze arrowheads had been found. Remnants of the arrows' wooden shafts provided a further possibility for dating with more than a third dating to the same time as the bones.[34] Contrasting these arrowheads with others made from flint and with wooden clubs, it has been surmised that two differently-equipped groups confronted each other.[35] No swords have been found so far, but bones show cutting traces typical for this type of weapon.[36] Some combatants rode into battle as evidenced by horse bones (of at least five horses) found on site. The original arrowhead's position in the initially found humerus bone shows that an archer on foot wounded a horseman.[37][38] Standardized metal weaponry was found intermingled with horse bones. These findings have led archaeologists to conclude that an officer class consisting of Bronze-wielding mounted warriors presided over the regular soldiers with simpler weaponry.[14]

The fact that almost no material finds were made between the bones except for single arrowheads, suggests that the corpses were robbed after the battle. Given that most remains are no longer in anatomical connection, the victors probably threw the dead into the river, which carried them downstream. They were then deposited in a calmer part of the river, covered by turf and thereby partially conserved.[39]

In 2010, a golden spiral ring was found on the banks of the Tollense; then in June 2011, a similar one, 2.9 cm (1.1 in) long and weighing 10 g. The material was identified by X-ray diffraction as tin. These findings are of special importance because of their rarity and because tin was vitally needed for making bronze.[40] In fact, these are the oldest known tin items in Germany.[41] The chronologically closest similar find is one from Hallstatt (Austria) - 600 years younger.[42]

At first, research on the remains by Aarhus University suggested that the combatants stemmed from two populations. Fighters of one of the groups were thought to have come from a distant region, as they had a diet including millet, which was allegedly not widely known in the North at that time, but this latter claim has been refuted. Palaeogenetic and strontium analyses were used to shed further light on the combatants' geographical origin[43] but revealed no decisive evidence, according to State Archeologist Jantzen.[44] Research on 14 skeletons in 2020 confirmed they all hailed from Central Europe and were genetically similar. None of those individuals was able to digest milk - although this trait (nowadays common in Europe) was hitherto thought to have spread several thousand years earlier.[45]

In 2016, scuba diving archaeologists found what was believed to be the contents of a toolkit belonging to one of the participants at the bottom of the river. A cluster of 31 Bronze artifacts was found on the river bed, with the items so close together that it was believed that they had once been in a box or bag which had since rotted away. The contents consisted of a Bronze knife with a curved blade, an awl decorated with ladders and rows of triangles, a Bronze chisel with wear marks, an assortment of Bronze scraps and ingots, and three tubes made of rolled Bronze. According to archaeologists, the pieces of scrap Bronze would likely have been used as currency in Bronze Age Europe in the absence of coins, and their presence suggested that the owner of the toolkit was not native to the area. Various artifacts found in the box suggested that its owner was from South-Central Europe and had traveled hundreds of miles to the battlefield.[46]

It has been speculated that a better-armed group from the South or West wanted to cross the river on their way north- or eastwards on a strategic, long-established causeway.[47][48] This road might well have been used for long-distance trade in tin and luxury goods (e.g. pearls from the Persian Gulf, found near Halle, or Mediterranean glass pearls found close to nearby Neustrelitz; both from 1200 BC). The battle seems to coincide with a period of heightened militancy 3,250 years ago, as metal became increasingly scarce north of the Alps and populations seem to have moved.[49]

The overseeing State Archaeologist Detlef Jantzen claims this to be the oldest archaeologically verifiable battlefield in Europe and one of the 50 most important find sites worldwide.[50] He also said: "The Tollense site has a dimension that nobody would have deemed possible for our region." Helle Vandkilde, archeologist at Aarhus University commented "Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on [...] Very few talked about warfare."[51]

A group of 5,000 combatants implies that they had been gathered, organised, fed, briefed, and led into battle. According to the researchers at the site, this would have been an astounding feat for the time, probably enabled by a central government. This would mean that socio-political development in Central Europe was more advanced and more bellicose than previously assumed,[52] roughly at a time when Egypt and the Hittites concluded their famous peace treaty. "The well-preserved bones and artifacts add detail to this picture of Bronze Age sophistication, pointing to the existence of a trained warrior class and suggesting that people from across Europe joined the bloody fray."

Roughly contemporaneous finds:

^ a b

^ [permanent dead link ]

^ Rathke, Martina (27 April 2012). "Bronzezeit-Schlachtfeld mit neuen Funden". Nordkurier (in German). p. 5.

^

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The battlefield of the Tollense valley ( German pronunciation: [tʰɔˈlɛnzə]) is a Bronze Age archaeological site in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the northern edge of the Mecklenburg Lake District. The site, discovered in 1996 and systematically excavated since 2007, extends along the valley of the small Tollense river, to the east of Weltzin village, on the municipal territories of Burow and Werder.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Coordinates: 34°34′N 36°31′E ﻿ / ﻿ 34.57°N 36.51°E

The Battle of Kadesh or Battle of Qadesh took place between the forces of the New Kingdom of Egypt under Ramesses II and the Hittite Empire under Muwatalli II at the city of Kadesh on the Orontes River, just upstream of Lake Homs near the modern Lebanon-Syria border.[14]

Battle of Kadesh

Part of Second Syrian campaign of Ramesses II

Ramses II during the battle, shown slaying one enemy while trampling another (from relief inside his Abu Simbel temple)

Belligerents

New Kingdom of Egypt

Hittite Empire

Commanders and leaders

Ramesses II

Muwatalli II

Strength

20,000-53,000 men[5]
(half engaged)

16,000 infantry[6]

2,000 chariots[7]

Somewhere between 23,000-50,000 men

Somewhere between 15,000[8]-40,000 infantry[9]
(not engaged)

Somewhere between 2,500-10,500 chariots[9][10]
Somewhere between 9,000-11,100 men[11]

Casualties and losses

Unknown ("heavy")[12]

Unknown (2,000 chariots destroyed)[13]

The battle is generally dated to 1274 BC from the Egyptian chronology,[15] and is the earliest battle in recorded history for which details of tactics and formations are known. It is believed to have been the largest chariot battle ever fought, involving between 5,000 and 6,000 chariots in total.[16][17][18]

As a result of discovery of multiple Kadesh inscriptions and the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty, it is the best documented battle in all of ancient history.

After expelling the Hyksos' 15th Dynasty around 1550 BC, the native Egyptian New Kingdom rulers became more aggressive in reclaiming control of their state's borders. Thutmose I, Thutmose III and his son and coregent Amenhotep II fought battles from Megiddo north to the Orontes River, including conflict with Kadesh.

Many of the Egyptian campaign accounts between c. 1400 and 1300 BC reflect the general destabilization of the Djahy region (southern Canaan). The reigns of Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III were undistinguished, except that Egypt continued to lose territory to the Mitanni in northern Syria.

During the late Eighteenth Dynasty, the Amarna letters tell the story of the decline of Egyptian influence in the region. The Egyptians showed flagging interest here until almost the end of the dynasty.[20] Horemheb (d. 1292 BC), the last ruler of this dynasty, campaigned in this region, finally beginning to turn Egyptian interest back to this region.

This process continued in the Nineteenth Dynasty. Like his father Ramesses I, Seti I was a military commander who set out to restore Egypt's empire to the days of the Tuthmosid kings almost a century before. Inscriptions on the Karnak walls record the details of his campaigns into Canaan and ancient Syria.[21] He took 20,000 men and reoccupied abandoned Egyptian posts and garrisoned cities. He made an informal peace with the Hittites, took control of coastal areas along the Mediterranean Sea and continued to campaign in Canaan. A second campaign led to his capture of Kadesh (where a stela commemorated his victory) and Amurru kingdom. His son and heir Ramesses II campaigned with him. There are historical records that record a large weapons order by Ramesses II in the year before the expedition he led to Kadesh in his fifth regnal year.

However, at some point both regions may have lapsed back under Hittite control. What exactly happened to Amurru is disputed. Hittitologist Trevor R. Bryce suggests that, although it may have fallen once again under Hittite control, it is more likely Amurru remained a Hittite vassal state.[22]

The immediate antecedents to the Battle of Kadesh were the early campaigns of Ramesses II into Canaan. In the fourth year of his reign, he marched north into Syria, either to recapture Amurru[23] or, as a probing effort, to confirm his vassals' loyalty and explore the terrain of possible battles.[22] In the spring of the fifth year of his reign, in May 1274 BC, Ramesses II launched a campaign from his capital Pi-Ramesses (modern Qantir). The army moved beyond the fortress of Tjel and along the coast leading to Gaza.[24]

The recovery of Amurru was Muwatalli's stated motivation for marching south to confront the Egyptians.

Ramesses led an army of four divisions: Amun, Re (P're), Seth (Suteh) and the apparently newly formed Ptah division.[25]

There was also a poorly documented troop called the nrrn (Ne'arin or Nearin), possibly Canaanite military mercenaries with Egyptian allegiance[26] or even Egyptians,[27] that Ramesses II had left in Amurru, apparently in order to secure the port of Sumur.[28] This division would come to play a critical role in the battle. Also significant was the presence of Sherden troops within the Egyptian army. This is the first time they appear as Egyptian mercenaries, and they would play an increasingly significant role in Late Bronze Age history, ultimately appearing among the Sea Peoples that ravaged the east Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age. Healy in Armies of the Pharaohs observes:

It is not possible to be precise about the size of the Egyptian chariot force at Kadesh though it could not have numbered less than 2,000 vehicles spread through the corps of Amun, P'Re, Ptah and Sutekh, assuming that approx. 500 machines were allocated to each corps. To this we may need to add those of the Ne'arin, for if they were not native Egyptian troops their number may not have been formed from chariots detached from the army corps.[29]

On the Hittite side, king Muwatalli had mustered several of his allies, among them Rimisharrinaa, the king of Aleppo. Ramesses II recorded a long list of 19 Hittite allies brought to Kadesh by Muwatalli. This list is of considerable interest to Hittitologists, as it reflects the extent of Hittite influence at the time.

Muwatalli had positioned his troops behind "Old Kadesh", but Ramesses was misled by two spies whom the Egyptians had captured to think that the Hittite forces were still far off, at Aleppo,[17] and ordered his forces to set up camp.

Ramesses II describes his arrival on the battlefield in the two principal inscriptions that he wrote concerning the battle, which were the so-called "Poem" and the "Bulletin":

(From the "Poem") Now then, his majesty had prepared his infantry, his chariotry, and the Sherden of his majesty's capturing... in the Year 5, 2nd month of the third season, day 9, his majesty passed the fortress of Sile. [and entered Canaan] ... His infantry went on the narrow passes as if on the highways of Egypt. Now after days had passed after this, then his majesty was in Ramses Meri-Amon, the town which is in the Valley of the Cedar.

His majesty proceeded northward. After his majesty reached the mountain range of Kadesh, then his majesty went forward... and he crossed the ford of the Orontes, with the first division of Amon (named) "He Gives Victory to User-maat-Re Setep-en-Re". His majesty reached the town of Kadesh... The division of Amon was on the march behind him; the division of Re was crossing the ford in a district south of the town of Shabtuna at the distance of one iter from the place where his majesty was; the division of Ptah was on the south of the town of Arnaim; the division of Set was marching on the road. His majesty had formed the first ranks of battle of all the leaders of his army, while they were [still] on the shore in the land of Amurru.

[From the "Bulletin"] Year 5, 3rd month of the third season, day 9, under the majesty of (Ramesses II)... The lord proceeded northward, and his majesty arrived at a vicinity south of the town of Shabtuna.[30]

As Ramesses and the Egyptian advance guard were about 11 kilometers from Kadesh, south of Shabtuna, he met two Shasu nomads who told him that the Hittite king was "in the land of Aleppo, on the north of Tunip" 200 kilometers away, where, the Shasu said, he was "(too much) afraid of Pharaoh, L.P.H., to come south".[31] This was, state the Egyptian texts, a false report ordered by the Hittites "with the aim of preventing the army of His Majesty from drawing up to combat with the foe of Hatti".[31] An Egyptian scout then arrived at the camp bringing two Hittite prisoners. The prisoners revealed that the entire Hittite army and the Hittite king were actually close at hand:

When they had been brought before Pharaoh, His Majesty asked, "Who are you?" They replied "We belong to the king of Hatti. He has sent us to spy on you." Then His Majesty said to them, "Where is he, the enemy from Hatti? I had heard that he was in the land of Aleppo." They of Tunip replied to His Majesty, "Lo, the king of Hatti has already arrived, together with the many countries who are supporting him... They are armed with their infantry and their chariots. They have their weapons of war at the ready. They are more numerous than the grains of sand on the beach. Behold, they stand equipped and ready for battle behind the old city of Kadesh."[32]

After this, Ramesses II called his princes to meet with him and discuss the fault of his governors and officials in not informing the position of Muwatalli II and his army. As Ramesses was alone with his bodyguard and the Amun division, the vizier was ordered to hasten the arrival of the Ptah and Seth divisions, with the Re division having almost arrived at the camp.[33] While Ramesses was talking with the princes, the Hittite chariots crossed the river and charged the middle of the Re division as they were making their way toward Ramesses' position. The Re division was caught in the open and scattered in all directions. Some fled northward to the Amun camp, all the while being pursued by Hittite chariots.

The Hittite chariotry then rounded north and attacked the Egyptian camp, crashing through the Amun shield wall and creating panic among the Amun division. However, the momentum of the Hittite attack was already starting to wane, as the impending obstacles of such a large camp forced many Hittite charioteers to slow their attack; some were killed in chariot crashes.[34] In the Egyptian account of the battle, Ramesses describes himself as being deserted and surrounded by enemies: "No officer was with me, no charioteer, no soldier of the army, no shield-bearer[.]"[35]

Ramesses was able to defeat his attackers and to return to the Egyptian lines: "I was before them like Set in his moment. I found the mass of chariots in whose midst I was, scattering them before my horses[.]" The pharaoh, now facing a desperate fight for his life, summoned up his courage, called upon his god Amun, and fought to save himself. Ramesses personally led several charges into the Hittite ranks together with his personal guard, some of the chariots from his Amun division and survivors from the routed division of Re.[34]

The Hittites, who believed their enemies to be totally routed, had stopped to plunder the Egyptian camp and so became easy targets for Ramesses's counterattack. His action was successful in driving the looters back towards the Orontes River and away from the Egyptian camp,[36] and in the ensuing pursuit, the heavier Hittite chariots were easily overtaken and dispatched by the lighter, faster Egyptian chariots.[17]

Although he had suffered a significant reversal, Muwatalli II still commanded a large force of reserve chariotry and infantry, as well as the walls of the town. As the retreat reached the river, he ordered another thousand chariots to attack the Egyptians, the stiffening element being the high nobles who surrounded the king. As the Hittite forces approached the Egyptian camp again, the Ne'arin troop contingent from Amurru suddenly arrived, surprising the Hittites. Finally, the Ptah division arrived from the south, threatening the Hittite rear.[37]

After six charges, the Hittite forces were almost surrounded, and the survivors were pinned against the Orontes.[28] The remaining Hittite elements, which had not been overtaken in the withdrawal, were forced to abandon their chariots and attempt to swim across the river, according to Egyptian accounts hurriedly ("as fast as crocodiles swimming"), where many of them drowned.[38]

There is no consensus about the outcome or what took place, with views ranging from an Egyptian victory to a draw,[39] or, in the view of Iranian Egyptologist Mehdi Yarahmadi, an Egyptian defeat, with the Egyptian accounts being simply propaganda.[40] The Hittite army was ultimately forced to retreat, but the Egyptians were unsuccessful in capturing Kadesh.[37]

Battle scene from the Great Kadesh reliefs of Ramses II on the Walls of the Ramesseum

Logistically unable to support a long siege of the walled city of Kadesh,[3] Ramesses gathered his troops and retreated south towards Damascus and ultimately back to Egypt. Once back in Egypt, Ramesses then proclaimed victory since he had routed his enemies, but he did not even attempt to capture Kadesh.[2] In a personal sense, however, the Battle of Kadesh was a triumph for Ramesses since after blundering into a devastating Hittite chariot ambush, the young king had courageously rallied his scattered troops to fight on the battlefield and escaped death or capture. The new lighter faster two-man Egyptian chariots were able to pursue and take down the slower three-man Hittite chariots from behind as they overtook them.[3]

Hittite records from Hattusa, however, tell of a very different conclusion to the greater campaign in which a chastened Ramesses was forced to depart from Kadesh in defeat. Modern historians conclude that the battle ended in a draw from a practical point of view but was a turning point for the Egyptians, who had developed new technologies and rearmed before pushing back against the years-long steady incursions by the Hittites.[3]

The Hittite king, Muwatalli II, continued to campaign as far south as the Egyptian province of Upi (Apa), which he captured and placed under the control of his brother Hattusili, the future Hattusili III.[41] Egypt's sphere of influence in Asia was now restricted to Canaan.[41] Even that was threatened for a time by revolts among Egypt's vassal states in the Levant, and Ramesses was compelled to embark on a series of campaigns in Canaan to uphold his authority there before he could initiate further assaults against the Hittite Empire.

In the eighth and ninth years of his reign, Ramesses extended his military successes. This time, he proved more successful against his Hittite foes by successfully capturing the cities of Dapur and Tunip,[42] where no Egyptian soldier had been seen since under Thutmose III, almost 120 years earlier.

Ramesses's victory proved to be ephemeral, however. The thin strip of territory pinched between Amurru and Kadesh did not make for a stable possession. Within a year, it had returned to the Hittite fold, which meant that Ramesses had to march against Dapur once more in his tenth year. His second success was equally as meaningless as his first since neither Egypt nor Hatti could decisively defeat the other in battle.[28]

An official peace treaty with Hattusili III, the new king of the Hittites[3] some 15 years after the Battle of Kadesh, and in the 21st year of Ramesses II's reign (1258 BC in conventional chronology), finally concluded running borderlands conflicts. The treaty was inscribed on a silver tablet, of which a clay copy survived in the Hittite capital of Hattusa, now in Turkey, and is on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. An enlarged replica of the agreement hangs on a wall at the headquarters of the United Nations, as the earliest international peace treaty known to historians.[3] Its text, in the Hittite version, appears in the links below. An Egyptian version survives on a papyrus.

There is more evidence in the form of texts and wall reliefs for this battle than for any other in the Ancient Near East, but almost all of it is from an Egyptian perspective. Indeed, the first scholarly report on the battle, by James Henry Breasted in 1903, praised the sources that allowed the reconstruction of the battle with certainty.[43] However, some historians argue that the battle was a draw at best and that Egyptian influence over Amurru and Qadesh seems to have been lost forever.[44]

The main source of information is in the Egyptian record of the battle for which a general level of accuracy is assumed, despite factual errors and propaganda.[45] The bombastic nature of Ramesses's version has long been recognized.[46] The Egyptian version of the battle is recorded in two primary forms, known as the Poem and the Bulletin. The Poem has been questioned as actual verse, as opposed to a prose account similar to that recorded by other pharaohs. Likewise, the Bulletin is itself simply a lengthy caption accompanying the reliefs.[47] The inscriptions are repeated multiple times (seven for the Bulletin and eight for the Poem, in temples in Abydos, Temple of Luxor, Karnak, Abu Simbel and the Ramesseum).[48]

In addition to these lengthy presentations, there are also numerous small captions used to point out various elements of the battle. Besides the inscriptions, there are textual occurrences preserved in Papyrus Raifet and Papyrus Sallier III,[49] and a rendering of these same events in a letter from Ramesses to Hattusili III written in response to a scoffing complaint by Hattusili about the pharaoh's victorious depiction of the battle.[50]

Hittite references to the battle, including the above letter, have been found at Hattusa, but no annals have been discovered that might describe it as part of a campaign. Instead, there are various references made to it in the context of other events. That is especially true of Hattusili III for whom the battle marked an important milestone in his career.

Hittite allies Edit

Sources: Goetze, A., "The Hittites and Syria (1300-1200 B.C.)", in Cambridge Ancient History (1975) p. 253; Gardiner, Alan, The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II (1975) pp. 57ff.; Breasted, James Henry, Ancient Records of Egypt; Historical Records (1906) pp. 125ff.; Lichtheim, Miriam, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 2: The New Kingdom (1978), pp. 57ff.

Egyptian Name

Location

Ḥt

Ḥatti (central Anatolia)

Drdny

Dardania (allies of the Trojans,[51] northwest Anatolia)

Qd

A poorly defined area in northern Syria

Qdš

Kadesh (in Syria)

Mwšꜣnt

Mushanet (Unknown) Possibly Mushki or Moschoi (Phrygians)

Lk

Lukka lands ( Lycia and Caria, southwest Anatolia)

Nwgs

Nuḥḥašši (in Syria)

I҆rwnt (sic!)

Arawanna (In Anatolia)

Ḥlb

Ḥalba ( Aleppo, in Syria. Led by its king, Talmi-Sarruma, grandson of Suppiluliuma I.)

In addition to these allies, the Hittite king also hired the services of some of the local Shasu tribes.

Hittite fallen Edit

Source: Gardiner, Alan, The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II (1975) pp. 39-41.

Name

Title

Spţr

Brother of Muwattalli

Trgnns

Charioteer

Grbts

Shield-bearer

Trgtţs

Troop-captain of those of Qbsw(?)

'Agm

Troop-captain

Kmyţ

A head of thr-warriors (infantry?)

Ḥrpsr

Royal scribe

Tydr

Chief of the bodyguard[52]

Pys

Charioteer

Smrts

Charioteer

Rbsnn

Troop-captain of ' Inns.

Ḥmţrm

Brother of Muwattalli

Tdr

Head of the thr-warriors

Ţ..m

Shield-bearer(?)

Ţwţs

Troop-captain of ' Ins

Bnq(?)

Charioteer

[?]

[One further name and title, lost]

Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell Books, 1992, p. 256.

^ Ancient Discoveries: Egyptian Warfare. Event occurs at 12:00 hrs EDST, 2008-05-14. Archived from the original on 2009-03-04.[unreliable source? ]

M. Healy, Qadesh 1300 BC: Clash of the warrior kings, 32

^ Richard Holmes, Battlefield. Decisive Conflicts in History, 2006

M. Healy, Qadesh 1300 BC: Clash of the warrior kings, 22

Siggurdsson, ^ Battle of Kadesh: Ramesses II, Egyptians fight Hittites to draw May 12th, 2016.

Near the modern village of ^ Al-Houz in Syria's Al-Qusayr District. see Kitchen, K. A., "Ramesside Inscriptions", volume 2, Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1996, pp. 16-17.

Around "Year 5 III Shemu day 9" of Ramesses II's reign (^ James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. III, p. 317) or more precisely: May 12, 1274 BC based on Ramesses' commonly accepted accession date in 1279 BC.

^ Eggenberger, David (1985). An Encyclopedia of Battles. Dover Publications. p. 214.

^ Dr. Aaron Ralby (2013). "Battle of Kadesh, c. 1274 BCE: Clash of Empires". Atlas of Military History. Parragon. pp. 54-55. ISBN 978-1-4723-0963-1.

^ Dr. Aaron Ralby (2013). "Hatti and Mitanni, 18th-12th Centuries BCE: A Kingdom Found". Atlas of Military History. Parragon. pp. 52-53. ISBN 978-1-4723-0963-1.

^ [1] W. J. Murnane, The Road to Kadesh: A Historical Interpretation of the Battle Reliefs of King Sety I at Karnak. (Second Edition Revised), Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1990, ISBN 0-918986-67-2

Bryce, Trevor, The Kingdom of the Hittites, Oxford University Press, new edition 2005, ISBN 0-19-927908-X, p. 233.

^ Goedicke, Hans (December 1966). "Considerations on the Battle of Kadesh". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 52: 71-80 [78]. doi:10.2307/3855821. JSTOR 3855821.

^ Schulman, A.R. (1981). "The Narn at Kadesh Once Again". Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. 11 (1): 7-19.

^ The Battle of Kadesh in the context of Hittite history[unreliable source? ] Archived October 14, 2013, at the Wayback Machine

Pritchard, James B. (1969). Ancient Near Eastern Texts. Princeton, ^ ISBN 978-0-691-03503-1. (ANET), "The Asiatic Campaigning of Rameses II", pp. 255-56

Wilson, John A, "The Texts of the Battle of Kadesh", The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 34, no. 4, July 1927, p. 278.

^ "Egyptian Accounts of the Battle of Kadesh". www.reshafim.org.il.

Mark Healy, op. cit., p. 61.

"Battle of Kadesh | HistoryNet". www.historynet.com.

^ Ancient Discoveries: Egyptian Warfare. History Channel Program: Ancient Discoveries: Egyptian Warfare with panel of three experts. Event occurs at 12:00 EDST, 2008-05-14. Archived from the original on April 16, 2008.[unreliable source? ]

^ Hasel, Michael G (1998). Domination and Resistance: Egyptian Military Activity in the Southern Levant, 1300-1185 B.C. (Probleme Der Agyptologie). Brill Academic Publishers. p. 155. ISBN 978-90-04-10984-1.

^ یاراحمدی, مهدی (2011). پارادوکس قادش : پیروزی رامسس بزرگ یا برتری مواتالی دوم ؟ [Kadesh paradox: the triumph of the great Ramses II Mvataly?] (in Persian). دانشگاه فردوس ی مشهد: شماره 44 -45 فصلنامه تاریخ پژوهی. pp. 141-151.[unreliable source? ]

Joyce Tyldesley, Ramesses: Egypt's Greatest Pharaoh, Penguin Books, 2000, p. 73.

^ James Henry Breasted, A History of the Ancient Egyptians (1908) sect. 305

^ De Mieroop, Marc Van (2007). A History of Ancient Egypt. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. p. 400. ISBN 9781405160704.

Gardiner, Alan, ^ The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II (1975) pp. 2-4. However, Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 2: The New Kingdom (1978) p. 58, maintains that the Poem is truly just that, contra Gardiner, and prefers to maintain the older tripartite division of the documentation.

Ockinga, Boyo (1987), "On the Interpretation of the Kadesh Record", Chronique d'Égypte, 62 (123-124): 38-48, doi:10.1484/J.CDE.2.308740

Roaf, Michael (1990). Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. Equinox. ISBN 0-8160-2218-6. includes information of the clash of the Egyptians and Hittites including the battle of Kadesh and maps of the regions controlled by the peoples named in the accounts.

Healy, Mark (1993). Qadesh 1300 B.C, Clash of the Warrior Kings. Osprey Publishing; Osprey Campaign Series #22. ISBN 978-1-85532-300-1.

Shaw, Ian (2003). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lichtheim, Miriam (1976). Ancient Egyptian Literature. II:The New Kingdom. Berkeley: University of California Press.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Coordinates: 34°34′N 36°31′E ﻿ / ﻿ 34.57°N 36.51°E The Battle of Kadesh or Battle of Qadesh took place between the forces of the New Kingdom of Egypt under Ramesses II and the Hittite Empire under Muwatalli II at the city of Kadesh on the Orontes River, just upstream of Lake

# data[].attributes.headline
c. 1200 BC: Ancestral Puebloan civilization in North America. (approximate date)

# data[].attributes.subject
c. 1200 BC: Ancestral Puebloan civilization in North America. (approximate date)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.[1] The Ancestral Puebloans are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara Tradition, who developed from the Picosa culture.

They lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. The Ancestral Puebloans possessed a complex network that stretched across the Colorado Plateau linking hundreds of communities and population centers. They held a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences that found form in their architecture. The kiva, a congregational space that was used chiefly for ceremonial purposes, was an integral part of this ancient people's community structure.

In contemporary times, the people and their archaeological culture were referred to as Anasazi for historical purposes. The Navajo, who were not their descendants, called them by this term, which meant "ancient enemies". Contemporary Puebloans do not want this term to be used.[2][3]

Archaeologists continue to debate when this distinct culture emerged. The current agreement, based on terminology defined by the Pecos Classification, suggests their emergence around the 12th century BC, during the archaeologically designated Early Basketmaker II Era. Beginning with the earliest explorations and excavations, researchers identified Ancestral Puebloans as the forerunners of contemporary Pueblo peoples.[1][3] Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Taos Pueblo.

The Ancestral Puebloan culture is perhaps best known for the stone and earth dwellings its people built along cliff walls, particularly during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III eras, from about 900 to 1350 AD in total. The best-preserved examples of the stone dwellings are now protected within United States' national parks, such as Navajo National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Mesa Verde National Park, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Aztec Ruins National Monument, Bandelier National Monument, Hovenweep National Monument, and Canyon de Chelly National Monument.

These villages, called pueblos by Spanish colonists, were accessible only by rope or through rock climbing. These astonishing building achievements had modest beginnings. The first Ancestral Puebloan homes and villages were based on the pit-house, a common feature in the Basketmaker periods.

Ancestral Puebloans are also known for their pottery. In general, pottery used for cooking or storage in the region was unpainted gray, either smooth or textured. Pottery used for more formal purposes was often more richly adorned. In the northern or "Anasazi" portion of the Ancestral Pueblo world, from about 500 to 1300 AD, the most common decorated pottery had black-painted designs on white or light gray backgrounds.[6] Decoration is characterized by fine hatching, and contrasting colors are produced by the use of mineral-based paint on a chalky background.[7] South of the Anasazi territory, in Mogollon settlements, pottery was more often hand-coiled, scraped, and polished, with red to brown coloring.[8]

Some tall cylinders are considered ceremonial vessels, while narrow-necked jars may have been used for liquids. Ware in the southern portion of the region, particularly after 1150 AD, is characterized by heavier black-line decoration and the use of carbon-based colorants.[7] In northern New Mexico, the local "black on white" tradition, the Rio Grande white wares, continued well after 1300 AD.

Changes in pottery composition, structure, and decoration are signals of social change in the archaeological record. This is particularly true as the peoples of the American Southwest began to leave their traditional homes and migrate south. According to archaeologists Patricia Crown and Steadman Upham, the appearance of the bright colors on Salada Polychromes in the 14th century may reflect religious or political alliances on a regional level. Late 14th- and 15th-century pottery from central Arizona, widely traded in the region, has colors and designs which may derive from earlier ware by both Ancestral Pueblo and Mogollon peoples.[9]

The Ancestral Puebloans also created many petroglyphs and pictographs. The pictograph style with which they are associated is the called the Barrier Canyon Style. This form of pictograph is painted in areas in which the images would be protected from the sun yet visible to a group of people. The figures are sometimes phantom or alien looking. The Holy Ghost panel in the Horseshoe Canyon is considered to be one of the earliest uses of graphical perspective where the largest figure appears to take on a three dimensional representation.

Recent archaeological evidence has established that in at least one great house, Pueblo Bonito, the elite family whose burials associate them with the site practiced matrilineal succession. Room 33 in Pueblo Bonito, the richest burial ever excavated in the Southwest, served as a crypt for one powerful lineage, traced through the female line, for approximately 330 years. While other Ancestral Pueblo burials have not yet been subjected to the same archaeogenomic testing, the survival of matrilineal descent among contemporary Puebloans suggests that this may have been a widespread practice among Ancestral Puebloans.[10]

The Ancestral Pueblo people crafted a unique architecture with planned community spaces. The ancient population centers such as Chaco Canyon (outside Crownpoint, New Mexico), Mesa Verde (near Cortez, Colorado), and Bandelier National Monument (near Los Alamos, New Mexico) have brought renown to the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. They consisted of apartment-like complexes and structures made from stone, adobe mud, and other local material, or were carved into the sides of canyon walls. Developed within these cultures, the people also adopted design details from other cultures as far away as contemporary Mexico.

In their day, these ancient towns and cities were usually multistoried and multipurposed buildings surrounding open plazas and viewsheds. They were occupied by hundreds to thousands of Ancestral Pueblo peoples. These population complexes hosted cultural and civic events and infrastructure that supported a vast outlying region hundreds of miles away linked by transportation roadways.

Constructed well before 1492 AD, these Ancestral Pueblo towns and villages in the North American Southwest were located in various defensive positions, for example, on high, steep mesas such as at Mesa Verde or present-day Acoma Pueblo, called the "Sky City", in New Mexico. Earlier than 900 AD and progressing past the 13th century, the population complexes were a major center of culture for the Ancestral Puebloans. In Chaco Canyon, Chacoan developers quarried sandstone blocks and hauled timber from great distances, assembling 15 major complexes. These ranked as the largest buildings in North America until the late 19th century.[11][12]

Evidence of archaeoastronomy at Chaco has been proposed, with the Sun Dagger petroglyph at Fajada Butte a popular example. Many Chacoan buildings may have been aligned to capture the solar and lunar cycles,[13] requiring generations of astronomical observations and centuries of skillfully coordinated construction.[14] Climate change is thought to have led to the emigration of Chacoans and the eventual abandonment of the canyon, beginning with a 50-year drought that started in 1130.[15]

Great Houses

Immense complexes known as "great houses" embodied worship at Chaco. Archaeologists have found musical instruments, jewelry, ceramics, and ceremonial items, indicating people in Great Houses were elite, wealthier families. They hosted indoor burials, where gifts were interred with the dead, often including bowls of food and turquoise beads.[16]

As architectural forms evolved and centuries passed, the houses kept several core traits. Most apparent is their sheer bulk; complexes averaged more than 200 rooms each, and some enclosed up to 700 rooms.[14] Individual rooms were substantial in size, with higher ceilings than Ancestral Pueblo works of preceding periods. They were well-planned: vast sections or wings erected were finished in a single stage, rather than in increments.

Houses generally faced the south. Plaza areas were almost always surrounded by edifices of sealed-off rooms or high walls. Houses often stood four or five stories tall, with single-story rooms facing the plaza; room blocks were terraced to allow the tallest sections to compose the pueblo's rear edifice. Rooms were often organized into suites, with front rooms larger than rear, interior, and storage rooms or areas.

Ceremonial structures known as kivas were built in proportion to the number of rooms in a pueblo. One small kiva was built for roughly every 29 rooms. Nine complexes each hosted an oversized Great Kiva, each up to 63 feet (19 m) in diameter. T-shaped doorways and stone lintels marked all Chacoan kivas.

Though simple and compound walls were often used, great houses were primarily constructed of core-and-veneer walls: two parallel load-bearing walls comprising dressed, flat sandstone blocks bound in clay mortar were erected.[17] Gaps between walls were packed with rubble, forming the wall's core. Walls were then covered in a veneer of small sandstone pieces, which were pressed into a layer of binding mud.[17] These surfacing stones were often placed in distinctive patterns.

The Chacoan structures altogether required the wood of 200,000 coniferous trees, mostly hauled - on foot - from mountain ranges up to 70 miles (110 km) away.[18][19]

Throughout the southwest Ancestral Puebloan region, and at Mesa Verde, the best-known site for the large number of well-preserved cliff dwellings, housing, defensive, and storage complexes were built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar.

Specific constructions had many similarities, but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend during the 13th century toward the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters.

Common Pueblo architectural forms, including kivas, towers, and pit-houses are included in this area, but the space constrictions of these alcoves resulted in a far denser concentration of their populations. Mug House, a typical cliff dwelling of the period, was home to around 100 people who shared 94 small rooms and eight kivas, built right up against each other and sharing many of their walls. Builders in these areas maximized space in any way they could and no areas were considered off-limits to construction.[19]

Not all of the people in the region lived in cliff dwellings; many colonized the canyon rims and slopes in multifamily structures that grew to unprecedented size as populations swelled.[19] Decorative motifs for these sandstone/mortar constructions, both cliff dwellings and not, included T-shaped windows and doors. This has been taken by some archaeologists, such as Stephen Lekson (1999), as evidence of the continuing reach of the Chaco Canyon elite system, which had seemingly collapsed around a century before.[22] Other researchers see these motifs as part of a more generalized Puebloan style and/or spiritual significance, rather than evidence of a continuing specific elite socioeconomic system.[23]

Notes

^ "Ancestral Pueblo culture." Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 4 June 2012.

^ Cordell, Linda; McBrinn, Maxine (2012). Archaeology of the Southwest (3 ed.).

Hewit, "Puebloan Culture" Archived 2010-07-09 at the Wayback Machine, University of Northern Colorado

"Anasazi". ^ U*X*L Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. U*X*L. 2008. Retrieved August 14, 2012 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G2-3048800031.html Archived 2013-09-21 at the Wayback Machine

^ The Anasazi or "Ancient Pueblo" Archived August 28, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, from CP-LUHNA, Northern Arizona University

^ Adams, Karen R.; Stewart, Joe D.; Baldwin, Stuart J. (2002). "Pottery Paint and Other Uses of Rocky Mountain Beeweed (Cleome serrulata Pursh) in the Southwestern United States: Ethnographic Data, Archæological Record, and Elemental Composition". Kiva. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing. 67 (4): 339-362. doi:10.1080/00231940.2002.11758462. JSTOR 30246404.

Cordell, p. 98

^ Cordell, Linda (1994). Ancient Pueblo Peoples. St. Remy Press and Smithsonian Institution. p. 20. ISBN 0-89599-038-5.

^ Cordell, pp. 142-143

^ Perry, George H.; Reich, David; Whiteley, Peter M.; LeBlanc, Steven A.; Kistler, Logan; Stewardson, Kristin; Swapan Mallick; Rohland, Nadin; Skoglund, Pontus (2017-02-21). "Archaeogenomic evidence reveals prehistoric matrilineal dynasty". Nature Communications. 8: 14115. doi:10.1038/ncomms14115. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 5321759. PMID 28221340.

Sofaer 1997

^ Stuart, David E. (2000). Anasazi America. University of New Mexico Press. p. 115. ISBN 0-8263-2178-X.

Fagan 2005, pp. 119-121

^ Kantner, John (2004). "Ancient Puebloan Southwest", pp. 161-166

^ English, Nathan B.; Betancourt, Julio L.; Dean, Jeffrey S.; Quade, Jay (9 October 2001). "Strontium isotopes reveal distant sources of architectural timber in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 98 (21): 11891-11896. doi:10.1073/pnas.211305498.

Lekson, Stephen (1999). ^ The Chaco Meridian: centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press

The first to surmise this was John W. Powell, ^ Canyons of the Colorado, 1895, Flood & Vincent.

^ Speller, Camilla F.; Kemp, Brian M.; Wyatt, Scott D.; Monroe, Cara; Lipe, William D.; Arndt, Ursula M.; Yang, Dongya Y. (22 January 2010). "Ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis reveals complexity of indigenous North American turkey domestication". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.0909724107.

^ Peterson, Larry (6 February 2017). "Mountains of Evidence". American Scientist.

Christy Turner, Steven LeBlanc (17 May 2000). Secrets of the Dead: Cannibalism in the Canyon (Motion Picture). PBS.

^ LeBlanc p. 174

^ Tim White, Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5MTUMR-2346, Princeton, 1992, ISBN 0-691-09467-5

^ Potter, James M.; Chuipka, Jason P. (December 2010). "Perimortem mutilation of human remains in an early village in the American Southwest: A case for ethnic violence". Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 29 (4): 507-523. doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2010.08.001.

^ Alexandra Witze (1 June 2001). "Researchers Divided Over Whether Anasazi Were Cannibals". National Geographic.

^ Preston, Douglas (November 30, 1998). "Cannibals of the Canyon". The New Yorker.

^ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Androphagi". Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 976.

^ Cordell, pp. 18-19

^ Pueblo culture Archived January 25, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, scroll down

^ Plog, p. 72.

Bibliography

Childs, Craig House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Little, Brown and Company, February 22, 2007. ISBN 0-316-60817-3.

Cordell, Linda S. Ancient Pueblo Peoples. St. Remy Press and Smithsonian Institution, 1994. ISBN 0-89599-038-5.

Diamond, Jared (2005), Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, London: Viking Penguin, ISBN 978-0-1431-1700-1

Fagan, Brian M. "Ancient North America: Tha Archaeology of a Continent (part five)." Thames and Hudson, Inc., New York City, 1991. ISBN 0-500-05075-9.

Fagan, B. (2005), Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-517043-1

Fagan, B. (1998), From Black Land to Fifth Sun: The Science of Sacred Sites, Basic Books, ISBN 0-201-95991-7

Jennings, Jesse D. Glen Canyon: An Archaeological Summary. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1966, republished 1998. ISBN 0-87480-584-8.

LeBlanc, Steven A. "Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest." 1999, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah. ISBN 0-87480-581-3.

Plog, Stephen. Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. Thames and Hudson, London, England, 1997. ISBN 0-500-27939-X.

Roberts, David D. In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest. Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN 0-684-81078-6.

Sofaer, Anna (1997), The Primary Architecture of the Chacoan Culture: A Cosmological Expression, University of New Mexico Press, archived from the original on July 23, 2009

Sofaer, Anna (1999), The Mystery of Chaco Canyon, South Carolina Educational Television

Great Drought. (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved September 30, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/243212/Great-Drought

Text by Michele Strutin; photography by George H.H. Huey. (1994), Chaco: A Cultural Legacy, Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, ISBN 1-877856-45-2

Woodhouse, Connie A.; Meko, David M.; MacDonald, Glen M.; Stahle, Dave W.; Cook, Edward R. (14 December 2010). "A 1,200-year perspective of 21st century drought in southwestern North America". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (50): 21283-21288. doi:10.1073/pnas.0911197107.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.[1] The Ancestral Puebloans are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara Tradition, who developed from the Picosa culture.

# data[].attributes.headline
c. 1200 BC: Olmec culture starts and thrives in Mesoamerica.

# data[].attributes.subject
c. 1200 BC: Olmec culture starts and thrives in Mesoamerica.

# data[].attributes.headline
1206 BC: Approximate starting date of Bronze age collapse, a period of migration, unrest and destruction in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

# data[].attributes.subject
1206 BC: Approximate starting date of Bronze age collapse, a period of migration, unrest and destruction in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

# data[].attributes.headline
1210 BC—Accession of legendary Magadhan king Subrata of the Brihadrata dynasty.

# data[].attributes.subject
1210 BC—Accession of legendary Magadhan king Subrata of the Brihadrata dynasty.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Magadha was an ancient Indian kingdom in southern Bihar, and was counted as one of the sixteen Mahajanapadas, 'Great Kingdoms' of ancient India. Magadha played an important role in the development of Jainism and Buddhism, and two of India's greatest empires, the Maurya Empire and Gupta Empire, originated in Magadha.

The Mauryan Empire and Gupta Empire, both of which originated in Magadha, saw advancements in ancient India's science, mathematics, astronomy, religion, and philosophy and were considered the Golden Age of India. The Magadh kingdom included republican communities such as the community of Rajkumar.[citation needed ] Villages had their own assemblies under their local chiefs called Gramakas. Their administrations were divided into executive, judicial, and military functions.

Geography Edit

The kingdom of the Magadha, before its expansion, corresponded to the modern districts of Patna, Jehanabad, Nalanda, Aurangabad, Arwal, Nawada and Gaya in southern Bihar. It was bounded on the north by the river Ganges, on the east by the river Champa, on the south by the Chota Nagpur Plateau, and on the west by the Son River.

This region of Greater Magadha had a culture and belief system of its own that predated Hinduism. Much of the second urbanisation took place here from c. 500 BCE onwards and it was here that Jainism became strong and Buddhism arose. The importance of Magadha's culture can be seen in that Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism adopted some of its features, most significantly a belief in rebirth and karmic retribution.

Some scholars have identified the Kīkaṭa tribe-mentioned in the Rigveda (3.53.14) with their ruler Pramaganda-as the forefathers of Magadhas because Kikata is used as synonym for Magadha in the later texts;[2] Like the Magadhas in the Atharvaveda, the Rigveda speaks of the Kikatas as a hostile tribe, living on the borders of Brahmanical India, who did not perform Vedic rituals.[3]

The earliest reference to the Magadha people occurs in the Atharvaveda, where they are found listed along with the Angas, Gandharis and Mujavats. The core of the kingdom was the area of Bihar south of the Ganges; its first capital was Rajagriha (modern day Rajgir), then Pataliputra (modern Patna). Rajagriha was initially known as 'Girivrijja' and later came to be known as so during the reign of Ajatashatru. Magadha expanded to include most of Bihar and Bengal with the conquest of Vajji confederation and Anga, respectively.[4] The kingdom of Magadha eventually came to encompass Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and the areas that are today the nations of Bangladesh and Nepal.[5]

The ancient kingdom of Magadha is heavily mentioned in Jain and Buddhist texts. It is also mentioned in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas.

There is little certain information available on the early rulers of Magadha. The most important sources are the Buddhist Pāli Canon, the Jain Agamas and the Hindu Puranas. Based on these sources, it appears that Magadha was ruled by the Haryanka dynasty for some 200 years, c. 543 to 413 BCE.[citation needed ]

Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, lived much of his life in the kingdom of Magadha. He attained enlightenment in Bodh Gaya, gave his first sermon in Sarnath and the first Buddhist council was held in Rajgriha.[6]

The Hindu Mahabharata calls Brihadratha the first ruler of Magadha. King Bimbisara of the Haryanka dynasty led an active and expansive policy, conquering the Kingdom of Anga in what is now West Bengal. King Bimbisara was killed by his son, Prince Ajatashatru. King Pasenadi, king of neighbouring Kosala and brother-in-law of King Bimbisara, promptly retook the gift of the Kashi province.

Accounts differ slightly as to the cause of King Ajatashatru's war with the Licchavi, an area north of the river Ganges. It appears that Ajatashatru sent a minister to the area who worked for three years to undermine the unity of the Licchavis. To launch his attack across the Ganges River, Ajatashatru built a fort at the town of Pataliputra. Torn by disagreements, the Licchavis fought with Ajatashatru. It took fifteen years for Ajatashatru to defeat them. Jain texts tell how Ajatashatru used two new weapons: a catapult, and a covered chariot with swinging mace that has been compared to a modern tank. Pataliputra began to grow as a centre of commerce and became the capital of Magadha after Ajatashatru's death.

The Haryanka dynasty was overthrown by the Shishunaga dynasty. The last Shishunaga ruler, Mahanandin, was assassinated by Mahapadma Nanda in 345 BCE, the first of the so-called "Nine Nandas", i. e. Mahapadma and his eight sons.

In 326 BCE, the army of Alexander approached the western boundaries of Magadha. The army, exhausted and frightened at the prospect of facing another giant Indian army at the Ganges, mutinied at the Hyphasis (the modern Beas River) and refused to march further east. Alexander, after the meeting with his officer Coenus, was persuaded that it was better to return and turned south, conquering his way down the Indus to the Ocean.

Around 321 BCE, the Nanda Dynasty ended and Chandragupta Maurya became the first king of the great Mauryan dynasty and Mauryan Empire with the help of Chanakya. The Empire later extended over most of South Asia under King Ashoka, who was at first known as 'Ashoka the Cruel' but later became a disciple of Buddhism and became known as ' Dharma Ashoka'.[7][8] Later, the Mauryan Empire ended, as did the Shunga and Khārabēḷa empires, to be replaced by the Gupta Empire. The capital of the Gupta Empire remained Pataliputra in Magadha.

Several Śramaṇic movements have existed before the 6th century BCE, and these influenced both the āstika and nāstika traditions of Indian philosophy.[9] The Śramaṇa movement gave rise to diverse range of heterodox beliefs, ranging from accepting or denying the concept of soul, atomism, antinomian ethics, materialism, atheism, agnosticism, fatalism to free will, idealization of extreme asceticism to that of family life, strict ahimsa (non-violence) and vegetarianism to permissibility of violence and meat-eating.[10] Magadha kingdom was the nerve centre of this revolution.

Jainism was revived and re-established after Mahavira, the last and the 24th Tirthankara, synthesised and revived the philosophies and promulgations of the ancient Śramaṇic traditions laid down by the first Jain tirthankara Rishabhanatha millions of years ago.[11]Buddha founded Buddhism which received royal patronage in the kingdom.

According to Indologist Johannes Bronkhorst, the culture of Magadha was in fundamental ways different from the Vedic kingdoms of the Indo-Aryans. He argues for a cultural area termed "Greater Magadha", defined as roughly the geographical area in which the Buddha and Mahavira lived and taught. Suggestive of this distinction, in some Vedic and post-Vedic rituals, a "Magadha man" represents the canonical non-Vedic "outsider", the Magadhan standing in for the presence of any and all non-Vedic peoples or the ritually impure.[12]

With regard to the Buddha, this area stretched by and large from Śrāvastī, the capital of Kosala, in the north-west to Rājagṛha, the capital of Magadha, in the south-east". According to Bronkhorst "there was indeed a culture of Greater Magadha which remained recognizably distinct from Vedic culture until the time of the grammarian Patañjali (ca. 150 BCE) and beyond". Vedic texts such as the Satapatha Brahmana demonize the inhabitants of this area as demonic and as speaking a barbarous speech. The Buddhologist Alexander Wynne writes that there is an "overwhelming amount of evidence" to suggest that this rival culture to the Vedic Aryans dominated the eastern Gangetic plain during the early Buddhist period. Orthodox Vedic Brahmins were, therefore, a minority in Magadha during this early period.[15]

The Magadhan religions are termed the sramana traditions and include Jainism, Buddhism and Ājīvika. Buddhism and Jainism were the religions promoted by the early Magadhan kings, such as Srenika, Bimbisara and Ajatashatru, and the Nanda Dynasty (345-321 BCE) that followed was mostly Jain. These Sramana religions did not worship the Vedic deities, practised some form of asceticism and meditation ( jhana) and tended to construct round burial mounds (called stupas in Buddhism). These religions also sought some type of liberation from the cyclic rounds of rebirth and karmic retribution through spiritual knowledge.

Two notable rulers of Magadha were Bimbisara (also known as Shrenika) and his son Ajatashatru (also known as Kunika), who are mentioned in Buddhist and Jain literature as contemporaries of the Buddha and Mahavira. Later, the throne of Magadha was usurped by Mahapadma Nanda, the founder of the Nanda Dynasty (c. 345-321 BCE), which conquered much of north India. The Nanda Dynasty was overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire (321-180 BCE). There is much uncertainty about the succession of kings and the precise chronology of Magadha prior to Mahapadma Nanda; the accounts of various ancient texts (all of which were written many centuries later than the era in question) contradict each other on many points. Furthermore, there is a "Long Chronology" and a contrasting "Short Chronology" preferred by some scholars, an issue that is inextricably linked to the uncertain chronology of the Buddha and Mahavira.[16]

Pre-Maurya (Long and Short Chronologies) Edit

According to historian John Keay, a proponent of the "Short Chronology," Bimbisara must have been reigning in the late 5th century BCE,[17] and Ajatashatru in the early 4th century BCE.[18] Keay states that there is great uncertainty about the royal succession after Ajatashatru's death, probably because there was a period of "court intrigues and murders," during which "evidently the throne changed hands frequently, perhaps with more than one incumbent claiming to occupy it at the same time" until Mahapadma Nanda was able to secure the throne.[18]

The following "Long Chronology" is according to the Buddhist Mahavamsa:[19]

Haryanka dynasty

Bimbisara (reigned c. 546-494 BCE)

Ajatashatru (c. 494-462 BCE)

Udayin (c. 462-446 BCE)

Anuruddha and Munda (c. 446-438 BCE)

Nagadasaka (c. 438-414 BCE)

Shishunaga dynasty

Shishunaga (c. 414-396 BCE)

Kalashoka (c. 396-368 BCE)

Ten sons of Kalashoka (c. 368-346 BCE)

Nanda Dynasty (c. 346-324 BCE)

On the other hand, the Hindu Puranas give a different sequence:[20]

Shishunaga (reigned for 40 years)

Kakavarna (36 years)

Kshemadharman (20 years)

Kshatraujas (29 years)

Bimbisara (28 years)

Ajatashatru (25 years)

Darbhaka or Darshaka or Harshaka (25 years)

Udayin (33 years)

Nandivardhana (42 years)

Mahanandin (43 years)

Nanda Dynasty (100 years)

A shorter list appears in the Jain tradition, which simply lists Shrenika (Bimbisara), Kunika (Ajatashatru), Udayin, followed by the Nanda Dynasty.[20]

Mauryan Dynasty (322-180 BCE) Edit

Gupta Empire Edit

References Edit

M. Witzel. "^ Rigvedic history: poets, chieftains, and polities," in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity. ed. G. Erdosy (Walter de Gruyer, 1995), p. 333

Ramesh Chandra Majumdar (1977). ^ Ancient India. Motilal Banarsidass Publ. ISBN 81-208-0436-8.

^ Sinha, Bindeshwari Prasad (1977). Dynastic History of Magadha, Cir. 450-1200 A.D. Abhinav Publications. p. 128.

^ "Lumbini Development Trust: Restoring the Lumbini Garden". Archived from the original on 6 March 2014.

Tenzin Tharpa, ^ Tibetan Buddhist Essentials: A Study Guide for the 21st Century: Volume 1: Introduction, Origin, and Adaptation, p.31

Sanjeev Sanyal (2016), ^ The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History, section "Ashoka, the not so great"

^ Ray, Reginald (1999). Buddhist Saints in India. Oxford University Press. pp. 237-240, 247-249. ISBN 978-0195134834.

^ Jaini, Padmanabh S. (2001). Collected papers on Buddhist Studies. Motilal Banarsidass. pp. 57-77. ISBN 978-8120817760.

^ Witzel, Michael (1997). "Macrocosm, Mesocosm, and Microcosm: The Persistent Nature of 'Hindu' Beliefs and Symbolic Forms". International Journal of Hindu Studies. 1 (3): 501-539. doi:10.1007/s11407-997-0021-x. JSTOR 20106493. S2CID 144673508.

^ Wynne, Alexander (2011). "Review of Bronkhorst, Johannes, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India". H-Buddhism.

Geiger, Wilhelm; Bode, Mabel Haynes (25 August 1912). "Mahavamsa : the great chronicle of Ceylon". London : Pub. for the Pali Text Society by Oxford Univ. Pr. - via Internet Archive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magadha was an ancient Indian kingdom in southern Bihar, and was counted as one of the sixteen Mahajanapadas , 'Great Kingdoms' of ancient India. Magadha played an important role in the development of Jainism and Buddhism, and two of India's greatest empires, the Maurya Empire and Gupta Empire, originated in Magadha.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Battle against Sherden sea pirates

In his second year, Ramesses II decisively defeated the Sherden sea pirates who were wreaking havoc along Egypt's Mediterranean coast by attacking cargo-laden vessels travelling the sea routes to Egypt.[20] The Sherden people probably came from the coast of Ionia, from southwest Anatolia or perhaps, also from the island of Sardinia.[21][22][23] Ramesses posted troops and ships at strategic points along the coast and patiently allowed the pirates to attack their perceived prey before skillfully catching them by surprise in a sea battle and capturing them all in a single action.[24] A stele from Tanis speaks of their having come "in their war-ships from the midst of the sea, and none were able to stand before them". There probably was a naval battle somewhere near the mouth of the Nile, as shortly afterward, many Sherden are seen among the pharaoh's body-guard where they are conspicuous by their horned helmets having a ball projecting from the middle, their round shields, and the great Naue II swords with which they are depicted in inscriptions of the Battle of Kadesh.[25] In that sea battle, together with the Sherden, the pharaoh also defeated the Lukka (L'kkw, possibly the later Lycians), and the Šqrsšw ( Shekelesh) peoples.

First Syrian campaign

The immediate antecedents to the Battle of Kadesh were the early campaigns of Ramesses II into Canaan. His first campaign seems to have taken place in the fourth year of his reign and was commemorated by the erection of what became the first of the Commemorative stelae of Nahr el-Kalb near what is now Beirut. The inscription is almost totally illegible due to weathering.

Additional records tell us that he was forced to fight a Canaanite prince who was mortally wounded by an Egyptian archer, and whose army, subsequently, was routed. Ramesses carried off the princes of Canaan as live prisoners to Egypt. Ramesses then plundered the chiefs of the Asiatics in their own lands, returning every year to his headquarters at Riblah to exact tribute. In the fourth year of his reign, he captured the Hittite vassal state of the Amurru during his campaign in Syria.[27]

Second Syrian campaign

Ramesses's forces were caught in a Hittite ambush and outnumbered at Kadesh when they counterattacked and routed the Hittites, whose survivors abandoned their chariots and swam the Orontes river to reach the safe city walls.[29] Ramesses, logistically unable to sustain a long siege, returned to Egypt.[30][31]

Third Syrian campaign

Egypt's sphere of influence was now restricted to Canaan while Syria fell into Hittite hands. Canaanite princes, seemingly encouraged by the Egyptian incapacity to impose their will and goaded on by the Hittites, began revolts against Egypt. In the seventh year of his reign, Ramesses II returned to Syria once again. This time he proved more successful against his Hittite foes. During this campaign he split his army into two forces. One force was led by his son, Amun-her-khepeshef, and it chased warriors of the Šhasu tribes across the Negev as far as the Dead Sea, capturing Edom- Seir. It then marched on to capture Moab. The other force, led by Ramesses, attacked Jerusalem and Jericho. He, too, then entered Moab, where he rejoined his son. The reunited army then marched on Hesbon, Damascus, on to Kumidi, and finally, recaptured Upi (the land around Damascus), reestablishing Egypt's former sphere of influence.[32]

Later campaigns in Syria

Ramesses extended his military successes in his eighth and ninth years. He crossed the Dog River ( Nahr al-Kalb) and pushed north into Amurru. His armies managed to march as far north as Dapur,[33] where he had a statue of himself erected. The Egyptian pharaoh thus found himself in northern Amurru, well past Kadesh, in Tunip, where no Egyptian soldier had been seen since the time of Thutmose III, almost 120 years earlier. He laid siege to the city before capturing it. His victory proved to be ephemeral. In year nine, Ramesses erected a stele at Beth Shean. After having reasserted his power over Canaan, Ramesses led his army north. A mostly illegible stele near Beirut, which appears to be dated to the king's second year, was probably set up there in his tenth.[34] The thin strip of territory pinched between Amurru and Kadesh did not make for a stable possession. Within a year, they had returned to the Hittite fold, so that Ramesses had to march against Dapur once more in his tenth year. This time he claimed to have fought the battle without even bothering to put on his corslet, until two hours after the fighting began. Six of Ramesses's youthful sons, still wearing their side locks, took part in this conquest. He took towns in Retenu,[35] and Tunip in Naharin,[36] later recorded on the walls of the Ramesseum.[37] This second success at the location was equally as meaningless as his first, as neither power could decisively defeat the other in battle.[38]

Peace treaty with the Hittites

This demand precipitated a crisis in relations between Egypt and Hatti when Ramesses denied any knowledge of Mursili's whereabouts in his country, and the two empires came dangerously close to war. Eventually, in the twenty-first year of his reign (1258 BC), Ramesses decided to conclude an agreement with the new Hittite king, Ḫattušili III, at Kadesh to end the conflict. The ensuing document is the earliest known peace treaty in world history.[41]

The peace treaty was recorded in two versions, one in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the other in Akkadian, using cuneiform script; both versions survive. Such dual-language recording is common to many subsequent treaties. This treaty differs from others, in that the two language versions are worded differently. While the majority of the text is identical, the Hittite version says the Egyptians came suing for peace and the Egyptian version says the reverse.[42] The treaty was given to the Egyptians in the form of a silver plaque, and this "pocket-book" version was taken back to Egypt and carved into the temple at Karnak.

The treaty was concluded between Ramesses II and Ḫattušili III in year 21 of Ramesses's reign (c. 1258 BC).[43] Its 18 articles call for peace between Egypt and Hatti and then proceeds to maintain that their respective deities also demand peace. The frontiers are not laid down in this treaty, but may be inferred from other documents. The Anastasy A papyrus describes Canaan during the latter part of the reign of Ramesses II and enumerates and names the Phoenician coastal towns under Egyptian control. The harbour town of Sumur, north of Byblos, is mentioned as the northernmost town belonging to Egypt, suggesting it contained an Egyptian garrison.[44]

No further Egyptian campaigns in Canaan are mentioned after the conclusion of the peace treaty. The northern border seems to have been safe and quiet, so the rule of the pharaoh was strong until Ramesses II's death, and the waning of the dynasty.[45] When the King of Mira attempted to involve Ramesses in a hostile act against the Hittites, the Egyptian responded that the times of intrigue in support of Mursili III, had passed. Ḫattušili III wrote to Kadashman-Enlil II, Kassite king of Karduniaš ( Babylon) in the same spirit, reminding him of the time when his father, Kadashman-Turgu, had offered to fight Ramesses II, the king of Egypt. The Hittite king encouraged the Babylonian to oppose another enemy, which must have been the king of Assyria, whose allies had killed the messenger of the Egyptian king. Ḫattušili encouraged Kadashman-Enlil to come to his aid and prevent the Assyrians from cutting the link between the Canaanite province of Egypt and Mursili III, the ally of Ramesses.

Campaigns in Nubia

Ramesses II also campaigned south of the first cataract of the Nile into Nubia. When Ramesses was about 22, two of his own sons, including Amun-her-khepeshef, accompanied him in at least one of those campaigns. By the time of Ramesses, Nubia had been a colony for 200 years, but its conquest was recalled in decoration from the temples Ramesses II built at Beit el-Wali[46] (which was the subject of epigraphic work by the Oriental Institute during the Nubian salvage campaign of the 1960s),[47] Gerf Hussein and Kalabsha in northern Nubia. On the south wall of the Beit el-Wali temple, Ramesses II is depicted charging into battle against the Nubians in a war chariot, while his two young sons, Amun-her-khepsef and Khaemwaset, are shown behind him, also in war chariots. A wall in one of Ramesses's temples says he had to fight one battle with the Nubians without help from his soldiers.

Campaigns in Libya

During the reign of Ramesses II, the Egyptians were evidently active on a 300-kilometre (190 mi) stretch along the Mediterranean coast, at least as far as Zawyet Umm El Rakham.[48] Although the exact events surrounding the foundation of the coastal forts and fortresses is not clear, some degree of political and military control must have been held over the region to allow their construction.

There are no detailed accounts of Ramesses II's undertaking large military actions against the Libyans, only generalised records of his conquering and crushing them, which may or may not refer to specific events that were otherwise unrecorded. It may be that some of the records, such as the Aswan Stele of his year 2, are harking back to Ramesses's presence on his father's Libyan campaigns. Perhaps it was Seti I who achieved this supposed control over the region, and who planned to establish the defensive system, in a manner similar to how he rebuilt those to the east, the Ways of Horus across Northern Sinai.

Ramesses built extensively throughout Egypt and Nubia, and his cartouches are prominently displayed even in buildings that he did not construct.[51] There are accounts of his honor hewn on stone, statues, and the remains of palaces and temples-most notably the Ramesseum in western Thebes and the rock temples of Abu Simbel. He covered the land from the Delta to Nubia with buildings in a way no monarch before him had.[52] He also founded a new capital city in the Delta during his reign, called Pi-Ramesses. It previously had served as a summer palace during Seti I's reign.[53]

His memorial temple, known today as the Ramesseum, was just the beginning of the pharaoh's obsession with building. When he built, he built on a scale unlike almost anything before. In the third year of his reign, Ramesses started the most ambitious building project after the pyramids, which were built almost 1,500 years earlier. The population was put to work changing the face of Egypt. In Thebes, the ancient temples were transformed, so that each one of them reflected honour to Ramesses as a symbol of his putative divine nature and power. Ramesses decided to eternalize himself in stone, and so he ordered changes to the methods used by his masons. The elegant but shallow reliefs of previous pharaohs were easily transformed, and so their images and words could easily be obliterated by their successors. Ramesses insisted that his carvings be deeply engraved into the stone, which made them not only less susceptible to later alteration, but also made them more prominent in the Egyptian sun, reflecting his relationship with the sun deity, Ra.

Ramesses constructed many large monuments, including the archaeological complex of Abu Simbel, and the mortuary temple known as the Ramesseum. He built on a monumental scale to ensure that his legacy would survive the ravages of time. Ramesses used art as a means of propaganda for his victories over foreigners, which are depicted on numerous temple reliefs. Ramesses II erected more colossal statues of himself than any other pharaoh, and also usurped many existing statues by inscribing his own cartouche on them.

Pi-Ramesses

Ramesses II moved the capital of his kingdom from Thebes in the Nile valley to a new site in the eastern Delta. His motives are uncertain, although he possibly wished to be closer to his territories in Canaan and Syria. The new city of Pi-Ramesses (or to give the full name, Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu, meaning "Domain of Ramesses, Great in Victory")[54] was dominated by huge temples and his vast residential palace, complete with its own zoo. In the 10th century AD the Bible exegete Rabbi Saadia Gaon, believed that the biblical site of Ramesses had to be identified with Ain Shams.[55] For a time, during the early 20th century, the site was misidentified as that of Tanis, due to the amount of statuary and other material from Pi-Ramesses found there, but it now is recognised that the Ramesside remains at Tanis were brought there from elsewhere, and the real Pi-Ramesses lies about 30 km (18.6 mi) south, near modern Qantir.[56] The colossal feet of the statue of Ramesses are almost all that remains above ground today. The rest is buried in the fields.[54]

Ramesseum

Oriented northwest and southeast, the temple was preceded by two courts. An enormous pylon stood before the first court, with the royal palace at the left and the gigantic statue of the king looming up at the back. Only fragments of the base and torso remain of the syenite statue of the enthroned pharaoh, 17 metres (56 ft) high and weighing more than 1,000 tonnes (980 long tons; 1,100 short tons). Scenes of the great pharaoh and his army triumphing over the Hittite forces fleeing before Kadesh are represented on the pylon. Remains of the second court include part of the internal facade of the pylon and a portion of the Osiride portico on the right. Scenes of war and the alleged rout of the Hittites at Kadesh are repeated on the walls. In the upper registers, feast and honor of the phallic deity Min, god of fertility.

On the opposite side of the court the few Osiride pillars and columns still remaining may furnish an idea of the original grandeur.[58] Scattered remains of the two statues of the seated king also may be seen, one in pink granite and the other in black granite, which once flanked the entrance to the temple. Thirty-nine out of the forty-eight columns in the great hypostyle hall (41 × 31 m) still stand in the central rows. They are decorated with the usual scenes of the king before various deities.[59] Part of the ceiling, decorated with gold stars on a blue ground, also has been preserved. Ramesses's children appear in the procession on the few walls left. The sanctuary was composed of three consecutive rooms, with eight columns and the tetrastyle cell. Part of the first room, with the ceiling decorated with astral scenes, and few remains of the second room are all that is left. Vast storerooms built of mud bricks stretched out around the temple.[58] Traces of a school for scribes were found among the ruins.[60]

A temple of Seti I, of which nothing remains beside the foundations, once stood to the right of the hypostyle hall.[59]

Abu Simbel

Other Nubian monuments

As well as the temples of Abu Simbel, Ramesses left other monuments to himself in Nubia. His early campaigns are illustrated on the walls of the Temple of Beit el-Wali (now relocated to New Kalabsha). Other temples dedicated to Ramesses are Derr and Gerf Hussein (also relocated to New Kalabsha).

Colossal statue

The colossal statue of Ramesses II dates back 3,200 years, and was originally discovered in six pieces in a temple near Memphis. Weighing some 83-tonne (82-long-ton; 91-short-ton), it was transported, reconstructed, and erected in Ramesses Square in Cairo in 1955. In August 2006, contractors relocated it to save it from exhaust fumes that were causing it to deteriorate.[63] The new site is near the future Grand Egyptian Museum.[64]

Tomb KV7

Originally Ramesses II was buried in the tomb KV7[65] in the Valley of the Kings, but because of looting, priests later transferred the body to a holding- area, re-wrapped it, and placed it inside the tomb of queen Ahmose Inhapy. Seventy-two hours later it was again moved, to the tomb of the high priest Pinedjem II. All of this is recorded in hieroglyphics on the linen covering the body of the coffin of Ramesses II. His mummy was eventually discovered in TT320 inside an ordinary wooden coffin[68] and is now in Cairo's National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (until 3 April 2021 it was in the Egyptian Museum).

The pharaoh's mummy reveals an aquiline nose and strong jaw. It stands at about 1.7 metres (5 ft 7 in).[69] Gaston Maspero, who first unwrapped the mummy of Ramesses II, writes, "on the temples there are a few sparse hairs, but at the poll the hair is quite thick, forming smooth, straight locks about five centimeters in length. White at the time of death, and possibly auburn during life, they have been dyed a light red by the spices (henna) used in embalming...the moustache and beard are thin...The hairs are white, like those of the head and eyebrows...the skin is of earthy brown, splotched with black... the face of the mummy gives a fair idea of the face of the living king."[70][71]

In 1975, Maurice Bucaille, a French doctor, examined the mummy at the Cairo Museum and found it in poor condition. French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing succeeded in convincing Egyptian authorities to send the mummy to France for treatment. In September 1976, it was greeted at Paris-Le Bourget Airport with full military honours befitting a king, then taken to a laboratory at the Musée de l'Homme.[72][73][74]

The mummy was forensically tested by Professor Pierre-Fernand Ceccaldi, the chief forensic scientist at the Criminal Identification Laboratory of Paris. Professor Ceccaldi determined that: "Hair, astonishingly preserved, showed some complementary data - especially about pigmentation: Ramesses II was a ginger haired ' cymnotriche leucoderma'." The description given here refers to a fair-skinned person with wavy ginger hair.[75][76] Subsequent microscopic inspection of the roots of Ramesses II's hair proved that the king's hair originally was red, which suggests that he came from a family of redheads.[77][78] This has more than just cosmetic significance: in ancient Egypt people with red hair were associated with the deity Set, the slayer of Osiris, and the name of Ramesses II's father, Seti I, means "follower of Seth".[79]

During the examination, scientific analysis revealed battle-wounds, old fractures, arthritis and poor circulation.[citation needed ] Ramesses II's arthritis is believed to have made him walk with a hunched back for the last decades of his life.[80] A 2004 study excluded ankylosing spondylitis as a possible cause and proposed diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis as a possible alternative,[81] which was confirmed by more recent work.[82] A significant hole in the pharaoh's mandible was detected. Researchers observed "an abscess by his teeth (which) was serious enough to have caused death by infection, although this cannot be determined with certainty".[80]

After being irradiated in an attempt to eliminate fungi and insects, the mummy was returned from Paris to Egypt in May 1977.[83]

Tomb of Nefertari

The tomb of the most important consort of Ramesses was discovered by Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1904.[58][62] Although it had been looted in ancient times, the tomb of Nefertari is extremely important, because its magnificent wall-painting decoration is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of ancient Egyptian art. A flight of steps cut out of the rock gives access to the antechamber, which is decorated with paintings based on chapter seventeen of the Book of the Dead. This astronomical ceiling represents the heavens and is painted in dark blue, with a myriad of golden five-pointed stars. The east wall of the antechamber is interrupted by a large opening flanked by representation of Osiris at the left and Anubis at the right; this in turn leads to the side chamber, decorated with offering-scenes, preceded by a vestibule in which the paintings portray Nefertari presented to the deities, who welcome her. On the north wall of the antechamber is the stairway down to the burial-chamber, a vast quadrangular room covering a surface-area of about 90 square metres (970 sq ft), its astronomical ceiling supported by four pillars, entirely decorated. Originally, the queen's red granite sarcophagus lay in the middle of this chamber. According to religious doctrines of the time, it was in this chamber, which the ancient Egyptians called the Golden Hall, that the regeneration of the deceased took place. This decorative pictogram of the walls in the burial-chamber drew inspiration from chapters 144 and 146 of the Book of the Dead: in the left half of the chamber, there are passages from chapter 144 concerning the gates and doors of the kingdom of Osiris, their guardians, and the magic formulas that had to be uttered by the deceased in order to go past the doors.[62]

Tomb KV5

In 1995, Professor Kent Weeks, head of the Theban Mapping Project, rediscovered Tomb KV5. It has proven to be the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and originally contained the mummified remains of some of this king's estimated 52 sons. Approximately 150 corridors and tomb chambers have been located in this tomb as of 2006 and the tomb may contain as many as 200 corridors and chambers.[85] It is believed that at least four of Ramesses's sons, including Meryatum, Sety, Amun-her-khepeshef (Ramesses's first-born son) and "the King's Principal Son of His Body, the Generalissimo Ramesses, justified" (i.e., deceased) were buried there from inscriptions, ostraca or canopic jars discovered in the tomb.[86] Joyce Tyldesley writes that thus far

no intact burials have been discovered and there have been little substantial funeral debris: thousands of potsherds, faience ushabti figures, beads, amulets, fragments of Canopic jars, of wooden coffins ... but no intact sarcophagi, mummies or mummy cases, suggesting that much of the tomb may have been unused. Those burials which were made in KV5 were thoroughly looted in antiquity, leaving little or no remains.[86]

Recent discoveries

In December 2019, a red granite royal bust of Ramesses II was unearthed by an Egyptian archaeological mission in the village of Mit Rahina in Giza. The bust depicted Ramesses II wearing a wig with the symbol "Ka" on his head. Its measurements were 55 cm (21.65 in) wide, 45 cm (17.71 in) thick and 105 cm (41.33 in) long. Alongside the bust, limestone blocks appeared showing Ramesses II during the Heb-Sed religious ritual.[87] "This discovery is considered one of the rarest archaeological discoveries. It is the first-ever Ka statue made of granite to be discovered. The only Ka statue that was previously found is made of wood and it belongs to one of the kings of the 13th dynasty of ancient Egypt which is displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square," said archaeologist Mostafa Waziri.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In his second year, Ramesses II decisively defeated the Sherden sea pirates who were wreaking havoc along Egypt's Mediterranean coast by attacking cargo-laden vessels travelling the sea routes to Egypt.[20] The Sherden people probably came from the coast of Ionia, from southwest Anatolia or perhaps, also from the island of

# data[].attributes.headline
1212 BC—Death of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses the Great.

# data[].attributes.subject
1212 BC—Death of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses the Great.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Battle against Sherden sea pirates

In his second year, Ramesses II decisively defeated the Sherden sea pirates who were wreaking havoc along Egypt's Mediterranean coast by attacking cargo-laden vessels travelling the sea routes to Egypt.[20] The Sherden people probably came from the coast of Ionia, from southwest Anatolia or perhaps, also from the island of Sardinia.[21][22][23] Ramesses posted troops and ships at strategic points along the coast and patiently allowed the pirates to attack their perceived prey before skillfully catching them by surprise in a sea battle and capturing them all in a single action.[24] A stele from Tanis speaks of their having come "in their war-ships from the midst of the sea, and none were able to stand before them". There probably was a naval battle somewhere near the mouth of the Nile, as shortly afterward, many Sherden are seen among the pharaoh's body-guard where they are conspicuous by their horned helmets having a ball projecting from the middle, their round shields, and the great Naue II swords with which they are depicted in inscriptions of the Battle of Kadesh.[25] In that sea battle, together with the Sherden, the pharaoh also defeated the Lukka (L'kkw, possibly the later Lycians), and the Šqrsšw ( Shekelesh) peoples.

First Syrian campaign

The immediate antecedents to the Battle of Kadesh were the early campaigns of Ramesses II into Canaan. His first campaign seems to have taken place in the fourth year of his reign and was commemorated by the erection of what became the first of the Commemorative stelae of Nahr el-Kalb near what is now Beirut. The inscription is almost totally illegible due to weathering.

Additional records tell us that he was forced to fight a Canaanite prince who was mortally wounded by an Egyptian archer, and whose army, subsequently, was routed. Ramesses carried off the princes of Canaan as live prisoners to Egypt. Ramesses then plundered the chiefs of the Asiatics in their own lands, returning every year to his headquarters at Riblah to exact tribute. In the fourth year of his reign, he captured the Hittite vassal state of the Amurru during his campaign in Syria.[27]

Second Syrian campaign

Ramesses's forces were caught in a Hittite ambush and outnumbered at Kadesh when they counterattacked and routed the Hittites, whose survivors abandoned their chariots and swam the Orontes river to reach the safe city walls.[29] Ramesses, logistically unable to sustain a long siege, returned to Egypt.[30][31]

Third Syrian campaign

Egypt's sphere of influence was now restricted to Canaan while Syria fell into Hittite hands. Canaanite princes, seemingly encouraged by the Egyptian incapacity to impose their will and goaded on by the Hittites, began revolts against Egypt. In the seventh year of his reign, Ramesses II returned to Syria once again. This time he proved more successful against his Hittite foes. During this campaign he split his army into two forces. One force was led by his son, Amun-her-khepeshef, and it chased warriors of the Šhasu tribes across the Negev as far as the Dead Sea, capturing Edom- Seir. It then marched on to capture Moab. The other force, led by Ramesses, attacked Jerusalem and Jericho. He, too, then entered Moab, where he rejoined his son. The reunited army then marched on Hesbon, Damascus, on to Kumidi, and finally, recaptured Upi (the land around Damascus), reestablishing Egypt's former sphere of influence.[32]

Later campaigns in Syria

Ramesses extended his military successes in his eighth and ninth years. He crossed the Dog River ( Nahr al-Kalb) and pushed north into Amurru. His armies managed to march as far north as Dapur,[33] where he had a statue of himself erected. The Egyptian pharaoh thus found himself in northern Amurru, well past Kadesh, in Tunip, where no Egyptian soldier had been seen since the time of Thutmose III, almost 120 years earlier. He laid siege to the city before capturing it. His victory proved to be ephemeral. In year nine, Ramesses erected a stele at Beth Shean. After having reasserted his power over Canaan, Ramesses led his army north. A mostly illegible stele near Beirut, which appears to be dated to the king's second year, was probably set up there in his tenth.[34] The thin strip of territory pinched between Amurru and Kadesh did not make for a stable possession. Within a year, they had returned to the Hittite fold, so that Ramesses had to march against Dapur once more in his tenth year. This time he claimed to have fought the battle without even bothering to put on his corslet, until two hours after the fighting began. Six of Ramesses's youthful sons, still wearing their side locks, took part in this conquest. He took towns in Retenu,[35] and Tunip in Naharin,[36] later recorded on the walls of the Ramesseum.[37] This second success at the location was equally as meaningless as his first, as neither power could decisively defeat the other in battle.[38]

Peace treaty with the Hittites

This demand precipitated a crisis in relations between Egypt and Hatti when Ramesses denied any knowledge of Mursili's whereabouts in his country, and the two empires came dangerously close to war. Eventually, in the twenty-first year of his reign (1258 BC), Ramesses decided to conclude an agreement with the new Hittite king, Ḫattušili III, at Kadesh to end the conflict. The ensuing document is the earliest known peace treaty in world history.[41]

The peace treaty was recorded in two versions, one in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the other in Akkadian, using cuneiform script; both versions survive. Such dual-language recording is common to many subsequent treaties. This treaty differs from others, in that the two language versions are worded differently. While the majority of the text is identical, the Hittite version says the Egyptians came suing for peace and the Egyptian version says the reverse.[42] The treaty was given to the Egyptians in the form of a silver plaque, and this "pocket-book" version was taken back to Egypt and carved into the temple at Karnak.

The treaty was concluded between Ramesses II and Ḫattušili III in year 21 of Ramesses's reign (c. 1258 BC).[43] Its 18 articles call for peace between Egypt and Hatti and then proceeds to maintain that their respective deities also demand peace. The frontiers are not laid down in this treaty, but may be inferred from other documents. The Anastasy A papyrus describes Canaan during the latter part of the reign of Ramesses II and enumerates and names the Phoenician coastal towns under Egyptian control. The harbour town of Sumur, north of Byblos, is mentioned as the northernmost town belonging to Egypt, suggesting it contained an Egyptian garrison.[44]

No further Egyptian campaigns in Canaan are mentioned after the conclusion of the peace treaty. The northern border seems to have been safe and quiet, so the rule of the pharaoh was strong until Ramesses II's death, and the waning of the dynasty.[45] When the King of Mira attempted to involve Ramesses in a hostile act against the Hittites, the Egyptian responded that the times of intrigue in support of Mursili III, had passed. Ḫattušili III wrote to Kadashman-Enlil II, Kassite king of Karduniaš ( Babylon) in the same spirit, reminding him of the time when his father, Kadashman-Turgu, had offered to fight Ramesses II, the king of Egypt. The Hittite king encouraged the Babylonian to oppose another enemy, which must have been the king of Assyria, whose allies had killed the messenger of the Egyptian king. Ḫattušili encouraged Kadashman-Enlil to come to his aid and prevent the Assyrians from cutting the link between the Canaanite province of Egypt and Mursili III, the ally of Ramesses.

Campaigns in Nubia

Ramesses II also campaigned south of the first cataract of the Nile into Nubia. When Ramesses was about 22, two of his own sons, including Amun-her-khepeshef, accompanied him in at least one of those campaigns. By the time of Ramesses, Nubia had been a colony for 200 years, but its conquest was recalled in decoration from the temples Ramesses II built at Beit el-Wali[46] (which was the subject of epigraphic work by the Oriental Institute during the Nubian salvage campaign of the 1960s),[47] Gerf Hussein and Kalabsha in northern Nubia. On the south wall of the Beit el-Wali temple, Ramesses II is depicted charging into battle against the Nubians in a war chariot, while his two young sons, Amun-her-khepsef and Khaemwaset, are shown behind him, also in war chariots. A wall in one of Ramesses's temples says he had to fight one battle with the Nubians without help from his soldiers.

Campaigns in Libya

During the reign of Ramesses II, the Egyptians were evidently active on a 300-kilometre (190 mi) stretch along the Mediterranean coast, at least as far as Zawyet Umm El Rakham.[48] Although the exact events surrounding the foundation of the coastal forts and fortresses is not clear, some degree of political and military control must have been held over the region to allow their construction.

There are no detailed accounts of Ramesses II's undertaking large military actions against the Libyans, only generalised records of his conquering and crushing them, which may or may not refer to specific events that were otherwise unrecorded. It may be that some of the records, such as the Aswan Stele of his year 2, are harking back to Ramesses's presence on his father's Libyan campaigns. Perhaps it was Seti I who achieved this supposed control over the region, and who planned to establish the defensive system, in a manner similar to how he rebuilt those to the east, the Ways of Horus across Northern Sinai.

Ramesses built extensively throughout Egypt and Nubia, and his cartouches are prominently displayed even in buildings that he did not construct.[51] There are accounts of his honor hewn on stone, statues, and the remains of palaces and temples-most notably the Ramesseum in western Thebes and the rock temples of Abu Simbel. He covered the land from the Delta to Nubia with buildings in a way no monarch before him had.[52] He also founded a new capital city in the Delta during his reign, called Pi-Ramesses. It previously had served as a summer palace during Seti I's reign.[53]

His memorial temple, known today as the Ramesseum, was just the beginning of the pharaoh's obsession with building. When he built, he built on a scale unlike almost anything before. In the third year of his reign, Ramesses started the most ambitious building project after the pyramids, which were built almost 1,500 years earlier. The population was put to work changing the face of Egypt. In Thebes, the ancient temples were transformed, so that each one of them reflected honour to Ramesses as a symbol of his putative divine nature and power. Ramesses decided to eternalize himself in stone, and so he ordered changes to the methods used by his masons. The elegant but shallow reliefs of previous pharaohs were easily transformed, and so their images and words could easily be obliterated by their successors. Ramesses insisted that his carvings be deeply engraved into the stone, which made them not only less susceptible to later alteration, but also made them more prominent in the Egyptian sun, reflecting his relationship with the sun deity, Ra.

Ramesses constructed many large monuments, including the archaeological complex of Abu Simbel, and the mortuary temple known as the Ramesseum. He built on a monumental scale to ensure that his legacy would survive the ravages of time. Ramesses used art as a means of propaganda for his victories over foreigners, which are depicted on numerous temple reliefs. Ramesses II erected more colossal statues of himself than any other pharaoh, and also usurped many existing statues by inscribing his own cartouche on them.

Pi-Ramesses

Ramesses II moved the capital of his kingdom from Thebes in the Nile valley to a new site in the eastern Delta. His motives are uncertain, although he possibly wished to be closer to his territories in Canaan and Syria. The new city of Pi-Ramesses (or to give the full name, Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu, meaning "Domain of Ramesses, Great in Victory")[54] was dominated by huge temples and his vast residential palace, complete with its own zoo. In the 10th century AD the Bible exegete Rabbi Saadia Gaon, believed that the biblical site of Ramesses had to be identified with Ain Shams.[55] For a time, during the early 20th century, the site was misidentified as that of Tanis, due to the amount of statuary and other material from Pi-Ramesses found there, but it now is recognised that the Ramesside remains at Tanis were brought there from elsewhere, and the real Pi-Ramesses lies about 30 km (18.6 mi) south, near modern Qantir.[56] The colossal feet of the statue of Ramesses are almost all that remains above ground today. The rest is buried in the fields.[54]

Ramesseum

Oriented northwest and southeast, the temple was preceded by two courts. An enormous pylon stood before the first court, with the royal palace at the left and the gigantic statue of the king looming up at the back. Only fragments of the base and torso remain of the syenite statue of the enthroned pharaoh, 17 metres (56 ft) high and weighing more than 1,000 tonnes (980 long tons; 1,100 short tons). Scenes of the great pharaoh and his army triumphing over the Hittite forces fleeing before Kadesh are represented on the pylon. Remains of the second court include part of the internal facade of the pylon and a portion of the Osiride portico on the right. Scenes of war and the alleged rout of the Hittites at Kadesh are repeated on the walls. In the upper registers, feast and honor of the phallic deity Min, god of fertility.

On the opposite side of the court the few Osiride pillars and columns still remaining may furnish an idea of the original grandeur.[58] Scattered remains of the two statues of the seated king also may be seen, one in pink granite and the other in black granite, which once flanked the entrance to the temple. Thirty-nine out of the forty-eight columns in the great hypostyle hall (41 × 31 m) still stand in the central rows. They are decorated with the usual scenes of the king before various deities.[59] Part of the ceiling, decorated with gold stars on a blue ground, also has been preserved. Ramesses's children appear in the procession on the few walls left. The sanctuary was composed of three consecutive rooms, with eight columns and the tetrastyle cell. Part of the first room, with the ceiling decorated with astral scenes, and few remains of the second room are all that is left. Vast storerooms built of mud bricks stretched out around the temple.[58] Traces of a school for scribes were found among the ruins.[60]

A temple of Seti I, of which nothing remains beside the foundations, once stood to the right of the hypostyle hall.[59]

Abu Simbel

Other Nubian monuments

As well as the temples of Abu Simbel, Ramesses left other monuments to himself in Nubia. His early campaigns are illustrated on the walls of the Temple of Beit el-Wali (now relocated to New Kalabsha). Other temples dedicated to Ramesses are Derr and Gerf Hussein (also relocated to New Kalabsha).

Colossal statue

The colossal statue of Ramesses II dates back 3,200 years, and was originally discovered in six pieces in a temple near Memphis. Weighing some 83-tonne (82-long-ton; 91-short-ton), it was transported, reconstructed, and erected in Ramesses Square in Cairo in 1955. In August 2006, contractors relocated it to save it from exhaust fumes that were causing it to deteriorate.[63] The new site is near the future Grand Egyptian Museum.[64]

Tomb KV7

Originally Ramesses II was buried in the tomb KV7[65] in the Valley of the Kings, but because of looting, priests later transferred the body to a holding- area, re-wrapped it, and placed it inside the tomb of queen Ahmose Inhapy. Seventy-two hours later it was again moved, to the tomb of the high priest Pinedjem II. All of this is recorded in hieroglyphics on the linen covering the body of the coffin of Ramesses II. His mummy was eventually discovered in TT320 inside an ordinary wooden coffin[68] and is now in Cairo's National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (until 3 April 2021 it was in the Egyptian Museum).

The pharaoh's mummy reveals an aquiline nose and strong jaw. It stands at about 1.7 metres (5 ft 7 in).[69] Gaston Maspero, who first unwrapped the mummy of Ramesses II, writes, "on the temples there are a few sparse hairs, but at the poll the hair is quite thick, forming smooth, straight locks about five centimeters in length. White at the time of death, and possibly auburn during life, they have been dyed a light red by the spices (henna) used in embalming...the moustache and beard are thin...The hairs are white, like those of the head and eyebrows...the skin is of earthy brown, splotched with black... the face of the mummy gives a fair idea of the face of the living king."[70][71]

In 1975, Maurice Bucaille, a French doctor, examined the mummy at the Cairo Museum and found it in poor condition. French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing succeeded in convincing Egyptian authorities to send the mummy to France for treatment. In September 1976, it was greeted at Paris-Le Bourget Airport with full military honours befitting a king, then taken to a laboratory at the Musée de l'Homme.[72][73][74]

The mummy was forensically tested by Professor Pierre-Fernand Ceccaldi, the chief forensic scientist at the Criminal Identification Laboratory of Paris. Professor Ceccaldi determined that: "Hair, astonishingly preserved, showed some complementary data - especially about pigmentation: Ramesses II was a ginger haired ' cymnotriche leucoderma'." The description given here refers to a fair-skinned person with wavy ginger hair.[75][76] Subsequent microscopic inspection of the roots of Ramesses II's hair proved that the king's hair originally was red, which suggests that he came from a family of redheads.[77][78] This has more than just cosmetic significance: in ancient Egypt people with red hair were associated with the deity Set, the slayer of Osiris, and the name of Ramesses II's father, Seti I, means "follower of Seth".[79]

During the examination, scientific analysis revealed battle-wounds, old fractures, arthritis and poor circulation.[citation needed ] Ramesses II's arthritis is believed to have made him walk with a hunched back for the last decades of his life.[80] A 2004 study excluded ankylosing spondylitis as a possible cause and proposed diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis as a possible alternative,[81] which was confirmed by more recent work.[82] A significant hole in the pharaoh's mandible was detected. Researchers observed "an abscess by his teeth (which) was serious enough to have caused death by infection, although this cannot be determined with certainty".[80]

After being irradiated in an attempt to eliminate fungi and insects, the mummy was returned from Paris to Egypt in May 1977.[83]

Tomb of Nefertari

The tomb of the most important consort of Ramesses was discovered by Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1904.[58][62] Although it had been looted in ancient times, the tomb of Nefertari is extremely important, because its magnificent wall-painting decoration is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of ancient Egyptian art. A flight of steps cut out of the rock gives access to the antechamber, which is decorated with paintings based on chapter seventeen of the Book of the Dead. This astronomical ceiling represents the heavens and is painted in dark blue, with a myriad of golden five-pointed stars. The east wall of the antechamber is interrupted by a large opening flanked by representation of Osiris at the left and Anubis at the right; this in turn leads to the side chamber, decorated with offering-scenes, preceded by a vestibule in which the paintings portray Nefertari presented to the deities, who welcome her. On the north wall of the antechamber is the stairway down to the burial-chamber, a vast quadrangular room covering a surface-area of about 90 square metres (970 sq ft), its astronomical ceiling supported by four pillars, entirely decorated. Originally, the queen's red granite sarcophagus lay in the middle of this chamber. According to religious doctrines of the time, it was in this chamber, which the ancient Egyptians called the Golden Hall, that the regeneration of the deceased took place. This decorative pictogram of the walls in the burial-chamber drew inspiration from chapters 144 and 146 of the Book of the Dead: in the left half of the chamber, there are passages from chapter 144 concerning the gates and doors of the kingdom of Osiris, their guardians, and the magic formulas that had to be uttered by the deceased in order to go past the doors.[62]

Tomb KV5

In 1995, Professor Kent Weeks, head of the Theban Mapping Project, rediscovered Tomb KV5. It has proven to be the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and originally contained the mummified remains of some of this king's estimated 52 sons. Approximately 150 corridors and tomb chambers have been located in this tomb as of 2006 and the tomb may contain as many as 200 corridors and chambers.[85] It is believed that at least four of Ramesses's sons, including Meryatum, Sety, Amun-her-khepeshef (Ramesses's first-born son) and "the King's Principal Son of His Body, the Generalissimo Ramesses, justified" (i.e., deceased) were buried there from inscriptions, ostraca or canopic jars discovered in the tomb.[86] Joyce Tyldesley writes that thus far

no intact burials have been discovered and there have been little substantial funeral debris: thousands of potsherds, faience ushabti figures, beads, amulets, fragments of Canopic jars, of wooden coffins ... but no intact sarcophagi, mummies or mummy cases, suggesting that much of the tomb may have been unused. Those burials which were made in KV5 were thoroughly looted in antiquity, leaving little or no remains.[86]

Recent discoveries

In December 2019, a red granite royal bust of Ramesses II was unearthed by an Egyptian archaeological mission in the village of Mit Rahina in Giza. The bust depicted Ramesses II wearing a wig with the symbol "Ka" on his head. Its measurements were 55 cm (21.65 in) wide, 45 cm (17.71 in) thick and 105 cm (41.33 in) long. Alongside the bust, limestone blocks appeared showing Ramesses II during the Heb-Sed religious ritual.[87] "This discovery is considered one of the rarest archaeological discoveries. It is the first-ever Ka statue made of granite to be discovered. The only Ka statue that was previously found is made of wood and it belongs to one of the kings of the 13th dynasty of ancient Egypt which is displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square," said archaeologist Mostafa Waziri.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In his second year, Ramesses II decisively defeated the Sherden sea pirates who were wreaking havoc along Egypt's Mediterranean coast by attacking cargo-laden vessels travelling the sea routes to Egypt.[20] The Sherden people probably came from the coast of Ionia, from southwest Anatolia or perhaps, also from the island of

# data[].attributes.headline
1213 BC—Theseus, legendary King of Athens, is deposed and succeeded by Menestheus.

# data[].attributes.subject
1213 BC—Theseus, legendary King of Athens, is deposed and succeeded by Menestheus.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Theseus (, ; Greek: Θησεύς [tʰɛːsěu̯s]) was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. His role in history has been called "a major cultural transition, like the making of the new Olympia by Hercules."[1]:204 The myths surrounding Theseus-his journeys, exploits, and friends-have provided material for fiction throughout the ages.

Theseus is sometimes described as the son of Aegeus, King of Athens, and sometimes as the son of the god Poseidon. He is raised by his mother, Aethra, and when he discovers his connection to Aegeus travels overland to Athens, having many adventures on the way. When he reaches Athens, he finds that Aegeus is married to Medea (formerly wife of Jason), who plots against him.

The most famous legend about Theseus is his slaying of the Minotaur, half man and half bull. He then goes on to unite Attica under Athenian rule: the synoikismos ('dwelling together'). As the unifying king, he is credited with building a palace on the fortress of the Acropolis. Pausanias reports that after the synoikismos, Theseus established a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos ('Aphrodite of all the People') on the southern slope of the Acropolis.

Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes use of varying accounts of the death of the Minotaur, Theseus' escape, how Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, fell in love with Theseus, and his betrayal of her.[i]

Plutarch's avowed purpose is to construct a life that parallels the Life of Romulus, the founding myth of Rome. Plutarch's sources, not all of whose texts have survived independently, included Pherecydes (mid-fifth century BCE), Demon (c. 400 BCE), Philochorus, and Cleidemus (both fourth century BCE).[2] As the subject of myth, the existence of Theseus as a real person has not been proven, but scholars believe that he may have been alive during the Late Bronze Age[3] possibly as a king in the 8th or 9th century BCE.[4]

Aegeus, one of the primordial kings of Athens, was childless. Desiring an heir, he asked the Oracle of Delphi for advice. Her cryptic words were "Do not loosen the bulging mouth of the wineskin until you have reached the height of Athens, lest you die of grief." Aegeus did not understand the prophecy and was disappointed. He asked the advice of his host Pittheus, king of Troezen. Pittheus understood the prophecy, got Aegeus drunk, and gave Aegeus his daughter Aethra.[5]

But following the instructions of Athena in a dream, Aethra left the sleeping Aegeus and waded across to the island of Sphairia that lay close to Troezen's shore. There she poured a libation to Sphairos (Pelops's charioteer) and Poseidon and was possessed by the sea god in the night. The mix gave Theseus a combination of divine as well as mortal characteristics in his nature; such double paternity, with one immortal and one mortal, was a familiar feature of other Greek heroes.[ii] After Aethra became pregnant, Aegeus decided to return to Athens. Before leaving, however, he buried his sandals and sword under a huge rock[iii] and told Aethra that when their son grew up, he should move the rock, if he were heroic enough, and take the tokens for himself as evidence of his royal parentage. In Athens, Aegeus was joined by Medea, who had left Corinth after slaughtering the children she had borne and had taken Aegeus as her new consort.

Thus Theseus was raised in his mother's land. When Theseus grew up and became a brave young man, he moved the rock and recovered his father's tokens. His mother then told him the truth about his father's identity and that he must take the sword and sandals back to the king Aegeus to claim his birthright. To journey to Athens, Theseus could choose to go by sea (which was the safe way) or by land, following a dangerous path around the Saronic Gulf, where he would encounter a string of six entrances to the Underworld,[iv] each guarded by a chthonic enemy. Young, brave, and ambitious, Theseus decided to go alone by the land route and defeated a great many bandits along the way.

When Theseus returned victorious to Athens, where he sacrificed the Bull, Medea tried to poison him. At the last second, Aegeus recognized the sandals and the sword and knocked the poisoned wine cup from Theseus's hands. Thus father and son were reunited, and Medea fled to Asia.[citation needed ]

When Theseus appeared in the town, his reputation had preceded him, as a result of his having traveled along the notorious coastal road from Troezen and slain some of the most feared bandits there. It was not long before the Pallantides' hopes of succeeding the childless Aegeus would be lost if they did not get rid of Theseus (the Pallantides were the sons of Pallas and nephews of King Aegeus, who was then living at the royal court in the sanctuary of Delphic Apollo).[6] So they set a trap for him. One band of them would march on the town from one side while another lay in wait near a place called Gargettus in ambush. The plan was that after Theseus, Aegeus, and the palace guards had been forced out the front, the other half would surprise them from behind. However, Theseus was not fooled. Informed of the plan by a herald named Leos, he crept out of the city at midnight and surprised the Pallantides. "Theseus then fell suddenly upon the party lying in ambush, and slew them all. Thereupon the party with Pallas dispersed," Plutarch reported.[7]

When King Minos heard what had befallen his son, he ordered the Cretan fleet to set sail for Athens. Minos asked Aegeus for his son's assassins, and if they were to be handed to him, the city would be spared. However, not knowing who the assassins were, King Aegeus surrendered the whole city to Minos' mercy. His retribution was that, at the end of every Great Year, which occurred after every seven cycles on the solar calendar, the seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens were to board a boat and be sent as tribute to Crete, never to be seen again.

In another version, King Minos had waged war with the Athenians and was successful. He then demanded that, at nine-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth created by Daedalus.

On the third occasion, Theseus volunteered to talk to the monster to stop this horror. He took the place of one of the youths and set off with a black sail, promising to his father, Aegeus, that if successful he would return with a white sail.[v] Like the others, Theseus was stripped of his weapons when they sailed. On his arrival in Crete, Ariadne, King Minos' daughter, fell in love with Theseus and, on the advice of Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread (a clew), so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth.[vi] That night, Ariadne escorted Theseus to the Labyrinth, and Theseus promised that if he returned from the Labyrinth he would take Ariadne with him. As soon as Theseus entered the Labyrinth, he tied one end of the ball of string to the doorpost and brandished his sword which he had kept hidden from the guards inside his tunic. Theseus followed Daedalus' instructions given to Ariadne: go forwards, always down, and never left or right. Theseus came to the heart of the Labyrinth and also upon the sleeping Minotaur. The beast awoke and a tremendous fight then occurred. Theseus overpowered the Minotaur with his strength and stabbed the beast in the throat with his sword (according to one scholium on Pindar's Fifth Nemean Ode, Theseus strangled it).[8]

After decapitating the beast, Theseus used the string to escape the Labyrinth and managed to escape with all of the young Athenians and Ariadne as well as her younger sister Phaedra. Then he and the rest of the crew fell asleep on the beach of the island of Naxos, where they stopped on their way back, looking for water. Athena woke Theseus and told him to leave early that morning and to leave Ariadne there for Dionysus, for Naxos was his island. Stricken with distress, Theseus forgot to put up the white sails instead of the black ones, so his father, the king, believing he was dead, committed suicide, throwing himself off a cliff of Sounion and into the sea, thus causing this body of water to be named the Aegean Sea.

According to Plutarch's Life of Theseus, the ship Theseus used on his return from Minoan Crete to Athens was kept in the Athenian harbor as a memorial for several centuries.

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus,[vii] for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place..."[9]

The ship had to be maintained in a seaworthy state, for, in return for Theseus's successful mission, the Athenians had pledged to honor Apollo every year henceforth. Thus, the Athenians sent a religious mission to the island of Delos (one of Apollo's most sacred sanctuaries) on the Athenian state galley-the ship itself-to pay their fealty to the god. To preserve the purity of the occasion, no executions were permitted between the time when the religious ceremony began to when the ship returned from Delos, which took several weeks.[10]

To preserve the ship, any wood that wore out or rotted was replaced; it was thus unclear to philosophers how much of the original ship remained, giving rise to the philosophical question of whether it should be considered "the same" ship or not. Such philosophical questions about the nature of identity are sometimes referred to as the " Ship of Theseus" paradox.

Regardless of these issues, the Athenians preserved the ship. They believed that Theseus had been an actual, historical figure and the ship gave them a tangible connection to their divine provenance.

In Iliad I, Nestor numbers Pirithous and Theseus "of heroic fame" among an earlier generation of heroes of his youth, "the strongest men that Earth has bred, the strongest men against the strongest enemies, a savage mountain-dwelling tribe whom they utterly destroyed." No trace of such an oral tradition, which Homer's listeners would have recognized in Nestor's allusion, survived in the literary epic. Later, Pirithous was preparing to marry Hippodamia. The centaurs were guests at the wedding feast, but got drunk and tried to abduct the women, including Hippodamia. The Lapiths won the ensuing battle.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses Theseus fights against and kills Eurytus, the "fiercest of all the fierce centaurs"[11] at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia.

Abduction of Persephone and encounter with Hades Edit

Theseus, a great abductor of women, and his bosom companion, Pirithous, since they were sons of Zeus and Poseidon, pledged themselves to marry daughters of Zeus.[12] Theseus, in an old tradition,[13] chose Helen, and together they kidnapped her, intending to keep her until she was old enough to marry. Pirithous chose Persephone, even though she was already married to Hades, king of the underworld. They left Helen with Theseus's mother, Aethra at Aphidna, whence she was rescued by the Dioscuri.

For many months in half-darkness, Theseus sat immovably fixed to the rock, mourning for both his friend and for himself. In the end, he was rescued by Heracles who had come to the underworld for his 12th task. There he persuaded Persephone to forgive him for the part he had taken in the rash venture of Pirithous. So Theseus was restored to the upper air but Pirithous never left the kingdom of the dead, for when Heracles tried to free Pirithous, the underworld shook. They then decided the task was beyond any hero and left. When Theseus returned to Athens, he found that the Dioscuri had taken Helen and Aethra to Sparta.

Phaedra, Theseus' second wife and the daughter of King Minos, bore Theseus two sons, Demophon and Acamas. While these two were still in their infancy, Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, Theseus' son by the Amazon queen Hippolyta. According to some versions of the story, Hippolytus had scorned Aphrodite to become a follower of Artemis, so Aphrodite made Phaedra fall in love with him as punishment. He rejected her out of chastity.

Alternatively, in Euripides' version, Hippolytus, Phaedra's nurse told Hippolytus of her mistress's love and he swore he would not reveal the nurse as his source of information. To ensure that she would die with dignity, Phaedra wrote to Theseus on a tablet claiming that Hippolytus had raped her before hanging herself. Theseus believed her and used one of the three wishes he had received from Poseidon against his son. The curse caused Hippolytus' horses to be frightened by a sea monster, usually a bull, and drag their rider to his death. Artemis would later tell Theseus the truth, promising to avenge her loyal follower on another follower of Aphrodite.

In a version recounted by the Roman playwright Seneca, entitled Phaedra, after Phaedra told Theseus that Hippolytus had raped her, Theseus called upon Neptune (as he did Poseidon in Euripides' interpretation) to kill his son.[14] Upon hearing the news of Hippolytus' death at the hands of Neptune's sea monster, Phaedra committed suicide out of guilt, for she had not intended for Hippolytus to die.[15]

In yet another version, Phaedra simply told Theseus Hippolytus had raped her and did not kill herself. Dionysus sent a wild bull that terrified Hippolytus's horses.

According to some sources[citation needed ], Theseus also was one of the Argonauts, although Apollonius of Rhodes states in the Argonautica[citation needed ] that Theseus was still in the underworld at this time. Both statements are inconsistent with Medea being Aegeus' wife by the time Theseus first came to Athens. With Phaedra, Theseus fathered Acamas, who was one of those who hid in the Trojan Horse during the Trojan War. Theseus welcomed the wandering Oedipus and helped Adrastus to bury the Seven against Thebes.

Lycomedes of the island of Skyros threw Theseus off a cliff after he had lost popularity in Athens. In 475 BCE, in response to an oracle, Cimon of Athens, having conquered Skyros for the Athenians, identified as the remains of Theseus "a coffin of a great corpse with a bronze spear-head by its side and a sword." (Plutarch, Life of Theseus).[16] The remains found by Cimon were reburied in Athens. The early modern name Theseion (Temple of Theseus) was mistakenly applied to the Temple of Hephaestus which was thought to be the actual site of the hero's tomb.

Literature Edit

Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus at Colonus features Theseus as a major character.

Euripides' tragedy Hippolytus and Seneca's Phaedra revolve around the death of Theseus' son.

In Geoffrey Chaucer's epic chivalric romance "The Knight's Tale," one of the Canterbury Tales, Theseus is the duke of Athens, husband of Ypolita, and protector of Emelye, Ypolita's sister, for whom the two knights of Thebes, Arcite and Palamon, do battle.

Jakob Ayrer wrote the play Theseus (1618)

Theseus is a prominent character as the Duke of Athens in William Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Hippolyta also appears in both plays.

F. L. Lucas's epic poem Ariadne (1932) is an epic reworking of the Labyrinth myth: Aegle, one of the sacrificial maidens who accompany Theseus to Crete, is Theseus's sweetheart, the Minotaur is Minos himself in a bull-mask, and Ariadne, learning on Naxos of Theseus's earlier love for Aegle, decides to leave him for the Ideal [Dionysus].[17]

André Gide's Thésée (1946) is a fictional autobiography where the mythical hero of Athens, now elderly, narrates his life story from his carefree youth to his killing of the Minotaur.

Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958) is a dramatic retelling of the Theseus legend from his childhood in Troizen until the return from Crete to Athens. While fictional, it is generally faithful to the spirit and flavor of the best-known variations of the original story. The sequel is The Bull from the Sea (1962), about the hero's later career.

Evangeline Walton's historical fiction novel The Sword is Forged (1983) chronicles the story of Theseus and Antiope.[18]

Fran Ross' 1974 novel Oreo draws heavily from the Theseus myth.[19]

Stephen Dobyns, wrote the poem Theseus within the Labyrinth (1986) which provides a retelling of the myth of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur, in particular the feelings of Ariadne.

In issue No. 12 of the Fright Night comic series, entitled Bull-Whipped, Theseus and the Minotaur are resurrected by the comic's Aunt Claudia Hinault, who is the reincarnation of Ariadne.

Kir Bulychov's 1993 book An Attempt on Theseus' Life (Russian: Покушение на Тезея) is about a plot to assassinate a man during a virtual reality tour in which he lives through Theseus' life.

Aleksey Ryabinin's book Theseus: The story of ancient gods, goddesses, kings, and warriors (2018) provides a retelling of the myths of Theseus, Aegeus, Minotaur, Ariadne, Pirithous and other personages of Greek mythology.[20][21]

Jorge Luis Borges presents a variation of the myth in a short story, "The House of Asterion" (Spanish: "La Casa de Asterión").

British comedian Tony Robinson wrote a version of the Theseus story entitled Theseus: Super Hero.

Opera, film, television and video game Edit

Thésée (1675) is an early French opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully to a libretto by Philippe Quinault, based on Ovid.

Teseo (1713) is an opera seria by George Frideric Handel to a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym, based on Quinault.

The opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Jean-Philippe Rameau, based on Racine, features Theseus as a character.

The first episode of the 2001 children's television series MythQuest, entitled "Minotaur," features a story in which the modern-day teen-aged protagonist finds himself unexpectedly thrust into Theseus' role and must follow through with the events of the existing myth, including slaying the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne and Daedalus.[22][better source needed ] The storyline was also adapted into a novelisation.[23]

In the miniseries Helen of Troy (2003), Theseus, played by Stellan Skarsgård, kidnaps Helen with Pirithous and waits for her to reach marriageable age; however, he is slain by Pollux and she is returned to Sparta.

In the video game God of War 2 (2007) Theseus, voiced by Paul Eiding, serves as a guardian to the Sisters of Fate. He wears a bronze armband that serves as a key across the Sisters lair.

In the film Immortals (2011), directed by Tarsem Singh, Theseus, played by Henry Cavill, leads a war against King Hyperion of Heraklion, played by Mickey Rourke.

The Indian film Ship of Theseus (2012), directed by Anand Gandhi, is an exploration of the philosophical idea underlying the myth.

In 2013, the BBC series Atlantis was released. In the first episode of season one, The Earth Bull, Jason enters the labyrinth. He is helped by Ariadne to slay him, as the myth of the Minotaur. Jason is based on the characters of Theseus, Perseus and the myth of Jason And The Argonauts. In Season 2 Part 1, Medea is introduced. Pasiphaё seeks to take back Atlantis after Ariadne is made Queen. The plot seems to be leading to Jason and The Argonauts.

In the video game Hades (video game), Theseus serves as a boss, accompanied by the Minotaur, attempting to keep the protagonist from escaping the underworld.

"May I therefore succeed in purifying Fable, making her submit to reason and take on the semblance of History. But where she obstinately disdains to make herself credible, and refuses to admit any element of probability, I shall pray for kindly readers, and such as receive with indulgence the tales of antiquity." (Plutarch, ^ Life of Theseus, translated by Bernadotte Perrin).

The theory, expounded as natural history by ^ Aristotle, was accepted through the nineteenth century and only proven wrong in modern genetics: see Telegony. Sometimes in myth, the result could be twins, one born divine of a divine father, the other human of a human sire: see Dioscuri. Of a supposed Parnassos, founder of Delphi, Pausanias observes, "Like the other heroes, as they are called, he had two fathers; one they say was the god Poseidon, the human father being Cleopompus." (Description of Greece x.6.1).

^ Rock "which had a hollow in it just large enough to receive these objects," Plutarch says.

Compared to ^ Hercules and his Labours, "Theseus is occupied only with the sacred Entrances that are local to the lands of Athens" (Ruck and Staples 1994:204).

Plutarch quotes ^ Simonides to the effect that the alternate sail given by Aegeus was not white, but "a scarlet sail dyed with the tender flower of luxuriant holm oak." (Plutarch, 17.5).

Ariadne is sometimes represented in vase-paintings with the thread wound on her ^ spindle.

^ Demetrius Phalereus was a distinguished orator and statesman, who governed Athens for a decade before being exiled, in 307 BCE.

Citations Edit

Ruck, Carl A.P., and Danny Staples (1994). "Theseus: Making the New Athens." Pp. 203-222 in ^ The World of Classical Myth. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Cueva, Edmund P. (1996). "Plutarch's Ariadne in Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe." ^ American Journal of Philology, 117(3):473-84.

^ Greene, Andrew. "Theseus, Hero of Athens".

^ Morford, Mark; Lenardon, Robert J.; Sham, Michael. "Classical Mythology Tenth Edition". Oxford University Press. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 10 November 2014.

Morford, Mark P. O., Robert J. Lenardon, and Michael Sham. 2014. ^ Classical Mythology (10th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

^ Plutarch. "Theseus". The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

^ Cooper, John M., ed. (1997). Plato: Complete Works. Associate editor, D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett. p. 37. ISBN 0-87220-349-2.

Ovid, ^ Metamorphoses XII: 217-153

Scholia on ^ Iliad III.144 and a fragment (#227) of Pindar, according to Kerenyi 1951:237, note 588.

^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 13.4 (557a); cf. Kerenyi (1959:234) and note.

^ Burkert, Walter (1985). Greek Religion. Harvard University Press. p. 206. ISBN 9780674362819.

^ F. L. Lucas (2014). Ariadne. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107677524.

^ Evangeline Walton (1983). "The Sword is Forged". Kirkus Reviews.

^ Mullen, Harryette Mullen (1 March 2002). ""Apple Pie with Oreo Crust": Fran Ross's Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel". MELUS. 27 (1): 107-129. doi:10.2307/3250639. ISSN 0163-755X.

Ryabinin, Aleksey. 2018. ^ Theseus.The story of ancient gods, goddesses, kings, and warriors. СПб.: Антология. ISBN 978-5-6040037-6-3.

^ O.Zdanov. Life and adventures of Theseus. // "KP", 14.02.2018.

^ The Minotaur (MythQuest #1) goodreads.com

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion (1985)

Kerényi, Karl, The Heroes of the Greeks (1959)

Price, Anne, The Quest for Theseus (London, 1970) examines the Theseus-Minotaur-Ariadne myth and its historical basis, and later treatments and adaptations of it in Western culture.

Ruck, Carl A.P. and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth: ch. IX "Theseus: making the new Athens" (1994), pp. 203-222.

Sideris, Athanasios, Theseus in Thrace. The silver lining on the clouds of the Athenian-Thracian relations in the 5th century BC (Sofia, 2015) presents new iconographical sources and examines the role of Theseus in the state ideology of Athens and its gift-diplomacy with Thrace.

Walker, Henry J., Theseus and Athens, Oxford University Press (US 1995). The most thorough scholarly examination of Theseus's archaic origins and classical myth and cult, and his place in classical literature.

At the first site, which was Epidaurus, sacred to Apollo and the healer Asclepius, Theseus turned the tables on the chthonic bandit, Periphetes, the Club Bearer, who beat his opponents into the Earth, taking from him the stout staff that often identifies Theseus in vase-paintings.

At the Isthmian entrance to the Underworld was a robber named Sinis, often called "Pityokamptes" (Greek: Πιτυοκάμπτης, lit. "he who bends Pinetrees"). He would capture travelers, tie them between two pine trees that were bent down to the ground, and then let the trees go, tearing his victims apart. Theseus slew him by his method. He then had seduced Sinis' daughter, Perigune, fathering the child Melanippus.

In another deed north of the Isthmus, at a place called Crommyon, he killed an enormous pig, the Crommyonian Sow, bred by an old crone named Phaea. Some versions name the sow herself as Phaea. The Bibliotheca by Pseudo-Apollodorus described the Crommyonian Sow as an offspring of Typhon and Echidna.

Near Megara, a robber named Sciron forced travelers along the narrow cliff-face pathway to wash his feet. While they knelt, he kicked them off the cliff behind them, where they were eaten by a giant turtle (or, in some versions, a sea monster). Theseus pushed him off the cliff where he was eaten as well.

Another of these enemies was Cercyon, king at the holy site of Eleusis, who challenged passers-by to a wrestling match and, when he had beaten them, killed them. Theseus beat Cercyon at wrestling and then killed him instead.

The last bandit was Procrustes the Stretcher, who had two beds, one of which he offered to passers-by in the plain of Eleusis. He then made them fit into it, either by stretching them or by cutting off their feet. Since he had two beds of different lengths, no one would fit. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, cutting off his legs and decapitating him with his axe.

Medea, the Marathonian Bull, Androgeus, and the Pallantides Edit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Theseus (, ; Greek: Θησεύς [tʰɛːsěu̯s]) was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. His role in history has been called "a major cultural transition, like the making of the new Olympia by Hercules."[1] :204 The myths surrounding Theseus-his journeys, exploits, and friends-have provided material for fiction throughout the ages.

# data[].attributes.headline
1207 Tukulti-Ninurta I dies, ends reign.

# data[].attributes.subject
1207 Tukulti-Ninurta I dies, ends reign.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tukulti-Ninurta I (meaning: "my trust is in [the warrior god] Ninurta"; reigned 1243-1207 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1366-1050 BC). He is known as the first king to use the title " King of Kings".

Tukulti-Ninurta I succeeded Shalmaneser I, his father, as king and won a major victory against the Hittite Empire at the Battle of Nihriya in the first half of his reign, appropriating Hittite territory in Asia Minor and the Levant. Tukulti-Ninurta I retained Assyrian control of Urartu, and later defeated Kashtiliash IV, the Kassite king of Babylonia, and captured the rival city of Babylon to ensure full Assyrian supremacy over Mesopotamia. He set himself up as king of Babylon, thus becoming the first native Mesopotamian to rule there, its previous kings having all been non-native Amorites or Kassites. He took on the ancient title "King of Sumer and Akkad" first used by Sargon of Akkad.

Tukulti-Ninurta had petitioned the god Shamash before beginning his counter offensive. Kashtiliash IV was captured, single-handed by Tukulti-Ninurta according to his account, who "trod with my feet upon his lordly neck as though it were a footstool" and deported him ignominiously in chains to Assyria. The victorious Assyrian demolished the walls of Babylon, massacred many of the inhabitants, pillaged and plundered his way across the city to the Esagila temple, where he made off with the statue of Marduk. After capturing Babylonia, he invaded the Arabian Peninsula, conquering the pre-Arab states of Dilmun and Meluhha. Middle Assyrian texts recovered at ancient Dūr-Katlimmu include a letter from Tukulti-Ninurta to his sukkal rabi'u, or grand vizier, Ashur-iddin advising him of the approach of his general Shulman-mushabshu escorting the captive Kashtiliash, his wife, and his retinue which incorporated a large number of women, on his way to exile after his defeat. In the process he defeated the Elamites, who had themselves coveted Babylon. He also wrote an epic poem documenting his wars against Babylon and Elam. After a Babylonian revolt, he raided and plundered the temples in Babylon, regarded as an act of sacrilege to all Mesopotamians, including Assyrians. As relations with the priesthood in Ashur began deteriorating, Tukulti-Ninurta built a new capital city; Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta. However, his sons rebelled against him and besieged him in his new city. During the siege, he was murdered. One of them, Ashur-nadin-apli, would succeed him on the throne.

After his death, the Assyrian Empire fell into a brief period of stagnation. The Tukulti-Ninurta Epic describes the war between Tukulti-Ninurta I and Kashtiliash IV.

Julian Jaynes identifies this king as the historical origin for Nimrod in the Old Testament.

^ J. M. Munn-Rankin (1975). "Assyrian Military Power, 1300-1200 B.C.", in I. E. S. Edwards (ed.) Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 2, Part 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 287-288, 298.

The Cambridge Ancient History, I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, (ed) I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, Edition 3, revised, Cambridge University Press, 1975, ^ ISBN 0-521-08691-4, ISBN 978-0-521-08691-2, pg. 284-295

^ Julian Jaynes (2000). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Mariner Books. p. 228. ISBN 9780547527543.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tukulti-Ninurta I (meaning: "my trust is in [the warrior god] Ninurta"; reigned 1243-1207 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1366-1050 BC). He is known as the first king to use the title " King of Kings".

# data[].attributes.headline
1237 Assyrian/Hittite Battle of Nihriya for Mitanni.

# data[].attributes.subject
1237 Assyrian/Hittite Battle of Nihriya for Mitanni.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Battle of Niḫriya was the culminating point of the hostilities between the Hittites and the Assyrians for control over the remnants of the former empire of Mitanni.

When Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I (r. c. 1344-1322 BC) conquered Mitanni, he created two provinces ( Aleppo and Carchemish), and distributed the large part of territories of this kingdom between his allies. The rest of what had been the empire of Mitanni retained its independence as a Hittite vassal state called Ḫanigalbat. During the reign of the Hittite king Mursili III (better known as Urḫi-Tešub), Ḫanigalbat was conquered by the Assyria Empire and the Assyrians controlled the East bank of the Euphrates. When Ḫattusili III ousted his nephew Urḫi-Tešub and seized the Hittite throne, he had to be content with the permanent loss of Ḫanigalbat to the Assyrians despite its former status as a Hittite vassal state.

The Assyrian involvement in Syria continued under the command of king Sulmanu-ašared I and precipitated a crisis with Ḫatti. The Hittites considered Assyrian involvement to be a clear attack on the frontiers of their empire and went into battle under their king: Tudḫalia IV, Ḫattusili's son and successor. This led to a major battle which is known today as the Battle of Niḫriya. A letter (RS 34.265) giving details of the campaign and its outcome was sent by Sulmanu-ašared to Ugarit.

In addition, information within Hittite document KBo IV 14 has been interpreted to show that the battle must have occurred around the 20th year of Sulmanu-ašared's reign.

The former idea that Niḫriya was to be equated with Na'iri, along the Upper Tigris, has been shown to be wrong. As per the Mari and Dur-Katlimmu letters, Niḫriya was located in the Upper Balih region.

The conflict between the two great powers took place in the neighborhood of Nihriya, with the Assyrians gaining a decisive victory. The Assyrian victory shook the Hittite state to its foundations as its king Tudhaliya IV faced several internal revolts against his reign. Tudhaliya IV would ultimately overcome all these challenges to his authority and retain the kingship of Hatti. Hostilities between Assyria and Ḫatti continued for some five years before a peace was negotiated and maintained.

^ The 'Eternal Treaty' from the Hittite perspective pp.3-4 by Trevor Bryce

^ Manfred Dietrich, "Salmanassar I. von Assyrien, Ibirānu (VI.) von Ugarit und Tudḫalija IV. von Hatti", Ugarit-Forschungen 35 (2003) 103-139.

^ A.A. Nemirovsky, "Synchronism of the Era of Hattusili III and the "Low" Chronology of the Late Bronze Age Century" (Немировский А.А., "Синхронизмы эпохи Хаттусилиса III и "короткая" хронология позднебронзового века."), Вестник Древней Истории, (2003/2) 3-15.

^ Jared L. Miller, "The Location of Nihriya and its Disassociation from Na'iri". In: H.D. Baker, K. Kaniuth and A. Otto, eds. Stories of Long Ago. Festschrift für Michael D. Roaf (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 397). Ugarit-Verlag. Münster: (2012) 349-372.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Battle of Niḫriya was the culminating point of the hostilities between the Hittites and the Assyrians for control over the remnants of the former empire of Mitanni. When Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I (r. c. 1344-1322 BC) conquered Mitanni, he created two provinces ( Aleppo and Carchemish), and distributed the large part of territories of this kingdom between his allies.

# data[].attributes.headline
1258 Tukulti-Ninurta I born. Limu: 1258: Kidin-Sin son of Adad-teya

# data[].attributes.subject
1258 Tukulti-Ninurta I born. Limu: 1258: Kidin-Sin son of Adad-teya

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tukulti-Ninurta I (meaning: "my trust is in [the warrior god] Ninurta"; reigned 1243-1207 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1366-1050 BC). He is known as the first king to use the title " King of Kings".

Tukulti-Ninurta I succeeded Shalmaneser I, his father, as king and won a major victory against the Hittite Empire at the Battle of Nihriya in the first half of his reign, appropriating Hittite territory in Asia Minor and the Levant. Tukulti-Ninurta I retained Assyrian control of Urartu, and later defeated Kashtiliash IV, the Kassite king of Babylonia, and captured the rival city of Babylon to ensure full Assyrian supremacy over Mesopotamia. He set himself up as king of Babylon, thus becoming the first native Mesopotamian to rule there, its previous kings having all been non-native Amorites or Kassites. He took on the ancient title "King of Sumer and Akkad" first used by Sargon of Akkad.

Tukulti-Ninurta had petitioned the god Shamash before beginning his counter offensive. Kashtiliash IV was captured, single-handed by Tukulti-Ninurta according to his account, who "trod with my feet upon his lordly neck as though it were a footstool" and deported him ignominiously in chains to Assyria. The victorious Assyrian demolished the walls of Babylon, massacred many of the inhabitants, pillaged and plundered his way across the city to the Esagila temple, where he made off with the statue of Marduk. After capturing Babylonia, he invaded the Arabian Peninsula, conquering the pre-Arab states of Dilmun and Meluhha. Middle Assyrian texts recovered at ancient Dūr-Katlimmu include a letter from Tukulti-Ninurta to his sukkal rabi'u, or grand vizier, Ashur-iddin advising him of the approach of his general Shulman-mushabshu escorting the captive Kashtiliash, his wife, and his retinue which incorporated a large number of women, on his way to exile after his defeat. In the process he defeated the Elamites, who had themselves coveted Babylon. He also wrote an epic poem documenting his wars against Babylon and Elam. After a Babylonian revolt, he raided and plundered the temples in Babylon, regarded as an act of sacrilege to all Mesopotamians, including Assyrians. As relations with the priesthood in Ashur began deteriorating, Tukulti-Ninurta built a new capital city; Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta. However, his sons rebelled against him and besieged him in his new city. During the siege, he was murdered. One of them, Ashur-nadin-apli, would succeed him on the throne.

After his death, the Assyrian Empire fell into a brief period of stagnation. The Tukulti-Ninurta Epic describes the war between Tukulti-Ninurta I and Kashtiliash IV.

Julian Jaynes identifies this king as the historical origin for Nimrod in the Old Testament.

^ J. M. Munn-Rankin (1975). "Assyrian Military Power, 1300-1200 B.C.", in I. E. S. Edwards (ed.) Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 2, Part 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 287-288, 298.

The Cambridge Ancient History, I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, (ed) I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, Edition 3, revised, Cambridge University Press, 1975, ^ ISBN 0-521-08691-4, ISBN 978-0-521-08691-2, pg. 284-295

^ Julian Jaynes (2000). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Mariner Books. p. 228. ISBN 9780547527543.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tukulti-Ninurta I (meaning: "my trust is in [the warrior god] Ninurta"; reigned 1243-1207 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1366-1050 BC). He is known as the first king to use the title " King of Kings".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shalmaneser I ( Shulmanu-asharedu;[1] 1274-1245 BC or 1265-1235 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365-1050 BC). Son of Adad-nirari I, he succeeded his father as king[2] in 1265 BC.

According to his annals, discovered at Assur, in his first year he conquered eight countries in the northwest and destroyed the fortress of Arinnu, the dust of which he brought to Assur. In his second year he defeated Shattuara, king of Hanilgalbat ( Mitanni), and his Hittite and Ahlamu allies.[2] He incorporated the remains of the Mittanni kingdom as part of one of the Assyrian provinces. Shalmaneser I also claimed to have blinded 14,400 enemy prisoners in one eye. He was one of the first Assyrian kings who was known to deport his defeated enemies to various lands rather than simply slaughtering them all.

He conquered the whole country from Taidu to Irridu, from Mount Kashiar to Eluhat, and from the fortresses of Sudu and Harranu to Carchemish on the Euphrates. He built palaces at Assur and Nineveh, restored the "world-temple" at Assur (Ehursagkurkurra), and founded the city of Kalhu (the biblical Calah/ Nimrud).[2] He was succeeded by his son Tukulti-Ninurta I.

Annual limmu officials beginning with the year of accession of Šulmanu-ašared. The list is partly derived from Freydank[3] and McIntyre.[4] The exact order of the earliest limmus is conjectural but the ordering from Šerriya onwards is essentially fixed.

1265: Adad-šumu-lešir son of Sin-ašared

1264: Šulmanu-ašared (king)

1263: Mušabšiu-Šibitti

1262: Ber-šumu-iddina

1261: Abi-ili son of Aššur-šumu-lešir

1260: Aššur-alik-pana

1259: Adad-Šamši son of Adad-šumu-lešir

1258: Kidin-Sin son of Adad-teya

1257: Šerriya (ordering from here onwards is essentially fixed)

1256: Aššur-kašid

1255: Aššur-mušabši son of Iddin-Mer

1254: Aššur-mušabši son of Anu-mušallim

1253: Qibi-Aššur son of Šamaš-aḫa-iddina

1252: Aššur-nadin-šume

1251: Mušallim-Aššur

1250: Qibi-Aššur son of Ṣilli-Marduk

1249: Ina-pi-Aššur-lišlim son of Bābu-aḫa-iddina

1248: Ber-šumu-lešir son of Ete-pi-Tašmete

1247: Aššur-dammiq son of Abi-ili

1246: Ber-bel-lite

1245: Ištar-eriš son of Šulmanu-qarrad

1244: Lullayu son of Adad-šumu-iddina

1243: Aššur-ketti-ide son of Abi-ili

1242: Ekaltayu

1241: Aššur-daʼissunu son of Ululayu

1240: Riš-Adad

1239: Nabu-bela-uṣur

1238: Usat-Marduk

1237: Ellil-ašared

1236: Ittabši-den-Aššur

1235: Ubru

The name means: "[the god] Shulmanu is preeminent"; Georges Roux, ^ Ancient Iraq (Penguin, 3rd ed., 1992), p. 295.

^ a One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Sayce, Archibald Henry (1911). "Shalmaneser". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 798. b c

^ Helmut Freydank, AoF 3 (2005), 45-56.

^ Eponyms of Shalmaneser 1 - Summary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shalmaneser I ( Shulmanu-asharedu;[1] 1274-1245 BC or 1265-1235 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365-1050 BC). Son of Adad-nirari I, he succeeded his father as king[2] in 1265 BC. According to his annals, discovered at Assur, in his first year he conquered eight countries in the northwest and destroyed the fortress of Arinnu, the dust of which he brought to Assur.

# data[].attributes.headline
1234 BC- Theseus of Athens begins his 30 year reign (if the end of his reign is agreed to have ended in 1204 BC).

# data[].attributes.subject
1234 BC- Theseus of Athens begins his 30 year reign (if the end of his reign is agreed to have ended in 1204 BC).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Theseus (, ; Greek: Θησεύς [tʰɛːsěu̯s]) was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. His role in history has been called "a major cultural transition, like the making of the new Olympia by Hercules."[1]:204 The myths surrounding Theseus-his journeys, exploits, and friends-have provided material for fiction throughout the ages.

Theseus is sometimes described as the son of Aegeus, King of Athens, and sometimes as the son of the god Poseidon. He is raised by his mother, Aethra, and when he discovers his connection to Aegeus travels overland to Athens, having many adventures on the way. When he reaches Athens, he finds that Aegeus is married to Medea (formerly wife of Jason), who plots against him.

The most famous legend about Theseus is his slaying of the Minotaur, half man and half bull. He then goes on to unite Attica under Athenian rule: the synoikismos ('dwelling together'). As the unifying king, he is credited with building a palace on the fortress of the Acropolis. Pausanias reports that after the synoikismos, Theseus established a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos ('Aphrodite of all the People') on the southern slope of the Acropolis.

Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes use of varying accounts of the death of the Minotaur, Theseus' escape, how Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, fell in love with Theseus, and his betrayal of her.[i]

Plutarch's avowed purpose is to construct a life that parallels the Life of Romulus, the founding myth of Rome. Plutarch's sources, not all of whose texts have survived independently, included Pherecydes (mid-fifth century BCE), Demon (c. 400 BCE), Philochorus, and Cleidemus (both fourth century BCE).[2] As the subject of myth, the existence of Theseus as a real person has not been proven, but scholars believe that he may have been alive during the Late Bronze Age[3] possibly as a king in the 8th or 9th century BCE.[4]

Aegeus, one of the primordial kings of Athens, was childless. Desiring an heir, he asked the Oracle of Delphi for advice. Her cryptic words were "Do not loosen the bulging mouth of the wineskin until you have reached the height of Athens, lest you die of grief." Aegeus did not understand the prophecy and was disappointed. He asked the advice of his host Pittheus, king of Troezen. Pittheus understood the prophecy, got Aegeus drunk, and gave Aegeus his daughter Aethra.[5]

But following the instructions of Athena in a dream, Aethra left the sleeping Aegeus and waded across to the island of Sphairia that lay close to Troezen's shore. There she poured a libation to Sphairos (Pelops's charioteer) and Poseidon and was possessed by the sea god in the night. The mix gave Theseus a combination of divine as well as mortal characteristics in his nature; such double paternity, with one immortal and one mortal, was a familiar feature of other Greek heroes.[ii] After Aethra became pregnant, Aegeus decided to return to Athens. Before leaving, however, he buried his sandals and sword under a huge rock[iii] and told Aethra that when their son grew up, he should move the rock, if he were heroic enough, and take the tokens for himself as evidence of his royal parentage. In Athens, Aegeus was joined by Medea, who had left Corinth after slaughtering the children she had borne and had taken Aegeus as her new consort.

Thus Theseus was raised in his mother's land. When Theseus grew up and became a brave young man, he moved the rock and recovered his father's tokens. His mother then told him the truth about his father's identity and that he must take the sword and sandals back to the king Aegeus to claim his birthright. To journey to Athens, Theseus could choose to go by sea (which was the safe way) or by land, following a dangerous path around the Saronic Gulf, where he would encounter a string of six entrances to the Underworld,[iv] each guarded by a chthonic enemy. Young, brave, and ambitious, Theseus decided to go alone by the land route and defeated a great many bandits along the way.

When Theseus returned victorious to Athens, where he sacrificed the Bull, Medea tried to poison him. At the last second, Aegeus recognized the sandals and the sword and knocked the poisoned wine cup from Theseus's hands. Thus father and son were reunited, and Medea fled to Asia.[citation needed ]

When Theseus appeared in the town, his reputation had preceded him, as a result of his having traveled along the notorious coastal road from Troezen and slain some of the most feared bandits there. It was not long before the Pallantides' hopes of succeeding the childless Aegeus would be lost if they did not get rid of Theseus (the Pallantides were the sons of Pallas and nephews of King Aegeus, who was then living at the royal court in the sanctuary of Delphic Apollo).[6] So they set a trap for him. One band of them would march on the town from one side while another lay in wait near a place called Gargettus in ambush. The plan was that after Theseus, Aegeus, and the palace guards had been forced out the front, the other half would surprise them from behind. However, Theseus was not fooled. Informed of the plan by a herald named Leos, he crept out of the city at midnight and surprised the Pallantides. "Theseus then fell suddenly upon the party lying in ambush, and slew them all. Thereupon the party with Pallas dispersed," Plutarch reported.[7]

When King Minos heard what had befallen his son, he ordered the Cretan fleet to set sail for Athens. Minos asked Aegeus for his son's assassins, and if they were to be handed to him, the city would be spared. However, not knowing who the assassins were, King Aegeus surrendered the whole city to Minos' mercy. His retribution was that, at the end of every Great Year, which occurred after every seven cycles on the solar calendar, the seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens were to board a boat and be sent as tribute to Crete, never to be seen again.

In another version, King Minos had waged war with the Athenians and was successful. He then demanded that, at nine-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth created by Daedalus.

On the third occasion, Theseus volunteered to talk to the monster to stop this horror. He took the place of one of the youths and set off with a black sail, promising to his father, Aegeus, that if successful he would return with a white sail.[v] Like the others, Theseus was stripped of his weapons when they sailed. On his arrival in Crete, Ariadne, King Minos' daughter, fell in love with Theseus and, on the advice of Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread (a clew), so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth.[vi] That night, Ariadne escorted Theseus to the Labyrinth, and Theseus promised that if he returned from the Labyrinth he would take Ariadne with him. As soon as Theseus entered the Labyrinth, he tied one end of the ball of string to the doorpost and brandished his sword which he had kept hidden from the guards inside his tunic. Theseus followed Daedalus' instructions given to Ariadne: go forwards, always down, and never left or right. Theseus came to the heart of the Labyrinth and also upon the sleeping Minotaur. The beast awoke and a tremendous fight then occurred. Theseus overpowered the Minotaur with his strength and stabbed the beast in the throat with his sword (according to one scholium on Pindar's Fifth Nemean Ode, Theseus strangled it).[8]

After decapitating the beast, Theseus used the string to escape the Labyrinth and managed to escape with all of the young Athenians and Ariadne as well as her younger sister Phaedra. Then he and the rest of the crew fell asleep on the beach of the island of Naxos, where they stopped on their way back, looking for water. Athena woke Theseus and told him to leave early that morning and to leave Ariadne there for Dionysus, for Naxos was his island. Stricken with distress, Theseus forgot to put up the white sails instead of the black ones, so his father, the king, believing he was dead, committed suicide, throwing himself off a cliff of Sounion and into the sea, thus causing this body of water to be named the Aegean Sea.

According to Plutarch's Life of Theseus, the ship Theseus used on his return from Minoan Crete to Athens was kept in the Athenian harbor as a memorial for several centuries.

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus,[vii] for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place..."[9]

The ship had to be maintained in a seaworthy state, for, in return for Theseus's successful mission, the Athenians had pledged to honor Apollo every year henceforth. Thus, the Athenians sent a religious mission to the island of Delos (one of Apollo's most sacred sanctuaries) on the Athenian state galley-the ship itself-to pay their fealty to the god. To preserve the purity of the occasion, no executions were permitted between the time when the religious ceremony began to when the ship returned from Delos, which took several weeks.[10]

To preserve the ship, any wood that wore out or rotted was replaced; it was thus unclear to philosophers how much of the original ship remained, giving rise to the philosophical question of whether it should be considered "the same" ship or not. Such philosophical questions about the nature of identity are sometimes referred to as the " Ship of Theseus" paradox.

Regardless of these issues, the Athenians preserved the ship. They believed that Theseus had been an actual, historical figure and the ship gave them a tangible connection to their divine provenance.

In Iliad I, Nestor numbers Pirithous and Theseus "of heroic fame" among an earlier generation of heroes of his youth, "the strongest men that Earth has bred, the strongest men against the strongest enemies, a savage mountain-dwelling tribe whom they utterly destroyed." No trace of such an oral tradition, which Homer's listeners would have recognized in Nestor's allusion, survived in the literary epic. Later, Pirithous was preparing to marry Hippodamia. The centaurs were guests at the wedding feast, but got drunk and tried to abduct the women, including Hippodamia. The Lapiths won the ensuing battle.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses Theseus fights against and kills Eurytus, the "fiercest of all the fierce centaurs"[11] at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia.

Abduction of Persephone and encounter with Hades Edit

Theseus, a great abductor of women, and his bosom companion, Pirithous, since they were sons of Zeus and Poseidon, pledged themselves to marry daughters of Zeus.[12] Theseus, in an old tradition,[13] chose Helen, and together they kidnapped her, intending to keep her until she was old enough to marry. Pirithous chose Persephone, even though she was already married to Hades, king of the underworld. They left Helen with Theseus's mother, Aethra at Aphidna, whence she was rescued by the Dioscuri.

For many months in half-darkness, Theseus sat immovably fixed to the rock, mourning for both his friend and for himself. In the end, he was rescued by Heracles who had come to the underworld for his 12th task. There he persuaded Persephone to forgive him for the part he had taken in the rash venture of Pirithous. So Theseus was restored to the upper air but Pirithous never left the kingdom of the dead, for when Heracles tried to free Pirithous, the underworld shook. They then decided the task was beyond any hero and left. When Theseus returned to Athens, he found that the Dioscuri had taken Helen and Aethra to Sparta.

Phaedra, Theseus' second wife and the daughter of King Minos, bore Theseus two sons, Demophon and Acamas. While these two were still in their infancy, Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, Theseus' son by the Amazon queen Hippolyta. According to some versions of the story, Hippolytus had scorned Aphrodite to become a follower of Artemis, so Aphrodite made Phaedra fall in love with him as punishment. He rejected her out of chastity.

Alternatively, in Euripides' version, Hippolytus, Phaedra's nurse told Hippolytus of her mistress's love and he swore he would not reveal the nurse as his source of information. To ensure that she would die with dignity, Phaedra wrote to Theseus on a tablet claiming that Hippolytus had raped her before hanging herself. Theseus believed her and used one of the three wishes he had received from Poseidon against his son. The curse caused Hippolytus' horses to be frightened by a sea monster, usually a bull, and drag their rider to his death. Artemis would later tell Theseus the truth, promising to avenge her loyal follower on another follower of Aphrodite.

In a version recounted by the Roman playwright Seneca, entitled Phaedra, after Phaedra told Theseus that Hippolytus had raped her, Theseus called upon Neptune (as he did Poseidon in Euripides' interpretation) to kill his son.[14] Upon hearing the news of Hippolytus' death at the hands of Neptune's sea monster, Phaedra committed suicide out of guilt, for she had not intended for Hippolytus to die.[15]

In yet another version, Phaedra simply told Theseus Hippolytus had raped her and did not kill herself. Dionysus sent a wild bull that terrified Hippolytus's horses.

According to some sources[citation needed ], Theseus also was one of the Argonauts, although Apollonius of Rhodes states in the Argonautica[citation needed ] that Theseus was still in the underworld at this time. Both statements are inconsistent with Medea being Aegeus' wife by the time Theseus first came to Athens. With Phaedra, Theseus fathered Acamas, who was one of those who hid in the Trojan Horse during the Trojan War. Theseus welcomed the wandering Oedipus and helped Adrastus to bury the Seven against Thebes.

Lycomedes of the island of Skyros threw Theseus off a cliff after he had lost popularity in Athens. In 475 BCE, in response to an oracle, Cimon of Athens, having conquered Skyros for the Athenians, identified as the remains of Theseus "a coffin of a great corpse with a bronze spear-head by its side and a sword." (Plutarch, Life of Theseus).[16] The remains found by Cimon were reburied in Athens. The early modern name Theseion (Temple of Theseus) was mistakenly applied to the Temple of Hephaestus which was thought to be the actual site of the hero's tomb.

Literature Edit

Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus at Colonus features Theseus as a major character.

Euripides' tragedy Hippolytus and Seneca's Phaedra revolve around the death of Theseus' son.

In Geoffrey Chaucer's epic chivalric romance "The Knight's Tale," one of the Canterbury Tales, Theseus is the duke of Athens, husband of Ypolita, and protector of Emelye, Ypolita's sister, for whom the two knights of Thebes, Arcite and Palamon, do battle.

Jakob Ayrer wrote the play Theseus (1618)

Theseus is a prominent character as the Duke of Athens in William Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Hippolyta also appears in both plays.

F. L. Lucas's epic poem Ariadne (1932) is an epic reworking of the Labyrinth myth: Aegle, one of the sacrificial maidens who accompany Theseus to Crete, is Theseus's sweetheart, the Minotaur is Minos himself in a bull-mask, and Ariadne, learning on Naxos of Theseus's earlier love for Aegle, decides to leave him for the Ideal [Dionysus].[17]

André Gide's Thésée (1946) is a fictional autobiography where the mythical hero of Athens, now elderly, narrates his life story from his carefree youth to his killing of the Minotaur.

Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958) is a dramatic retelling of the Theseus legend from his childhood in Troizen until the return from Crete to Athens. While fictional, it is generally faithful to the spirit and flavor of the best-known variations of the original story. The sequel is The Bull from the Sea (1962), about the hero's later career.

Evangeline Walton's historical fiction novel The Sword is Forged (1983) chronicles the story of Theseus and Antiope.[18]

Fran Ross' 1974 novel Oreo draws heavily from the Theseus myth.[19]

Stephen Dobyns, wrote the poem Theseus within the Labyrinth (1986) which provides a retelling of the myth of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur, in particular the feelings of Ariadne.

In issue No. 12 of the Fright Night comic series, entitled Bull-Whipped, Theseus and the Minotaur are resurrected by the comic's Aunt Claudia Hinault, who is the reincarnation of Ariadne.

Kir Bulychov's 1993 book An Attempt on Theseus' Life (Russian: Покушение на Тезея) is about a plot to assassinate a man during a virtual reality tour in which he lives through Theseus' life.

Aleksey Ryabinin's book Theseus: The story of ancient gods, goddesses, kings, and warriors (2018) provides a retelling of the myths of Theseus, Aegeus, Minotaur, Ariadne, Pirithous and other personages of Greek mythology.[20][21]

Jorge Luis Borges presents a variation of the myth in a short story, "The House of Asterion" (Spanish: "La Casa de Asterión").

British comedian Tony Robinson wrote a version of the Theseus story entitled Theseus: Super Hero.

Opera, film, television and video game Edit

Thésée (1675) is an early French opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully to a libretto by Philippe Quinault, based on Ovid.

Teseo (1713) is an opera seria by George Frideric Handel to a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym, based on Quinault.

The opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Jean-Philippe Rameau, based on Racine, features Theseus as a character.

The first episode of the 2001 children's television series MythQuest, entitled "Minotaur," features a story in which the modern-day teen-aged protagonist finds himself unexpectedly thrust into Theseus' role and must follow through with the events of the existing myth, including slaying the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne and Daedalus.[22][better source needed ] The storyline was also adapted into a novelisation.[23]

In the miniseries Helen of Troy (2003), Theseus, played by Stellan Skarsgård, kidnaps Helen with Pirithous and waits for her to reach marriageable age; however, he is slain by Pollux and she is returned to Sparta.

In the video game God of War 2 (2007) Theseus, voiced by Paul Eiding, serves as a guardian to the Sisters of Fate. He wears a bronze armband that serves as a key across the Sisters lair.

In the film Immortals (2011), directed by Tarsem Singh, Theseus, played by Henry Cavill, leads a war against King Hyperion of Heraklion, played by Mickey Rourke.

The Indian film Ship of Theseus (2012), directed by Anand Gandhi, is an exploration of the philosophical idea underlying the myth.

In 2013, the BBC series Atlantis was released. In the first episode of season one, The Earth Bull, Jason enters the labyrinth. He is helped by Ariadne to slay him, as the myth of the Minotaur. Jason is based on the characters of Theseus, Perseus and the myth of Jason And The Argonauts. In Season 2 Part 1, Medea is introduced. Pasiphaё seeks to take back Atlantis after Ariadne is made Queen. The plot seems to be leading to Jason and The Argonauts.

In the video game Hades (video game), Theseus serves as a boss, accompanied by the Minotaur, attempting to keep the protagonist from escaping the underworld.

"May I therefore succeed in purifying Fable, making her submit to reason and take on the semblance of History. But where she obstinately disdains to make herself credible, and refuses to admit any element of probability, I shall pray for kindly readers, and such as receive with indulgence the tales of antiquity." (Plutarch, ^ Life of Theseus, translated by Bernadotte Perrin).

The theory, expounded as natural history by ^ Aristotle, was accepted through the nineteenth century and only proven wrong in modern genetics: see Telegony. Sometimes in myth, the result could be twins, one born divine of a divine father, the other human of a human sire: see Dioscuri. Of a supposed Parnassos, founder of Delphi, Pausanias observes, "Like the other heroes, as they are called, he had two fathers; one they say was the god Poseidon, the human father being Cleopompus." (Description of Greece x.6.1).

^ Rock "which had a hollow in it just large enough to receive these objects," Plutarch says.

Compared to ^ Hercules and his Labours, "Theseus is occupied only with the sacred Entrances that are local to the lands of Athens" (Ruck and Staples 1994:204).

Plutarch quotes ^ Simonides to the effect that the alternate sail given by Aegeus was not white, but "a scarlet sail dyed with the tender flower of luxuriant holm oak." (Plutarch, 17.5).

Ariadne is sometimes represented in vase-paintings with the thread wound on her ^ spindle.

^ Demetrius Phalereus was a distinguished orator and statesman, who governed Athens for a decade before being exiled, in 307 BCE.

Citations Edit

Ruck, Carl A.P., and Danny Staples (1994). "Theseus: Making the New Athens." Pp. 203-222 in ^ The World of Classical Myth. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Cueva, Edmund P. (1996). "Plutarch's Ariadne in Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe." ^ American Journal of Philology, 117(3):473-84.

^ Greene, Andrew. "Theseus, Hero of Athens".

^ Morford, Mark; Lenardon, Robert J.; Sham, Michael. "Classical Mythology Tenth Edition". Oxford University Press. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 10 November 2014.

Morford, Mark P. O., Robert J. Lenardon, and Michael Sham. 2014. ^ Classical Mythology (10th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

^ Plutarch. "Theseus". The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

^ Cooper, John M., ed. (1997). Plato: Complete Works. Associate editor, D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett. p. 37. ISBN 0-87220-349-2.

Ovid, ^ Metamorphoses XII: 217-153

Scholia on ^ Iliad III.144 and a fragment (#227) of Pindar, according to Kerenyi 1951:237, note 588.

^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 13.4 (557a); cf. Kerenyi (1959:234) and note.

^ Burkert, Walter (1985). Greek Religion. Harvard University Press. p. 206. ISBN 9780674362819.

^ F. L. Lucas (2014). Ariadne. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107677524.

^ Evangeline Walton (1983). "The Sword is Forged". Kirkus Reviews.

^ Mullen, Harryette Mullen (1 March 2002). ""Apple Pie with Oreo Crust": Fran Ross's Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel". MELUS. 27 (1): 107-129. doi:10.2307/3250639. ISSN 0163-755X.

Ryabinin, Aleksey. 2018. ^ Theseus.The story of ancient gods, goddesses, kings, and warriors. СПб.: Антология. ISBN 978-5-6040037-6-3.

^ O.Zdanov. Life and adventures of Theseus. // "KP", 14.02.2018.

^ The Minotaur (MythQuest #1) goodreads.com

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion (1985)

Kerényi, Karl, The Heroes of the Greeks (1959)

Price, Anne, The Quest for Theseus (London, 1970) examines the Theseus-Minotaur-Ariadne myth and its historical basis, and later treatments and adaptations of it in Western culture.

Ruck, Carl A.P. and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth: ch. IX "Theseus: making the new Athens" (1994), pp. 203-222.

Sideris, Athanasios, Theseus in Thrace. The silver lining on the clouds of the Athenian-Thracian relations in the 5th century BC (Sofia, 2015) presents new iconographical sources and examines the role of Theseus in the state ideology of Athens and its gift-diplomacy with Thrace.

Walker, Henry J., Theseus and Athens, Oxford University Press (US 1995). The most thorough scholarly examination of Theseus's archaic origins and classical myth and cult, and his place in classical literature.

At the first site, which was Epidaurus, sacred to Apollo and the healer Asclepius, Theseus turned the tables on the chthonic bandit, Periphetes, the Club Bearer, who beat his opponents into the Earth, taking from him the stout staff that often identifies Theseus in vase-paintings.

At the Isthmian entrance to the Underworld was a robber named Sinis, often called "Pityokamptes" (Greek: Πιτυοκάμπτης, lit. "he who bends Pinetrees"). He would capture travelers, tie them between two pine trees that were bent down to the ground, and then let the trees go, tearing his victims apart. Theseus slew him by his method. He then had seduced Sinis' daughter, Perigune, fathering the child Melanippus.

In another deed north of the Isthmus, at a place called Crommyon, he killed an enormous pig, the Crommyonian Sow, bred by an old crone named Phaea. Some versions name the sow herself as Phaea. The Bibliotheca by Pseudo-Apollodorus described the Crommyonian Sow as an offspring of Typhon and Echidna.

Near Megara, a robber named Sciron forced travelers along the narrow cliff-face pathway to wash his feet. While they knelt, he kicked them off the cliff behind them, where they were eaten by a giant turtle (or, in some versions, a sea monster). Theseus pushed him off the cliff where he was eaten as well.

Another of these enemies was Cercyon, king at the holy site of Eleusis, who challenged passers-by to a wrestling match and, when he had beaten them, killed them. Theseus beat Cercyon at wrestling and then killed him instead.

The last bandit was Procrustes the Stretcher, who had two beds, one of which he offered to passers-by in the plain of Eleusis. He then made them fit into it, either by stretching them or by cutting off their feet. Since he had two beds of different lengths, no one would fit. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, cutting off his legs and decapitating him with his axe.

Medea, the Marathonian Bull, Androgeus, and the Pallantides Edit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Theseus (, ; Greek: Θησεύς [tʰɛːsěu̯s]) was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. His role in history has been called "a major cultural transition, like the making of the new Olympia by Hercules."[1] :204 The myths surrounding Theseus-his journeys, exploits, and friends-have provided material for fiction throughout the ages.

# data[].attributes.headline
c. 1240 BC—The Philistines expand their influence into Cyprus and Canaan.

# data[].attributes.subject
c. 1240 BC—The Philistines expand their influence into Cyprus and Canaan.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Philistines were an ancient people who lived on the south coast of Canaan from the 12th century BC until 604 BC, when their polity, after having already been subjugated for centuries by Assyria, was finally destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia.[1] After becoming part of his empire and its successor, the Persian Empire, they lost their distinct ethnic identity and disappeared from the historical and archaeological record by the late 5th century BC.[2] The Philistines are known for their biblical conflict with the Israelites. Though the primary source of information about the Philistines is the Hebrew Bible, they are first attested to in reliefs at the Temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, in which they are called Peleset[a] (accepted as cognate with Hebrew Peleshet);[3] the parallel Assyrian term is Palastu,[b] Pilišti,[c] or Pilistu.[d][4]

Several theories are given about the origins of the Philistines. The Hebrew Bible mentions in two places that they originate from Caphtor (possibly Crete/ Minoa).[5] The Septuagint connects the Philistines to other biblical groups such as Caphtorim and the Cherethites and Pelethites, which have been identified with the island of Crete.[6] This has led to the modern theory of Philistines having an Aegean origin.[7] In 2016, a large Philistine cemetery was discovered near Ashkelon, containing more than 150 dead buried in oval-shaped graves. A 2019 genetic study found that, while all three Ashkelon populations derive most of their ancestry from the local Semitic-speaking Levantine gene pool, the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct due to a European-related admixture; this genetic signal is no longer detectable in the later Iron Age population. According to the authors, the admixture was likely due to a " gene flow from a European-related gene pool" during the Bronze to Iron Age transition, which supports the theory that a migration event occurred.[8]

The English term Philistine comes from Old French Philistin; from Classical Latin Philistinus; from Late Greek Philistinoi; ultimately from Hebrew Pəlištî (פלשתי‎; plural Pəlištîm, פלשתים‎), meaning 'person of Pəlešeth [פלשת‎]'; and there are cognates in Akkadian (aka Assyrian, Babylonian) Palastu and Egyptian Palusata;[9] the term Palestine has the same derivation.[10]

The Hebrew term Plištim occurs 286 times in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible (of which 152 times are in 1 Samuel). It also appears in the Samaritan Pentateuch.[11] In the Greek version of the Bible, called Septuagint, the equivalent term Phylistiim occurs 12 times, again in the Pentateuch.[12]

In secondary literature, " Philistia" is further mention in the Aramaic Visions of Amram (4Q543-7), which is dated "prior to Antiochus IV and the Hasmonean revolt," possibly to the time of High Priest of Israel Onias II; Jubilees 46:1-47:1 might have used Amram as a source.[13]

Outside of pre- Maccabean Israelite religious literature, evidence for the name and the origins of the Philistines is less abundant and less consistent. In the remainder of the Hebrew Bible, ha-Plištim is attested at Qumran for 2 Samuel 5:17.[14] In the Septuagint, however, 269 references instead use the term allophylos ('of another tribe').[15]

In 712 BC, a local usurper, Iamani ascended the throne of Ashdod. That same year, he organized a failed uprising against Assyria. The Assyrian King Sargon II invaded Philistia which effectively became an Assyrian province. Though he allowed Iamani to remain on the throne,Gath was conquered, and possibly also destroyed in the same campaign in 711 BC.

In the Book of Genesis, the Philistines are said to descend from the Casluhites, an Egyptian people. However, according to rabbinic sources, these Philistines were different from those described in the Deuteronomistic history.[19] Deuteronomist sources describe the "Five Lords of the Philistines"[e] as based in five city-states of the southwestern Levant: Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, from Wadi Gaza in the south to the Yarqon River in the north. This description portrays them at one period of time as among the Kingdom of Israel's most dangerous enemies.[15] In contrast, the Septuagint uses the term allophuloi ( Greek: ἀλλόφυλοι) instead of "Philistines," which means simply 'other nations'.

Torah (Pentateuch) Edit

With regard to descendants of Mizraim, the biblical progenitor of the Egyptians, the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 states in Hebrew: " ve-et Patrusim ve-et Kasluhim asher yats'u mi-sham Plištim ve-et Kaftorim." Literally, it says that those whom Mizraim begat included "the Pathrusim, Casluhim, out of whom came the Philistines, and the Caphtorim."

There is some debate among interpreters as to whether this verse was originally intended to signify that the Philistines themselves were the offspring of the Casluhim or the Caphtorim. While the Casluhim or the Caphtorim origin was widely followed by some 19th-century biblical scholars, others such as Friedrich Schwally,[21] Bernhard Stade,[22] and Cornelis Tiele[23] argued for a Semitic origin. Interestingly, the Caphtorites were considered to derive from Crete [24]while Cashluhim derived from Cyrenaica,[25] which was part of the province Crete and Cyrenacia in Roman times, which alludes to the similarities between them.

The Torah does not record the Philistines as one of the nations to be displaced from Canaan. In Genesis 15:18-21 the Philistines are absent from the ten nations Abraham's descendants will displace as well as being absent from the list of nations Moses tells the people they will conquer, though the land in which they resided is included in the boundaries based on the locations of rivers described ( Deut 7:1, 20:17). In fact, the Philistines, through their Capthorite ancestors, were allowed to conquer the land from the Avvites ( Deuteronomy 2:23). God also directed the Israelites away from the Philistines upon their Exodus from Egypt according to Exodus 13:17. In Genesis 21:22-27, Abraham agrees to a covenant of kindness with Abimelech, the Philistine king, and his descendants. Abraham's son Isaac deals with the Philistine king similarly, by concluding a treaty with them in chapter 26 ( Genesis 26:28-29).

Unlike most other ethnic groups in the Bible, the Philistines are almost always referred to without the definite article in the Torah.[26]

Rabbinic sources state that the Philistines of Genesis were different people from the Philistines of the Deuteronomistic history (the series of books from Joshua to 2 Kings).[19] According to the Talmud ( Chullin 60b), the Philistines of Genesis intermingled with the Avvites. This differentiation was also held by the authors of the Septuagint (LXX), who translated (rather than transliterated) its base text as allophuloi ( Greek: ἀλλόφυλοι, 'other nations') instead of philistines throughout the Books of Judges and Samuel.[19][27]

Throughout the Deuteronomistic history, Philistines are almost always referred to without the definite article, except on 11 occasions.[26] On the basis of the LXX's regular translation into "allophyloi", Robert Drews states that the term "Philistines" means simply "non-Israelites of the Promised Land" when used in the context of Samson, Saul and David.[28]

Judges 13:1 tells that the Philistines dominated the Israelites in the times of Samson, who fought and killed over a thousand (e.g. Judges 15). According to 1 Samuel 5-6, they even captured the Ark of the Covenant for a few months.

A few biblical texts, such as the Ark Narrative and stories reflecting the importance of Gath, seem to portray Late Iron I and Early Iron II memories.[29] They are mentioned more than 250 times, the majority in the Deuteronomistic history,[citation needed ] and are depicted as among the arch-enemies of the Israelites,[30] a serious and recurring threat before being subdued by David.

The Bible paints the Philistines as the main enemy of the Israelites (prior to the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Neo-Babylonian Empire) with a state of almost perpetual war between the two. The Philistine cities lost their independence to Assyria, and revolts in the following years were all crushed. They were subsequently absorbed into the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Achaemenid Empire, and disappeared as a distinct ethnic group by the late 5th century BC.[2]

Amos in 1:8 sets the Philistines / ἀλλοφύλοι at Ashdod and Ekron. In 9:7 God is quoted asserting that, as he brought Israel from Egypt, he also (in the Hebrew) brought the Philistines from Caphtor.[31] In the Greek this is, instead, bringing the ἀλλόφυλοι from Cappadocia.[32]

Battles between the Israelites and the Philistines Edit

The following is a list of battles described in the Bible as having occurred between the Israelites and the Philistines:[33]

The Philistines are the subject of research and speculation in biblical archaeology and beyond.

The origin of the Philistines is still debated. The probable Aegean connection is discussed in the paragraph on "Archaeological evidence". Here-below are presented the possible connections between Philistines and various similar ethnonyms, toponyms or other philological interpretations of their biblical name: the "Peleset" mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions, a kingdom named as "Walistina/Falistina" or "Palistin" from the region near Aleppo in Syria, and older theories connecting them to a Greek locality or a Greek-language name.

The "Peleset" from Egyptian inscriptions Edit

Since 1846, scholars have connected the biblical Philistines with the Egyptian " Peleset" inscriptions.[34][35][36][37][38] All five of these appear from c.1150 BCE to c.900 BCE just as archaeological references to Kinaḫḫu, or Ka-na-na ( Canaan), come to an end;[39] and since 1873 comparisons were drawn between them and to the Aegean " Pelasgians."[41] Archaeological research to date has been unable to corroborate a mass settlement of Philistines during the Ramesses III era.[42]

"Walistina/Falistina" and "Palistin" in Syria Edit

A Walistina is mentioned in Luwian texts already variantly spelled Palistina.[45][46][47] This implies dialectical variation, a phoneme ("f"?) inadequately described in the script,[48] or both. Falistina was a kingdom somewhere on the Amuq plain, where the Amurru kingdom had held sway before it.[49]

In 2003, a statue of a king named Taita bearing inscriptions in Luwian was discovered during excavations conducted by German archaeologist Kay Kohlmeyer in the Citadel of Aleppo.[50] The new readings of Anatolian hieroglyphs proposed by the Hittitologists Elisabeth Rieken and Ilya Yakubovich were conducive to the conclusion that the country ruled by Taita was called Palistin.[51] This country extended in the 11th-10th centuries BCE from the Amouq Valley in the west to Aleppo in the east down to Mehardeh and Shaizar in the south.[52]

Due to the similarity between Palistin and Philistines, Hittitologist John David Hawkins (who translated the Aleppo inscriptions) hypothesizes a connection between the Syro-Hittite Palistin and the Philistines, as do archaeologists Benjamin Sass and Kay Kohlmeyer.[53] Gershon Galil suggests that King David halted the Arameans' expansion into the Land of Israel on account of his alliance with the southern Philistine kings, as well as with Toi, king of Ḥamath, who is identified with Tai(ta) II, king of Palistin (the northern Sea Peoples).[54]

However, the relation between Palistin and the Philistines is much debated. Israeli professor Itamar Singer notes that there is nothing (besides the name) in the recently discovered archaeology that indicates an Aegean origin to Palistin; most of the discoveries at the Palistin capital Tell Tayinat indicate a Neo-Hittite state, including the names of the kings of Palistin. Singer proposes (based on archaeological finds) that a branch of the Philistines settled in Tell Tayinat and were replaced or assimilated by a new Luwian population who took the Palistin name.[55]

Greece: "Palaeste" and phyle histia theories Edit

Another theory, proposed by Hermann Jacobsohn [de] in 1914, is that the name derives from the attested Illyrian- Epirote locality Palaeste, whose inhabitants would have been called Palaestīnī according to Illyrian normal grammatical practice.[56]

Allen Jones (1972) suggests that the name Philistine represents a corruption of the Greek phyle histia ('tribe of the hearth'), with the Ionic spelling of hestia.[57]

According to Joshua 13:3 and 1 Samuel 6:17, the land of the Philistines (or Allophyloi), called Philistia, was a pentapolis in the southwestern Levant comprising the five city-states of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, from Wadi Gaza in the south to the Yarqon River in the north, but with no fixed border to the east.[15]

Tell Qasile (a "port city") and Aphek were located on the northern frontier of Philistine territory, and Tell Qasile in particular may have been inhabited by both Philistine and non-Philistine people.[58]

The location of Gath is not entirely certain, although the site of Tell es-Safi, not far from Ekron, is currently the most favoured.[59]

The identity of the city of Ziklag, which according to the Bible marked the border between the Philistine and Israelite territory, remains uncertain.[60]

In the western part of the Jezreel Valley, 23 of the 26 Iron Age I sites (12th to 10th centuries BCE) yielded typical Philistine pottery. These sites include Tel Megiddo, Tel Yokneam, Tel Qiri, Afula, Tel Qashish, Be'er Tiveon, Hurvat Hazin, Tel Risim, Tel Re'ala, Hurvat Tzror, Tel Sham, Midrakh Oz and Tel Zariq. Scholars have attributed the presence of Philistine pottery in northern Israel to their role as mercenaries for the Egyptians during the Egyptian military administration of the land in the 12th century BCE. This presence may also indicate further expansion of the Philistines to the valley during the 11th century BCE, or their trade with the Israelites. There are biblical references to Philistines in the valley during the times of the Judges. The quantity of Philistine pottery within these sites is still quite small, showing that even if the Philistines did settle the valley, they were a minority that blended within the Canaanite population during the 12th century BCE. The Philistines seem to have been present in the southern valley during the 11th century, which may relate to the biblical account of their victory at the Battle of Gilboa.[61]

Since Edward Hincks[34] and William Osburn Jr.[35] in 1846, biblical scholars have connected the biblical Philistines with the Egyptian " Peleset" inscriptions;[36][37] and since 1873, both have been connected with the Aegean " Pelasgians".[62] The evidence for these connections is etymological and has been disputed.[41]

Inscriptions written by the Philistines have not yet been found or conclusively identified.[63]

Based on the Peleset inscriptions, it has been suggested that the Casluhite Philistines formed part of the conjectured " Sea Peoples" who repeatedly attacked Egypt during the later Nineteenth Dynasty.[64][65] Though they were eventually repulsed by Ramesses III, he finally resettled them, according to the theory, to rebuild the coastal towns in Canaan. Papyrus Harris I details the achievements of the reign (1186-1155 BC) of Ramesses III. In the brief description of the outcome of the battles in Year 8 is the description of the fate of some of the conjectured Sea Peoples. Ramesses claims that, having brought the prisoners to Egypt, he "settled them in strongholds, bound in my name. Numerous were their classes, hundreds of thousands strong. I taxed them all, in clothing and grain from the storehouses and granaries each year." Some scholars suggest it is likely that these "strongholds" were fortified towns in southern Canaan, which would eventually become the five cities (the Pentapolis) of the Philistines.[66] Israel Finkelstein has suggested that there may be a period of 25-50 years after the sacking of these cities and their reoccupation by the Philistines. It is possible that at first, the Philistines were housed in Egypt; only subsequently late in the troubled end of the reign of Ramesses III would they have been allowed to settle Philistia.[citation needed ]

The "Peleset" appear in four different texts from the time of the New Kingdom.[63] Two of these, the inscriptions at Medinet Habu and the Rhetorical Stela at Deir al-Medinah, are dated to the time of the reign of Ramesses III (1186-1155 BC).[63] Another was composed in the period immediately following the death of Ramesses III ( Papyrus Harris I).[63] The fourth, the Onomasticon of Amenope, is dated to some time between the end of the 12th or early 11th century BC.[63]

The inscriptions at Medinet Habu consist of images depicting a coalition of Sea Peoples, among them the Peleset, who are said in the accompanying text to have been defeated by Ramesses III during his Year 8 campaign. In about 1175 BC, Egypt was threatened with a massive land and sea invasion by the "Sea Peoples," a coalition of foreign enemies which included the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Deyen, the Weshesh, the Teresh, the Sherden, and the PRST. They were comprehensively defeated by Ramesses III, who fought them in " Djahy" (the eastern Mediterranean coast) and at "the mouths of the rivers" (the Nile Delta), recording his victories in a series of inscriptions in his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. Scholars have been unable to conclusively determine which images match what peoples described in the reliefs depicting two major battle scenes. A separate relief on one of the bases of the Osirid pillars with an accompanying hieroglyphic text clearly identifying the person depicted as a captive Peleset chief is of a bearded man without headdress.[63] This has led to the interpretation that Ramesses III defeated the Sea Peoples, including Philistines, and settled their captives in fortresses in southern Canaan; another related theory suggests that Philistines invaded and settled the coastal plain for themselves.[67] The soldiers were quite tall and clean-shaven. They wore breastplates and short kilts, and their superior weapons included chariots drawn by two horses. They carried small shields and fought with straight swords and spears.[68]

The Rhetorical Stela are less discussed, but are noteworthy in that they mention the Peleset together with a people called the Teresh, who sailed "in the midst of the sea". The Teresh are thought to have originated from the Anatolian coast and their association with the Peleset in this inscription is seen as providing some information on the possible origin and identity of the Philistines.[69]

The Harris Papyrus, which was found in a tomb at Medinet Habu, also recalls Ramesses III's battles with the Sea Peoples, declaring that the Peleset were "reduced to ashes." The Papyrus Harris I, records how the defeated foe were brought in captivity to Egypt and settled in fortresses.[70] The Harris papyrus can be interpreted in two ways: either the captives were settled in Egypt and the rest of the Philistines/Sea Peoples carved out a territory for themselves in Canaan, or else it was Ramesses himself who settled the Sea Peoples (mainly Philistines) in Canaan as mercenaries.[71] Egyptian strongholds in Canaan are also mentioned, including a temple dedicated to Amun, which some scholars place in Gaza; however, the lack of detail indicating the precise location of these strongholds means that it is unknown what impact these had, if any, on Philistine settlement along the coast.[69]

The only mention in an Egyptian source of the Peleset in conjunction with any of the five cities that are said in the Bible to have made up the Philistine pentapolis comes in the Onomasticon of Amenope. The sequence in question has been translated as: "Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gaza, Assyria, Shubaru [...] Sherden, Tjekker, Peleset, Khurma [...]" Scholars have advanced the possibility that the other Sea Peoples mentioned were connected to these cities in some way as well.[69]

Aegean connection Edit

Many scholars have interpreted the ceramic and technological evidence attested to by archaeology as being associated with the Philistine advent in the area as strongly suggestive that they formed part of a large scale immigration to southern Canaan, probably from Anatolia and Cyprus, in the 12th century BCE.[72]

The proposed connection between Mycenaean culture and Philistine culture was further documented by finds at the excavation of Ashdod, Ekron, Ashkelon, and more recently Gath, four of the five Philistine cities in Canaan. The fifth city is Gaza. Especially notable is the early Philistine pottery, a locally made version of the Aegean Mycenaean Late Helladic IIIC pottery, which is decorated in shades of brown and black. This later developed into the distinctive Philistine pottery of the Iron Age I, with black and red decorations on white slip known as Philistine Bichrome ware.[73] Also of particular interest is a large, well-constructed building covering 240 square metres (2,600 sq ft), discovered at Ekron. Its walls are broad, designed to support a second story, and its wide, elaborate entrance leads to a large hall, partly covered with a roof supported on a row of columns. In the floor of the hall is a circular hearth paved with pebbles, as is typical in Mycenaean megaron hall buildings; other unusual architectural features are paved benches and podiums. Among the finds are three small bronze wheels with eight spokes. Such wheels are known to have been used for portable cultic stands in the Aegean region during this period, and it is therefore assumed that this building served cultic functions. Further evidence concerns an inscription in Ekron to PYGN or PYTN, which some have suggested refers to " Potnia", the title given to an ancient Mycenaean goddess. Excavations in Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gath reveal dog and pig bones which show signs of having been butchered, implying that these animals were part of the residents' diet.[74][75] Among other findings there are wineries where fermented wine was produced, as well as loom weights resembling those of Mycenaean sites in Greece.[76]

Further evidence of the Aegean origin of the initial Philistine settlers was provided by studying their burial practices in the so far only discovered Philistine cemetery, excavated at Ashkelon (see below).

However, for many years scholars such as Gloria London, John Brug, Shlomo Bunimovitz, Helga Weippert, and Edward Noort, among others, have noted the "difficulty of associating pots with people", proposing alternative suggestions such as potters following their markets or technology transfer, and emphasize the continuities with the local world in the material remains of the coastal area identified with "Philistines", rather than the differences emerging from the presence of Cypriote and/or Aegean/ Mycenaean influences. The view is summed up in the idea that 'kings come and go, but cooking pots remain', suggesting that the foreign Aegean elements in the Philistine population may have been a minority.[77][78]

Geographic evolution Edit

Material culture evidence, primarily pottery styles, indicates that the Philistines originally settled in a few sites in the south, such as Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron.[79] It was not until several decades later, about 1150 BC, that they expanded into surrounding areas such as the Yarkon region to the north (the area of modern Jaffa, where there were Philistine farmsteads at Tel Gerisa and Aphek, and a larger settlement at Tel Qasile).[79] Most scholars, therefore, believe that the settlement of the Philistines took place in two stages. In the first, dated to the reign of Ramesses III, they were limited to the coastal plain, the region of the Five Cities; in the second, dated to the collapse of Egyptian hegemony in southern Canaan, their influence spread inland beyond the coast.[80] During the 10th to 7th centuries BC, the distinctiveness of the material culture appears to have been absorbed with that of surrounding peoples.[81]

Burial practices Edit

The Leon Levy Expedition, consisting of archaeologists from Harvard University, Boston College, Wheaton College in Illinois and Troy University in Alabama, conducted a 30-year investigation of the burial practices of the Philistines, by excavating a Philistine cemetery containing more than 150 burials dating from the 11th to 8th century BCE Tel Ashkelon. In July 2016, the expedition finally announced the results of their excavation.[82]

Archaeological evidence, provided by architecture, burial arrangements, ceramics, and pottery fragments inscribed with non-Semitic writing, indicates that the Philistines were not native to Canaan. Most of the 150 dead were buried in oval-shaped graves, some were interred in ashlar chamber tombs, while there were 4 who were cremated. These burial arrangements were very common to the Aegean cultures, but not to the one indigenous to Canaan. Lawrence Stager of Harvard University believes that Philistines came to Canaan by ships before the Battle of the Delta circa 1175 BCE. DNA was extracted from the skeletons for archaeogenetic population analysis.[83]

The Leon Levy Expedition, which has been going on since 1985, helped break down some of the previous assumptions that the Philistines were uncultured people by having evidence of perfume near the bodies in order for the deceased to smell it in the afterlife.[84]

A study carried out on skeletons at Ashkelon in 2019 by an interdisciplinary team of scholars from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the Leon Levy Expedition found that human remains at Ashkelon, associated with "Philistines" during the Iron Age, derived most of their ancestry from the local Levantine gene pool, but with a certain amount of Southern-European-related admixture. This confirms previous historic and archaeological records of a Southern-European migration event, but it did not leave a long-lasting genetic impact.[8] After two centuries, the Southern-European genetic markers were dwarfed by the local Levantine gene pool, suggesting intensive intermarriage. The Philistine culture and peoplehood remained distinct from other local communities for six centuries.[85] The DNA suggests an influx of people of European heritage into Ashkelon in the twelfth century BC. The individuals' DNA shows similarities to that of ancient Cretans, but it is impossible to specify the exact place in Europe from where Philistines had migrated to Levant, due to limited number of ancient genomes available for study, "with 20 to 60 per cent similarity to DNA from ancient skeletons from Crete and Iberia and that from modern people living in Sardinia."[86][8] The finding fits with an understanding of the Philistines as an "entangled" or "transcultural" group consisting of peoples of various origins, said Aren Maeir, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. "While I fully agree that there was a significant component of non-Levantine origins among the Philistines in the early Iron Age," he said. "These foreign components were not of one origin, and, no less important, they mixed with local Levantine populations from the early Iron Age onward." Laura Mazow, an archaeologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., said the research paper supported the idea that there was some migration into the site from the west[dubious ].[8][dubious ] She added that the findings "support the picture that we see in the archaeological record of a complex, multicultural process that has been resistant to reconstruction by any single historical model."[87] "When we found the infants - infants that were too young to travel... these infants couldn't march or sail to get to the land around Ashkelon, so they were born on site. And their DNA revealed [that] their parents' heritage was not from the local population," Dr. Adam A. Aja, assistant curator of collections at the Harvard Semitic Museum and one of the Ashkelon Philistine cemetery archaeologists, explained, referring to the new genetic input from the direction of Southern Europe that was found in bone samples taken from infants buried under the floors of Philistine homes.[88] Modern archaeologists agree that the Philistines were different from their neighbors: Their arrival on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in the early 12th century B.C. is marked by pottery with close parallels to the ancient Greek world, the use of an Aegean-instead of a Semitic-script, and the consumption of pork.[89] Nevertheless, Cretans were not too unfamiliar with the Levant, with connections being established since the Minoan era, as seen by their influence on Tel Kabri.[90]

The population of the area associated with Philistines is estimated to have been around 25,000 in the 12th century BC, rising to a peak of 30,000 in the 11th century BC.[91] The Canaanite nature of the material culture and toponyms suggest that much of this population was indigenous, such that the migrant element would likely constitute less than half the total, and perhaps much less.[91]

Nothing is known for certain about the language of the Philistines. Pottery fragments from the period of around 1500-1000 BCE have been found bearing inscriptions in non-Semitic languages, including one in a Cypro-Minoan script.[92] The Bible does not mention any language problems between the Israelites and the Philistines, as it does with other groups up to the Assyrian and Babylonian occupations.[93] Later, Nehemiah 13:23-24 writing under the Achaemenids records that when Judean men intermarried women from Moab, Ammon and Philistine cities, half the offspring of Judean marriages with women from Ashdod could speak only their mother tongue, Ašdôdît, not Judean Hebrew ( Yehûdît); although by then this language might have been an Aramaic dialect.[94] There is some limited evidence in favour of the assumption that the Philistines were originally Indo-European-speakers, either from Greece or Luwian speakers from the coast of Asia Minor, on the basis of some Philistine-related words found in the Bible not appearing to be related to other Semitic languages.[95] Such theories suggest that the Semitic elements in the language were borrowed from their neighbours in the region. For example, the Philistine word for captain, "seren", may be related to the Greek word tyrannos (thought by linguists to have been borrowed by the Greeks from an Anatolian language, such as Luwian or Lydian[95]). Although most Philistine names are Semitic (such as Ahimelech, Mitinti, Hanun, and Dagon)[93] some of the Philistine names, such as Goliath, Achish, and Phicol, appear to be of non-Semitic origin, and Indo-European etymologies have been suggested. Recent finds of inscriptions written in Hieroglyphic Luwian in Palistin substantiate a connection between the language of the kingdom of Palistin and the Philistines of the southwestern Levant.[96][97][98]

The deities worshipped in the area were Baal, Astarte, and Dagon, whose names or variations thereof had already appeared in the earlier attested Canaanite pantheon.[15]

Cities excavated in the area attributed to Philistines give evidence of careful town planning, including industrial zones. The olive industry of Ekron alone includes about 200 olive oil installations. Engineers estimate that the city's production may have been more than 1,000 tons, 30 percent of Israel's present-day production.[68]

There is considerable evidence for a large industry in fermented drink. Finds include breweries, wineries, and retail shops marketing beer and wine. Beer mugs and wine kraters are among the most common pottery finds.[99]

"Lords" is a translation of ^ sarnei (סַרְנֵ֣י) in Hebrew. The equivalent in the Greek of the Septuagint is satraps (σατραπείαις).

St. Fleur, Nicholas. 2019. "^ DNA Begins to Unlock Secrets of the Ancient Philistines." New York Times.

^ "Philistine people". Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. According to biblical tradition (Deuteronomy 2:23; Jeremiah 47:4), the Philistines came from Caphtor (possibly Crete, although there is no archaeological evidence of a Philistine occupation of the island.)

Romey, Kristin. 2016. "^ Discovery of Philistine Cemetery May Solve Biblical Mystery." National Geographic. Retrieved 31 July 2017.

^ Feldman, Michal; Master, Daniel M.; Bianco, Raffaela A.; Burri, Marta; Stockhammer, Philipp W.; Mittnik, Alissa; Aja, Adam J.; Jeong, Choongwon; Krause, Johannes (3 July 2019). "Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines". Science Advances. 5 (7): eaax0061. Bibcode:2019SciA....5...61F. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax0061. PMC 6609216. PMID 31281897. Lay summary - NewScientist (3 July 2019).

"^ Philistine." Online Etymology Dictionary.

^ "Origin and meaning of the name Palestine by". Online Etymology Dictionary.

^ Genesis 10:13, 21:32-34, 26:1f, etc.

4QSam^ a column 35 (2 Samuel 4:9-6:3), in Fincke, Andrew, ed. 2001. The Samuel Scroll from Qumran: 4QSama Restored and Compared to the Septuagint and 4QSamc. Leiden: Brill. p. 144.

^ Fahlbusch & Bromiley 2005, "Philistines", p. 185.

^ Jobling, David; Rose, Catherine (1996), "Reading as a Philistine", in Mark G. Brett (ed.), Ethnicity and the Bible, Brill, p. 404, ISBN 9780391041264, Rabbinic sources insist that the Philistines of Judges and Samuel were different people altogether from the Philistines of Genesis. (Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 60 (Braude: vol. 1, 513); the issue here is precisely whether Israel should have been obliged, later, to keep the Genesis treaty.) This parallels a shift in the Septuagint's translation of Hebrew pĕlištim. Before Judges, it uses the neutral transliteration phulistiim, but beginning with Judges it switches to the pejorative allophuloi. [Footnote 26: To be precise, Codex Alexandrinus starts using the new translation at the beginning of Judges and uses it invariably thereafter, Vaticanus likewise switches at the beginning of Judges, but reverts to phulistiim on six occasions later in Judges, the last of which is 14:2.]

Strange, J. ^ Caphtor/Keftiu: A New Investigation (Leiden: Brill) 1980

^ Navigating the Bible, World ORT, 2000, commentary Pathrusim, Casluhim

^ Alter, Robert (2009). The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. W. W. Norton & Company. p. xvii. ISBN 978-0-393-07025-5.

Vandersleyen 1985, pp. 40-41 n.9: [Original French]: "À ma connaissance, les plus anciens savants qui ont proposé explicitement l' identification des Pourousta avec les Philistins sont William Osburn Jr., Ancient Egypt, Her Testimony to the Truth of the Bible..., Londres 1846. p. 99. 107. 137. et Edward Hincks, An Attempt to Ascertain the Number, Names, and Powers, of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic or Ancient Egyptian Alphabet, Dublin, 1847, p. 47"
[Translation]: "To my knowledge, the earliest scholars who explicitly proposed the identification of Pourousta with the Philistines are William Osburn Jr., Ancient Egypt, Her Testimony to the Truth of the Bible ..., London, 1846. pp. 99, 107, 137, and Edward Hincks, An Attempt to Ascertain the Number, Names, and Powers, of the Letters of the Alphabet Egyptian Hieroglyphic gold Ancient , Dublin, 1847, p. 47"

Vandersleyen 1985, pp. 39-41: "Quand Champollion visita Médinet Habou en juin 1829, il vit ces scénes, lut le nom des Pourosato, sans y reconnaître les Philistins; plus tard, dans son Dictionnaire égyptien et dans sa Grammaire égyptienne, il transcrivit le même nom Polosté ou Pholosté, mais contrairement à ce qu'affirmait Brugsch en 1858 et tous les auteurs postérieurs, Champollion n'a nulle part écrit que ces Pholosté étaient les Philistins de la Bible. [When Champollion visited Medinet Habu in June 1829, he experienced these scenes, reading the name of Pourosato, without recognizing the Philistines; Later, in his Dictionnaire égyptien and its Grammaire égyptienne, he transcribed the same name Polosté or Pholosté, but contrary to the assertion by Brugsch in 1858 and subsequent authors, Champollion has nowhere written that these Pholosté were the Philistines of the Bible.]"

^ Dothan & Dothan 1992, pp. 22-23, write of the initial identification: "It was not, however, until the spring of 1829, almost a year after they had arrived in Egypt, that Champollion and his entourage were finally ready to tackle the antiquities of Thebes... The chaotic tangle of ships and sailors, which Denon assumed was a panicked flight into the Indus, was actually a detailed portrayal of a battle at the mouth of the Nile. Because the events of the reign of Ramesses III were unknown from other, the context of this particular war remained a mystery. On his return to Paris, Champollion puzzled over the identity of the various enemies shown in the scene. Since each of them had been carefully labeled with a hieroglyphic inscription, he hoped to match the names with those of ancient tribes and peoples mentioned in Greek and Hebrew texts. Unfortunately, Champollion died in 1832 before he could complete the work, but he did have success with one of the names. [......] proved to be none other than the biblical Philistines." Dothan and Dothan's description was incorrect in stating that the naval battle scene (Champollion, Monuments,Plate CCXXII) "carefully labeled with a hieroglyphic inscription" each of the combatants, and Champollion's posthumously published manuscript notes contained only one short paragraph on the naval scene with only the "Fekkaro" and "Schaïratana" identified (Champollion, Monuments, page 368). Dothan and Dothan's following paragraph "Dr. Greene's Unexpected Discovery" incorrectly confused John Beasley Greene with John Baker Stafford Greene [ca]. Champollion did not make a connection to the Philistines in his published work, and Greene did not refer to such a connection in his 1855 work which commented on Champollion (Greene 1855, p. 4)

Assaf Yasur-Landau (16 June 2014). The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age. Cambridge University Press. p. 180. ISBN 978-1-139-48587-6. It seems, then, that the etymological evidence for the origin of the Philistines and other Sea Peoples can be defined as unfocused and ambiguous at best.

^ Rieken, Elisabeth. A. Süel (ed.). "Das Zeichen <sà> im Hieroglyphen-luwischen". Acts of the VIIth International Congress of Hittitology, Çorum, August 25-31, 2008. Ankara: Anıt Matbaa. 2: 651-60.

^

^

^ Bunnens, Guy (2006). A New Luwian Stele and the Cult of the Storm-god at Til Barsib-Masuwari. Tell Ahmar, Volume 2. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. p. 130. ISBN 9789042918177.

^ Salner, Omri (17 December 2014). "The History of King David in Light of New Epigraphic and Archeological Data". Haifa University.

^ Butler, Trent C, editor. Holman Bible Dictionary, "Ziklag" (1991)

^ Avner Raban, "The Philistines in the Western Jezreel Valley", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 284 (November 1991), pp. 17-27, The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The American Schools of Oriental Research.

^ The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe Ca. 1200 B.C., Robert Drews, p55 Quote: "A slight shift occurred in 1872, when F. Chabas published the first translation of all the texts relating to the wars of Merneptah and Ramesses III. Chabas found it strange that the Peleset shown in the reliefs were armed and garbed in the same manner as "European" peoples such as the Sicilians and Sardinians, and he, therefore, argued that these Peleset were not from Philistia after all but were Aegean Pelasgians. It was this unfortunate suggestion that triggered Maspero's wholesale revision of the entire episode. In his 1873 review of Chabas's book, Maspero agreed that the Peleset of Medinet Habu were accoutred more like Europeans than Semites and also agreed that they were Aegean Pelasgians. But he proposed that it must have been at this very time - in the reign of Ramesses III - that these Pelasgians became Philistines."

^ Killebrew 2005, p. 202.

^ Killebrew, Ann E. (2013), "The Philistines and Other "Sea Peoples" in Text and Archaeology", Society of Biblical Literature Archaeology and biblical studies, Society of Biblical Lit, 15, p. 2, ISBN 9781589837218 . Quote: "First coined in 1881 by the French Egyptologist G. Maspero (1896), the somewhat misleading term "Sea Peoples" encompasses the ethnonyms Lukka, Sherden, Shekelesh, Teresh, Eqwesh, Denyen, Sikil / Tjekker, Weshesh, and Peleset (Philistines). [Footnote: The modern term "Sea Peoples" refers to peoples that appear in several New Kingdom Egyptian texts as originating from "islands" (tables 1-2; Adams and Cohen, this volume; see, e.g., Drews 1993, 57 for a summary). The use of quotation marks in association with the term "Sea Peoples" in our title is intended to draw attention to the problematic nature of this commonly used term. It is noteworthy that the designation "of the sea" appears only in relation to the Sherden, Shekelesh, and Eqwesh. Subsequently, this term was applied somewhat indiscriminately to several additional ethnonyms, including the Philistines, who are portrayed in their earliest appearance as invaders from the north during the reigns of Merenptah and Ramesses Ill (see, e.g., Sandars 1978; Redford 1992, 243, n. 14; for a recent review of the primary and secondary literature, see Woudhuizen 2006). Hencefore the term Sea Peoples will appear without quotation marks.]"

"Philistines | Follow The Rabbi". followtherabbi.com.

^ Killebrew 2005, pp. 204-205.

Ann E. Killebrew, ^ Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300-1100 B.C.E, Society of Biblical Lit, 2005 p. 230.

^ Stager, Lawrence. "When Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon". Biblical Archaeological Review. Archived from the original on 19 May 2011.

^ Schloen, David (30 July 2007). "Recent Discoveries at Ashkelon". The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

^ Carl S. Ehrlich (1996). The Philistines in Transition: A History from Ca. 1000-730 B.C.E. Brill. p. 10. ISBN 90-04-10426-7. The difficulty of associating pots with peoples or ethnic groups has often been commented on. Nonetheless, the association of the Philistines with the Iron Age I bichrome pottery bearing their name is most often taken for granted. Although scholars have backed off from postulating that every site with bichrome pottery was under Philistine control, the ethnic association remains... A cautionary note has, however, been sounded in particular by Brug, Bunimovitz, H. Weippert, and Noort, among others. In essence, their theories rest on the fact that even among sites in the Philistine heartland, the supposed Philistine pottery does not represent the major portion of the finds... While not denying Cypriote and/or Aegean/ Mycenean influence in the material cultural traditions of coastal Canaan in the early Iron Age, in addition to that of Egyptian and local Canaanite traditions, the above named "minimalist" scholars emphasize the continuities between the ages and not the differences. As H. Weippert has stated, "Könige kommen, Könige gehen, aber die Kochtöpfe bleiben." In regard to the bichrome pottery, she follows Galling and speculates that it was produced by a family or families of Cypriote potters who followed their markets and immigrated into Canaan once the preexisting trade connections had been severed. The find at Tell Qasile of both bichrome and Canaanite types originating in the same pottery workshop would appear to indicate that the ethnic identification of the potters is at best an open question. At any rate, it cannot be facilely assumed that all bichrome ware was produced by "ethnic" Philistines. Thus Bunimovitz's suggestion to refer to "Philistia pottery" rather than to "Philistine" must be given serious consideration... What holds true for the pottery of Philistia also holds true for other aspects of the regional material culture. Whereas Aegean cultural influence cannot be denied, the continuity with the Late Bronze traditions in Philistia has increasingly come to attention. A number of Iron Age I features which were thought to be imported by the Philistines have been shown to have Late Bronze Age antecedents. It would hence appear that the Philistines of foreign (or "Philistine") origin were the minority in Philistia.

^ "Know thine enemy: DNA study solves ancient riddle of origins of the Philistines".

^ "Ancient DNA reveals the roots of the Biblical Philistines". Nature. 571 (7764): 149. 4 July 2019. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-02081-x. S2CID 195847736.

^ "Archaeology shows Philistines, enemy of Israelites, came from Europe".

^ "Ancient DNA may reveal origin of the Philistines". 3 July 2019.

^ "Remains of Minoan fresco found at Tel Kabri"; "Remains Of Minoan-Style Painting Discovered During Excavations of Canaanite Palace", ScienceDaily, 7 December 2009

Tenney, Merrill (2010), The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible, 4, Zondervan, ISBN 9780310876991, Little is known of the Philistine language or script. There is never any indication in the Bible of a language problem between the Israelites and Philistines. The Philistines must have adopted the indigenous Semitic language soon after arriving in Canaan, or they might have already known a Semitic language before they came. Their names are usually Semitic (e.g., Ahimelek, Mitinti, Hanun, and the god Dagon). But two Philistine names may have come from the Asianic area: Achish has been compared with Anchises, and Goliath with Alyattes. A few Hebrew words may be Philistine loanwords. The word for helmet (koba H3916 or qoba H7746) is a foreign word often attributed to the Philistines. The term for "lords," already mentioned (seren), can possibly be connected with tyrannos ("tyrant"), a pre-Greek or Asianic word. Some have connected three seals discovered in the excavations at Ashdod with the Philistines. The signs resemble the Cypro-Minoan script. Three inscribed clay tablets from Deir Alla (SUCCOTH) also have been attributed to the Philistines. These signs resemble the Cypro-Mycenaean script. Both the seals and clay tablets are still imperfectly understood.

^

^ Weeden, Mark (December 2013). "After the Hittites: the kingdoms of Karkamish and Palistin in northern Syria" (PDF). Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. 56 (2): 1-20. doi:10.1111/j.2041-5370.2013.00055.x.

^ Ritenbaugh, Richard T. (November 2006). "Who Were the Philistines?". Charlotte, North Carolina: Church of the Great God.[better source needed ]

Bonfante, G. (1946). "Who were the Philistines?". American Journal of Archaeology. 50 (2): 251-62. doi:10.2307/499052. JSTOR 499052.

Dothan, Trude Krakauer; Dothan, Moshe (1992). People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0-02-532261-3.

Drews, Robert (1995), "Four: Migrations", The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe Ca. 1200 B.C., Princeton University Press, pp. 48-72, ISBN 978-0-69102591-9

Drews, Robert (1998), "Canaanites and Philistines", Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 23 (81): 39-61, doi:10.1177/030908929802308104, S2CID 144074940

Finkelstein, Israel (December 2002). "The Philistines in the Bible: A Late-Monarchic Perspective". Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. 27 (2): 131-67. doi:10.1177/030908920202700201. S2CID 170636773.

Hitchcock, Louise (2011), "All the Cherethites, and all the Pelethites, and all the Gittites': A Current Assessment of the Evidence for the Minoan Connection with the Philistines", Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Cretan Studies, 21-27 October 2011, p. 20

Jones, A. (1972). "The Philistines and the Hearth: Their Journey to the Levant". Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 31 (4): 343-350. doi:10.1086/372205. S2CID 161766215.

Macalister, R. A. Stewart (1911), "The Philistines: Their History and Civilization", Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology, Oxford University Press

Maeir, A. M. (2005). "Philister-Keramik". In Frantz-Szabo, Gabriella; Hellwag, Ursula (eds.). Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie, Band 14. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 528-536.

Mendenhall, George E. (1973). The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-1267-4.

Rabin, Chaim (1963). "Hittite Words in Hebrew". Orientalia. 32: 113-139.

Redford, Donald Bruce (1992). Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03606-3.

Sherratt, Susan (1998), Seymour Gitin; Amichai Mazar; Ephraim Stern (eds.), ""Sea Peoples" and the economic structure of the late second millennium in the eastern Mediterranean", Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Essays in Honor of Trude Dothan, Israel Exploration Society, pp. 292-313

Silberman, Neil A. (1998), Seymour Gitin; Amichai Mazar; Ephraim Stern (eds.), "The Sea Peoples, the Victorians, and Us", Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Essays in Honor of Trude Dothan, Israel Exploration Society, pp. 268-275

Ussishkin, David (2008). "The Date of the Philistine Settlement in the Coastal Plain: The View from Megiddo and Latish". In Grabbe, Lester L. (ed.). Israel in Transition: From late Bronze II to Iron IIa (c.1250-850 B.C.E.). Volume I. The Archaeology. New York: T & T Clark International. pp. 203-216. ISBN 9780567027269.

Vandersleyen, Claude (2003). "Keftiu: A Cautionary Note". Oxford Journal of Archaeology. 22 (2): 209-212. doi:10.1111/1468-0092.t01-1-00005.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Philistines were an ancient people who lived on the south coast of Canaan from the 12th century BC until 604 BC, when their polity, after having already been subjugated for centuries by Assyria, was finally destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia.[1] After becoming part of his empire and its successor, the Persian Empire, they lost their distinct ethnic identity and disappeared from the historical and archaeological record by the late 5th century BC.[2] The Philistines are known for their biblical conflict with the Israelites.

# data[].attributes.headline
1250 BC—Wu Ding becomes emperor of Shang Dynasty to 1192 BC.
c. 1250 BC: Earliest writing (oracle bones) that survived exists in Ancient China.

# data[].attributes.subject
1250 BC—Wu Ding becomes emperor of Shang Dynasty to 1192 BC.
c. 1250 BC: Earliest writing (oracle bones) that survived exists in Ancient China.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
According to later tradition, in the sixth year of his father's reign, he was ordered to live at He (河) and study under Gan Pan (甘盤). These early years spent among the common people allowed him to become familiar with their daily problems.

In the Records of the Grand Historian he was listed by Sima Qian as the twenty-second Shang king, succeeding his father Xiao Yi (小乙). The oracle bone script inscriptions unearthed at Yinxu (Ruins of Yin) alternatively record that he was the twenty-first Shang king. The Shiji says that he was enthroned in the year of Dingwei (丁未) with Gan Pan (甘盤) as his prime minister and Yin (殷) as his capital.

He cultivated the allegiance of neighbouring tribes by marrying one woman from each of them. His favoured consort Fu Hao entered the royal household through such a marriage and served as military general and high priestess. Another of Wu Ding's wives, Fu Jing, was probably responsible for overseeing agricultural production, as this was the subject she divined about most frequently.

According to Bamboo Annals, in the twenty-fifth year of his reign, his son Zu Ji (祖己) died at a remote area after being exiled.

In the twenty-ninth year of his reign, he conducted rituals in honour of his ancestor King Tang, the first king of the Shang dynasty, at the Royal Temple. Angered by the presence of a wild chicken standing on one of the ceremonial bronze vessels, he condemned his vassals and wrote a proclamation called Day of the Supplementary Sacrifice to Gao Zong (高宗肜日, presently in the Book of Documents [1]). However, the Book of Documents passage in question is attributed to Zu Ji, who is evidently still alive.

According to the Bamboo Annals, the thirty-second year of his reign, he sent troops to Guifang (鬼方) and after three years of fighting he conquered it. The Di (氐) and Qiang (羌) immediately sent envoys to Shang to negotiate. His armies went on to conquer Dapeng (大彭) in the forty-third year of his reign, and Tunwei (豕韋) in the 50th year of his reign. Exactly how this is related to the campaigns in the oracle bone divinations is unclear, where the Gui fang appears once, but the Gong Fang and Tu Fang campaigns have hundreds of divinations.

He died in the fifty-ninth year of his reign according to all the sources available, none of which are contemporary. Widely regarded in later tradition as one of the best kings of the Shang dynasty, he was given the posthumous name Wu Ding (武丁) and was succeeded by his son Zu Geng (祖庚).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to later tradition, in the sixth year of his father's reign, he was ordered to live at He (河) and study under Gan Pan (甘盤). These early years spent among the common people allowed him to become familiar with their daily problems. In the Records of the Grand Historian he was listed by Sima Qian as the twenty-second Shang king, succeeding his father Xiao Yi (小乙).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since this war was considered among the ancient Greeks as either the last event of the mythical age or the first event of the historical age, several dates are given for the fall of Troy. They usually derive from genealogies of kings. Ephorus gives 1135 BC,[207] Sosibius 1172 BC,[208] Eratosthenes 1184 BC/1183 BC,[209] Timaeus 1193 BC,[210] the Parian marble 1209 BC/1208 BC,[211] Dicaearchus 1212 BC,[212] Herodotus around 1250 BC,[213] Eretes 1291 BC,[214] while Douris gives 1334 BC.[215] As for the exact day Ephorus gives 23/24 Thargelion (May 6 or 7), Hellanicus 12 Thargelion (May 26)[216] while others give the 23rd of Sciroforion (July 7) or the 23rd of Ponamos (October 7).

The glorious and rich city Homer describes was believed to be Troy VI by many twentieth century authors, and destroyed about 1275 BC, probably by an earthquake. Its successor, Troy VIIa, was destroyed around 1180 BC; it was long considered a poorer city, and dismissed as a candidate for Homeric Troy, but since the excavation campaign of 1988, it has come to be regarded as the most likely candidate.[217][218][219]

Ancient authors

Apollodorus, Gods & Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus, translated by Michael Simpson, The University of Massachusetts Press, (1976). ISBN 0-87023-205-3.

Apollodorus, Apollodorus: The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer, two volumes, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Volume 1: ISBN 0-674-99135-4. Volume 2: ISBN 0-674-99136-2.

Euripides, Andromache, in Euripides: Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, with an English translation by David Kovacs. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. (1996). ISBN 0-674-99533-3.

Euripides, Helen, in The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. in two volumes. 1. Helen, translated by E. P. Coleridge. New York. Random House. 1938.

Euripides, Hecuba, in The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. in two volumes. 1. Hecuba, translated by E. P. Coleridge. New York. Random House. 1938.

Herodotus, Histories, A. D. Godley (translator), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920; ISBN 0-674-99133-8. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].

Pausanias, Description of Greece, (Loeb Classical Library) translated by W. H. S. Jones; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. (1918). Vol 1, Books I-II, ISBN 0-674-99104-4; Vol 2, Books III-V, ISBN 0-674-99207-5; Vol 3, Books VI-VIII.21, ISBN 0-674-99300-4; Vol 4, Books VIII.22-X, ISBN 0-674-99328-4.

Proclus, Chrestomathy, in Fragments of the Kypria translated by H.G. Evelyn-White, 1914 (public domain).

Proclus, Proclus' Summary of the Epic Cycle, trans. Gregory Nagy.

Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica, in Quintus Smyrnaeus: The Fall of Troy, Arthur Sanders Way (Ed. & Trans.), Loeb Classics #19; Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. (1913). (1962 edition: ISBN 0-674-99022-6).

Strabo, Geography, translated by Horace Leonard Jones; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. (1924)

Modern authors

Burgess, Jonathan S. 2004. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Johns Hopkins). ISBN 0-8018-7890-X.

Castleden, Rodney. The Attack on Troy. Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 1-84415-175-1).

Davies, Malcolm (2000). "Euripides Telephus Fr. 149 (Austin) and the Folk-Tale Origins of the Teuthranian Expedition" (PDF). Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. 133: 7-10.

Durschmied, Erik. The Hinge Factor:How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History. Coronet Books; New Ed edition (7 Oct 1999).

Frazer, Sir James George, Apollodorus: The Library, two volumes, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Volume 1: ISBN 0-674-99135-4. Volume 2: ISBN 0-674-99136-2.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Penguin (Non-Classics); Cmb/Rep edition (April 6, 1993). ISBN 0-14-017199-1.

Kakridis, J., 1988. Ελληνική Μυθολογία ("Greek mythology"), Ekdotiki Athinon, Athens.

Karykas, Pantelis, 2003. Μυκηναίοι Πολεμιστές ("Mycenean Warriors"), Communications Editions, Athens.

Latacz, Joachim. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. New York: Oxford University Press (US), 2005 (hardcover, ISBN 0-19-926308-6).

Simpson, Michael. Gods & Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus, The University of Massachusetts Press, (1976). ISBN 0-87023-205-3.

Strauss, Barry. The Trojan War: A New History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0-7432-6441-X).

Thompson, Diane P (2004). The Trojan War: Literature and Legends from the Bronze Age to the Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1737-4.

Troy: From Homer's Iliad to Hollywood Epic, edited by Martin M. Winkler. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007 (hardcover, ISBN 1-4051-3182-9; paperback, ISBN 1-4051-3183-7).

Wood, Michael. In Search of the Trojan War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 (paperback, ISBN 0-520-21599-0); London: BBC Books, 1985 (ISBN 0-563-20161-4).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since this war was considered among the ancient Greeks as either the last event of the mythical age or the first event of the historical age, several dates are given for the fall of Troy. They usually derive from genealogies of kings.

# data[].attributes.headline
c. 1258 BC—The Exodus as depicted in the Bible.

# data[].attributes.subject
c. 1258 BC—The Exodus as depicted in the Bible.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Exodus ( Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, Yeẓi'at Miẓrayim: lit. 'Departure from Egypt') is the founding myth of the Israelites.[a] It tells a story of Israelite enslavement and departure from Egypt, revelations at biblical Mount Sinai, and wanderings in the wilderness up to the borders of Canaan. Its message is that the Israelites were delivered from slavery by Yahweh their god, and therefore belong to him by covenant.

The consensus of modern scholars is that the Bible does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE from the indigenous Canaanite culture. Most modern scholars believe that the story of the Exodus has some historical basis,[6] but contains little that is accurate or reliable.

The story of the Exodus is spread over four of the biblical books of the Torah or Pentateuch, namely Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There is a widespread agreement that the composition of the Torah took place in the Middle Persian Period (5th century BCE), although some traditions behind it are older since allusions to the story are made by 8th-century BCE prophets such as Amos and Hosea.

The biblical Exodus is central in Judaism, with it being recounted daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated in festivals such as Passover. Early Christians saw the Exodus as a typological prefiguration of resurrection and salvation by Jesus. The story has also resonated with non-Jewish groups, such as the early American settlers fleeing persecution in Europe, and African Americans striving for freedom and civil rights.

Narrative

The story of the Exodus is told in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the last four of the first five books of the Bible (also called the Torah or Pentateuch). In the first book of the Pentateuch, the Book of Genesis, the Israelites had come to live in Egypt in the Land of Goshen during a famine due to the fact that an Israelite, Joseph, had become a high official in the court of the pharaoh. Exodus begins with the deaths of Joseph and the ascension of a new pharaoh "who did not know Joseph" (Exodus 1:8). The pharaoh becomes concerned by the number and strength of Israelites in Egypt and enslaves them, commanding them to build at two "supply" or "store cities" called Pithom and Rameses (Exodus 1:11).[b] The pharaoh also orders the slaughter at birth of all male Hebrew children. One Hebrew child, however, is rescued by being placed in a basket on the Nile. He is found and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, who names him Moses. Moses eventually kills an Egyptian he sees beating a Hebrew slave, and is forced to flee to Midian, marrying a daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro. The old pharaoh dies and a new one ascends to the throne.

Moses, in Midian, goes to Mount Horeb, where Yahweh appears in a burning bush and commands him to go to Egypt to free the Hebrew slaves and bring them to the promised land in Canaan. Yahweh also speaks to Moses's brother Aaron; they both assemble the Israelites and perform signs so that they believe in Yahweh's promise. Moses and Aaron then go to the Pharaoh and ask him to let the Israelites go into the desert for a religious festival, but the Pharaoh refuses and commands the Israelites to make bricks without straw and increases their workload. Moses and Aaron return to the Pharaoh and this time ask him to free the Israelites. The Pharaoh demands for Moses to perform a miracle, and Aaron throws down Moses' staff, which turns into a tannin (sea monster or snake) (Exodus 7:8-13); however, Pharaoh's magicians[c] are also able to do this, though Moses' staff devours the others. The Pharaoh then refuses to let the Israelites go.

After this, Yahweh begins inflicting the Plagues of Egypt on the Egyptians for each time that Moses goes to Pharaoh and Pharaoh refuses to release the Israelites. Pharaoh's magicians are able to replicate the first plagues, in which Yahweh turns the Nile to blood and produces a plague of frogs, but are unable to reproduce any plagues after the third, the plague of gnats. After each plague Pharaoh allows the Israelites to worship Yahweh to remove the plague, then refuses to free them. Moses is then commanded to fix the first month of Aviv at the head of the Hebrew calendar. He instructs the Israelites to take a lamb on the 10th day of the month, slaughter it on the 14th, and daub its blood on their doorposts and lintels, and to observe the Passover meal that night, the night of the full moon. In the final plague, Yahweh kills all the firstborn sons of Egypt and the firstborn cattle, but the Israelites, with blood on their doorposts are spared. Yahweh commands that the Israelites observe a festival as "a perpetual ordinance" to remember this event (Exodus 12:14). Pharaoh finally agrees to let the Israelites go after his firstborn son is killed. Yahweh leads the Israelites in the form of a pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night. However, once the Israelites have already left, Yahweh hardens Pharoahs heart. Pharaoh then changes his mind and pursues the Israelites to the shore of the Red Sea. Moses uses his staff to part the Red Sea, and the Israelites cross on dry ground, but the sea closes down on the pursuing Egyptians, drowning them all.

The Israelites now begin to complain about Aaron and Moses, as Yahweh miraculously provided them first with water and food, eventually raining manna down for them to eat. Amalek attacks at Rephidim but is defeated in battle. Jethro comes to Moses with Moses's wife and sons; on Jethro's advice, Moses appoints judges for the tribes of Israel. The Israelites reach the Sinai Desert and Yahweh calls Moses to Mount Sinai, where Yahweh reveals himself to his people and establishes the Ten Commandments and Mosaic covenant: the Israelites are to keep his torah (i.e. law, instruction), and in return he will give them the land of Canaan. Yahweh establishes the Aaronic priesthood and various rules for ritual worship, among other laws. However, in Moses's absence the Israelites sin against Yahweh by creating the idol of a golden calf, and as retaliation Yahweh has the Levites kill three thousand people (Exodus 32:28) and Yahweh sends a plague on the Israelites. The Israelites now accept the covenant, which is reestablished, build a tabernacle for Yahweh, and receive their laws. Yahweh commands Moses to take a census of the Israelites and establishes the duties of the Levites. Then the Israelites depart from Mount Sinai.

Yahweh commands Moses to send twelve spies ahead to Canaan to scout the land. The spies discover that the Canaanites are strong, and, believing that the Israelites cannot defeat them, the spies falsely report to the Israelites that Canaan is full of giants so that the Israelites will not invade (Numbers 13:31-33). The Israelites refuse to go to Canaan, so Yahweh manifests himself and declares that the generation that left Egypt will have to pass away before the Israelites can enter Canaan. The Israelites will have to remain in the wilderness for forty years, and Yahweh kills the spies through a plague except for the righteous Joshua and Caleb, who will be allowed to enter the promised land. A group of Israelites led by Korah, son of Izhar, rebels against Moses, but Yahweh opens the earth and sends them living to Sheol.

The Israelites come to the oasis of Kadesh Barnea, where Miriam dies and the Israelites remain for forty years. The people are without water, so Yahweh commands Moses to get water from a rock by speaking to it, but Moses strikes the rock with his staff instead, for which Yahweh forbids him from entering the promised land. Moses sends a messenger to the king of Edom requesting passage through his land to Canaan, but the king refuses. The Israelites then go to Mount Hor, where Aaron dies. The Israelites try to go around Edom, but the Israelites complain about lack of bread and water, so Yahweh sends a plague of poisonous snakes to afflict them. After Moses prays for deliverance, Yahweh has him create the brazen serpent, and the Israelites who look at it are cured. The Israelites are soon in conflict with various other kingdoms, and king Balak of Moab attempts to have the seer Balaam curse the Israelites, but Balaam blesses the Israelites instead. Some Israelites begin having sexual relations with Moabite women and worshipping Moabite gods, so Yahweh orders Moses to impale the idolators and sends a plague, but the full extent of Yahweh's wrath is averted when Phinehas impales an Israelite and a Midianite woman having intercourse (Numbers 25:7-9). Yahweh commands the Israelites to destroy the Midianites and Moses and Phinehas take another census. They then conquer the lands of Og and Sihon in Transjordan, settling the Gadites, Reubenites, and half the Tribe of Manasseh there.

Moses then addresses the Israelites for a final time on the banks of the Jordan River, reviewing their travels and giving them further laws. Yahweh tells Moses to summon Joshua, whom Yahweh commissions to lead the conquest of Canaan. Yahweh tells Moses to ascend Mount Nebo, from where he sees the promised land and where he dies.

Covenant and law

The climax of the Exodus is the covenant (binding legal agreement) between God and the Israelites mediated by Moses at Sinai: Yahweh will protect the Israelites as his chosen people for all time, and the Israelites will keep Yahweh's laws and worship only him.[22] The covenant is described in stages: at Exodus 24:3-8 the Israelites agree to abide by the "book of the covenant" that Moses has just read to them; shortly afterwards God writes the "words of the covenant" - the Ten Commandments - on stone tablets; and finally, as the people gather in Moab to cross into Canaan, the land God has promised them, Moses makes a new covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites "beside the covenant he made with them at Horeb" (Deuteronomy 29:1). The laws are set out in a number of codes:[24]

The earliest traces of the traditions behind the exodus appear in the northern prophets Amos (possibly) and Hosea (certainly), both active in the 8th century BCE in northern Israel, but their southern contemporaries Isaiah and Micah show no knowledge of an exodus. (Micah 6:4-5 contains a reference to the exodus, which many scholars take to be an addition by a later editor.)[e] The story may, therefore, have originated a few centuries earlier, perhaps in the 9th or 10th BCE, and there are signs that it took different forms in Israel, in the Transjordan region, and in the southern Kingdom of Judah before being unified in the Persian era. The Exodus narrative was most likely further altered and expanded under the influence of the return from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE.

Evidence from the Bible suggests that the Exodus from Egypt formed a "foundational mythology" or "state ideology" for the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The northern psalms 80 and 81 state that God "brought a vine out of Egypt" (Psalm 80:8) and record ritual observances of Israel's deliverance from Egypt as well as a version of part of the Ten Commandments (Psalm 81:10-11). The Books of Kings records the dedication of two golden calves in Bethel and Dan by the Israelite king Jeroboam I, who uses the words "Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28). Scholars relate Jeroboam's calves to the golden calf made by Aaron of Exodus 32. Both include a nearly identical dedication formula ("These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt;" Exodus 32:8). This episode in Exodus is "widely regarded as a tendentious narrative against the Bethel calves". Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggests that event, which would have taken place around 931 BCE, may be partially historical due to its association with the historical pharaoh Sheshonq I (the biblical Shishak). Stephen Russell dates this tradition to "the eighth century BCE or earlier," and argues that it preserves a genuine Exodus tradition from the Northern Kingdom, but in a Judahite recension. Russell and Frank Moore Cross argue that the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom may have believed that the calves at Bethel and Dan were made by Aaron. Russell suggests that the connection to Jeroboam may have been later, possibly coming from a Judahite redactor. Pauline Viviano, however, concludes that neither the references to Jeroboam's calves in Hosea (Hosea 8:6 and 10:5) nor the frequent prohibitions of idol worship in the seventh-century southern prophet Jeremiah show any knowledge of a tradition of a golden calf having been created in Sinai.

Some of the earliest evidence for Judahite traditions of the exodus is found in Psalm 78, which portrays the Exodus as beginning a history culminating in the building of the temple at Jerusalem. Pamela Barmash argues that the psalm is a polemic against the Northern Kingdom; as it fails to mention that kingdom's destruction in 722 BCE, she concludes that it must have been written before then. The psalm's version of the Exodus contains some important differences from what is found in the Pentateuch: there is no mention of Moses, there are only seven plagues in Egypt, and the manna is described as "food of the mighty" rather than as bread in the wilderness. Nadav Na'aman argues for other signs that the Exodus was a tradition in Judah before the destruction of the northern kingdom, including the Song of the Sea and Psalm 114, as well as the great political importance that the narrative came to assume there.[f] A Judahite cultic object associated with the exodus was the brazen serpent or nehushtan: according to 2 Kings 18:4, the brazen serpent had been made by Moses and was worshiped in the temple in Jerusalem until the time of king Hezekiah of Judah, who destroyed it as part of a religious reform, possibly around 727 BCE.[g] In the Pentateuch, Moses creates the brazen serpent in Numbers 21:4-9. Meindert Dijkstra writes that while the historicity of the Mosaic origin of the Nehushtan is unlikely, its association with Moses appears genuine rather than the work of a later redactor. Mark Walter Bartusch notes that the nehushtan is not mentioned at any prior point in Kings, and suggests that the brazen serpent was brought to Jerusalem from the Northern Kingdom after its destruction in 722 BCE.

The revelation of God on Sinai appears to have originally been a tradition unrelated to the Exodus. Joel S. Baden notes that "[t]he seams [between the Exodus and Wilderness traditions] still show: in the narrative of Israel's rescue from Egypt there is little hint that they will be brought anywhere other than Canaan-yet they find themselves heading first, unexpectedly, and in no obvious geographical order, to an obscure mountain." In addition, there is widespread agreement that the revelation of the law in Deuteronomy was originally separate from the Exodus: the original version of Deuteronomy is generally dated to the 7th century BCE. The contents of the books of Leviticus and Numbers are late additions to the narrative by priestly sources.

Scholars broadly agree that the publication of the Torah (or Pentateuch) took place in the mid-Persian period (the 5th century BCE), echoing a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation.[78] Many theories have been advanced to explain the composition of the first five books of the Bible, but two have been especially influential. The first of these, Persian Imperial authorisation, advanced by Peter Frei in 1985, holds that the Persian authorities required the Jews of Jerusalem to present a single body of law as the price of local autonomy. Frei's theory was demolished at an interdisciplinary symposium held in 2000, but the relationship between the Persian authorities and Jerusalem remains a crucial question. The second theory, associated with Joel P. Weinberg and called the "Citizen-Temple Community", proposes that the Exodus story was composed to serve the needs of a post-exilic Jewish community organized around the Temple, which acted in effect as a bank for those who belonged to it. The books containing the Exodus story served as an "identity card" defining who belonged to this community (i.e., to Israel), thus reinforcing Israel's unity through its new institutions.

In Judaism

Commemoration of the Exodus is central to Judaism, and Jewish culture. In the Bible, the Exodus is frequently mentioned as the event that created the Israelite people and forged their bond with God, being describes as such by the prophets Hosea Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The Exodus is invoked daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated each year during the Jewish holidays of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The fringes worn at the corners of traditional Jewish prayer shawls are described as a physical reminder of the obligation to observe the laws given at the climax of Exodus: "Look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord" (Numbers). The festivals associated with the Exodus began as agricultural and seasonal feasts but became completely subsumed into the Exodus narrative of Israel's deliverance from oppression at the hands of God.

For Jews, Passover celebrates the freedom of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, the settling of Canaan by the Israelites and the "passing over" of the angel of death during the death of the first-born. Passover involves a ritual meal called a Seder during which parts of the exodus narrative are retold. In the Hagaddah of the Seder it is written that every generation is obliged to remind and identify itself in terms of the Exodus. Thus the following words from the Pesaḥim (10:5) are recited:

"In every generation a person is duty-bound to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt".[h]

Because the Israelites fled Egypt in haste without time for bread to rise, the unleavened bread matzoh is eaten on Passover, and homes must be cleansed of any items containing leavening agents, known as Chametz.

Shavuot celebrates the granting of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai; Jews are called to rededicate themselves to the covenant on this day. Some denominations follow Shavuot with The Three Weeks, during which the "two most heinous sins committed by the Jews in their relationship to God" are mourned: the Golden Calf and the doubting of God's promise by the Twelve Spies. A third Jewish festival, Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, is associated with the Israelites living in booths after they left their previous homes in Egypt. It celebrates how God provided for the Israelites while they wandered in the desert without food or shelter. It is celebrated by building a sukkah, a temporary shelter also called a booth or tabernacle, in which the rituals of Sukkot are performed, recalling the impermanence of the Israelites' homes during the desert wanderings.

Non-Jewish significance

The Christian ritual of the eucharist and the holiday of Easter draw directly on the imagery of the Passover and the Exodus. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently associated with motifs of the Exodus. The Gospel of Mark has been suggested to be a midrash on the Exodus, though scholar Larry Perkins thinks this unlikely. Mark suggests that the outpouring of Jesus' blood creates a new covenant (Mark 14:24) in the same way that Moses' sacrifice of bulls had created a covenant (Exodus 24:5). In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reverses the direction of the Exodus by escaping from the Massacre of the Innocents committed by Herod the Great before himself returning from Egypt (Matt 2:13-15). Other parallels in Matthew include that he is baptized by water (Matt 3:13-17), and tested in the desert; unlike the Israelites, he is able to resist temptation (Matt. 4.1-3). The Gospel of John repeatedly calls Jesus the Passover lamb (John 1:29, 13:1, 19:36), something also found in 1 Peter (1 Pet 1:18-20), and 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 5:7-8). Michael Graves calls Paul's discussion of the exodus in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 and his comparison of the early church in Corinth to the Israelites in the desert "[t]he two most significant NT passages touching on the exodus." John also refers to Jesus as manna (John 6:31-5), water flowing from a rock in the desert (John 7:37-9) and as a pillar of fire (John 8:12). Early Christians frequently interpreted actions taken in the Exodus, and sometimes the Exodus as a whole, typologically to prefigure Jesus or actions of Jesus.

In Romans 9:17, Paul interprets the hardened heart of Pharaoh during the Plagues of Egypt as referring to the hardened hearts of the Jews who rejected Christ. Early Christian authors such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine all emphasized the supersession of the Old Covenant of Moses by the New Covenant of Christ, which was open to all people rather than limited to the Jews.

A number of historical events and situations have been compared to the Exodus. Many early American settlers interpreted their flight from Europe to a new life in America as a new exodus. American "founding fathers" Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin recommended for the Great Seal of the United States to depict Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. African Americans suffering under slavery and racial oppression interpreted their situation in terms of the Exodus, making it a catalyst for social change. South American Liberation theology also takes much inspiration from the Exodus.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Exodus ( Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, Yeẓi'at Miẓrayim: lit. 'Departure from Egypt') is the founding myth of the Israelites.[a] It tells a story of Israelite enslavement and departure from Egypt, revelations at biblical Mount Sinai, and wanderings in the wilderness up to the borders of Canaan.

# data[].attributes.headline
1209 1st Written Evidence of the Israelites.

# data[].attributes.subject
1209 1st Written Evidence of the Israelites.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Israelites (;[1] Hebrew: בני ישראל‎ Bnei Yisra'el) were a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes of the ancient Near East, who inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods.[2][3][4][5][6]

In the Hebrew Bible, the term Israelites is used interchangeably with the term Twelve Tribes of Israel. Although related, the terms Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews are not interchangeable in all instances. "Israelites" ( Yisraelim) refers to the people whom the Hebrew Bible describes specifically as the direct descendants of any of the sons of the patriarch Jacob (later called Israel), and his descendants as a people are also collectively called "Israel", including converts to their faith in worship of the national god of Israel, Yahweh. "Hebrews" ( ʿIvrim), on the contrary, is used to denote the Israelites' immediate forebears who dwelt in the land of Canaan, the Israelites themselves, and the Israelites' ancient and modern descendants (including Jews and Samaritans). "Jews" ( Yehudim) is used to denote the descendants of the Israelites who coalesced when the Tribe of Judah absorbed the remnants of various other Israelite tribes.

During the period of the divided monarchy, "Israelites" was only used to refer to the inhabitants of the northern Kingdom of Israel, and it is only extended to cover the people of the southern Kingdom of Judah in post-exilic usage.[7]

Efforts to confirm the Israelites' biblical origins through archaeology, once widespread, have been largely abandoned as unproductive,[8] with many scholars viewing the stories as inspiring national myth narratives with little historical value.

Based on the archaeological evidence, according to the modern archaeological account, the Israelites and their culture did not overtake the region by force, but instead branched out of the indigenous Canaanite peoples that long inhabited the Southern Levant, Syria, ancient Israel, and the Transjordan region[9][10][11] through a gradual evolution of a distinct monolatristic-later cementing as monotheistic-religion centered on Yahweh. The outgrowth of Yahweh-centric monolatrism from Canaanite polytheism started with Yahwism, the belief in the existence of the many gods and goddesses of the Canaanite pantheon but with the consistent worship of only Yahweh. Along with a number of cultic practices, this gave rise to a separate Israelite ethnic group identity. The final transition of their Yahweh-based religion to monotheism and rejection of the existence of the other Canaanite gods set the Israelites apart from their fellow Canaanite brethren.[12][13][14] The Israelites, however, continued to retain various cultural commonalities with other Canaanites, including use of one of the Canaanite dialects, Hebrew, which is today the only living descendant of that language group.

According to the religious narrative of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites' origin is traced back to the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham and his wife Sarah, through their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and their son Jacob (who was later called Israel, whence they derive their name) with his wives Leah and Rachel and the handmaids Zilpa and Bilhah. The Israelites are the ethnic stock from which modern Jews and Samaritans originally trace their ancestry.[15][16][17][18][19][20] Modern Jews are named after and also descended from the southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah,[9][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] particularly the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon and partially Levi. Many Israelites took refuge in the Kingdom of Judah following the collapse of the Kingdom of Israel.[31]

Finally, in Judaism, the term "Israelite" is, broadly speaking, used to refer to a lay member of the Jewish ethnoreligious group, as opposed to the priestly orders of Kohanim and Levites. In texts of Jewish law such as the Mishnah and Gemara, the term יהודי ( Yehudi), meaning Jew, is rarely used, and instead the ethnonym ישראלי ( Yisraeli), or Israelite, is widely used to refer to Jews. Samaritans are not and never call themselves "Jews" יהודים ( Yehudim), but commonly refer to themselves and to Jews collectively as Israelites, and they describe themselves as Israelite Samaritans.[32][33]

The term Israelite is the English name for the descendants of the biblical patriarch Jacob in ancient times, which is derived from the Greek Ἰσραηλῖται,[34] which was used to translate the Biblical Hebrew term b'nei yisrael, יִשְׂרָאֵל as either "sons of Israel" or "children of Israel".[35]

The name Israel first appears in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 32:29. It refers to the renaming of Jacob, who, according to the Bible, wrestled with an angel, who gave him a blessing and renamed him Israel because he had "striven with God and with men, and have prevailed". The Hebrew Bible etymologizes the name as from yisra "to prevail over" or "to struggle/wrestle with", and El (God).[36][37] However, modern scholarship interprets El as the subject, "El rules/struggles",[38][39][40] from sarar (שָׂרַר) 'to rule'[41] (cognate with sar (שַׂר) 'ruler',[42] Akkadian šarru 'ruler, king'[43]), which is likely cognate with the similar root sara (שׂרה) "fought, strove, contended".[44][45]

The name Israel first appears in non-biblical sources c. 1209 BCE, in an inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah. The inscription is very brief and says simply: "Israel is laid waste and his seed is not" (see below). The inscription refers to a people, not to an individual or a nation-state.[46]

Three Egyptologists have suggested that the name 'Israel' appears in a topographical relief that either dates to the period of the Nineteenth Dynasty (perhaps during the reign of Ramses II) or even earlier during the Eighteenth Dynasty.[47] This reading remains controversial.[48][49]

The Israelite story begins with some of the culture heroes of the Jewish people, the patriarchs. The Torah traces the Israelites to the patriarch Jacob, grandson of Abraham, who was renamed Israel after a mysterious incident in which he wrestles all night with God or an angel. Jacob's twelve sons (in order of birth), Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin, become the ancestors of twelve tribes, with the exception of Joseph, whose two sons Manasseh and Ephraim, who were adopted by Jacob, become tribal eponyms ( Genesis 48).[56]

The mothers of Jacob's sons are:

Jacob and his sons are forced by famine to go down into Egypt, although Joseph was already there, as he had been sold into slavery while young. When they arrive they and their families are 70 in number, but within four generations they have increased to 600,000 men of fighting age, and the Pharaoh of Egypt, alarmed, first enslaves them and then orders the death of all male Hebrew children. A woman from the tribe of Levi hides her child, places him in a woven basket, and sends him down the Nile river. He is named Mosheh, or Moses, by the Egyptians who find him. Being a Hebrew baby, they award a Hebrew woman the task of raising him, the mother of Moses volunteers, and the child and his mother are reunited.[57][58]

At the age of forty Moses kills an Egyptian, after he sees him beating a Hebrew to death, and escapes as a fugitive into the Sinai desert, where he is taken in by the Midianites and marries Zipporah, the daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro. When he is eighty years old, Moses is tending a herd of sheep in solitude on Mount Sinai when he sees a desert shrub that is burning but is not consumed. The God of Israel calls to Moses from the fire and reveals his name, Yahweh, and tells Moses that he is being sent to Pharaoh to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt.[59]

Yahweh tells Moses that if Pharaoh refuses to let the Hebrews go to say to Pharaoh "Thus says Yahweh: Israel is my son, my first-born and I have said to you: Let my son go, that he may serve me, and you have refused to let him go. Behold, I will slay your son, your first-born". Moses returns to Egypt and tells Pharaoh that he must let the Hebrew slaves go free. Pharaoh refuses and Yahweh strikes the Egyptians with a series of horrific plagues, wonders, and catastrophes, after which Pharaoh relents and banishes the Hebrews from Egypt. Moses leads the Israelites out of bondage[60] toward the Red Sea, but Pharaoh changes his mind and arises to massacre the fleeing Hebrews. Pharaoh finds them by the sea shore and attempts to drive them into the ocean with his chariots and drown them.[61]

Yahweh causes the Red Sea to part and the Hebrews pass through on dry land into the Sinai. After the Israelites escape from the midst of the sea, Yahweh causes the ocean to close back in on the pursuing Egyptian army, drowning them. In the desert Yahweh feeds them with manna that accumulates on the ground with the morning dew. They are led by a column of cloud, which ignites at night and becomes a pillar of fire to illuminate the way, southward through the desert until they come to Mount Sinai. The twelve tribes of Israel encamp around the mountain, and on the third day Mount Sinai begins to smolder, then catches fire, and Yahweh speaks the Ten Commandments from the midst of the fire to all the Israelites, from the top of the mountain.[62]

Moses ascends biblical Mount Sinai and fasts for forty days while he writes down the Torah as Yahweh dictates, beginning with Bereshith and the creation of the universe and earth.[63][64] He is shown the design of the Mishkan and the Ark of the Covenant, which Bezalel is given the task of building. Moses descends from the mountain forty days later with the Sefer Torah he wrote, and with two rectangular lapis lazuli[65] tablets, into which Yahweh had carved the Ten Commandments in Paleo-Hebrew.[citation needed ] In his absence, Aaron has constructed an image of Yahweh,[66] depicting him as a young golden calf, and has presented it to the Israelites, declaring "Behold O Israel, this is your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt". Moses smashes the two tablets and grinds the golden calf into dust, then throws the dust into a stream of water flowing out of Mount Sinai, and forces the Israelites to drink from it.[67]

Moses ascends Mount Sinai for a second time and Yahweh passes before him and says: 'Yahweh, Yahweh, a god of compassion, and showing favor, slow to anger, and great in kindness and in truth, who shows kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving wrongdoing and injustice and wickedness, but will by no means clear the guilty, causing the consequences of the parent's wrongdoing to befall their children, and their children's children, to the third and fourth generation'[68] Moses then fasts for another forty days while Yahweh carves the Ten Commandments into the second set of stone tablets. After the tablets are completed, light emanates from the face of Moses for the rest of his life, causing him to wear a veil so he does not frighten people.[69]

Moses descends Mount Sinai and the Israelites agree to be the chosen people of Yahweh and follow all the [613 commandments|laws of the Torah]]. Moses prophesies if they forsake the Torah, Yahweh will exile them for the total number of years they did not observe the shmita.[70] Bezael constructs the Ark of the Covenant and the Mishkan, where the presence of Yahweh dwells on earth in the Holy of Holies, above the Ark of the Covenant, which houses the Ten Commandments. Moses sends spies to scout out the Land of Canaan, and the Israelites are commanded to go up and conquer the land, but they refuse, due to their fear of warfare and violence. In response, Yahweh condemns the entire generation, including Moses, who is condemned for striking the rock at Meribah, to exile and death in the Sinai desert.[71]

Before Moses dies he gives a speech to the Israelites where he paraphrases a summary of the mizwoth given to them by Yahweh, and recites a prophetic song called the Ha'azinu. Moses prophesies that if the Israelites disobey the Torah, Yahweh will cause a global exile in addition to the minor one prophesied earlier at Mount Sinai, but at the end of days Yahweh will gather them back to Israel from among the nations when they turn back to the Torah with zeal.[72] The events of the Israelite exodus and their sojourn in the Sinai are memorialized in the Jewish and Samaritan festivals of Passover and Sukkoth, and the giving of the Torah in the Jewish celebration of Shavuoth.[56][73]

Forty years after the Exodus, following the death of the generation of Moses, a new generation, led by Joshua, enters Canaan and takes possession of the land in accordance with the promise made to Abraham by Yahweh. The land is allocated to the tribes by lottery. Eventually, the Israelites ask for a king, and Yahweh gives them Saul. David, the youngest (divinely favored) son of Jesse of Bethlehem would succeed Saul. Under David, the Israelites establish the united monarchy, and under David's son Solomon they construct the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, using the 400-year-old materials of the Mishkan, where Yahweh continues to tabernacle himself among them. On the death of Solomon and reign of his son, Rehoboam, the kingdom is divided in two.[74]

The kings of the northern Kingdom of Israel are uniformly bad, permitting the worship of other gods and failing to enforce the worship of Yahweh alone, and so Yahweh eventually allows them to be conquered and dispersed among the peoples of the earth; and strangers rule over their remnant in the northern land. In Judah some kings are good and enforce the worship of Yahweh alone, but many are bad and permit other gods, even in the Holy Temple itself, and at length Yahweh allows Judah to fall to her enemies, the people taken into captivity in Babylon, the land left empty and desolate, and the Holy Temple itself destroyed.[56][75]

Yet despite these events, Yahweh does not forget his people but sends Cyrus, king of Persia to deliver them from bondage. The Israelites are allowed to return to Judah and Benjamin, the Holy Temple is rebuilt, the priestly orders restored, and the service of sacrifice resumed. Through the offices of the sage Ezra, Israel is constituted as a holy nation, bound by the Torah and holding itself apart from all other peoples.[56][76]

Origins

Several theories exist proposing the origins of the Israelites in raiding groups, infiltrating nomads or emerging from indigenous Canaanites driven from the wealthier urban areas by poverty to seek their fortunes in the highland.[77] Various, ethnically distinct groups of itinerant nomads such as the Habiru and Shasu recorded in Egyptian texts as active in Edom and Canaan could have been related to the later Israelites, which does not exclude the possibility that the majority may have had their origins in Canaan proper. The name Yahweh, the god of the later Israelites, may indicate connections with the region of Mount Seir in Edom.[78]

The prevailing academic opinion today is that the Israelites were a mixture of peoples predominantly indigenous to Canaan, although an Egyptian matrix of peoples may also have played a role in their ethnogenesis,[82][83][84] with an ethnic composition similar to that in Ammon, Edom and Moab,[83] and including Habiru and Shasu.[85] The defining feature which marked them off from the surrounding societies was a staunch egalitarian organisation focused on the worship of Yahweh, rather than mere kinship.[83]

Language

The language of the Canaanites may perhaps be best described as an "archaic form of Hebrew, standing in much the same relationship to the Hebrew of the Old Testament as does the language of Chaucer to modern English."[citation needed ] The Canaanites were also the first people, as far as is known, to have used an alphabet, as early as the 12th century BCE[86]

The name "Israel"

The name Israel first appears c. 1209 BCE, at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the very beginning of the period archaeologists and historians call Iron Age I, on the Merneptah Stele raised by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah. The inscription is very brief:

Plundered is Canaan with every evil,
Carried off is Ashkelon,
Seized upon is Gezer,
Yeno'am is made as that which does not exist
Israel lies fallow, it has no seed;
Ḫurru has become a widow because of Egypt.[78]

As distinct from the cities named ( Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoam) which are written with a toponymic marker, Israel is written hieroglyphically with a demonymic determinative indicating that the reference is to a human group, variously located in central Palestine[78] or the highlands of Samaria.[87]

Pre-state (Iron Age I) and monarchies (Iron Age II)

Over the next two hundred years (the period of Iron Age I) the number of highland villages increased from 25 to over 300[10] and the settled population doubled to 40,000.[88] By the 10th century BCE a rudimentary state had emerged in the north-central highlands,[89] and in the 9th century this became a kingdom.[90] Settlement in the southern highlands was minimal from the 12th through the 10th centuries BCE, but a state began to emerge there either in the 10th or the 9th century,[91] and from 850 BCE onwards a series of inscriptions are evidence of a kingdom which its neighbours refer to as the " House of David."[92]

From the downfall of the two kingdoms to Bar Kochba

In the pre-exilic First Temple Period the political power of Judea was concentrated within the tribe of Judah, Israel was dominated by the tribe of Ephraim and the House of Joseph, while the Galilee was associated with the tribe of Naphtali, the most eminent tribe of northern Israel.[93][94]

After the destruction of the kingdom of Israel and kingdom of Judah in 720 and 586 BCE respectively,[95][96] the concepts of Jew and Samaritan gradually replaced Judahite and Israelite.[citation needed ]

At the time of the Kingdom of Israel, the Galilee was populated by northern tribes of Israel, but following the Babylonian exile the region became Jewish.[citation needed ]

Four centuries after the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity, the Hasmonean kingdom was established, consisting of three regions, Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee.

During the Second Temple period relations between the Jews and Samaritans remained tense. In 120 BCE the Hasmonean king Yohanan Hyrcanos I destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim, due to the resentment between the two groups over a disagreement of whether Mount Moriah in Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim in Shechem was the actual site of the Aqedah, and the chosen place for the Holy Temple, a source of contention that had been growing since the two houses of the former united monarchy first split asunder in 930 BCE and which had finally exploded into warfare.[97][98][dubious ] 190 years after the destruction of the Samaritan Temple and the surrounding area of Shechem, the Roman general and future emperor Vespasian launched a military campaign to crush the Jewish revolt of 66 CE, which resulted in the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by his son Titus, and the subsequent exile of Jews from Judea and the Galilee in 135 CE following the Bar Kochba revolt.[99][100]

In 2000, M. Hammer, et al. conducted a study on 1371 men and definitively established that part of the paternal gene pool of Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa and Middle East came from a common Middle East ancestral population.[101] Another study (Nebel et al. 2001) noted; "In comparison with data available from other relevant populations in the region, Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors. The authors found that "Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin differed from the other Middle Eastern populations studied, mainly in specific high-frequency Eu 10 haplotypes not found in the non-Arab groups." and suggested that some of this difference might be due to migration and admixture from the Arabian peninsula during the last two millennia.[102] A 2004 study (by Shen et al.) comparing Samaritans to several Jewish populations (including Ashkenazi Jews, Iraqi Jews, Libyan Jews, Moroccan Jews, and Yemenite Jews, as well as Israeli Druze and Palestinians) found that "the principal components analysis suggested a common ancestry of Samaritan and Jewish patrilineages. Most of the former may be traced back to a common ancestor in what is today identified as the paternally inherited Israelite high priesthood (Cohanim) with a common ancestor projected to the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel."[18]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Israelites (;[1] Hebrew: בני ישראל‎ Bnei Yisra'el) were a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes of the ancient Near East, who inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods.[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] In the Hebrew Bible, the term Israelites is used interchangeably with the term Twelve Tribes of Israel .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Aššur-dān I, m Aš-šur-dān(kal) an, was the 83rd king of Assyria, reigning for 46 (variant: 36) years, c. 1179 to 1134 BC (variant: c. 1169 to 1134 BC), and the son of Ninurta-apal-Ekur, where one of the three variant copies of the Assyrian King List shows a difference. The Synchronistic King List and a fragmentary copy give his Babylonian contemporaries as Zababa-šum-iddina, c. 1158 BC, and Enlil-nādin-aḫe, c. 1157-1155 BC, the last of the kings of the Kassite dynasty, but it is probable he was contemporary with two more preceding and two following these monarchs, if the length of his reign is correct.

During the twilight years of the Kassite dynasty, the Synchronistic History records that he seized the cities of Zaban, Irriya, Ugar-sallu and a fourth town name not preserved, plundering them and "taking their vast booty to Assyria." A fragmentary clay tablet usually assigned to this king lists his military conquests over "[...]yash and the land of Irriya, the land of the Suhu, the kings of the land Shadani, [...y]aeni, king of the land Shelini." Fresh from their conquest of the Babylonians, it seems the Elamite hordes overwhelmed the Assyrian city of Arraphe, which was not recovered until late in Aššur-dān's reign.

Few inscriptions have been recovered for this king although he is mentioned in two of those of his descendant Tukultī-apil-Ešarra. One of these inscriptions mentions his demolition of the dilapidated temple of An and Adad, originally built by Išme-Dāgan II 641 years earlier. It was not to be reconstructed until 60 years later by Tukultī-apil-Ešarra, who also names him in his genealogy. A dedication for the king appears on a bronze statue votive offering to the Egašankalamma, temple of Ištar in Arbail, offered by Šamši-Bēl, a scribe.

A partial reconstruction of the sequence of limmus, the Assyrian Eponym dating system, has been proposed influenced by a letter which provides the initial sequence of Pišqiya, the official during whose reign his predecessor died, Aššur-dān (the king), Atamar-den-Aššur, Aššur-bel-lite, and Adad-mušabši. A harem edict or palace decree was issued giving the penalties for misdemeanors of maidservants, where the first offence is punishable with a beating thirty times with rods by her mistress. Two sons of Aššur-dān were to contest the throne after his death, Ninurta-tukulti-Ashur ruling for less than a year before being overthrown and forced to flee by his brother Mutakkil-Nusku.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aššur-dān I, m Aš-šur-dān(kal) an, was the 83rd king of Assyria, reigning for 46 (variant: 36) years, c. 1179 to 1134 BC (variant: c. 1169 to 1134 BC), and the son of Ninurta-apal-Ekur, where one of the three variant copies of the Assyrian King List shows a difference.

# data[].attributes.headline
1260 Tapputi is born. Limu: Aššur-alik-pana

# data[].attributes.subject
1260 Tapputi is born. Limu: Aššur-alik-pana

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gansell, A. R.
2013 "Images and Conceptions of Ideal Feminine Beauty in Neo-Assyrian Royal Contexts," pp.391-420 in M. Feldman and B. Brown, eds. Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art. Boston: de Gruyter.

2007 "From Mesopotamia to Modern Syria: Ethno-archaeological Perspectives on Female Adornment During Rites of Passage," pp. 449-83, in M. Feldman and J. Cheng, eds. Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context, Festschrift Irene J. Winter. Boston: Brill.

Hussein, M. M.
2016 Nimrud: The Queens' Tombs, M. Gibson, de., trans. by M. Altaweel. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Kertai, D.
2013 "The Queens of the Neo-Assyrian Empire." Altorientalische Forschungen 40:108-24.

Macgregor, S. L.
2012 Beyond Hearth and Home: Women in the Public Sphere in Neo-Assyrian Society. Issue 5 of Publications of the Foundation for Finnish Assyriological Research and Volume 21 of State Archives of Assyria Studies.

Melville, S. C.
1999 The Role of Naqia/Zakutu in Sargonid Politics. Volume 9 of State Archives of Assyria Studies. Helsinki: the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.

Solvang, E. K. M.
2006 "Another Look 'Inside': Harems and the Interpretation of Women," pp.374-98 S. Holloway, ed. Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press.

Svärd, S.
2015 Women and Power in Neo-Assyrian Palaces. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning Sites 3D model of an ancient Assyrian queen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gansell, A. R. 2013 "Images and Conceptions of Ideal Feminine Beauty in Neo-Assyrian Royal Contexts," pp.391-420 in M. Feldman and B. Brown, eds. Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art. Boston: de Gruyter. 2007 "From Mesopotamia to Modern Syria: Ethno-archaeological Perspectives on Female Adornment During Rites of Passage," pp.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ninurta-apal-Ekur, inscribed mdMAŠ-A- é-kur, meaning " Ninurta is the heir of the Ekur," was a king of Assyria in the early 12th century BC who usurped the throne and styled himself king of the universe and priest of the gods Enlil and Ninurta. His reign is immensely significant to the Chronology of the ancient Near East as it overlaps the reigns of his Babylonian contemporaries Adad-šuma-uṣur and Meli-Šipak.

There is some dispute as to how long he reigned, based on discrepancies among various copies of the Assyrian King List. The Nassouhi King List, sometimes considered to be older than the other versions of the King List we have, gives him 13 years of reign, but the other king lists give him only three. More recent scholarship has tended to support the shorter reign, in which case he reigned from 1182 to 1180 BC (alternately, he reigned from 1192 to 1180 BC).

There are up to eleven possible limmu officials named for his regnal years and a recent publication proposes the following sequence:

As the seventh in the sequence is Ninurta-apal-Ekur's son and successor, Aššur-dan I, and the king was thought to occupy the limmu position in the first year of his ascendancy, it is suggested that the succession took place here.

His father was Ilī-padâ, who had followed his father, Aššur-iddin, and grandfather, Qibi-Aššur, as grand vizier, or sukkallu rabi'u, of Assyria and king of the dependant state of Ḫanigalbat. Qibi-Aššur may be one of three officials who are attested as limmu's, the sons of Šamaš-aḫa-iddina, Ṣilli-Marduk, Ibašši-ili, respectively and it is this latter one, whose limmu year directly follows that of Tukulti-Ninurta I, that has led some to speculate that Ninurta-apal-Ekur was a descendant of Adad-nirari I, a genealogy that is unlikely as he claims descent only from Eriba-Adad I in his inscriptions. The earlier two have their limmu years during the reign of Shalmaneser I which better fits the chronology.

The preceding Assyrian king, Enlil-kudurri-usur, a son of the earlier powerful king Tukulti-Ninurta I, was vanquished in battle against the Kassite monarch, Adad-šuma-uṣur, a defeat so ignoble that the Assyrian officers "seized [Enlil-kudu]r-usur their lord and gave (him) to Adad-šuma-uṣur." Perhaps to secure their passage, the Assyrians also handed over renegade Babylonians who had fled to the Assyrian side.

While these events were unfolding, "Ninurta-apal-Ekur went home. He mustered his numerous troops and marched to conquer Libbi-ali (the city of Aššur)." The Kings List tells us that he "came up from Karduniaš, seized the throne," although it can only be speculated what he was doing in Karduniaš (Babylonia). The Synchronistic Chronicle continues "But [...] arrived unexpectedly, so he turned and went home" which suggests that the succession was not smooth.

Ninurta-apil-Ekur is said to have "guarded all the people of Assyria, with wings like an eagle spread out over his country. He was the recipient of gifts from Meli-Šipak, who sent teams of horses and rugs, as a recently discovered text records, unearthed during excavations at Assur.

He issued nine palace decrees relating to conduct of the court and the oppressive discipline of the royal harem, suggestive of insecurity in the succession, although he need not have worried as his descendants would continue to rule Assyria until at least the eighth century BC. The first relates to the conduct of a eunuch approaching the harem and that of the concubines. The second threatens the harem women with having their throats cut, if when quarreling they should blaspheme against a god. The third punished men guilty of lèse majesté and the remaining are too fragmentary to be certain of their contents, but regulate curses against, for example, the royal furniture, i.e. bed and stool. Minor infractions were dealt with severely, with the guilty woman having her nose pierced and being beaten with rods.

A text records his gift of jewelry to his daughter Muballita[ṭ-...], the great high priestess.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ninurta-apal-Ekur, inscribed mdMAŠ-A- é-kur, meaning " Ninurta is the heir of the Ekur," was a king of Assyria in the early 12th century BC who usurped the throne and styled himself king of the universe and priest of the gods Enlil and Ninurta.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Enlil-kudurrī-uṣur, md Enlil(be)-ku-dúr-uṣur, (Enlil protect the eldest son), was the 81st king of Assyria. Depending on the length of reign one gives to his successor, Ninurta-apal-Ekur, this would have been either from 1187 to 1183 BC or from 1197 to 1193 BC. The former dates are more common in recent studies.

Enlil-kudurri-usur was the son of Tukulti-Ninurta I. He succeeded his nephew, Ashur-nirari III 's brief reign and ruled for five years. Apart from king lists and chronicles, there are no other extant inscriptions of this king.

The Synchronistic King List identifies his Babylonian contemporary with Adad-šuma-uṣur, his eventual nemesis. In the Synchronistic History, the battle between him and Adad-šuma-uṣur is given as a pretext for his Assyrian rival, Ninurta-apal-Ekur, a son of Ilī-padâ and descendant of Eriba-Adad I, to "come up from Karduniaš," i.e. Babylonia, and make a play for the Assyrian throne. Grayson and others have speculated that this was with the tacit assistance of Adad-šuma-uṣur, but there is currently no published evidence to support this theory. Ninurta-apal-Ekur's purpose for being in Babylonia is also unknown, whether a political refugee or an administrator of the Assyrian held portion. The Walker Chronicle describes how following his abject defeat at Adad-šuma-uṣur's hands, Enlil-kudurrī-uṣur was seized by his own officers and handed over to his opponent. Only after these events did Adad-šuma-uṣur go on to extend his territory to include the city of Babylon itself.

Meanwhile, the Synchronistic History continues, Ninurta-apal-Ekur had "mustered his numerous troops and marched to conquer Libbi-ali (the city of Aššur). But [...] arrived unexpectedly, so he turned and went home." As Grayson points out, this passage is open to various interpretations, only one of which is that the missing name could have been that of Enlil-kudurrī-uṣur, released by his captor to sow confusion amongst his northern foes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Enlil-kudurrī-uṣur, md Enlil(be)-ku-dúr-uṣur, (Enlil protect the eldest son), was the 81st king of Assyria. Depending on the length of reign one gives to his successor, Ninurta-apal-Ekur, this would have been either from 1187 to 1183 BC or from 1197 to 1193 BC. The former dates are more common in recent studies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Aššur-nerari III, inscribed m aš-šur-ERIM.GABA, " Aššur is my help," was king of Assyria (1203-1198 BC or 1193-1187 BC). He was the grandson of Tukulti-Ninurta I and might have succeeded his uncle or more probably his father Ashur-nadin-apli to the throne, who had participated in a conspiracy against Tukulti-Ninurta I which led to his murder.

According to the Nassouhi Assyrian King List, he was the son of Aššur-nadin-apli, his predecessor in this copy and that from Khorsabad, although the Khorsabad and SDAS variants both give his father as Aššur-naṣir-apli, his predecessor only on the SDAS copy. All three copies agree on his length of reign, an otherwise poorly attested 6 years, following the brief 3 or 4-year reign of his immediate predecessor, suggesting he may have been quite young when he assumed the throne and perhaps explaining the prominence of his grand vizier, Ilī-padâ. Traces of his name also appear on a fourth, small fragment of the kinglist. His eponym year, likely to have been his first full year in office, dates a corn loan tablet from the archive of Urad-Šerūa and his family and a tablet excavated in Tell Taban, Syria, and dated to the eponym year of Adad-bān-kala, may be of his reign or that of his successor.

A fragment of an extraordinarily insulting letter is preserved in the Kouyunjik Collections in the British Museum and is addressed by Adad-šuma-uṣur, king of Babylon, to two rulers, Aššur-nerari III and Ilī-padâ, who are addressed as the "kings of Assyria." The letter was copied and preserved in the Assyrian archives, possibly because of the enhanced status given to Ilī-padâ, the father of Ninurta-apal-Ekur, king of Assyria, c. 1182-1180 BC, whose descendants reigned on at least until the 8th century, and whose genealogical claim to the throne was tenuous and otherwise only based upon descent by a collateral line from Eriba-Adad I, c. 1392-1366 BC.

He was quite possibly violently swept aside by the ascendancy of IIlil-kudurrī-uṣur, another son of Tukulti-Ninurta I and probably his uncle. The life and career of his grand vizier, mentor and fellow "king" of Assyria, Ilī-padâ, seems to have ended at this point or shortly afterwards. The evidence from an archive which might shed light on the events of this period remains unavailable, leading the historian Itamar Singer to observe "regrettably, two important archives of the thirteenth century BC, each with some 400 tablets, still remain unpublished, ...(including) the Middle Assyrian texts from Tell Sabi Abyad (found in 1997-1998)."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aššur-nerari III, inscribed m aš-šur-ERIM.GABA, " Aššur is my help," was king of Assyria (1203-1198 BC or 1193-1187 BC). He was the grandson of Tukulti-Ninurta I and might have succeeded his uncle or more probably his father Ashur-nadin-apli to the throne, who had participated in a conspiracy against Tukulti-Ninurta I which led to his murder.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Aššūr-nādin-apli, inscribed m aš-šur-SUM-DUMU.UŠ, was king of Assyria (1207 BC - 1204 BC or 1196 BC - 1194 BC short chronology). The alternate dating is due to uncertainty over the length of reign of a later monarch, Ninurta-apal-Ekur, where conflicting king lists differ by ten years. His name meant " Aššur is the giver of an heir" in the Akkadian language. He was a son of Tukulti-Ninurta I.

The events surrounding the overthrow of Tukulti-Ninurta remain somewhat shrouded in mystery. His military conquests seem to have taken place during the first half of his reign with modern scholarship suggesting that his climactic victory against Kaštiliašu IV and the city of Babylon occurred during two campaigns during his thirteenth and fifteenth years, if the placing of the eponyms, the Assyrian dating system, of Etel-pi-Aššur and Aššur-bel-ilani are correct. The latter part of his reign was characterized by reversal as the over-extended Assyrian military struggled to hold on to the earlier prizes and this may well have been the reason for his toppling.

Copies of the Assyrian King List record that "Aššūr-nādin or nāṣir-apli, his son, seized the throne (for himself and) ruled for three or four years." Brinkman relates that "it is uncertain whether one or two princes lie behind the conflicting scribal traditions," but Grayson is more emphatic, "there seem to have been at least two sons." Yamada, however, argues that it was scribal confusion with the later succession of Tukulti-Ninurta II by Aššūr-nāṣir-apli II. The names differ by just one cuneiform character, PAB for nāṣir and SUM for nādin. The Babylonian Chronicle P recalls "Aššur-nāṣir-apli, his son ( mar-šu) and the officers of Assyria rebelled, removed him from his throne, shut him up in a room and killed him."

It was Aššūr-nādin-apli who succeeded to the throne, as testified by the scanty inscriptions left behind, which include bricks from Assur (line art pictured), "(Property of) the palace of Aššūr-nādin-apli ..." and a lengthy text on a stone tablet commemorating rerouting the Tigris to the north of the city by "divine means" to recover agricultural fields and the erection of a shrine. This breaks with Assyrian tradition, extending the list of royal epithets to include "faithful shepherd, to whom by the command of the gods Aššur, Enlil and Šamaš the just sceptre was given and whose important name was called for the return (or care) of the land, the king under the protective hand of the god An and select of the god Enlil..." by which we may infer he was seeking divine support for his tenuous throne.

Just one eponym has been positively identified for his rule, that of Erīb-Sîn, which dates the stone tablet. A tablet also dated to this year was found at Tell Taban, site of the vassal state of Tâbatu near modern Al-Hasakah during salvage excavation under the direction of Hirotoshi Numoto in advance of the building of a dam in northeastern Syria. The king of Tâbatu was an Assyrian official named Adad-bēl-gabbe whose rule spanned that of four Assyrian monarchs seemingly unaffected by the turmoil at the heart of the empire.

He was succeeded by Aššur-nerari III, who was either his son or his nephew, again depending on the existence of Aššūr-naṣir-apli.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aššūr-nādin-apli, inscribed m aš-šur- SUM-DUMU.UŠ, was king of Assyria (1207 BC - 1204 BC or 1196 BC - 1194 BC short chronology). The alternate dating is due to uncertainty over the length of reign of a later monarch, Ninurta-apal-Ekur, where conflicting king lists differ by ten years.

# data[].attributes.body
Limu: 1244: Lullayu son of Adad-šumu-iddina

1243: Aššur-ketti-ide son of Abi-ili

36 year reign; father dies at 12; becomes king at 14; and dies at 50.

Tapputi: ages 16 - 52

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tukulti-Ninurta I (meaning: "my trust is in [the warrior god] Ninurta"; reigned 1243-1207 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1366-1050 BC). He is known as the first king to use the title " King of Kings".

Tukulti-Ninurta I succeeded Shalmaneser I, his father, as king and won a major victory against the Hittite Empire at the Battle of Nihriya in the first half of his reign, appropriating Hittite territory in Asia Minor and the Levant. Tukulti-Ninurta I retained Assyrian control of Urartu, and later defeated Kashtiliash IV, the Kassite king of Babylonia, and captured the rival city of Babylon to ensure full Assyrian supremacy over Mesopotamia. He set himself up as king of Babylon, thus becoming the first native Mesopotamian to rule there, its previous kings having all been non-native Amorites or Kassites. He took on the ancient title "King of Sumer and Akkad" first used by Sargon of Akkad.

Tukulti-Ninurta had petitioned the god Shamash before beginning his counter offensive. Kashtiliash IV was captured, single-handed by Tukulti-Ninurta according to his account, who "trod with my feet upon his lordly neck as though it were a footstool" and deported him ignominiously in chains to Assyria. The victorious Assyrian demolished the walls of Babylon, massacred many of the inhabitants, pillaged and plundered his way across the city to the Esagila temple, where he made off with the statue of Marduk. After capturing Babylonia, he invaded the Arabian Peninsula, conquering the pre-Arab states of Dilmun and Meluhha. Middle Assyrian texts recovered at ancient Dūr-Katlimmu include a letter from Tukulti-Ninurta to his sukkal rabi'u, or grand vizier, Ashur-iddin advising him of the approach of his general Shulman-mushabshu escorting the captive Kashtiliash, his wife, and his retinue which incorporated a large number of women, on his way to exile after his defeat. In the process he defeated the Elamites, who had themselves coveted Babylon. He also wrote an epic poem documenting his wars against Babylon and Elam. After a Babylonian revolt, he raided and plundered the temples in Babylon, regarded as an act of sacrilege to all Mesopotamians, including Assyrians. As relations with the priesthood in Ashur began deteriorating, Tukulti-Ninurta built a new capital city; Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta. However, his sons rebelled against him and besieged him in his new city. During the siege, he was murdered. One of them, Ashur-nadin-apli, would succeed him on the throne.

After his death, the Assyrian Empire fell into a brief period of stagnation. The Tukulti-Ninurta Epic describes the war between Tukulti-Ninurta I and Kashtiliash IV.

Julian Jaynes identifies this king as the historical origin for Nimrod in the Old Testament.

^ J. M. Munn-Rankin (1975). "Assyrian Military Power, 1300-1200 B.C.", in I. E. S. Edwards (ed.) Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 2, Part 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 287-288, 298.

The Cambridge Ancient History, I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, (ed) I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, Edition 3, revised, Cambridge University Press, 1975, ^ ISBN 0-521-08691-4, ISBN 978-0-521-08691-2, pg. 284-295

^ Julian Jaynes (2000). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Mariner Books. p. 228. ISBN 9780547527543.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tukulti-Ninurta I (meaning: "my trust is in [the warrior god] Ninurta"; reigned 1243-1207 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1366-1050 BC). He is known as the first king to use the title " King of Kings".

# data[].attributes.headline
1245 Shalmanaser I ends reign. Limu: Ištar-eriš son of Šulmanu-qarrad

# data[].attributes.subject
1245 Shalmanaser I ends reign. Limu: Ištar-eriš son of Šulmanu-qarrad

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shalmaneser I ( Shulmanu-asharedu; 1274-1245 BC or 1265-1235 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365-1050 BC). Son of Adad-nirari I, he succeeded his father as king in 1265 BC.

According to his annals, discovered at Assur, in his first year he conquered eight countries in the northwest and destroyed the fortress of Arinnu, the dust of which he brought to Assur. In his second year he defeated Shattuara, king of Hanilgalbat ( Mitanni), and his Hittite and Ahlamu allies. He incorporated the remains of the Mittanni kingdom as part of one of the Assyrian provinces. Shalmaneser I also claimed to have blinded 14,400 enemy prisoners in one eye. He was one of the first Assyrian kings who was known to deport his defeated enemies to various lands rather than simply slaughtering them all.

He conquered the whole country from Taidu to Irridu, from Mount Kashiar to Eluhat, and from the fortresses of Sudu and Harranu to Carchemish on the Euphrates. He built palaces at Assur and Nineveh, restored the "world-temple" at Assur (Ehursagkurkurra), and founded the city of Kalhu (the biblical Calah/ Nimrud). He was succeeded by his son Tukulti-Ninurta I.

Annual limmu officials beginning with the year of accession of Šulmanu-ašared. The list is partly derived from Freydank and McIntyre. The exact order of the earliest limmus is conjectural but the ordering from Šerriya onwards is essentially fixed.

1265: Adad-šumu-lešir son of Sin-ašared

1264: Šulmanu-ašared (king)

1263: Mušabšiu-Šibitti

1262: Ber-šumu-iddina

1261: Abi-ili son of Aššur-šumu-lešir

1260: Aššur-alik-pana

1259: Adad-Šamši son of Adad-šumu-lešir

1258: Kidin-Sin son of Adad-teya

1257: Šerriya (ordering from here onwards is essentially fixed)

1256: Aššur-kašid

1255: Aššur-mušabši son of Iddin-Mer

1254: Aššur-mušabši son of Anu-mušallim

1253: Qibi-Aššur son of Šamaš-aḫa-iddina

1252: Aššur-nadin-šume

1251: Mušallim-Aššur

1250: Qibi-Aššur son of Ṣilli-Marduk

1249: Ina-pi-Aššur-lišlim son of Bābu-aḫa-iddina

1248: Ber-šumu-lešir son of Ete-pi-Tašmete

1247: Aššur-dammiq son of Abi-ili

1246: Ber-bel-lite

1245: Ištar-eriš son of Šulmanu-qarrad

1244: Lullayu son of Adad-šumu-iddina

1243: Aššur-ketti-ide son of Abi-ili

1242: Ekaltayu

1241: Aššur-daʼissunu son of Ululayu

1240: Riš-Adad

1239: Nabu-bela-uṣur

1238: Usat-Marduk

1237: Ellil-ašared

1236: Ittabši-den-Aššur

1235: Ubru

The name means: "[the god] Shulmanu is preeminent"; Georges Roux, ^ Ancient Iraq (Penguin, 3rd ed., 1992), p. 295.

^ a One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Sayce, Archibald Henry (1911). "Shalmaneser". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 798. b c

^ Helmut Freydank, AoF 3 (2005), 45-56.

^ Eponyms of Shalmaneser 1 - Summary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shalmaneser I ( Shulmanu-asharedu; 1274-1245 BC or 1265-1235 BC) was a king of Assyria during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365-1050 BC). Son of Adad-nirari I, he succeeded his father as king in 1265 BC. According to his annals, discovered at Assur, in his first year he conquered eight countries in the northwest and destroyed the fortress of Arinnu, the dust of which he brought to Assur.