World History in a Year (Week 12) - 1700s BC
This week the focus is on central and southern Asia, the Minoans, and Mesopotamia.
First, Central Asia. It appears that, around the 1700s BC, the Sintashta people living in the Urals spread out in multiple directions, both east and south. Eastwards, a Sintashta-related culture (used in the limited archaeological sense of “similar-looking pottery and other artefacts”) called the Andronovo culture spread across the Asian steppes east of the Ural Mountains, as far as areas around the eastern and northern borders of China. This culture was based on cattle and sheep herding in small permanent settlements (5 to 250 people). At the same time, it appears that the urban-oriented society of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), south of Sintashta in what is now Turkmenistan, underwent a substantial collapse, with urban populations falling and elaborate pottery types being replaced with simpler ones. The appears to be attributable to a migration or invasion of some of the Sintashta people to the area.
This means that for the first time there were people with some degree of a common culture and livelihood (focused on animal herding and reliant on horses) living from the borders of China to the borders of South Asia to the borders of West Asia. It enabled more rapid diffusion of culture and technology throughout Asia.
The Harappa civilization completed its fall in this century, with people leaving the cities for rural areas in large numbers. Although Harappa had some kind of contact with horse-riding steppe peoples (e.g., enough to be aware of horses), probably for a few centuries before this, there does not appear to have been any invasion or large movement of new people into the area, and there are few indications of violence. The most probable cause is an environmental disaster - while several have been proposed, ranging from floods to droughts, and multiple elements could have contributed, the big one is the shifting of the Ghaggar-Hakra river to an entirely new course, which would have deprived cities and farms along that river of their water source.
However, there’s an issue with attributing the fall of states to environmental disasters alone, and it’s illustrated by the Minoans during this period. A time of Minoan advances - importantly, they developed their own writing, called Linear A, in the first half of the 1700s BC - was interrupted by a major earthquake (possibly more than one) that destroyed the Minoan palaces and many other buildings in their cities. There are indications that the disaster may have made some Minoans desperate enough to resort to human sacrifice. And yet, despite this, recovery from the earthquakes was relatively rapid, and rebuilding was underway before the end of the century. The Minoans would go on to centuries more of prosperity. So an ancient state suffering a major natural disaster will not necessarily cause it to collapse.
Linear A, like the Harappan script, remains undeciphered, so we do not know the Minoans’ descriptions of these times. The meaning of a few symbols in Linear A has been determined with some confidence (e.g., person, sheep, goat, pig, cow, wheat, olives, figs, oil, wine, cloth), but not enough to read phrases. There are over 300 symbols, around 90 of which are common.
Moving to Mesopotamia, we’ve got one figure who is famous in world history, and another who is famous on tumblr. This is the age of Hammurabi’s Babylon; it is also the period in which Ea-Nasir lived.
Hammurabi’s Babylon was one of two short-lived empires in the 1700s BC that did not outlast their founders. The first was the state of Northern Mesopotamia (1790s-1776 BC); its ruler Shamshi-Adad conquered northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria, including the state of Mari. After his death, Northern Mesopotamia rapidly fell to Eshnunna (to the east, in western Iran) and Yamkhad (to the west, in northwest Syria), and Mari’s power was restored.
Hammurabi became king of Babylon in 1792 BC. During the 1760s BC, he rapidly built his empire by allying with his neighbours to defeat more powerful states, and then successively turning on those neighbours. First he conquered Larsa, the main state in his region (south-central Mesopotamia). Then he conquered Eshnunna by allying with Elam (also to his east) and Mari, and followed it up by allying with Mari and Yamkhad to conquer Elam. At this point you’d expect people to think twice about being his allies, but it was too late. He finished up by conquering Mari, leaving his empire and Yamkhad as the only two major states in the region stretching from western Iran to the Mediterranean. The famous Code of Hammurabi dates from after his conquests, in the 1750s BC. His empire, for all its size and fame, was very brief, and disintegrated not long after his death in 1750 BC – interestingly, losing control of its territory in south and central Mesopotamia, his former power base, while his successors continued to hang on in some parts of the north like Mari.
The first written records of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of the Flood date to Hammurabi’s time: we get them from what were basically students’ school assignments, copying these texts out. It’s as if, in the far future, the record of literature from our era was derived solely from Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. We can also see from school assignments that there were geometry classes, including use of the Pythagorean theorem and determining the height of a stack of grain based on its circumference and slope.
After the fall of Hammurabi’s empire, some previously-major cities like Ur were largely abandoned, and others like Uruk declined in prominence. Cities in northern Mesopotamia also declined in size from around the 1720s BC. This could be because political and economic centralization by Hammurabi reduced the ability of city-states to be economically self-sufficient.
