Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 60

To the people of early civilizations, their cities must have seemed superior to rural villages and nomadic tribes (plenty of which still wandered the hinterlands), and incredibly powerful and secure. Yet the early civilizations, like every civilization since, faltered, splintered, succumbed, or evolved as political and military fortunes rose and fell.

A good example of an evolving civilization is Babylon, which grew into an empire around 1894 BC as King Sumuabum conquered surrounding cities and villages. His successor, Hammurabi, extended Babylon’s lands from the Persian Gulf to parts of Assyria before he died in 1750 BC. Babylon’s first empire (another arose 1,000 years later, and I talk about it later in this section) lasted almost 300 years. But in 1595 BC, a fierce neighboring people, the Hittites, conquered the city of Babylon and its lands.

The Hittite Empire spread across Asia Minor, encompassing a huge area of what are today central and eastern Turkey and extending into today’s Syria. Then, around 1200 BC, marauders smashed and burned Hittite cities so thoroughly that eventually, nobody remembered who had left carvings such as the twin lions flanking what must have been a grand ceremonial entrance. It took 19th- and 20th-century archaeologists to rediscover these once-mighty people.

The Hittites were major rivals, and later major allies, of Egypt. The two superpowers pitted their armies against each other at the Battle of Kadesh in Northern Syria in 1275 BC. A few decades later, the nations were at peace. Pharaoh Ramses II married a daughter of Hittite King Hattusilis III.

The Assyrians, a common enemy of the Hittites and Egyptians, built a great civilization too, centered on the upper Tigris River. Assyrians ruled much of Mesopotamia between 2600 and 612 BC. These people, or at least their rulers, appear to have been a bloodthirsty lot. Carvings on their palace walls feature scenes of enemies being beheaded. In Assyrian writings, kings boasted about how many captives they crucified, impaled, and skinned alive.