The Ancients - Old Testament Warriors

Episode Date: December 6, 2020

It’s probably the most famous book in the world, and it’s also essentially the only literary source which covers the genesis of warfare and the nation state. Simon Elliott is an archaeologist, historian and broadcaster. He came onto the podcast to talk to Tristan about 7,500 years of history - in under an hour. Using the Bible as a jumping off point, Simon takes us through the technological developments and innovation of warfare, bringing in other archaeological findings to support the singular perspective of the bible. This episode runs through the first walled settlement at Jericho, the first battle chariots and the development of different strategies. This truly is a who’s who of the Ancients, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians of all kingdoms, Hittites, Sea Peoples, Philistines and Hebrews.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today's podcast is a whirlwind because we are aiming to cover almost 7,000 years of ancient history. Because today's topic is Old Testament warriors. We are looking at the militaries of some of those civilizations that are

mentioned in the Old Testament and that we know thrived in some cases thousands, in other cases hundreds of years before the birth of Christ or the start of the common era, whatever takes your fancy. So we are talking the Sumerians, we are talking the Assyrians, we're talking the Babylonians, we're talking the Hittites, we're talking the Cansyrians, we're talking the Babylonians, we're talking the Hittites, we're talking the Canaanites, we're talking the Hebrew tribes, we're talking the Egyptians and even the Sea Peoples. They even get a mention too. So this is a huge topic and I was delighted to get on the show my good old friend and the one and only Simon Elliott. Simon is primarily a Roman historian but in one of his most recent books,

he's gone a bit further back in ancient history to study this period in ancient history where the Old Testament is one of our main literary sources. So it was great to get him on the show to talk about the military of these societies. A word of warning, chariots feature heavily. Here's Simon. feature heavily. Here's Simon. Simon Elliott, lovely to have you on the show. Tristan, it's amazing to be back on History Hit. I love working with you guys, as you know. Thank you so much for having me back. No problem whatsoever. And today we are talking something slightly different to ancient Roman Greece, Old Testament warriors.

Now, Simon, this is a vast topic geographically and chronologically. It's a huge topic. But if you think about it, I mean, you're talking about the entirety of prehistory into the history of conflict and warfare. on the way that I put the book together are from around 9,000, 8,500 BC, all through to the onset of the classical world when the Persians overthrow the Medes. So you're talking about 550 BC. So it's immense. And then the geography goes all the way from, let's say, the Eastern Mediterranean. So in the book, I talk about Crete. I talk about the Balkans and Anatolia. It goes all the way through to Iran. So it's absolutely enormous. Just to clarify, that's 7,500 years. It sounds daunting, actually.

And it is daunting. There's no two ways of disguising the fact that in writing the book, I set myself an enormous task. But also, it's one of those research projects, which is incredibly fulfilling. And what I found in actual fact was that I thought I knew a lot about chunks of it so I knew a lot about I thought biblical history I thought I knew a lot about Egyptian history thought I knew a lot about the Minoans and Mycenaeans but actually you don't you almost have to go back to scratch because you're tackling your own received wisdom it's a real task actually

for us as historians historiography because you're going back to these received wisdoms and challenging them and in so doing I learned an awful lot and interestingly a lot of it has begun to thread through into the research I'm doing into the classical world. Well Simon you mentioned biblical history there so the bible if we're talking about sources I'm guessing this must be one of the key literary sources for this period. One of my starting points actually was a book called The Bible is History which looks at the various books of the Bible and looks at what is archaeologically provable and not provable. In actual fact if you were to look at the various types of resource that you can use as sources for any ancient history project usually you're

looking at the written record, you're looking at the archaeological record, you're looking at analogy and you're looking at anecdote and the, you're looking at the archaeological record, you're looking at analogy, and you're looking at anecdote. And the more you get into the historical period when people are writing history, the more it goes, the balance shifts away from being certainly the latitude with analogy and anecdote towards being more archaeology and then the historical record. Here, we've got problems, haven't we? Because at the beginning of our period, there is no written record because there's no writing. So within the period I'm researching, you have the origins of writing, which is fascinating in its own right. That's another pod. And even when you get to the written record, the sources are very sparse. So at the very beginning, you're looking at the archaeological record and anecdotes and

analogy. And then as you get into the historical period, even with the written record, you're looking at very simple things like initially accounting and then king's lists lists of things then that the kings have achieved and done someone like as an example and it's only when you get into the period when the old testament's being written that you start getting a real flavor for some of the individuals we're talking about that character starts arriving but there's the problem certainly in the historical period referenced by the old testament books what i find fascinating is that the hebrew kingdoms are only a small number let's say two when you get the divided kingdom period earlier you have the united kingdom of hundreds of city states in the region all of these city states in the region in the levant in the middle east the near east all of them will have had their own written records in one way, shape or form. All of them. They're all lost to us. Absolutely every single one is

lost to us apart from this one collection of stories with the Old Testament. And that is what is so astonishing. So you're looking at every single thing that we know of. The starting point in the historical period is through the prism of this one collection of written records. And you have to really bear that in mind so in that sense that's well why archaeology in particular is very important here that's remarkable when you think of it that the bible is one perspective out of perhaps there would have been hundreds but this is the one that survives it is astonishing if you to take some of the great cultures and civilizations that you and i would have grown up with learning about at school and history and religious education etc we talk about the Egyptians we talk about the Hittites

we talk about the Assyrians we talk about the Babylonians we talk about the Medes remember in the Old Testament the Medes are referenced as being the scourge of God against the Babylonians such is their unchallengeable authority on the battlefield, which is a great entry point for my point. My point is that it's only through the Old Testament collection of stories that we actually have colour about all these cultures, which otherwise we'd only know from various reliefs on temples and things like that. We'll get onto the Hebrew kingdoms and the Old Testament and all that in a bit. But first of all, let's go right to the start, the genesis, the origins of warfare, or what we could possibly say are the origins of warfare in this period.

Simon, the big question, how do we define warfare? It's a fantastic question. And it's actually the entry point for the book. So what I thought I'd do, because I'm starting at the very beginning of recorded war, the way that we view war, I thought what I'd do is I'd try and actually come up with a definition of warfare so when did warfare begin and I actually started thinking about this when I was doing my master's degree at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL because one of the modules there was looking at the changeover in two periods of time from the Natufian to the Neolithic period in the Near East so this is the period when you go from sedentary hunter-gatherers beginning to settle down, becoming pastoralists, moving into the arrival of farming with the

Neolithic period, which is a very dramatic thing because this is when you start getting the origins of urban settlement, towns beginning, communities starting to live together completely differently. It's an absolute, total, massive revolution. So within that context, I thought I'd have a think about when might warfare have begun. So I did some research and I came up with a couple of axes and these two axes are the ones which I set against each other to come up with my definition and the axes were one the type of society we're talking about this can range from the simplest family gathering through a tribe through various iterations up to a state and then on the other axes I looked at kinds of conflict

so looking at things like homicide to raiding through various iterations up to what you and I will call today war. So between the two of them I looked for what I could define warfare as and the definition I came to was where you have a state not two states this is the key thing. A state, one protagonist, who has its entire societal commitment bent towards a conflict. And that allowed me to start examining the archaeological record for evidence of this. So you can look at various things. You can look in the archaeological record at people being killed in fighting. So we know that we have Neanderthal skeletons, which have got embedded spearheads as examples. That's probably homicide, maybe raiding not warfare one of the things you can look at though tristan is you can look at

fortifications because these are very deliberate things which have to if they're significant require a state to engage in the process and one jumped straight out at me from the historical record or the archaeological record this is Jericho so it's pre-pottery Neolithic A Jericho it's just at the beginning of the Neolithic period it's just when you started to get significant settlement starting Jericho is on the Dead Sea Jericho it turns out is at the southern end of a long-range trading network where you have obsidian which is the finest material to make tools in this period, being exported down this long-range trading network from the Zagros Mountains in modern Iran

in eastern Anatolia down through to the Dead Sea region. And in return from the Dead Sea's payment back, they're sending the rare minerals from the Dead Sea. So Jericho becomes fabulously wealthy in a world where very few places are fabulously wealthy it's one of these places in the age in which it prospered where it was like a bright shining light amid the darkness and that is what attracted I believe probably between 9000 and 8000 BC so we're going back 10,000 years that's the point to make contextualize this stonehenge 3500 3000 bc the old king egyptian pyramids 3000 bc maybe a bit earlier this is 10 000 years ago between 9 and 8 000 bc and because jericho was doing so well it attracted unwelcome attention i think from nomadic raiders

to the extent where they decided to defend themselves and what they did was they built around this town a 600 meter long wall so it's the first fortification around a town ever built this wall was five meters high remember there's no writing here so whoever designed this is drawing it with a stick in the mud just think how mental that is it's astonishing right somebody had the wherewithal then to do this i think it's amazing shows you the astonishing qualities of human beings so it's 600 meters in circumference it's five meters high it's two meters thick but here's the real kicker what's the one thing you need to spot people coming over the horizon you need a tower so they build a tower eight meters high within the wall circuit and

even better within this tower there's an integral staircase so whoever's drawing in the mud with his stick has got the wherewithal to invent an integral staircase so that's astonishing so that's what i think is the beginning of warfare in the way I contextualise it, because to do that, it would have taken the entire state, the whole population of this settlement over a number of years probably to do it. So you're telling me that there is surviving archaeology at the site of Jericho that shows in roughly the 9th millennium BC, between 8,000 and 9,000 BC, early Neolithic times. Jericho was a walled settlement and within this wall there was a tower and within this tower

there was even an integral staircase. And somebody had the wherewithal or group to design it with a stick in the mud remarkable absolutely remarkable do you think this really emphasizes that jericho could be the first city-state in history it's a very difficult question because it depends how you define city-state because to be a city-state they'd have to control the entire surrounding territory and the interesting thing about jericho it's a great question by the way it's where it is it's on the floodplain of the dead sea in fact one of the alternative theories about it being a defensive wall circuit is that the wall circuit's there to prevent the settlement being overrun by mud flows. I think that's nonsense, personally. All you would

do then is move the settlement, not spend two years having your entire society build a fortification. My instincts are that they were importing anything they needed that they couldn't get locally. So it's the first city, not the first city--state i think city-state you're probably looking towards anatolia probably slightly later indeed we mustn't forget that although i don't know perhaps there might be things going on in the far east or in africa at this time or india i guess we don't know that do we but for this part of the world like the near east and the mediterranean jericho and this archaeology at jericho feels very significant in ancient history. That's what I think, yes. And it's in the book.

And following that, so Jericho, it seems to be perhaps, let's say, one of the first cities in this area. But then we start to see an explosion of city-states a bit further east, a bit later. You do. Well, first of all, there's a gap. So you have Jericho flourishing, then you have other areas in the region flourishing, but you have to go all the way through to around 3000 BC before you start getting what you and I will call the iteration of a flourishing city-state based culture. And that's actually not on the shores of the Dead Sea, it's not in Anatolia, it's actually in the eastern arc of what we would have been brought up calling the Fertile Crescent so you're looking at Mesopotamia the land between the rivers and in Mesopotamia you have the Tigris and Euphrates and the very first major city-states with significant size cities so these

are far far larger than Jericho 6,000 years earlier these are the great city-states of Sumer like Ur and places like that and it's here in actual fact that you start getting the first formal organized forms of conflict which are evident in the armies not just fortifications so your starting point when you're looking for the beginnings of civilization, as we would call it, with the beginnings of these cities is that you have very fertile land. To make the land as suitable as possible for agriculture in this very fertile land, you need to irrigate it. And to irrigate it, you need to have large numbers of canals. And to do that, you need to engage the entire state to build them.

So this is the beginning of the organization, which allows you to have these initial cities cities then once you've got the agriculture up and running you look further afield for other goods stone to build things wood to construct things to burn to build ships whatever you're looking for metals for whatever reason now the interesting thing about the land between the rivers is there isn't any of that there you've got basically very fertile mudflats which are great for agriculture, but for nothing else. So you're having to import everything else, wood from the Mediterranean coast, from the Zagros Mountains, extractor materials, metals from the Zagros Mountains, which creates friction between the emerging city-states because they all want to dominate the long-range trading networks. This is what drives the origins of warfare in terms of the

very first, what you and I will call armies. So warfare, it evolves and it's involved here because of the city-states wanting to get control over these pretty long distance trading routes. Tristan, warfare is always about control. But in this case, you make a fantastic point because we're talking about the beginnings of the city-states that you and I referenced. And immediately, they're aters of the throats. So there's no common love between these various societies even though they're the same people speaking the same languages, often worshipping the same gods. All they're doing is looking to the northwest thinking, right, I want my cedar from the Lebanon, how am I going to get it down here and stop my neighbour getting it at the same time? And what do we know about the military makeups of these early city-states? In my research the most powerful weapon through to the advent of

formal armies is probably the bow because of the range it gives the protagonist. In terms of hominin use it's a fairly recent weapon certainly later than things like the spear throw and things like that. So the first formal armies which you find for these city-states are dominated by unarmed archers but quite quickly you end up with an arms race taking place so the first thing you see is the advent of what later get called phalanxes actually you end up with these phalanxes of spearmen who've got a degree of protection so the initial degrees of protection are look from the depictions in artwork as though they're long leather cloaks with discs of some kind of metal, maybe copper, on them to give some kind of

protection against what are probably not very powerful bows. And these spearmen are also shown wearing helmets, which may be a primitive kind of leather helmet, or some kind of a metal, maybe copper again. So the spearmen are there, and they're protected from the bowmen. So they need to do something back. So you end up with these dense formations the spearmen are there and they're protected from the bowmen so they need to do something back so you end up with these dense formations of spearmen ultimately fighting each other and then you have an evolution so you have later spearmen in the sumerian into the akkadian period having very large shields and that kind of thing and then you start seeing other kinds of specialized troop types emerging in these armies as well so start with the bowmen into the spearmen with a much

greater degree of protection what else can we do well let's say our flanks aren't very secure so what do we do let's put something quite quick and nippy on the flanks starting off the few light troops and then ultimately you end up with battle cars pulled by onegas which are a primitive form of equid and so you can see here this is ripped through the entirety of military history actually when you have an arms race you have the development of new kinds of technology and tactics. And you mentioned it right there, that other element, which seems absolutely astonishing when reading your book as well. I thought this was hilarious, that you also have at this time these battle cars pulled by Onegas, which are asses. That's right. Absolutely.

Having said that, let's just go back to the historiography again. The historiography is based on about five pictures. That's it. Let's remember we're talking about the high Sumerian period, as it were. It's about 3000 BC to about 2250 BC. So you're talking about 750 years. We're basing our entire knowledge of a principal arm of these armies on about five pictures. Same with the spearmen, the way as well so we get to the demise of the sumerians but at the same time as we see the demise of the sumerians we see the rise of this military technology that comes to dominate in this area of ancient history absolutely in actual fact there are two points i'll make there tristan so firstly you have a natural evolution okay in the land between the rivers so you have the sumerian period of dominance you then have

the akkadian period of dominance and it's wrapped up with what we now call the third dynasty of er which is a return back to a form of sumerian dominance but the bit in the middle is really important the akkadians because this is the first time that we see a conqueror one individual who lived who claimed within his lifetime to be the great i'm always wary of people who call themselves the great in their lifetime antiochus the third springs to mind who we can talk until the cows come home in my opinion that he wasn't the great well if people call themselves the great in their lifetime then I would challenge it apart from this guy Sargon the Great. So Sargon of Akkad is the first individual that we could argue ruled a vast empire. His empire, so Akkad are the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys so not the lower reaches near the coast

but more sort of inland into sort of central modern Iraq towards eastern Syria. So Sargon of Akkad it seems ruled an empire which may have ranged from Cyprus, certainly the Levant, through to the Persian Gulf and then maybe down into Arabia as well. So this is your first empire and it also sets a pattern which continues in this region all the way through to the death of Alexander the Great and you can follow them through one by one you go with the Akkadians, the Mitanni, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Medians, the Persians, Alexander the Great with the Macedonians defeating the Achaemenid Persians, Phineas. So this is the first of a pattern which then dominates the region for over 2,000

years. In terms of his military technology it wasn't that different to that of the Sumerians except that his battle cars drawn by asses tended to be better and also it seems that they had lighter battle cars as well which may have been manned by one man so the battle car of the Sumerians had four asses and the actual body of the car was like a box made of wood and you had a fighting platform that was protected. It seems under the Akkadians you might have had nippy sort of two Onega battle cars which were more suitable to scouting like a light cavalry role really later but it's towards the end of this period that we then see the arrival of a technology which comes to dominate as you rightly, warfare in this region all the way

through almost to the end, actually, towards the beginning of the classical Greek period. That's the chariot. And the interesting thing with the chariots, Tristan, is where it came from. Well, you've asked the question, where do we think it came from, Simon? There's received wisdom that the chariot originated with the Hyksos who were a Canaanitic people who ended up settling the Nile Delta at the expense of the Egyptians at a certain stage but actually it seems now they were the beneficiaries of an earlier cultural migration so it seems as though the chariot the idea that you have a platform initially a fast nippy platform pulled by horses so it can go fast and a long way originated in the central asian steppe with the ancestors of the scythians because we

know the original chariots that we'd recognize them today albeit these are four-wheeled are in burial mounds kurgans from the central asian steppe from forebears of the scythians and it looks like the vector of transmission was through the hurrians who were people who lived in the western zagros mountains and in eastern anatolia so you can see this transfer the vector coming through from the central asian steppe through the zagros mountains where it can spread to the west into anatolia and ultimately to the balkans peninsula and then crete it can spread to the east through to modern iran it can spread south east through to syria and modern iraq and it can spread through the levant and ultimately to egypt and it looks to me as though this is what happened i mean simon that's

astonishing so it it spreads westwards but it's adopted by all these different cultures which are further west and do we see the design of the chariot evolving we do the thing about the chariot tristan you know i play toy soldiers obviously i'm a war gamer i can remember by my first new kingdom egyptian chariots and painted them when i was about 20 18 maybe at university misspending my first grant and i can just remember now how cool they looked that's the thing these things look so cool if they look cool to me playing toy soldiers how cool would one of these chariots look to contemporary audiences that is the reason why they were adopted not by society at large but by the aristocracy and we have a word for that the word is the marianu or the marianu i call them marianu the marianu were a chariot riding

aristocracy where the actual noble was the warrior on the fighting platform and he would own the chariot own the stables where the horses came from he'd employ or own maybe the driver of his chariot and within a given let's say a syrian city-state collective you'd have clouds of these rushing around on the battlefield dominating warfare to the extent where there is actually one culture which is the successors to the Acadians say 500 years later who are called the Mitanni. The Mitanni are famous throughout the region in contemporary records as being the ultimate example of the Mariano but it's this idea where you have a chariot riding aristocracy which threads through all the way. Another great thing about this period by the way Tristan that you don't have to address it chronologically you can follow individual threads and this is a great thread the mariano chariots

probably were that kind of technology for eight or nine hundred years and then it's through the likes of in the west the minoans and mycenaeans that they involve more as a sort of a battle platform with a spearman unarmored spearman often as opposed to a bowman, which is how the usual chariots were armed. And the later chariots that the Assyrians used, the Neo-Assyrians of Ashurbanipal, they were like tanks. They were like the King Tigers, the Tiger IIs of their day. You're talking about huge battle platform bodies of the chariots drawn by four very large horses, all armoured with four or five crew on the battle platform.

So they weren't just nipping around, shooting or throwing javelins or whatever. These were smashing into opposing ranks of foot. And my mind immediately thought of the Hollywood epic Troy, where you see the heroes being drawn up at the front of their lines on the chariots as these prestigious carts. But actually, they're not fighting on the chariots. They get off the chariots when they get to the battlefield. In that case, and I know it's a hollywood movie but it very much emphasizes that the chariots there were a symbol of status and prestige absolutely right that's spot on in

fact it's really fascinating when you really dig down into how these weapons of war were used they are the elite weapons of war it's like the elephants in the armies of the poorest as indians and that kind of thing all these successor kingdoms to us as historians with a bent on military history for me playing toy soldiers it would look odd to deploy your troops before a battle lining up your foot covering your flanks but then putting your elite weapons across the front of your foot think of the way that hannibal deployed at zammer for example it's a great example to us it looks odd presumably let's use that as an example to riff on it. Horses are scared of elephants.

Stick your elephants on the flanks, push the opponent's mounted troops out of the way, and envelop your opponent. That's the way, logically, we would do it. But it's not the way they did it then. And exactly the same with the chariots. The reason is about prestige. Because you want to actually, in the first instance, if you're the ruler of a city-state and your army is a citizen soldier army where your

army is composed of farmers who are really annoyed that they can't get their crops in because you've actually recruited them for two or three months towards the end of the year the last thing you want is them to be butchered in a battle because you can't then go home and then feed yourself because you can't get your crops in as happened with the anglo-saxons after they lost to william the conqueror so what happens well you try and scare the opponents away so you don't have to have a battle and how do you do that you put your elite So what happens? Well you try and scare the opponents away so you don't have to have a battle and how do you do that? You put your elite troops across the front so you try and scare them away. What happens if they don't get scared away? Well you end up either with a titanic clash of chariots as we had at Kadesh between the Hittites and the New Kingdom

Egyptians or often and this appears to be the case actually with the Mycenaeans if you don't scare them away, some of the chariot riders who are the real leaders get down and lead their foot components. Others go to the flanks. So you end up with a bombardment of javelins and insults and bows on the enemy battle line, swirling chariots. It fails. So basically you withdraw to the flanks and cover the main battle winning weapon ultimately, which if you get to that stage throughout history has always been the main foot body Now, one of the best things about this topic, you've mentioned them a couple of times in passing already, the Egyptians.

One of the great things of this topic is that you say we don't need to go through everything chronologically, we can look at different threads. Simon, first of all, the rise of Egypt, what do we know? We imagine Egypt with the Libyans to the west, we've got the Canaanites to the northeast. How does Egypt emerge? It's all about the rivers again, isn't it? Just like Mesopotamia. Interestingly, of course, pre-dynastic and old King James of Egypt emerges slightly later than the early Sumerian states, and it looks as though they originated each other in complete isolation. And actually, they very rarely fought. The reason they didn't fight was because of the distances involved at the time. So they knew about each other ultimately, but they weren't fighting over the resources in the Levant, which the later Middle and New Kingdom Egyptians and the Akkadians, the Mitanni, were all the time. And therefore, you have a completely different

evolution of military technology. So you don't have dense bodies of organized spearmen in the same way a phalanx you don't have your battle cars etc what you tend to have in certainly all kingdom egyptian armies into middle kingdom egyptian armies are armies dominated by bowmen and by their own spearmen their own spearmen with shorter spears with quite large body shields each of them as opposed to the front rankings as the sumerians to prevent them being hit with showers of javelins or bows the reason is because their opponents were nowhere near as symmetrical so the city-states fought each other in sumeria but the various iterations of pre-dynastic and old kingdom egypt as you say have three opponents principally the nubians to their east and south the Libyans to

their west so the Nubians famous for the use of the bow light troops skirmishing the Libyans famous for these the javelin light troops skirmishing and then the Canaanites as well to their north in modern Israel and Gaza and therefore your military technology because you don't have a symmetrical threat evolves differently if you had a counterfactual engagement with an old kingdom Egyptian army fighting a Sumerian army or an Akkadian army my instincts are that the Egyptians would have lost quite quickly because they don't have a symmetrical threat. However the big change takes place of course with the advent of the Marianu and the chariot riding cultures in Levant, because quickly this permeates all the way down to Egypt. By this time, Egypt's developed into the new kingdom with the wherewithal to take on all comers in the region. So then you do have symmetrical conflicts. You do have the evolution of military battle tactics. You do therefore have the new kingdom being one of the leading, if not the leading army of its age. the leading if not the leading army of its age so the new kind of kingdom becoming the leading army of its age i like to go back to the bible and focusing on the particular story from the old

testament these old testament warriors which is the emergence of the hebrew tribes in egypt how do the hebrew tribes how do they come under egyptian sway it's important to remember that the Hebrew tribes were simply Canaanitic tribes living in Canaan and they were amongst hundreds of other peoples and cultures living in the region okay we just know so much about them through the prism of the Bible and it looks as though they were part of a migratory event in terms of their engagement with Egypt they were part of a migratory event maybe caused by climate change actually where the peoples in the region including the Hebrew peoples headed down towards the Nile Delta where they could have a living which they weren't able to because of climate change at the time and they were there at the wrong time afterwards when you have various new Egyptian rulers coming to the

fore who decide they want to demonstrate their wealth by building new towns, cities, fortifications, and therefore they look to sources of labour to do it. And they force the settlers in the Nile Delta, in this case, the Hebrew kingdoms. That's the beginning of the story. And I'm guessing this is also at the time then of the famous Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses II. It is. I mean, this is the other great point I will make as well about the whole period covered by the book. But particularly when you can pick out threads from the Bible, you get these great figures jumping out at you. So Sargon of Achaia we've spoken about, we've got Ramesses II, we've got Ashurbanipal, we've got Nebuchadnezzar, etc. And certainly Ramesses II is one of the great

sort of titans of his day. One of the fascinating things for me actually was about the Hebrew kingdoms, because it's again something through just education. I'm 55 now, so you're going back a long way. I thought I knew a lot about it, and I knew nothing about it. And I had to relearn everything from scratch about the origins of the Hebrew kingdoms. And you end up, especially in the period before you have the United Kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon, a period when the Hebrew peoples are settling in the region which later becomes Israel and Judea and they take on all comers and they win all the time. Now of course we know this because they wrote about it themselves so we only have one side of the story but it seems

the archaeological record shows broadly it's true as well. There's a serious warrior spirit, a desire to take on all comers who challenge them, which really comes through from what they write about themselves, but also, crucially, the archaeological record. So how do they get to that point there? How do the Hebrew tribes go from being, let's say, forced labour under Ramesses II in Egypt to getting back to Canaan and what would be Judea and Israel with the kingdoms of as you mentioned Saul, David and Solomon? Chariots. You know I've spoken about the vector of transfer of the Mariana and chariot riding culture and technology from Central Asia through Anatolia and the Zagros Mountains

into the Levant. Well it's around this time that this technology is emerging through the Levant on its way down to Egypt. So they get caught up in the wave of the Marianu. So their elites within their armies of the United and Divided Kingdoms then just become their own Marianu. And intriguingly, the very late Divided Kingdom armies of Israel and Judea, they look like they're almost like Neo-Assyrian armies armies having their own Tiger II kind of battle chariots as well but on a much smaller scale. So basically all of these cultures get caught up in each cultural wave of transfer going through and it just so happens that I think the United Kingdom, one of the trigger points for me, is this cultural wave with the Marianu going through the region.

Well let's talk about another culture which seems to emerge on the scene at this time, the Sea Peoples. How do they affect all of this with the Egyptians and the Hebrews? The narrative of the Sea Peoples begins in 2000 BC and ends in 1250 BC. So around 2000 BC you get the emergence of the first city-states of the Minoans on Crete, who weren't Greek by the way. They actually, we don't know what language they spoke but they weren't Greek which is intriguing because you and I think of them the way we've been taught as being part of the Greek phenomena. Well they weren't. They were a dominant maritime power, probably the very first maritime power. I think Thucydides himself says that King Minos created the world's first navy as an example and it was a hugely successful empire across the Aegean into the Peloponnese

and Attica but later later, around 1450 BC, they defeated themselves and then Crete, the city-states fall to the Mycenaeans, who are probably the facilitating vector for the Mycenaean city-states to start flourishing in the Peloponnese and Attica. So Mycenae, Athens, etc. It's probably the cultural transfer from the Minoans. It goes back to by the Minoans, because the Mycenaeans turned out to the cultural transfer from the minoans it goes back to bite the minoans because the mycenaeans turn out to be even better than the minoans everything so therefore the mycenaeans then basically dominate the region the aegean into western anatolia this is of course period of the trojan war written about much later and then though you have a phenomena again probably

linked to a trigger event which is a probably climate change called the late bronze age collapse so about 1250 bc all these major city-states in the mycenaean world collapse and a lot of them in anatolia suffer very heavily as well even into the levant and even into egypt but certainly the ones in the balkans the mycenaean world they all collapse and it looks like the majority of the sea peoples were actually basically late Bronze Age Vikings. So you have the city-states collapsing one after another, maybe fighting each other for limited resources because of climate change. So the displaced peoples, because this is a seafaring culture, end up raiding trying to get the resources they need to survive. And it goes ballistic because they end up not only predating the western and southern coast of Anatolia, they end up predating

the northern coast of North Africa. And then you have migratory movements on them as well going all the way through Anatolia into the Levant and into Libya and from there banging around the western borders of Egypt and you end up actually with two waves of sea people migrants knocking on the doors of Egypt one to the left associated with the Libyans and one from the north through the Levant associated with all the peoples there and there's a very intriguing thread you can draw from that which impacts the world in which we live today greatly one of the people there were many so-called tribes within the sea peoples one of them were called the Pellicet who are really fierce fighters they were part of this northern migrator away which then turned south through the Levant and they impressed the Egyptians so much that the Egyptians decided

that to stop any more sea peoples actually attacking them from the north what they would do is they settle the Pellicet on their northern border as a barrier state and this is the originator of the peoples who later became called in the bible the philistines and of course it's from the philistines that today we have the word palestine so there's a thread you can draw all the way through from the late bronze age collapse to today and perhaps another thread too but forgive me simon if i'm barking up the wrong tree the exodus story getting out of egypt and all that could that also be a reason why they didn't go, according to the story, via the Mediterranean coastline, via Gaza, why they actually went around the Sinai Peninsula and up that way,

because you had the palisade now in Gaza? Yes, absolutely spot on. That's exactly the reason. Or whoever was there before, but basically they couldn't get through because for whatever reason there was a physical barrier. The obvious physical barrier is the palisade or another people who've been placed there for the same reason so they end up with this march through the wilderness which becomes one of the key narratives of the hebrew peoples of the world today wow well there you go and let's keep on the hebrew tribes in a bit longer because i do

find that very interesting especially with the old testament and all that and all these different kings and battles and conquests as it were the reigns of Saul David and Solomon this is the time of the united monarchy that's the united monarchy so this is when you have all the tribes of Israel united under one monarchy and then you move into the period of the divided monarchy but remember it's crucial to remember that these peoples at the time in terms of their military technology and military tactics were not unique. They were the same as everybody else. Very often, certainly under the divided monarchy, you find that the armies of Israel and Judea are fighting as allies with either the Egyptians or the Hittites or the Assyrians or with each other or whatever because basically it goes all

the way back to the starting point of our conversation Tristan we're seeing nearly everything through the prism of the one written text letters reflects by the way in terms of historiography we have other sources we have Egyptian hieroglyphics we have other styles of writing with the Assyrians etc we have state archives at places like Ugarit. We have cuneiform tablets. We have other forms of writing, but the one that gives us huge amounts of colour, to my mind, over all the rest, is the Bible. And keeping on that thread then, regarding the military of these kingdoms, does the Bible give us any indication that, let's say, the military of Solomon, aside from the chariots, was very different to, let's's say the military of Saul before him. Yeah absolutely to put it simply it's a percentage of chariots as the chronology

progresses you have more chariots and they're bigger and you end up with this sign curve that towards the end of the divided monarchy because the cultural influence of the near Assyrians were their tiger twos you have a sign curve that goes suddenly way up in terms of the size of the chariots as well. So Saul would have had a few chariots, David a few more, Solomon quite a few, then each iteration of the divided monarchies, lots and lots more and lots more, and finally they get bigger and then they lose. We'll get into that in a second. I mean, is it similar with the Philistines too? The Philistines actually were, we see them through quite a short period of time. So instead

of being able to say they went from one point to another, we can only see a snippet really. And that snippet puts them on a par with the New Kingdom Egyptians and with the Canaanitic states as well. You probably tend to find that the foot component in the armies of the new kingdom Egyptians was better organized and better armed than the foot component in the armies of the Canaanitic states and the Canaanitic states tended to be a bit more chargey to contact as opposed to disciplined etc. And around this time the Egyptians the Canaanitic states there is now the emergence of new superpowers from a bit further east emerging onto the scene. It's worth remembering again that you've had major powers

already. So you've had the Hittites, for example, going back to your very good point about the sea peoples, the Hittites, as we know them in the way that we're educated today, they effectively end with the sea peoples who scour the region clean before they turn south into the Levant. But if you go back to the region we spoke about with the Sargon of Akkad and then with the Mitanni, you can then see from the onset of the 1st millennium BC the arrival of the Assyrians in particular. So the Middle Assyrian armies, the New Kingdom Assyrian armies as it were, so Neo-Assyrian.

And then you get the very, very latest iteration of the Assyrians, the later Sargonid armies as well. And you're going through to about 700, 600 BC, where you do get effectively superpowers dominating the region. And again, you have this chronology of the Assyrians, which the Assyrians themselves then fall to an alliance of the Medes, a fearful opponent, the Bible tells us, and the Babylonians. And then the Medes, a fearful opponent the Bible tells us, and the Babylonians. And then the Medes remove the Babylonians and then Cyrus the Great initiates the

Achaemenid Persian Empire by defeating the Medes. And this is the beginning of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and then that's taken out by Alexander the Great and that's it. So I would argue actually this crescendoing begins around 1000 BC. And the Assyrian influence said the Tiger II tanks, the heavy tanks there, become dominant in the region. And then you also mentioned them just then. And other people which we know do have a big, significant impact, particularly on the Levant, are the Babylonians. And these are highly significant. For much of this period, Babylon is one of the key cities if not the key city in the region but it's very often not at the centre of power within the region. It's a key

city within various iterations of the Assyrian empire etc etc. It's always a pain in the back side though for most of these powers because it's clearly one of these cities that thinks a lot of itself and its people think a lot of itself so while they're subjects or vassals within another sort of region they're always rebelling and always causing problems this is actually there's a story here where we get great insight into the way the Assyrians ruled their world the Assyrians if you were to ask me Tristan which culture in world history I would least like to cross and by the way I'm a Roman specialist and the Romans weren't a very clever people to cross as we know it's the Assyrians because they really really did go to town on you so the Romans

certainly carried out a genocide the Assyrians carried out genocides but then went backwards in time as well and you can see this through the story of Ashurbanipal the great renaissance prince who is not the eldest son of his father but his father realizes that he's a bright lad so makes him his heir and so there's an eldest son to deal with so the eldest son who's not as bright a lad gets put in charge of ruling Babylon when Ashurbanipal's father dies so now we have Ashurbanipal the king we have the eldest son who should have been king but it's not in charge of the vassal state or whatever we want to call it in Babylon and of course he starts causing trouble so you can imagine he's sort of a playboy of his day you know most marriageable man

in the entire world of his day because he's the king of Babylon but doesn't have the responsibility of ruling the Assyrian empire all the way through to the cedars in the eastern Mediterranean. So he rebels this elder son and so Ashurbanipal spends two years putting the rebellion down ultimately the elder son dies we don't know how but he dies and then the leading citizens of Babylon pop out to have a little chat with Ashurbanipal and they say, look, we're really sorry about this. You know, it's clearly a misunderstanding. Clearly, we tried to hold on to power for too long and we shouldn't have tried that. So we're sorry. And we hope we can do some kind of deal. And Ashurbanipal says, absolutely. So what I want you to do is I want to take you on a little holiday to Nineveh. And firstly, what I'd like to do is i i'm going to take on a little holiday to nineveh and firstly what i'd like to do is to just go and visit the royal burial grounds and go to the

various tombs of your forebears and collect their bones and then what we'll do we'll take them back to nineveh so this is what happens the elites of babylon get taken to nineveh taken to an arena where you have the sort of like coliseum of its day with all the population there booing and screaming they are then sent into their own bespoke regions in the arena and they're given the bones of their forebears and told to grind them to dust and then they're staked out on the ground and then they're flayed alive so genocide with a bit of reverse genocide thrown in as well so you certainly don't want to mess with the Assyrians, certainly the later Assyrians. But of course, the Assyrians themselves overplay their hand

because they're defeated by the Medes and the Babylonians. Is this a story in the Old Testament? Absolutely. It's in the Old Testament. And it's also in some of the iconography, which you can see to this day, actually, on some of the Assyrian reliefs, etc., in places like the British Museum. There's a great image of Ashurbanipal, actually,

who's having tea in his garden. You can imagine him having his peppermint tea or whatever he's drinking of the day and he's got his family around him they're drinking sweet meats it's all lovely the dogs playing and scampering there's flowers everywhere you look at the tree above his head there's the head of one of his victims wow by the way this is the renaissance prince so this is the best you get right this is the guy whose. So this is the best you get, right? This is the guy who's actually made interest in Babylon was in sending his own inspectors to every centre of culture in his known world to either collect or get copies of every written record and put them in a library in Nineveh. So this is a guy who actually did think he was a Renaissance prince and he still behaved with what you and I would call today absolute bestiality against his opponents. So answering my own question earlier, don't cross the Assyrians.

I mean, Simon, I actually just find it really astonishing there how much gruesome, colourful detail there is surviving in the Bible about some of these standout figures of antiquity like this Assyrian king Ashurbanipal? Two points. Number one, bad news sells today and did then. So gruesome stories always attract a readership. But secondly, from a historian's perspective, it's always important, as you know because we've spoken about it off camera many times, to remember that peoples of the past are like us but they're different. And one of the key areas where they're different in this this past in the Roman world certainly as well is the attitude towards casual violence which to them was an absolutely normal part of

their day-to-day living. Almost everybody who lived then had no control over their own destiny in one way shape or form whereas today in the world in which we live both those things aren't true in much of the world. So most people in the world do have a degree of control over their own personal destiny and they do have an attitude to casual violence which they believe it's abhorrent to the same levels not everywhere by the way sadly but certainly in most places so that's my key take out there is always try and put yourself through the mindset of the peoples in the past and they experience their world in a very different way. And could we perhaps say one event that also really seems to emphasise this is the savage siege and sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

I mean, looking at this, this is absolutely brutal. It is, but again, let's contextualise. One of the things that you would say about all the Hebrew kingdoms, even into the divided kingdom phases is that they were very militaristic in that they never shied away from throwing their weight around and they very often in defeat came back the difference between them and the Romans is the Romans came back and won whereas the Hebrew kingdoms often came back and didn't win they just got defeated again and again and again but they still kept coming back there's something very fighty about

the whole attitude you can see here and ultimately they paid the price with as you say the absolute savage sack of jerusalem simon just to wrap this all up you mentioned takeaways from the book and from writing this and you also mentioned you are primarily a roman historian what were some of the key takeaways from writing this book looking at this period of ancient history i got a real thrill from an academic perspective, doing something absolutely new, which is coming up with a definition of warfare to give me the starting point in the book. Secondly, looking at the first iteration of the great empires, which dominated the region with Sargon the Great, which was completely new to me. Thirdly, looking at this cultural vector of transfer of the Mariano and the chariots

throughout the region. So the Jaguars and the mgs of their day and then and finally just looking at how absolutely fierce the hebrew kingdoms were from the earliest phase through to the end of the divided monarchy but certainly particularly in the pre-kingdom phase when they took on all comers and they absolutely punched above their weight just absolutely the whole thing's fascinating because a lot of the points of research were so new well simon elliott pass on the back we have just rattled through 7 500 years of history in just under an hour and just before we finish simon your book on this is called old testament warriors out as a hardback now so because of covid it was due to be published and it's only been published as a kindle so it's been published

now as a standalone hardback with new images as well, because I've actually got even more new images from my previous travels in February next year. So I love writing it and I hope that comes through if your viewers read it. There we go. Well done, buddy. Huge applause for that. And for all your other projects which are currently ongoing. Simon, thank you so much for coming on the show. Absolute pleasure. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Absolute pleasure and thank you so much for having me.