RICHARD MILES: Istanbul in Turkey, a city poised between east and west
and between the present and the past.
It's a good place to think about where all this comes from,
not the physical structures of this particular city,
but the invisible web that holds all cities together
and which we humans have been spinning since the time of the very first cities,
some 6,000 years ago.
Civilisation is the best word for it,
one of the most profound innovations in our human story.
Historians today have become a little bit embarrassed
by the word civilisation.
We prefer less exalted terms such as culture, community, or society.
But in telling the stories
of the first great civilisations of the ancient world,
I'm going to be making the case for civilisation itself.
More than 4,000 years ago,
an unknown poet listed the attributes of a successful city,
the place where civilisation was first forged, and where the aspirations
of a civilisation still find their most concrete expression.
The details of the poem are so vivid, they could have been written yesterday.
MAN: The warehouses are well provisioned,
and the houses within the city are well built.
Those who bathe before the holidays rejoice in the courtyards.
And foreigners flock to and fro like exotic birds.
WOMAN: The old women are full of good advice.
MAN: The old men are full of good counsel.
WOMAN: The young women are full of dancing spirit.
MAN: The young men are full of fighting spirit.
WOMAN: And the little ones are full of the spirit of joy.
MAN: The people are happy.
MILES: Of course, not everybody can be happy.
But I believe that the aspirations expressed in that ancient poem
make as much sense to us now as they did 4,000 years ago.
It's like that when you look down into the well of history.
It gets dark so quickly.
But then just sometimes,
you catch a glimpse of something at the bottom, alive and moving.
Then suddenly you realise that it's your own reflection looking back at you.
That's the story that I want to tell to you now.
It's not the story of ancient worlds long past,
it's the story of us, then.
MILES: When we talk about the ancient world,
we tend to think of rare and exotic artefacts
or the monumental remains of epic architecture.
But these are just the empty shells that got left behind
when the tide of history turned.
The living creatures, the civilisations that once inhabited these shells,
were rarely if ever static or stately.
They were dynamic, chaotic, and always threatening to spin out of control,
because civilisation is based on an improbable idea
that strangers can live together in dense urban settings,
forging new allegiances that replace the ties of family, clan or tribe.
It's an idea we're still coming to terms with today.
But one of the best ways to understand the challenges
is to look at how our ancestors tackled them the first time around.
In Baghdad, people know all too well just how precious civilisation is,
and how vulnerable.
The ancient Greeks believed that the cornerstone for all successful societies
was Eunomia, good order.
Lose that and you're in danger of losing everything.
Today, slowly and painfully,
Iraqis are struggling to put back together
the good order that dictatorship, regime change and civil war tore apart.
They live with the hope that things will be better one day.
It's a tall order but not an impossible one.
In this part of the world, it's a story that's been played out again and again
from the time of the very first cities,
which appeared in this region some 6,000 years ago.
We're in southern Iraq,just north of Basra, and I'm on my way to the place
where this experiment in a new way of being human was first tried.
The ancient Greeks called this region Mesopotamia,
the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
But this is also the land between two seas,
the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea,
known to us as the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
It is also the land between mountain and desert,
lagoon and salt marsh,
and all of these geographical features have to be borne in mind
when considering the birthplace of the first civilisations.
Geography versus history.
It's impossible to know which takes precedence.
There's no getting away from the brutal facts of nature.
Rivers that flood will dry up,
rainfall that's intermittent, mountains that are impassable,
deserts that are hostile.
Applying this kind of analysis to Mesopotamia,
where the summers are hot, the winters are cold,
and rainfall is low, I'd sum it up like this.
Difficult, but not impossible.
No Garden of Eden, but no howling wilderness either.
People had occupied this marginal land for a thousand years
before the cities came.
They arrived as pastoralists with their herds
but they stayed on as farmers,
clinging close to the riverbanks
in scattered communities of one or two thousand people at most.
But then,just under 6,000 years ago, a remarkable thing happened.
People left the security of their family compounds and tribal villages.
They came together with other strangers
to create something far more complex,
a city, a society, a civilisation.
The first place we know of where this radical experiment was tried is here.
The ancient city of Uruk.
So here it is, Uruk, the mother of all cities.
Nowadays, as you can imagine, it's quite difficult to get to.
But I'm glad I did.
Athens, Rome, Constantinople,
London, Paris, New York.
If you traced the family trees of all these great cities,
they'd all lead back here, to this dry and dusty corner of southern Iraq.
Nowadays, there's not much to see.
But 5,000 years ago,
this was home to 40, or perhaps 50,000 people.
A population density unprecedented in human history.
In the mythology of Mesopotamia, Uruk was built by Gilgamesh,
two thirds god, one third human.
The great epic poem, The Legend of Gilgamesh,
contains a proud description of his city.
MAN: Go up, pace the walls of Uruk,
study the foundation terrace, and examine the brickwork.
Is not the masonry made of kiln-fired brick?
And did not the seven sages lay its foundations?
Three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk.
In fact, if anything,
The Legend of Gilgamesh understates things.
The walls that surrounded Uruk were nearly 10 kilometres in length,
enclosing an area of six square kilometres.
Now, just to give you a point of comparison,
classical Athens at its height was no more than five square kilometres.
And even Imperial Rome was little more than 10.
So, by the measures of the ancient world,
these first cities were neither small nor insignificant.
Right from the very start, they were big players.
Starting just under 6,000 years ago, the archaeological record at Uruk
reveals a period of intensive building and rebuilding,
which went on for four or five centuries.
In that period, a dozen or more large public buildings were built,
temples, palaces, assembly halls.
We don't know for sure what they were,
but they were all of different shapes and sizes,
and they used novel building techniques like these cone mosaics,
which once lined the walls here.
You get the feeling that behind the restless building and rebuilding,
the people of Uruk were searching for ways through architecture
to express the new social structures that had come to be in their new city,
the shape of things to come.
But what kind of a society was being built at Uruk?
And why had it come about?
The answer can be found in the need to satisfy
the most basic of all human needs, hunger.
Civilisation might have its head in the clouds,
but it marches on its stomach.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY)
This is the Euphrates,
one of history's great rivers, 1,700 miles from source to delta.
There's a lot of debate about where the name comes from,
but some say it's derived from the Akkadian word, phrat,
which means fruitful.
And it's certainly that,
provided its waters can be got to the farmers' fields.
Agriculture, growing crops rather than raising livestock,
pre-dates the first cities by thousands of years.
But at some point, and quite suddenly,
agricultural activity in Mesopotamia became more intensive
and on a larger scale than had ever been seen before.
It may have been in response to an environmental crisis,
a prolonged period of drought
or the sudden change in the course of the river
following a cataclysmic flood.
For the first time since people had started living in this marginal land,
their survival would have depended on finding ways to manage the waters,
forcing them to think beyond the narrow concerns of their clans
and finding common cause with other clans,
building dams and digging canals to bring the water to the crops
on which all their lives now depended.
The social consequences of this co-operation were profound.
Those farmers weren't just digging ditches and sowing barley,
they were planting the seed from which the tree of civilisation would grow.
But what turns the farmer in his field into a citizen of a city?
To answer that question I travelled 600 miles north from Uruk,
over the border into present-day Syria,
to another ancient city, Tell Brak.
The Syrians call this area Al-Jazeera, the Island,
because it's situated between the Euphrates to the south
and the Tigris to the north.
And the waters of both created an island of fertility
in a sea of desert and mountain.
And that is Tell Brak.
It looks like a hill, but that impressive hump is actually man-made,
the result of thousands and thousands of years of occupation,
which has raised the level of the site 50 metres above the surrounding plain.
Tell Brak stands as an impressive monument
to the compulsive city building activities of our ancestors.
Excavations have been going on here since the 1930s,
when the British archaeologist, Max Mallowan,
accompanied by his new bride, the crime writer Agatha Christie,
first started working on Tell Brak.
Among Mallowan's finds were these distinctive eye amulets,
which had also been found in great numbers at Uruk.
This suggests that people from Uruk may have travelled north,
bringing their radical new ideas with them.
Even today, Tell Brak is an incredibly rich site.
As you walk around, you can't help but tread on a carpet
of ceramic fragments,
which could be anything from three to six thousand years old.
This is Area TW.
And these structures date back to the fifth millennium BC,
when the first city appeared here.
These buildings are close to the city gate.
What we're looking at here is a type of light industrial unit,
complete with a layer of ash from the ovens that were once here.
But the reason why we're here
is because of something which is stuck in the trench wall over there.
It's a fragment of the past which raises intriguing questions
about the nature of the society
that first emerged here 6,000 years ago.
Don't try this at home,
not unless you're a trained archaeologist
and you've got permission from the authorities who run the site.
Now, got to be a bit careful here because it's very, very loose.
Might break it.
Well, we need a little bit of a trowel. Got to be very, very careful.
This looks like it could be a complete one.
Yeah, just ease it out gently.
When we talk about the ancient world,
we tend to quite naturally think of the iconic or awe-inspiring,
venus de Milo or the Egyptian Sphinx, picture postcard stuff.
But I don't suppose you'd find one of these in the postcard rack.
But for me, these are as significant as any armless Greek goddess
or noseless mythical beast.
And now, I'm just going to...
And there you have a bowl from the fourth millennium BC.
And it's complete. Amazing.
For any archaeologist of this period, this would be instantly recognisable
as a BRB, a bevel-rimmed bowl.
And they were made by digging a bowl-shaped hole in the ground,
pushing the clay in, and then working it around the edges
until it took on the shape of the mould.
Then they were finished off by running a finger along the rim,
creating a bevel just like this one,
made by somebody's finger 6,000 years ago.
But the extraordinary thing about the BRB
is that there are just so many of them.
They've been found in their thousands at sites from Turkey to Syria,
from Iran to Iraq.
Here at Tell Brak, they've found so many that they've had to rebury most of them
just to free up space in their storage areas.
So what does the ubiquity of the BRB tell us?
One theory is that this is a ration bowl
issued by some kind of central authority to its workers,
holding a standard measure of grain.
Think of it as being a bit like an ancient pay-packet,
a bowl of barley in return for a hard day's graft
in the irrigation ditches, without which there wouldn't be any barley.
The ration bowl theory is further strengthened by this.
It's a stylised head and what looks suspiciously like a BRB.
And this was a symbol for ration
used in the account books of the first cities.
Because you can't have beans without bean counters.
And what this shows is how with the growth of civilisation,
one thing led to another.
From farming to irrigation, to rations, to account books, to writing.
That's how civilisation snowballed.
The BRB is the next logical step on
from the canals and the dams dug by that first generation
of Mesopotamian farmers.
But it's the product of a very different kind of society.
Rather than the co-operation of autonomous clans,
the BRB suggests a powerful political authority had emerged
which could persuade or force the general population
to dig and delve for the common good.
And just as the credit card is the symbol of our consumer economy,
the BRB is the symbol of a redistributive economy,
which is what the first cities operated under,
a dominant central authority directing the workforce,
collecting all the fruits of its hard labour
and bringing them to the centre for redistribution
through some kind of rationing system.
A bit like North Korea without the cult of personality.
Controlling the workforce made managerial sense,
but as we'll see again and again in the story of civilisation,
the law of unintended consequences also came into play.
One thing lead to another.
Intensive farming is generally more productive than small-scale farming,
and so it generates more than can be consumed,
a surplus in other words.
In bumper years the food surplus can be stored against the lean years,
and that makes the centre that controls everything even more powerful.
A food surplus also means that non-food products can be grown,
providing raw materials for making or for trading with other centres
with their own surplus of raw materials.
This allows the centre to invest in the specialists,
the craftsmen and women with the skills to weave,
throw pots or bash metal
as well as the merchants who run the import-export side.
It's the beginnings of industry and trade.
The surplus also supports other specialisations.
Soldiers, builders, musicians, doctors, fortune tellers, prostitutes.
All of these can now be afforded
thanks to the surplus generated by the toiling masses.
It's the beginnings of the class system.
At the top of the system, of course, are the executives who run things.
In Uruk we know that they had titles like "Master of the Sheep",
or the "Master of the Grain".
And you can bet that the masters got more than the daily bowl of grain
doled out to the workers.
The fat cats, it seems, have always been with us.
And the place where all of these diverse constituents came together was,
of course, the city, a new man-made feature in the landscape,
dominant and impressive behind sturdy walls.
The city directed the energies and controlled the fate of people
who had traded the autonomy of their tribe
for the good order and security of their civilisation.
Religion, rather than politics,
seems to have been the motivating ideology in the first cities.
All of their hard labour, all of the great public works,
the canals, the fields of barley, the city walls,
were for the gods rather than for the people.
In fact the people were there to serve the gods.
That was why the gods had turned clay into flesh in the first place.
Mesopotamian religion was suffused with an overwhelming sense
of the fragility of civilisation.
In this land of marshes and wandering rivers,
the line separating the solid from the liquid was uncertain.
And if it wasn't for protection of the gods,
all that hard work, all that had been achieved,
could be swept away into watery chaos.
(CHILDREN CHATTERING)
(SPEAKING ARABIC)
We know a surprising amount about the way
in which the first cities were organised.
Thanks to the development of an important new technology,
one which would become one of the foundation stones
on which all civilisations rested, writing.
Records were first inscribed in wet clay in Uruk and other cities.
Lists of people and things, basic bookkeeping.
But within a few hundred years, writing systems had become
much more sophisticated, capable of recording concepts as well as things.
Soon after that, there were even special schools
where the art of writing was taught
by an important new city-specialist.
(SPEAKING ARABIC)
The scribe.
Now, you might think the clay would make a rather crude
and cumbersome medium for writing.
Especially when compared with the delicate papyrus rolls
of the ancient Egyptians.
But clay is far tougher than papyrus.
And the accidental fires which plagued these ancient cities
turned durable clay into indestructible stone.
And this is why we have many, many more historic documents
from this period than later ones.
This was history built to last.
And history, along with love songs, peace treaties and lullabies,
was among the things that the scribes started to write.
Scribes began to look into the past and put things in the right order.
Kings, their births, deaths, marriages, were the obvious place to start.
As we've seen, civilisations built on hierarchies,
they were based on specialisations.
From labourers to scribes, from craftsmen to temple priests.
But what did the king do? What was his job description?
Who needed him?
In tribal societies, the power of leaders is rarely absolute.
Restrained by a web of expectations, traditions and taboos,
rulers are subject to the collective will of their communities.
They can lead, but only as far as the people are prepared to follow.
But in the first cities, the webs of tribal life dissolved.
Schooled in the new system of hierarchies and specialisations,
people quickly learnt how to be followers.
The priests in the temple shepherded them in the direction of heaven,
but there was also room for leaders who were more down-to-earth.
In Sumeria, he was known as the lugal, literally, the big man,
an important political counterweight to the power of the priests,
a charismatic flesh-and-blood individual in the palace
rather than a distant god in the temple.
Kings set out to be different from the rest, in life and in death.
This was made dramatically clear in the discoveries of pioneer archaeologist,
Sir Leonard Woolley, who, in the 1920s and 1930s,
excavated the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.
Woolley and his team studied more than 1,800 burials,
dating from around four and a half thousand years ago.
Most of them were simple affairs, but 16 of them were very different.
You can see from the drawings done at the time
what the first difference was.
These were mass burials involving men, women, and animals, too.
Their bodies laid out in ranks in the outer chamber.
And in the inner chamber was the focus
of all this carefully choreographed death.
A single figure surrounded by objects of astonishing beauty and rarity.
Woolley called these burials the death pits,
but they're now known, rather more sedately, as the Royal tombs.
Certainly with grave goods as stunning as these,
you could expect nothing less than royalty.
But what about the other bodies,
the ones that accompanied Meskalamdug the king
and uabi the queen in death?
In his classic work, Ur of the Chaldees,
Woolley explained his findings
with a compelling picture of a royal funeral.
The body of the dead ruler laid out in the inner sanctum of the tomb,
whilst the outer enclosure slowly filled with mourners, ladies-in-waiting,
loyal soldiers and slaves loudly bewailing their terrible loss.
And then as solemn music played, the tomb is shut from the outside,
and the mourners take poison.
Lit by the flames of guttering oil lamps, they then die one by one,
presumably to be reborn on the other side of the grave
and once again to serve their royal master.
We simply don't know enough about the beliefs of the Sumerians
to be sure whether Woolley's reconstruction is accurate or not.
However, one thing is clear, the charisma of royalty, even in death,
exerted a powerful pull.
People followed kings in life, death and beyond.
And of course they would also follow them into battle.
From the start, war was civilisation's dark shadow,
marching alongside it, inseparable from it.
Boundary stones placed by cities to claim a piece of territory
became trophies in the wars that they provoked
when neighbouring cities marched into battle to challenge their claims.
This is Naram-Sin, king of Akkad.
He reigned for nearly 40 years, and spent most of it fighting.
His grandfather, Sargon of Akkad, was the first great Mesopotamian ruler
to turn a kingdom into an empire,
conquering his way city by city
from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.
Empire was a new unit of currency in the civilisation stakes,
but Naram-Sin had to fight hard to hold on to what his grandfather had won.
The logic of a territorial empire was simple,
conquer or lose everything.
But when the city-states of Mesopotamia began to flex their regional muscles,
they stepped up into the Premier League.
And that meant, sooner or later, that they'd come up against
one of the top teams of the ancient world, Egypt,
with its astounding monumental architecture,
its divine god-kings and its all-pervasive preoccupation with death.
But for all its magnificence and power,
Egypt's contribution to the growth of civilisation
is not as overwhelming as you might first imagine.
There's so much to say about ancient Egypt,
but the first thing that has to be said, was that it was certainly different.
For a start, the geographical hand that it had been dealt was a strong one,
and the ace in the hole was this, the River Nile.
Once a year, beginning in June and ending in September,
the waters of the Nile rose, the river burst its banks,
and the fields for miles on either side were flooded.
Instead of the labour-intensive canal systems
that the Mesopotamians developed to control the Tigris and the Euphrates,
the Egyptians simply banked up their fields
to hold the flood waters in place for a crucial 40 to 60 days
at the start of each growing season.
After which, the banks were broken, the life-giving water drained off,
and a fertile layer of black mud was left to receive the seed.
Of course, it wasn't quite as straightforward as that.
Some years, there was too little water, some years, too much.
But Bronze Age technology wasn't advanced enough
to control these mighty waters.
All the Egyptians could do was monitor the fluctuations carefully
by a system of nilometers, like this one at Aswan.
Cosseted by its miraculous river
and separated from the rest of the ancient world by desert and sea,
the Egyptians were like an island people,
conservative, complacent, xenophobic,
incurious about the rest of the world.
Slow to adapt new technologies, from the potter's wheel to metallurgy,
Egypt had a Stone Age heart in a Bronze Age body.
Otherness was Egypt's great selling point, then and now.
The things that fascinate us,
pyramids, incestuous royal marriage,
mummification, and the whole, elaborate, expensive cult of death
were the very things that fascinated Egypt's neighbours.
But like their famous hieroglyphs, they only really made sense in Egypt.
Egypt's cultural reputation across the ancient world was enormous,
but just as there was only one River Nile,
there could be only one Egypt.
And the lessons learnt here about building a civilisation,
were definitely not for export.
And so, Egypt, despite its wealth and magnificence,
was in historical terms, a bit of a glittering dead-end.
The Egyptians were also terrible snobs.
olitical marriages between foreign courts
became a common diplomatic tool in the Bronze Age world.
But while many a foreign princess came to Egypt
to cement an alliance or seal a treaty,
Egyptian kings refused to allow any of their daughters to be sent abroad.
Who knew what nasty surprises awaited them there?
The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
that indispensable guide to the life hereafter,
conceded that it was theoretically possible
for non-Egyptians to win a place in the afterlife.
But the Gods would soon separate them out because of the way they smelt.
In the tomb of the vizier Rekhmire,
the smelly foreigners are doing what they are supposed to do,
forming an orderly queue and paying tribute.
The Syrians from the Levant with their horses,
the Kushites from Africa with their ivory and giraffes,
the Minoans from Crete with their distinctive conical jugs,
all of them are there to bend the knee and buy the goodwill of mighty Egypt.
Chauvinism of Rekhmire's tomb disguises a broader,
more profound truth about the ancient world.
Outside of the narrow confines of Egypt,
there was a big, wide world full of lots of different kinds of people.
They were known to each other
and each had things that the others wanted.
So, rather than seeing these images as Rekhmire would have done,
as a sign of Egypt's political dominance,
instead we should see them as a picture of an international market
based upon the exchange of desirable goods.
Trade rather than tribute was the heartbeat of Rekhmire's world.
And it began with the raw materials which made up a substance
that defined the age, bronze.
Bronze-making was a transformative technology.
It wasn't just that bronze could make tools and weapons
that were sharp-edged and durable,
it was also amazingly versatile.
It could be cast in all shapes and sizes,
from a clothes pin to a two-man saw.
It was made from 10 parts copper to one part tin,
but the distribution of these essential raw materials was not uniform.
In fact, as the general rule,
where you found copper you did not find tin.
So the only way for civilisations to get their hands
on sufficient quantities of both was to trade.
From this necessity came a Bronze Age world that was surprisingly joined-up,
and one of the best places to see the joins is in Central Anatolia,
in what is now Turkey.
This is the ancient city of Kanesh.
And behind me, on that low hill there,
was its palace and administrative centre,
which 4,000 years ago were ruled over by a dynasty of Anatolian kings.
Now, we don't actually know very much about them.
But we do know an awful lot about the people that lived down here
in the lower city.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING)
Back then, if you were an Anatolian local strolling down this street,
this would have seemed like a very alien place.
Different clothes, food, customs, gods and language.
Because all around me here are the ruins of the houses, warehouses and workshops
of foreign merchants from the Assyrian city of Assur,
about 900 miles to the east and about 50-days' mule ride.
This was the karem, or port, of Kanesh,
a permanent colony of Assyrian ex-pats
who had come west to make their fortunes in the import-export business,
bringing with them their distinctive drinking jugs
with which they honoured their now-distant gods.
These Assyrian merchants
were an essential link in a trading network
which stretched all the way from Afghanistan in the east
to the Mediterranean Coast in Egypt,
an ancient precursor of our own global economy.
The Assyrians could get things that people here in Anatolia wanted.
Tin, essential for making bronze, which they bought in Iran.
Textiles, from Mesopotamia, and more exotic raw materials
like lapis lazuli which came all the way from distant Afghanistan.
In exchange for these goods,
the Assyrians received silver and gold which they sent home,
using it to finance the next consignment or banking it for a rainy day.
We know an enormous amount about these Assyrian merchants
because we have thousands and thousands of their letters.
As you might expect from such canny businessmen,
most of them are to do with money matters, contracts,
bills of sale, receipts, legal wrangles.
But not all of them.
There are also personal letters,
not just from the merchants themselves, but from the women in their lives.
And these present a far more human face to our business story,
and voices that still speak to us across the millennia.
One of the best of these letters is written by a lady called Lamassi
to her husband, Pushu-ken, who was an Assyrian merchant at Kanesh.
Now, Lamassi writes...
(WOMAN READING IN LOCAL LANGUAGE)
WOMAN: (READING IN ENGLISH) When you left,
you did not leave me any silver, not even one shekel.
What is this extravagance about which you always write to me?
There is nothing here to buy our food. But you think we are extravagant?
I sent everything we have to you.
And today, I am living in an empty house.
Send me the money you have received for my textiles
so that I can buy some necessities.
And then there is this killer line.
Since you left, Salum-Ahum has already built a house,
double the size.
When will we be able to do the same?
Lamassi, I have to tell you that even 4,000 years on,
you know how to make a man feel really bad.
While the Lamassis of this world worried about keeping up
with the Salum-Ahums,
at the top of the social pyramid, the rulers of the Bronze Age world
engaged in their own games of one-upmanship.
War, as ever, was the ultimate recourse,
but by the middle of the second millennium BC,
there was a new game to play, diplomacy.
The Hittite kings of Anatolia
were the pioneers of this new form of war by other means.
In Hattusa, the capital city of the Hittites,
fragments of more than 70 peace treaties have been found.
The Hittites seem to have had an almost religious dread
of breaking their word.
When one of their kings did, by launching a sneak attack on Egypt,
plague came to Hattusa and thousands died,
including the king himself.
The king's son considered this to be a divine judgment.
He wrote a series of plague prayers accusing his father of
bad faith and seeking forgiveness from the storm gods
in whose name the original treaty had been signed.
It took more than prayers to patch up relations with Egypt,
and the bad blood culminated
in the greatest land battle of the Bronze Age,
the Battle of qadesh.
It's commemorated here at the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel.
Proclaimed as a clear victory for the Egyptians,
in fact, it was more of a score draw and it ended with a peace treaty
sworn in the name of the sun god of Egypt and the storm god of the Hittites.
History teaches us that the fine words and documents like this
are often as fragile as the materials that they're written upon.
But history also teaches us that the fighting only stops
when the wrangling over the fine print begins.
If you wanted to find a typical king
at the centre of this complex web of war,
diplomacy, marriage, gift-giving and trade,
there are few more attractive figures than Zimri-Lim,
who for 20 years ruled as King of Mari, beginning sometime around 1770 BC.
Mari occupied a strategic position between the cities of Mesopotamia
to the south-east, the kingdoms of Anatolia to the north-west,
and the port-cities of the Mediterranean to the west.
The city was close to the river Euphrates,
and a canal connecting it to the river was dug through its centre,
creating an inland port of great economic value.
As a young man, Zimri-Lim had to fight hard for his kingdom
after a period of exile.
And ultimately, he would lose it, betrayed by his closest ally.
But history has been more kind to Zimri-Lim,
because in the traces that he left behind,
we find probably for the first time in human history,
the outline of a recognisable personality.
His urbanity and enthusiasms set him apart
from the rather faceless kings who he competed against and cooperated with.
From all that we know, Zimri-Lim was obviously a rather civilised chap.
He built himself a huge, imposing palace
covering an area of 25,000 square metres.
The throne room was designed like a temple,
its walls covered with frescoes painted by craftsmen
imported from Minoan Crete.
The palace even had its own ice-house so that the king's honey-sweetened wine
could be served cold.
Zimri-Lim was evidently a bit of a pleasure-seeker.
And he could get impatient when he felt that his needs
were not being catered to.
In a letter to one of his governors,
he complained about the quality of the truffles that had been sent to him.
When his sister, Lictum, married a Syrian king, he wrote,
In the land where you dwell, there are many ostriches.
Why have you sent me no ostriches?
Midway through his reign, Zimri-Lim made a journey from Mari
to the coast of the Mediterranean,
a round trip of more than 1,000 miles by river and land.
He brought with him his family, his court officials, his cooks,
physicians and musicians, and his army.
Some 4,000 people put in motion by the whim of a great king.
He visited fellow kings and royal in-laws,
distributing and receiving gifts as he went.
He even found time to arrange a divorce for one his daughters
whose marriage to a neighbouring king hadn't worked out.
But his final destination was here, Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast.
The grand tour took five months to complete.
And it must've been a hugely complex, disruptive and expensive exercise.
And there was no reason for it either except, I think, curiosity.
I think that King Zimri-Lim, of landlocked Mari just wanted to see this,
the sea.
Mari, as Zimri-Lim knew, was only a small part of a much bigger world.
A world connected by trade and diplomacy, marriage and war,
but also connected by the sea.
Merchant ships plied these coasts.
Driven by the pursuit of profits and the quest for raw materials,
they unwittingly carried with them the idea of civilisation
to places far distant from Mari.
An amazing discovery, made about 25 years ago,
just off the coast of south-west Turkey, reveals just how far
the idea of civilisation had been carried in the thousands of years
since it was first tried out.
At Uluburun, archaeologists discovered a shipwreck
dated to the end of the 14th century BC,
about 3,300 years ago,
the high-water mark of the Bronze Age.
In the quarter of a century since the shipwreck was discovered,
archaeologists have recovered more than 17 tons of material from the seabed.
Around 15,000 objects in total,
which when pieced together
provide an extraordinarily detailed picture of Bronze Age civilisation
and its surprising interconnections.
What this nameless wreck tells us is that this was a joined-up world.
They've found raw materials and products from Syria, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt,
Nubia, the Balkans, Iraq, Italy and Central Asia.
Glass, ivory, ostrich shells, pottery and jewellery,
all the varied riches of the Bronze Age world.
They've also recovered 10 tons of copper from Cyprus
in the form of oxhide ingots,
the standard shape and measure used throughout the Eastern Mediterranean
for trading this vital raw ingredient.
But the cargo is just the start.
Thanks to some brilliant detective work
by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology,
it's now possible to say, with a fair degree of certainty,
where the ship came from, where it was going,
who was on board and why.
This sword and dagger probably belonged
to the ship's captain and owner, a Canaanite.
These animal-shaped weights, balance pan and wooden writing boards
belonged to the merchants on board who were from what is today Syria.
Fish hooks and corn grinders belonged to the crew,
giving us a good idea of the cuisine available on this Mediterranean cruise.
Knuckle bones used as dice
tell us something about the shipboard entertainments.
All of this is stuff that you'd expect to find from a ship
whose home port was on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean,
in the vicinity of Ugarit.
But in fact, archaeologists have discovered items
from further afield, too,
foreign stuff.
So it looks like the ship was carrying passengers.
And judging by the style of their personal effects,
they were Greeks from the kingdom of Mycenae.
Mycenae was on the Greek mainland,
a very long way from the ship's home port,
but connected to it by the Bronze Age network of trade and diplomacy.
What the Uluburun wreck shows is that civilisation had come west at last.
This is what civilisation looked liked when it came west.
A golden death mask of an unknown warrior-king from Mycenae.
Looking at these death masks,
striking in the blunt assertion of power and status,
you feel the distance that separated
the millennia-old civilisations of the East
from the civilisations that had gained a precarious toe-hold in the West.
The Mycenaeans were originally nomadic warrior-herdsmen
who'd conquered what is now Greece in the third millennium BC.
It's thought that they learned the arts of civilisation from Minoan Crete,
including the art of writing, but they never completely lost their rough edges.
Mycenaen society was a vigorous hybrid of civilised East and tribal West.
Their kings lived in heavily-fortified fortresses,
they hunted lions in the mountains,
and they went into battle in helmets made from boar's tusks.
Zimri-Lim's passions for truffles and ostriches would have seemed out of place
in this warrior society.
There were no cities in the Mycenaean world
to compare to those in the East in terms of size, population density,
and social complexity.
The wanax or king in his citadel held the monopoly of power,
supported by a warrior caste of loyal retainers.
The temple, a great institution in its own right in the East,
was reduced to the role of cheerleader.
And at the bottom of the heap was a class of agricultural serfs
tightly controlled by the centre.
All Bronze Age societies were hierarchical,
but the Mycenaean class structure was particularly brutal.
Them and us with very little in between.
This all made for a civilisation with very shallow roots,
and that was why in the 13th century BC, it was all swept away.
The reverberations of that cataclysm didn't stop at Mycenae.
They were felt throughout the Bronze Age world.
And once they'd subsided, that world was in ruins.
And civilisation, that hard-won and precious human achievement,
would enter its first dark age.