RICHARD MILES: There used to be a city here.
A prosperous Bronze Age port on the coast of present day Syria,
with palaces and temples, warehouses and factories,
markets and shops, streets and houses
and people, too, in their tens of thousands.
But then, just over 3,000 years ago,
Ugarit was destroyed, never to be rebuilt.
Ugarit fell victim to a man-made catastrophe
that came from the sea.
The human tide of the dispossessed and the desperate engulfed it
and dozens of other Bronze Age cities, from Greece to Syria,
from Turkey to Egypt.
The destruction of these once great centres
reduced more than 4,000 years of civilisation into a layer of ash.
Following the great Bronze Age collapse, civilisation was down, but not out.
The survivors of the catastrophe would live to fight another day,
usually with each other.
In this struggle for survival,
the hard power of military muscle and state sponsored violence
would be pitted against the soft power of trade and exchange,
in a new and pitiless age.
The age of iron.
The collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms is a sobering reminder
of the fragility of this thing that we call civilisation,
but also its tenacity.
For in the new age of iron, civilisation would re-emerge,
tempered in the flames of conflict,
tougher and more resilient than ever before.
This is Pylos, in the Western eloponnese.
In the Late Bronze Age, this part of Greece
was on the very fringes of the civilised world.
That way, to the west and north, lay mainland Europe,
where the tribal ties of kin and clan still prevailed.
To the south and east lay Crete, Cyprus, Syria and Anatolia.
Way stations on the way back
towards the first cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
By the Late Bronze Age, these cities already qualified as ancient.
The experiment known as civilisation
had been running there for more than 3,000 years
and was still going strong.
Here in Pylos, civilisation was still relatively new.
The Mysonians, as these Bronze Age Greeks were called,
had learnt the arts of civilisation from the Minoans.
Everything from writing and fresco painting
to the workings of a centralised economy
had found their way west, from the stepping stone island of Crete.
But Mysonian Greece was no mere pale imitation.
riest kings and priestesses
had ruled from the temple palaces of Crete.
Pylos and the other cities of Bronze Age Greece
were ruled by a king in a citadel,
supported by a cast of aristocratic retainers,
fighters to the very marrow with their boar tusk helmets.
But these born warriors were about to face the fight of their lives.
By the 13th century BC,
it was clear that all was not well with the Mysonian kingdoms.
The great fortified citadels,
from where the Mysonian kings dominated their territories,
were becoming even more defensive with higher walls and deeper wells.
A sure sign that they were expecting trouble from someone.
Written records, from here at Pylos,
talk ominously about watchers who guard the sea
and their followers with chariots.
It sounds like an early warning system, naked eye radar,
coupled with the fastest communication system known to the Bronze Age.
But what were these watchers looking for?
And what was this nameless threat coming from across the sea?
The next set of clues in this historical whodunnit
can be found here, in Ugarit, the port city on the coast of Syria.
Ugarit was numbered among the great cities of the Bronze Age world.
They'd grown fat and fair
by acting as a vital link in the web of trade and diplomacy.
They joined the ancient cities of Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean world,
as far as the far flung cities of Mysonian Greece.
The artefacts found here tell their own story
about the brilliance and sophistication of a city,
which has been described as the venice of the Ancient World.
But sometime around 1200 BC,
Ugarit was completely destroyed.
Like Pylos, the ruins of Ugarit have yielded precious written records,
miraculously preserved.
And these give us our first real glimpse
of the agents responsible for a catastrophe
that slowly but surely was engulfing the whole region.
The letters were to and from Amarapi, the last king of Ugarit.
They're fragmentary, but that only adds to their drama.
These are dispatches from the front line of a war for survival,
unleashed by a mysterious enemy
who appeared suddenly from the western seas.
The first to feel the consequences were the Hittite kings of Anatolia,
in modern-day Turkey,
a few hundred miles to the north of Ugarit.
Here's a fragment from a letter from the Hittite king, Suppiluliumas,
to Amarapi, King of Ugarit.
The enemy advances against us and there is no number.
Then there's a break in the text here.
Whatever is available, look for it and send it to me.
Now, this is from the king of one of the most powerful states in the region.
You don't need to read between the lines
to sense the panic and desperation in his plea.
This letter is from Amarapi to his father-in-law,
the king of Alashiya and what is now Cyprus.
And it suggests that Ugarit had sent troops to help the Hittites
with disastrous consequences.
My father, behold, the enemy's ships came.
My cities were burnt and they did evil things in my country.
Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots
are in the Hittite country?
And all my ships are in the land of Lucca.
Thus the country's abandoned, may my father know it?
Seven ships of the enemy that came inflicted much damage upon us.
Seven ships, that's hardly D-Day, is it? But I think it goes to show
just how vulnerable these Bronze Age cities were.
The disasters, both natural and man-made.
King Amarapi, rather touchingly,
takes time out from his troubles to try and reassure his mother.
And thou, my mother, be not afraid and do not put worries in thy heart.
Which was rather optimistic, considering that things were now very, very bad.
In another letter to a certain Zarden, he doesn't pull his punches.
Our food on the threshing floors is burnt.
And also the vineyards are destroyed.
Our city is destroyed and may you know it.
That was it for Ugarit. Game over.
Throughout these dramatic letters, the enemy remains faceless and nameless.
In fact you get the feeling that Ugarit never really knew what hit it.
But as the threat advanced south and east,
the enemy emerged into plain sight.
At Medinet Habu, near Luxor,
on the eastern wall of the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III,
you can see what happened
when the ships, which had wiped Ugarit off the map, headed south to Egypt.
King Ramses is there, gigantic,
with his drawn bow and flooding around him in a tidal wave
are barbaric warriors with horned helmets
and outlandish mohican hairdos.
According to Egyptian accounts, these are the Sea Peoples,
the Peleset, the Shekelesh, the Habaru.
Raiders from Italy, Sardinia, Sicily and the Aegean.
Nomads from the desert fringes of the Levant.
Savages from beyond the pale of civilisation.
The Egyptians had been troubled by sea-borne raiders from the West before.
From the eighth year of Ramses' reign, around 1180 BC,
they returned in even greater numbers.
And, this time, there was a new and troubling development.
They brought women and children with them.
According to one theory, this was no hit and run raid,
but a mass movement of people.
Perhaps displaced from their own homes in the West
and now looking for new lands to settle.
No one knows for sure what caused the mass migration
of the Sea Peoples in this period.
Explanations range from a natural disaster,
a flood, a famine, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption,
to a cascade of tribal movements that began as far away as China
and spread in a cataclysmic domino effect.
Whatever the explanation, this tide of humanity
swept over the civilised world and left it in ruins.
According to the version of events recorded here,
Ramses' army smashed the Sea Peoples.
For much of the rest of the civilised world,
his victory over these desperately fierce,
or fiercely desperate, invaders came too late.
In a period of just 50 years, from around 1200 to 1150 BC,
many of the centres of Bronze Age culture,
from mainland Greece to the Near East,
was snuffed out one after the other.
One by one, their names were added to the roll call of destruction.
In the west, Pylos, Sparta, Mycenae, Athens, Iolkos.
In the east, Hattusa, Tarsus, Carchemish, Alalakh
and Ugarit, King Amarapi's doomed city.
Then qatna, qadesh, Hazor, Lachish
Megiddo, or Armageddon,
where archaeologists have only recently discovered the ash layer
that attests to the world that ended here.
These cities hadn't been brought down by the hammer blows of a rival,
but by the attrition of a rag bag of have-not's.
People on the other side of the plate glass window of civilisation,
but with the desperation and numbers to smash their way through.
The vulnerability of these once powerful centres
shows that for all its complexity and sophistication,
Bronze Age civilisation
was never much deeper or durable than a layer of gold leaf.
The catastrophe of the Sea Peoples
is one of the great break points in our story,
when the radio goes off the air.
In many areas, writing disappeared and, with it, history.
Agricultural output collapsed, cities were deserted,
populations dwindled, the connections between people withered,
the world shrank.
Artefacts became crude and cumbersome.
In some areas, even oil lamps disappeared.
This truly was the First Dark Age.
In the centuries that followed,
that precious and vulnerable organism called civilisation would lie dormant.
Its complex systems no longer relevant in these new times.
But slowly it revives.
And when the story of civilisation unfolds for the second time,
it would be into a new world, a harsher world,
the age of iron.
Iron was once a precious metal, praised in poetry and used in jewellery.
But the techniques for hardening it and transforming it into steel
turned a precious metal into an essential one.
These techniques, pioneered in Bronze Age Anatolia,
were once closely guarded secrets.
But the destruction of the Hittite Kingdom
by the Sea Peoples caused the iron masters to migrate to other regions,
bringing the secrets of their guild with them.
Unlike copper and tin, the raw materials for bronze,
the ingredients for steel, iron ore and charcoal,
were widely available.
Once the secrets of iron-making became known,
the age of iron truly began.
Initially used to make tools,
it wasn't long before iron weapons were being made.
Ultimately, iron would democratise warfare,
taking weapons out of the hands of the few
and putting them into the hands of the many.
The political and social consequences of that revolution
would play out in the centuries to come.
But first came the question of who would thrive
in this new hard-edged age of iron.
Who were the winners, the losers and the new powers in the land?
The collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms
was a bit like the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
With the big beasts out of the running,
a variety of smaller mammal-like kingdoms
now had their moment in the sun.
Amongst these inheritors were the people responsible for these
rather beautiful votive offerings from Byblos, or what is now Lebanon.
They'd be known to history, but not themselves, as the Phoenicians.
And it would be on their narrow shoulders
that many of the achievements of Bronze Age civilisation
would be carried forward into the new age of iron.
For a people who don't exactly loom large
in the histories of the Ancient World,
the list of Phoenician achievements is pretty impressive.
Pioneering ship building and navigation techniques,
commercial and financial innovations,
the exploration and colonisation of the Central and Western Mediterranean.
All of these would have a positive effect
on the preservation and eventual revival of civilisation,
following the Bronze Age collapse.
But all of these achievements are eclipsed by this,
the technology that, like iron, would transform the Ancient World.
This is the sarcophagus of Ahirom
who ruled in Byblos some time around 1200 BC.
And the inscription running along the top here
is thought to be the world's oldest known example of an alphabet.
Ominously, this was a curse that threatened anybody
who dared to desecrate the tomb of the king.
But, in fact, the development of an alphabet by the Phoenicians
was a blessing which we're still benefitting from today.
Earlier writing systems, Egyptian hieroglyphics
or Akkadian cuneiform
were a kind of bureaucratic code based on a complex system of symbols,
which stood for things or for syllables of words.
The skills required to use them
were restricted to a class of trained specialists known as scribes.
An alphabet is far simpler.
Each letter indicates the sound of a spoken word,
so learning how to pronounce the alphabet
allows you to sound out words,
even if you don't know what they mean.
Alphabet systems are more like speech recording than code breaking
and they're easier to use and teach.
So, just as iron put weapons into the hands of the masses,
so the alphabet took reading and writing
out of the hands of a narrow clique of specialists and democratised them.
The Phoenician alphabet was made up of 22 letters.
All of which were consonants,
so it means that this inscription has no vowel sounds in it.
So it would've been a bit like a text message
sent by an impatient teenager.
And this made for a very fast and efficient mode
of recording and communication,
which was exactly what the business-minded Phoenicians wanted.
The Phoenicians were businessmen to their bones.
A tradition that continues today in Lebanon,
where most of the major Phoenician cities were found.
This is Byblos. In the Bronze Age,
before the destruction wrought by the Sea Peoples,
this Phoenician city had been a vassal kingdom of Egypt,
as many of the artefacts and structures found here make clear.
This is the Temple of the Obelisks, built around 1300 BC,
just before the great Bronze Age collapse.
The obelisk, the symbol of the Egyptian sun god, Ra,
is one of the most ubiquitous features of Egyptian religious architecture
and its presence here tells you all you need to know
about the dominance of Egypt in this period.
But the catastrophe of the Sea Peoples changed things for everyone,
including Egypt.
The walls of Medinet Habu might boast of the total annihilation
of this threat from the sea,
but hard times came to Egypt nonetheless.
When things finally settled down after two centuries of darkness and confusion,
it's apparent that Egypt's glory days are over
as the story of Wenamun makes clear.
I think that all leaders of great nations
should read and contemplate the story of Wenamun,
a high temple official from Thebes, in Egypt,
who came to Byblos around 1075 BC.
It's a sobering story of what happens
when your international credit rating drops through the floor.
The Report of Wenamun is a first person account of a temple official
who travelled to Byblos
to acquire one of the region's most sought after resources, timber,
from the legendary cedars of Lebanon.
These days, the mountains of Lebanon
have been more or less cleared of these mighty trees,
but back then they were a plentiful
and vital supply of tall, sweet smelling timber
for building ships and temples.
Once an Egyptian pharaoh had only to snap his divine fingers
for a whole forest of cedars to be dispatched south.
But as Wenamun discovered,
since the Sea Peoples everything had changed.
His journey to Byblos hadn't been an easy one.
Having been robbed along the way,
he was then kept waiting for 29 days before eventually being granted
a rather grudging interview by Tjekerbaal, the prince of the city.
What your father did, what your father's father did,
you will do too, declared Wenamun rather grandly.
To which the prince of Byblos replied,
And I will do it, as long as you pay.
For I'm not your servant, nor the servant of he who sent you.
Clearly the relationship between Byblos and Egypt was now strictly business.
Cash on delivery.
And please do not ask for credit as refusal often offends.
For the trading cities of the Mediterranean coast,
the Bronze Age collapse was like a bonfire of Bronze Age red tape
and a green light for entrepreneurs and the spirit of free enterprise.
Liberated from the control of kings and distant palaces,
the traders in coastal cities like Byblos
organised themselves into firms,
based around the networks of their extended families.
When the kings did return, their control was no longer absolute.
Instead they went into business with the merchant princes,
lending them ready cash to underwrite their trading ventures.
For their part, the merchants got a place at the high table,
shaping the political destiny of their cities
and always with the bottom line in mind.
As we all know,
every successful business, is meant to have a USP,
a Unique Selling Proposition.
And for the Phoenicians, it was the sea and their mastery of it.
We already know from the wrecks of Bronze Age ships,
the sea was an important route for trade,
but during the Iron Age,
the Phoenicians would turn it into a super highway.
The Phoenicians were blue water sailors.
Rather than hugging the coast,
navigating cautiously between headland and headland,
they struck out into the great watery unknown by day and by night,
guided by the star that bore their name, the Phoenice, or pole star.
(SEAGULLS CAWING)
With their advanced navigation skills,
the Phoenicians began to stitch together a web of trade from sea to shining sea.
But what were the Phoenicians carrying in their distinctive horse-headed boats?
We know from Wenamun's story
how important the cedars of Lebanon were.
But the Phoenicians had other desirable commodities to sell
to a world that was picking itself up
from the disaster of the Bronze Age collapse,
and one in particular with which they will always be associated.
Why were the Phoenicians called the Phoenicians?
Well, you could say they literally made a name for themselves with this.
This is a murex, a sea mollusc, which was the source
of one of the most precious commodities of the Ancient World.
A powerful dye, famed for the intensity of its colour.
It's known simply as purple.
The Phoenicians had cornered the market in it,
so the Greeks called them by their name for purple, phoinix,
hence the Phoenicians, the purple people.
If you were passing along this coastline 3,000 years ago,
I reckon you'd know that you were heading towards a Phoenician port.
The first clue would be geographical.
A spit of land sticking out to sea or a sizable inshore island.
These were the sites which the Phoenicians preferred for their cities.
Amphibious places, half land, half water.
And as you came closer,
the tell-tale sign of the double harbour,
which meant that ships could arrive safely into the port
whichever way the wind was blowing.
And if there wasn't a double harbour, then the Phoenicians built one.
And just as you're docking, the wind suddenly changes direction
and you catch the foul stench of the purple works on the outskirts of town,
the source of so much of Phoenicians' exportable wealth.
Welcome to Tyre, which 3,000 years ago
was the most successful and the most powerful of the Phoenician city states.
Like Byblos and Sidon, Tyre grew fat on trade.
So fat, that around 1000 BC,
it was becoming an important power in the region
and the object of some fear and a lot of envy
amongst its immediate neighbours.
In the Bible, the prophet Ezekiel
paints a vivid picture of Tyre in its glory days.
In a long and detailed passage, he lists 20 or so cities
and the imports which Tyre received from each.
There's silver, iron, tin and lead, and Tashish.
Some think this is Spain.
Ivory, ebony and saddle cloths from Gedda,
that's in Saudi Arabia.
Spices, precious stones and gold from Sheba.
Wine and wool from Damascus. The list goes on and on.
"Tyre", says Ezekiel, "Your frontiers are far out to sea,
When you unloaded your goods, to satisfy so many peoples,
you enriched the kings of the Earth with your excess of wealth and goods.
Isaiah was even less flattering,
accusing Tyre of playing the whore to all the kingdoms.
But the only profits which the merchant princes of Tyre
were really interested in
were those that you could tot up at the end of the financial year.
To trace the origins of those carping profits back to their source,
you have to travel inland
from the thriving port cities of the Mediterranean coast
and head south to the land of one of the most intriguing peoples
of the Ancient World, the Jews.
Like the Phoenicians, the Jews have benefited from the elbow room
created by the collapse of the great Bronze Age kingdoms.
According to the Bible, Jerusalem was the capital of the kingdom of Israel,
founded by King David and inherited by his son, Solomon.
Many archaeologists now wonder just how powerful and unified
Solomon's kingdom really was.
For them, the biblical account was a vision of a golden age,
how things should have been rather than the way things were.
Both sceptics and true believers are agreed that after Solomon
there were two distinct Jewish kingdoms in this region.
Israel, or Samaria, in the north
and Judah, whose capital was here in Jerusalem, to the south.
Mammal kingdoms, both of them.
Beneficiaries of the great Bronze Age collapse.
But in the following centuries,
both North and South would suffer the same fate
as all the other small kingdoms in this part of the world.
But the dinosaurs weren't extinct after all,
they were back, but this time clad in iron rather than bronze,
dreaming of a universal empire based on aggressive expansion
and the systematic use of violence and terror.
It's time to meet the Assyrians.
This is Shalmaneser III, king of the Assyria during the 9th century BC.
He ruled for 35 years, 31 of which he was at war.
That's what the Assyrians did, war.
War underpinned their society, their economy and their civilisation.
For an Assyrian king, the greatest attribute wasn't wisdom or justice,
it was melammu,
a shimmering radiance that flashed out from his brow
to intimidate his enemies, shock and awe without the aid of bunker busters
or cruise missiles.
If geography is fate, the Assyrians learned to overcome theirs.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe of the Sea Peoples,
Assyria found itself with a small, triangular territory
wedged between the plains of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Iran to the north.
Cramped and landlocked,
it learned to fight for every square mile of territory.
Raised in the school of hard knocks, the Assyrians went on to major
in the arts of empire building and aggression,
directed against neighbouring kingdoms.
Every year the Assyrian king would summon his army to Nineveh
and, every year, lead them against those unfortunate enough
to lie within striking distance.
It was kind of a harvest,
an annual gathering in of plunder and tribute.
The Assyrians respected no gods but their own.
In Babylon and Egyptian Thebes, hallowed temples spared for millennia
by the scourge of war were ransacked.
Their gods carried off to be laid at the feet of Ashur,
the Assyrian god of war.
Mere mortals fared far worse.
Impalings, amputations,
burnings alive, flayings alive,
disfigurements, mass blindings, mass deportations.
These were par for the course when an Assyrian army took your city.
All the locals could do was cower in the reeds
until the tsunami of violence abated.
But this wasn't mindless violence.
This was carefully directed violence.
violence as an instrument of state policy,
an economy of terror,
because after the shock and awe came the shekels and the plunder.
A raid by Shalmaneser's father on a kingdom in Southeast Turkey
netted the following plunder.
40 chariots complete with trappings,
460 horses, 2,000 cattle, 5,000 sheep,
silver, gold, lead, copper and iron in varying but large amounts,
fine linen and various pieces of fancy furniture
including couches made of ivory and inlaid with gold.
The ruler's sister, the daughters of his nobles and their rich dowries.
1,500 subjects who were snatched away and brought to Assyria as slaves.
He also imposed an annual tribute of sheep, grain, gold and silver.
And that was just the proceeds of one of 15 victims from that year's campaign.
Who says that war crimes don't pay?
Shalmaneser III followed in his father's rapacious footsteps.
His appetite for plunder took him west
to the Phoenician cities of the Mediterranean coast
and south to the kingdom of Israel.
At the mouth of the Dog River near Beirut,
he erected a monument to himself
and boasted about the tribute he'd received from his victims.
You can see what receiving tribute meant
on the famous Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser in the British Museum.
This is Jehu, the king of Israel, adopting the position recommended
in the presence of all that dazzling melammu.
If the kings had continued to do the sensible thing,
then the Jews of the Ancient World would probably have been spared
a great deal of suffering.
But the kings didn't, so the people weren't.
Jehu's successors decided that it was better to die like lions
than live like sheep.
In 737 BC, the northern kingdom of Israel
threw off its subservient vassal status and allied itself
with Assyria's great rival, Egypt.
Bad move.
"The Assyrians", as a poet would later write,
"came down like a wolf on the fold."
Within a decade, the northern kingdom was no more.
Its cities destroyed, its territories annexed
its people deported en masse to Assyria.
The 10 Tribes of Israel became the 10 Lost Tribes,
chewed up by the Assyrian war machine.
But in the brutal ecology of the age of iron,
one kingdom's loss is another kingdom's gain.
With its more powerful northern neighbour wiped off the map,
the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah now came into its own.
Jerusalem quickly grew from an insignificant hill town
into the capital city of an important Assyrian vassal state.
And so things might have continued
if the kings of Judah had kept their lips firmly planted on the ground.
But King Hezekiah had other plans.
Although the terrible fate of the northern kingdom
was still in living memory,
he too made the fateful decision to defy the Assyrians,
to stop paying tribute and to make an alliance with the Egyptians.
He certainly understood the consequences.
This massive wall, 20 foot wide in certain places,
was hastily thrown up.
And the houses that stood in its path were demolished to make way for it.
And this was just a start of Hezekiah's defensive strategy.
You can't fault Hezekiah for not being prepared.
He also ordered the construction of this subterranean conduit,
a third of a mile long, cut through the bedrock of the city,
designed to carry fresh water from a spring outside the city walls
to a reservoir inside.
So, Hezekiah had done all he could.
He'd built his wall, he'd dug his tunnel.
Now all he could do was to wait for the wrath of the Assyrians
to crash down around his ears.
That's more or less what happened when the Assyrian king, Sennacherib,
marched into Judah looking for payback.
Except that it didn't happen in Jerusalem.
Sennacherib was more than happy to leave Hezekiah hiding
behind his fancy new wall like a caged bird,
as one Assyrian text contemptuously put it.
And meanwhile, the Assyrian army marched west
to Hezekiah's second city, Lachish.
What happened next was recorded in gruesome detail
in a frieze that once decorated the palace of Sennacherib.
The city fell, of course, with all the inevitable consequences.
Up here on the western slopes,
archaeologists have discovered a mass grave
containing the bodies of over 1,500 men, women and children.
Some of them possibly the victims of the terrible atrocities
depicted on the frieze.
As for the survivors, the frieze also reveals their fate.
Mass deportation to Assyria where the men were put to work
in the stone quarries raising up monuments
to the greater glory of the mighty Assyrian Empire.
There's a sequel to the story of Hezekiah's defiance of Assyria.
When he died, he was succeeded by his son, Manasseh.
Manasseh rejected his father's policies,
got down on his knees and declared himself a loyal vassal
of the Assyrian king.
More importantly, he found a way to make himself useful.
The Assyrians were tough, but they weren't psychopaths.
If you gave them something that they wanted,
then they'd let you survive.
Manasseh gave them olive oil.
In fact he turned the town of Echron, to the north of here,
into a virtual oil refinery.
Over 100 oil presses have been discovered there
suggesting the scale of production needed for this little kingdom
to keep the Assyrian beast at bay.
The Jews weren't the only ones trying to satisfy the demanding Assyrians.
The ever resourceful Phoenicians also had to raise their game.
And, as we'll see, by doing so, they revived the arts of civilisation
that had been lost for centuries to the West.
When the Assyrians swept into the territory of the Phoenicians,
they immediately recognised that they'd captured a flock
of golden geese.
The merchants of Byblos, Sidon and Tyre were permitted to continue as before,
but the lion's share of their profits
would be diverted to the Assyrian treasury.
It was a hostile takeover with no golden parachutes.
On the gates of his palace at Balawat, Shalmaneser III
bragged about the tribute extracted from the Phoenicians,
showing their horse-headed boats unloading the loot
in satisfying amounts.
A century later, Sargon II, elaborated on the same theme,
decorating the walls of his new, city sized palace in Khorsabad
with a frieze showing Phoenician Hippoi delivering Lebanese cedar in amounts
that the Egyptian Wenamun could only have dreamed about.
But the Assyrians were impossible to please.
As a rule of thumb, the tribute demanded rose twentyfold
with every succeeding generation.
And so, the Phoenicians had no choice.
They got on their boats, took to the seas
and started looking for new ways to get rich quick.
They headed west into the Mediterranean.
They went to Cyprus and Malta, to Italy, Sardinia and Sicily,
to North Africa, Ibiza and Spain,
searching for new markets and new sources of raw materials,
founding ports and trading colonies along the way,
and laying the foundations of what would one day become
the Carthaginian Empire.
I'm heading now towards the island of Mothia.
But during the time when the Phoenicians built their colony here,
this was actually joined to the mainland by a causeway.
Now, all around me here are salt works.
And the Phoenicians tended to build their colonies close to sources of salt.
It was used not only for the preservation of food,
but also in the dyeing process, their very famous Tyrian Purple.
This small, flat island off the west coast of Sicily
is now given over mostly to scrub and vines.
But Mothia was once a bustling emporium
set up by the Phoenicians at the beginning of the eighth century BC.
And the main reason for its existence was to act as a staging post
for the lucrative trade routes that went from Greece all the way down to Italy
and across the western coast of Sicily, then down to North Africa.
But it also had its own industrial units, too,
making not only the famous purple dye, but also pottery.
And here we can see a very fine example of a pottery kiln.
These guys were really into everything.
(BEES BUZZING)
But though they came in search of profits,
like industrious honey bees,
the Phoenicians carried with them the pollen of civilisation
into regions that had been blighted by the Bronze Age collapse.
And the ones who benefited the most
were the people known to us as the Greeks.
But who were these Iron Age Greeks,
the ones who came after the Bronze Age Mycenaeans?
What was their story?
The Bronze Age collapse had hit the Mycenaean kingdoms hard.
This part of the world had always been on the edge of civilisation.
When the catastrophe of the Sea Peoples happened,
it fell off the edge.
Populations collapsed,
farming reverted from agriculture to pastoralism.
A land of citadels ruled by warrior kings
became a country of tribal villages,
separated from each other, closed in on themselves.
But the Dark Ages weren't completely dark.
The archaeological record contains vivid flashes of light
that suggest that not everything was lying dormant.
(SHIP HORN BLOWING)
If you come to Ischia, in the Bay of Naples,
you can see one of these lightning flashes.
A modest enough artefact, but one which carries on it
the mark of these changing times.
It's known as the Cup of Nestor,
found at a site called Pithekoussai,
and it dates from around the eighth century BC.
And scratched on its side is a poem.
It says, "I am Nestor's cup, good to drink from."
Whoever drinks this cup empty
straightaway desire for beautiful, crowned Aphrodite
will seize him.
Now, I'm sure many of us recognise the headiness
that comes from knocking back a glass of wine.
But the Cup of Nestor makes a more sober point.
This little poem was written in Greek using an alphabet.
Before the Bronze Age collapse, Greek was written down in Linear B,
an unwieldy system that used more than 200 signs and symbols,
which was only really good for bookkeeping.
But here we are, just a few centuries later,
with Greek speakers using a concise and efficient alphabet
with less than 30 characters to write poetry.
So clearly at some point during the Dark Ages,
the Greeks have received enlightenment from someone.
The getting of wisdom is all about the company you keep.
On Ischia and elsewhere we know that the Greeks were rubbing shoulders
with the inventors of the alphabet, the Phoenicians.
Both groups had come here to exploit the region's iron, silver and tin mines
and seemed to have ended up as partners rather than rivals.
This allowed the Greeks to sit at the feet of the purple people
and to re-learn the lost arts of civilisation.
Just a few centuries after that simple poem
was scratched on the side of a cup,
a Greek named Herodotus wrote a monumental,
multi-volumed work called The Histories,
in which he acknowledged the debt that the Greeks owed to the Phoenicians
for giving them the alphabet.
Later historians have added further items to that debt of honour,
the cultivation of vines and olives,
interest-bearing loans and banking,
weights and measures and even political institutions such as kingship
were all said to have been brought to the West
by the industrious Phoenicians.
But the Greeks were inveterate tinkerers,
instinctive improvers of other people's ideas.
They took the Phoenician alphabet one stage further,
devising five new letters which reproduced vowel sounds as well.
No longer restricted to the abbreviated text speak of the Phoenician alphabet,
the Greek alphabet became a more expressive tool,
better at capturing the melodies and rhythms of speech,
poetry as well as cargo manifests.
But the charming frivolity of Nestor's Cup
gives no clue as to what came next.
A piece of writing so monumental and so profound
that it would shape the destiny of the Greek speaking world.
MAN: (READING) Rage, sing of the rage of Achilles, Goddess.
That ill-fated killer, Peleus' son
who cost the Achaeans so dear,
sending to hell so many brave souls,
mighty warriors turned into carrion,
a feast for dogs and birds.
The unmistakable war music of The Iliad,
16,000 lines of hexameter verse
that plunge you straight into the strife and havoc
which is said to have happened here in front of the walls of Troy
some 3,200 years ago.
The very first word of The Iliad is Menon, rage.
And that's what it explores with unflinching clarity and insight.
The rage of men fighting for vengeance, honour and personal gain,
for victory and survival.
But also for the intoxicating adrenaline rush
that comes with the licensed savagery of war.
MAN: Achilles hacked at his collarbone just below the neck
driving in deep the double-edged blade hard to the hilt.
And down Lycaon fell, his face in the dust,
his black blood flooding out to soak the earth.
Achilles grabbed his foot and tossed him into the river
and away he went downstream, sped by stinging words.
Go, then, down to the fishes. Lie there with them.
Let them suck the blood from your wounds
and arrange your funeral rites.
MILES: Homer is the name attached to this poem without precedent.
He is variously described
as its author, composer, performer or compiler.
But was he one man or many?
An individual genius, a tradition or a guild of poets?
Claimed by seven different cities as their native son,
Homer has been called the Cheshire Cat of world literature.
Always disappearing.
What we do know is that sometime between 750 and 700 BC,
The Iliad was written down using the new technology, the Greek alphabet.
The language, though Greek,
was like nothing that had been heard before or since.
It was a jumble of different dialects.
Imagine an English language poem
written in Texan, Jamaican, Scots and South African.
It was also a jumble of weapons technologies,
battle tactics and political institutions
taken from periods both ancient and modern.
However, to the Greeks it must have made sense.
Over 180 manuscripts of The Iliad have survived.
That's more than twice the number of its sister epic, The Odyssey.
A crude but telling measure of a work's popularity and relevance.
One reason for the centrality of the Iliad to the Greeks
is that it gave them a mirror in which they could see themselves
and the kind of societies they were creating.
Alongside all the blood and guts, The Iliad poses profound questions
about the nature of society, the qualities of leadership,
the rules by which people consent to be governed.
Well-walled Troy with its lofty gates, wide streets and fine towers
is in many ways the ideal city-state to which the Greeks aspired.
And Hector, the noble warrior,
who fights and dies for the survival of his city,
is the champion of civilisation and the real hero of the Iliad.
It's the Greeks, the wolves at the gates,
who are troubled and troubling.
They wrangle over the reasons why they're there,
the justness of their cause and the motives of their leaders.
And it's this that puts the politics, as well as the poetry, into the Iliad.
According to legend, this is where the Greek camp was.
The black ships drawn up on the beach near the mouth of the Scamander River.
A rampart and ditch surmounted by wooden walls thrown up around them.
A makeshift vagabond place compared to well-walled Troy.
This is where Achilles, the hero, sulked in his tents,
where Agamemnon blustered and strutted
trying to maintain his authority as High King.
This is where wily Odysseus, the unscrupulous aristocrat
plotted and schemed.
And it was here, too, that a debate took place,
that asked, but did not answer,
a question that would preoccupy the Greeks
in the centuries to come.
The Greek army was assembled to hear their master's decision
about whether or not the siege would be abandoned
and they'd be going home.
They were there to listen, approve and obey,
but one of their number dared to speak out.
Thersites was just a common soldier, a spear carrier,
one of the poor, bloody infantry.
And it's clear that Homer disapproves of him.
He describes him as a hunchback, bandy-legged,
and as the ugliest man who ever came to Troy.
Although spoken through broken teeth, his words were fluent and flowing
as he abused Agamemnon, the High King, and demanded an immediate evacuation.
With morale at a low ebb,
this was a critical moment in the long war.
It's Odysseus who puts a stop to this subversive rant.
Who are you to wrangle with kings? he demands,
before beating Thersites with his rod of office.
The mutinous moment passes, the siege carries on,
but the question still hangs in the air,
Who are you to wrangle with kings?
The generations of Greeks that came after the heroes of Troy
would give many different answers to that question.
And in doing so, would change their world forever
and also lay the foundations for our own.