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Visual History of the World
(CONTENTS)
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First Empires
ca. 7000 B.C. - 200 A.D.
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The Middle East was the
cradle of mankind's first advanced civilizations. In Egypt and the
Fertile Crescent, which extends in an arc from the north of the
Arabian Peninsula east through Palestine to Mesopotamia, the first
state structures emerged in parallel with the further development of
animal husbandry, agriculture, trade, and writing. The first great
empires, such as those of the Egyptian pharaohs, the Babylonians,
the Assyrians, and the Persians, evolved at the beginning of the
third millennium B.C., out of small communities usually clustered
around a city. Similar development also occurred on the Indian
subcontinent and in China, where quite distinct early advanced
civilizations took shape as well.
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The golden mask of Tutankhamun, a jewel of ancient
Egyptian artwork,
showing the pharaoh in a ceremonial robe decorated with the heraldic
animals, the vulture and cobra, ca. 1340 B.C.
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The Hittites
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CA. 1570-CA. 650 B.C.
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The Hittites were an Indo-European
people who migrated out of the steppes north of the Black Sea and into
Asia Minor during the second millennium B.C. From there they pushed into
Syria and Mesopotamia, where they established an empire that competed
with Egypt's New Kingdom for supremacy in the Near East. The empire came
to an end under the onslaught of the sea peoples in 1200 â.ñ.
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The Old Kingdom ca. 1570-1343 â.ñ.

The Hittite Empire (red) at the
height of its power in ca. 1290 BC,
bordering on the Egyptian Empire (green)
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The Hittites encountered an old,
highly developed civilization in Asia Minor from which they adopted
numerous cultural developments and religious concepts.
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One of the oldest cities of the world,
Catal Huyuk, existed in
Anatolia possibly as early as 7000 B.C.
The city on the west coast of
Asia Minor, known as 5 Troy (Ilium) from Homer's Iliad and
referred to as "Wilusa" by Hittite sources, also belonged to the
cultural area of ancient Anatolia. The Hittites first settled, however,
in central Anatolia in the land of the Hattis, from whom their name may
have derived. There they lived in numerous, independently ruled
communities until about 1630 B.C., when King Labarnas II established
political unity and moved his capital to the ancient city of Hattusa,
after which he took his name Hattusilis I.

5 Artist's reconstruction of ancient Troy
Hattusilis expanded the borders of the Old Kingdom that he had founded
through 1 military campaigns in western Asia Minor and northern Syria.
His grandson, Mursilis I, conquered the important Syrian trading center,
Aleppo, and reached Babylon with his armies around 1600 B.C.
In addition to his role as commander of military forces, the
Hittite king also held, together with his queen, religious offices in
the state cult as the 3 weather god and sun goddess respectively. The
queen participated in council meetings, had her own chancellery, and
also maintained independent diplomatic relations with other princes.
After the death of the king, she retained her offices and titles as his
widow.
In general, 4 women, whether they were
2 married, widowed, or
divorced, were well provided for. Hittite law also appears to have been
rather progressive in comparison with the
other cultures of the Near Hast, as the death penalty was rarely
imposed. The assassination ot Mursilis I by his brother-in-law Hantilis
around 1590 âä . led to turmoil around the throne and a revolt of the
nobility. Because of the instability in the leadership. the Hittites
lost control of Syria to the Hurrite Mitanni kingdom and were forced to
focus on Anatolia.
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1 Archer and charioteer, ninth century
B.C.
2 A Hittite couple, ca. 800 B.C.
3 The Hittite weather god with a bundle of lightning bolts beneath the
winged sun disk
4 Hittite women, spinning, eighth-seventh century B.C.
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The
Hittite Gods

Hittite gods
The Hittites were called the "people of the thousand gods."
Apart from their own, they took up many of the deities and
religious concepts of their neighbors. A deity pair associated
with the weather and the sun was always at the head of the
Hittite pantheon and was worshiped in the official national
cult. Above all, vegetation, mountain, and water gods also
played a role in daily religious life.

Hittite gods
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The New Kingdom ca. 1335-1200 â.ñ.
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The rise of the Hittites marked the
beginning of the New Kingdom. Weakened by fierce battles with Egypt,
the empire managed to settle the conflict only to ultimately be destroyed by the sea peoples.
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After a transitional and chaotic phase in which the Hittites contended
with enemies such as the
Gashga people in their immediate
vicinity, Suppiluliumas I (reigned
1380-1346 B.C.), brother of Arnuwanda, established the Hittite
empire by defeating the Mitannian kingdom and making vassals
of the Amorite princes in Syria about 1335 B.C. He fortified
his capital and organized the
state, dividing it into provinces ruled by princes. He installed his
son Telipinus in Aleppo as priestking of the weather god, who was
worshiped there as well.
Suppiluliumas, his son 7 Mursilis
II, (reigned 1345-1315 B.C.), and his grandson Muwattalis (reigned
1315-1290 â.ñ.) were all drawn into conflicts with Egypt, which had been
allied with the Mitanni and also claimed hegemony over Syria.

7 Earthenware plaque with
the seal of King Mursilis II
in Hittite hieroglyphics and cuneiform script, ca. 1300 b,c.
In about 1285, Muwattalis and the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II fought at
the 6 Orontes River in
Syria in the 9 Battle of Kadesh. No clear victor emerged, although Muwattalis was able to maintain his hegemony over Syria. It was
only after Hattusilis III signed a treaty with the
Egyptians in 1259 â.ñ. that peace between the two exhausted powers was secured for the remainder of the century. During this period, disputes within the royal family and with the nobility led to political
disintegration. Catastrophic crop failures and famine made the
import of grain from Egypt necessary and compounded the empire's
difficulties. The weakened
empire of the Hittites was
no longer able to withstand the onslaught of the sea peoples,
particularly the Greek Achaians.

6
The Orontes River in Syria
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9
Three marching soldiers, ninth century B.C.
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The line of 8 Hittite kings ended abruptly with Suppiluliumas II around
1200 B.C. The capital, Hattusa, was completely demolished by unknown
attackers. They may
have been raiding Gashga peoples, former soldiers, or even the city's
own populace. Troy, a Hittite vassal state located in
present-day Turkey, was also destroyed at this time.
Only in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria did small, independent
Hittite kingdoms survive, lasting into the seventh century B.C. They
were finally overrun by the advance of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, while the rest of Anatolia sank into a "Dark Age" until
the appearance of the Phrygians and Lydians.
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8
Statue of a late Hittite king, ninth century B.C.
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The Peace Treaty
between Hattusilis III
and Ramses II
"Look, Reamasesa-mai-amana, the great king, the king of the country of
Egypt, is at peace and fraternity with Hattusili, the great king, the
king of the country of Hatti. Look, the children of Reamasesa, the great
king, the king of the country of Egypt, they will be forever in a state
of peace and of fraternity with the children of Hattusili, the great
king, the king of the country of Hatti. They will remain in the line of
our bond of fraternity and of peace; the country of Egypt and the
country of Hatti will be forever in a state of ðåañå and of fraternity as it is with us...."

Peace treaty in cuneiform script, 1259 B.C.
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Kingdoms on the Borders of the Fertile Crescent
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ca. 1500-546 B.C.
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Besides the great empires of the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians, and Egyptians, there were many, often short-lived kingdoms in
Asia Minor, North Syria, and Mesopotamia. They served as buffer states
between the great powers and were frequently occupied by foreign
soldiers. They were also sought after as partners in alliances and
agreements to secure trade routes passing through their territories.
During periods when their more powerful neighboring empires fell into
crisis or collapsed, they sometimes won a precarious status of
independence and occasionally rose to positions of considerable power
and influence in the region.
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Mitanni and Urartu

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In the north of the Fertile Crescent lay the Mitannian kingdom of the
Indo-Iranian Hurrites. After a period of Hittite supremacy, the Kingdom
of Urartu supplanted the Kingdom of Mitanni.
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Around 1500 B.C., at the time of the fall of the Hittite Old Kingdom,
the Hurrites founded the Kingdom of Mitanni, of which they formed only a
small ruling
elite. At its peak, between 1450 and 1350 B.C., the kingdom stretched
from the Mediterranean coast through Syria to East Anatolia, Armenia,
and North Mesopotamia, where Assyria was a vassal state of the Hurrites.
The first written evidence, using the Akkadian alphabet, dates from the
beginning of the third millennium B.C., with inscriptions over the next 2000 years in Akkadian,
Sumerian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Hebrew, as well as in Hurrite. At first,
Egypt competed with the Hurrites for control of Syria, but then
the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty formed an alliance with them against
the renewed and mounting threat of the Hittites. The alliance was then
sealed over many generations through marriage. Eventually, after the
Middle Assyrian Kingdom had forcibly liberated itself from Mitannian
dominance, the Hurrites were subdued by the Hittites under King
Suppluliuna, who elevated the Hittite state to its maximum splendor, in
about 1335 â.c.
In Urartu, a region on Lake Van in 4 East Anatolia, descendents of the Hurrites established various kingdoms after the fall of the Hittite New
Kingdom in 1200 B.C. when it was invaded by many tribes. These merged to
create a unified state around 860 B.C.

4
Landscape in East Anatolia
The
economy was based primarily on 1,
3 ore mining and processing, along
with agriculture and trade.
Fierce disputes with the Neo-Assyrian Empire over the control of trade
routes and ore deposits developed in the eighth century. The Assyrians
allied themselves with the Cimmerians, an Indo-European nomadic
people, and defeated Urartu in 714. The
story of Urartu comes to its ultimate end in 640 â.ã. with the invasion
of the Scythians, who followed the Cimmerians. At the same time,
Armenians entered Urartu territory from southwestern Europe. The area
remained a bone of contention between the great powers, including the
Roman Empire, the Farthians, and the Sassanians.
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1
Bronze helmet from Urartu, eighth century B.C.
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3
Bronze votive tablet from Urartu, showing the weather god Teisheba
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The 2 kings of Urartu expanded
their kingdom into the Caucasus, East Anatolia, and northwest Iran.

2 Urartian language stone
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Urartu Sphinx
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Part of a throne with deity on a bull
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Phrygia and Lydia
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Following the end of the Hittite empire around 1200 B.C., Anatolia
experienced a cultural decline until the Phrygians in the eighth century
â.ñ In the seventh century the Lydians carved out an extensive area of
territory in which they established powerful kingdoms.
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The 7 Phrygians emerged from the Balkans around 1100 B.C. and penetrated
into Asia Minor. By the eighth century, there was a thriving Phryrian
kingdom in the
center of Anatolia that maintained cultural and trade relations with the
Greeks in the west and the Urartians and Assyrians in the east.
The 5 Lydians then gained control of the western part of Asia Minor.
They defeated the Cimmerians and attempted to expand their kingdom
westward over the Greek colonies on the coast of Anatolia (Ionia), as
well as over the entire Anatolian highlands. Their eastern border, by
agreement first with the Medes and later with the Persians, was
fixed at the Halys River in north-central Anatolia.
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7 Phrygian Bronze Helmet, sixth century B.C.
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5 Remainder of the Temple of Artemis
in the Lydian capital Sardis,
steel
engraving, 19th century
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King Croesus's golden broach
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The last Lydian
king, 6 Croesus—whose
8 wealth became proverbial— conquered almost all
of the Greek coastal cities. He then turned eastward after the Oracle of
Delphi prophesied that a great empire would fall if he crossed the Halys.
Thus feeling assured of victory, Croesus crossed the river in 546 B.C.
and marched against Persia but was defeated by the Persian king Cyrus
II—the prophesy came true, but it was his own
great kingdom that fell.
According to legend, Croesus was 11 pardoned shortly before
he was to be burned at the stake, and he may later
have become an official f at the Persian court.The Phrygians and
Lydians lived on, not only in myths but also , in the cultural legacy they left to the Greeks and the Romans—the cults of Dionysus and of the
"Great Mother" Cybele.
They also introduced the practice of 9 minting
coins to Europe.
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9 Lydian gold coin from Croesus's reign,
sixth century B.C.
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Croesus on the pyre, Attic red-figure amphora,
500–490 BC, Louvre
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1st century BC marble statue of
Cybele
from Formia, Campania
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Cybele with her attributes, a
Roman marble,
c. 50 CE, Getty Museum
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6 Tomb statue of
King Croesus,
ca. 520 B.C.
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11
Croesus, about to be burned at the stake,
is shown mercy by Cyrus,
wood
engraving, 19th century
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Babylon:Croesus on the Funeral Pyre
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8 Solon before Croesus,
Croesus boasts about his treasures before the Athenian lawgiver and
traveler Solon,
painting by Gerard van Honthorst. 1624
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Croessus and Solon
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Croesus Receiving Tribute from a Lydian Peasant, by
Claude Vignon.
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The
area's significant deposits of gold inspired the
10 myth of King Midas, son of Gordius, the legendary founder of the kingdom, and the
goddess Cybele. Midas committed suicide at the beginning of the
seventh century when the Cimmerians, who were being driven westward
by the Scythians, burned the Phrygian capital, Gordium, to the ground.

10 Midas's daughter is turned to gold by his touch,
colored
lithograph, 19th century
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Midas
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The Legend of Midas
The legend of Midas relates how Dionysus granted the king his wish that
everything he touched would turn to gold. However, when even food and
drink turned to gold, he was pushed to the verge of starvation. Then the
god commanded him to bathe in the Pactolus River to be freed of his
gift, ft was said that this was the reason the little river in
Asia Minor had such a wealth of gold. In another myth, Midas was
given the ears of an ass by Apollo because he favored Apollo's
rival in a contest he judged. Midas concealed his ears under a Phrygian cap.
Erroneously interpreted as the cap of liberty, it later became the
symbol of freedom during the French Revolution.

Midas and Bacchus, by
Nicolas Poussin
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