Mar 12 - Quality columns at the palaestra on what was the island of Tyre, Al Mina excavations

The history of this part of the city was as momentous as possible from the early 1st millenium to the 300s BC. This was the greatest Phoenician city at the time of the greatest Phoenician achievements (the earlier part of the 1st mill. BC, and the Phoenician colonization of much of the Mediterranean, including the foundation of Carthage), an impregnable island fortress widely considered unconquerable. It was also such an important outpost of the Persian empire in 332 B.C. that Alexander the Great knew he had to conquer it (or the local fleet might have attacked Greece once Alexander's forces had marched further east), and so it was here that his engineers invented and first used the torsion catapult and built a 1/2 km. long causeway for use in one of the most amazing sieges in history. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1GIHgUgLZI

- King Hiram had an offshore fortress built on the island, and It was from here that he ruled a maritime empire in the 10th cent. BC that produced the best sailors the world had yet seen to explore further than anyone would until the arrival of the Vikings 1700 years later, passing the 'pillars of Hercules' at Gibraltar, rounding the Cape of Good Hope (according to Herodotus), and sailing north to Wales to trade for tin. Their journeys, which could be the greatest in ancient history, began here. They might have been inspired by Hiram, their 'sea king', whose throne "sat before large windows opening upon the sea and crashing waves" and by the central importance of the worship of gods of the sea in Phoenician religion (Melkart, a principle Phoenician deity, was god of the sea and storms, and Baal was a son of the fish god Dagon and a patron deity of mariners.)

- There's evidence that Sidon and Byblos paid tribute to Tyre as it grew in a period of Egyptian decline and a lull in the procession of aggressive Mesopotamian empires. (Babylon was in eclipse and Assyria was at rest. The 10th cent. BC would be remembered as a golden age until 911 and the return of Assyrian aggression and dominance, which would last until 612 and the destruction of Nineveh.) It was from Tyre that the Phoenicians colonized much of the Mediterranean, establishing Cyrene and Sabratha (in Libya), and colonies at Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Marseilles, Cadiz, and, of course, Carthage, which would become the greatest rival and threat that Rome would face before the appearance of the Huns. Tyre's early history was so widely admired and romanticized that when Judaean bards and historians were glorifying David and Solomon in accounts or sources written in the 7th or 6th cent. BC (or earlier for some elements?) which would become or be incorporated into the biblical books of Samuel, Judges and Kings en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_Samuel, they made a point to portray Solomon as the BFF of Hiram, who supplied him with much cedar for the First temple in Jerusalem which Solomon paid for generously with "20,000 cors of wheat ... and 20,000 cors of beaten oil" to be paid every year (1 Kings 5:1-12), and later gave Hiram a gift of 20 cities in the land of Galilee. "Hiram's servants, "shipmen that had knowledge of the sea", taught the sailors of Solomon the route from Ezion-geber and Eloth to Ophir, whence large stores of gold were brought to King Solomon (1 Kings 9:26; 2 Ch 8:17 f)." www.bible-history.com/isbe/H/HIRAM/ (According to Brittanica.com, Samuel belongs "along with Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and 1 and 2 Kings ... to the tradition of Deuteronomic history first committed to writing about 550 BC, during the Babylonian Exile". How well does that entry reflect a consensus for biblical scholars? I've also read that "most biblical scholars (today) are coming to believe that the "Deuteronomistic History" (the whole core narrative from Joshua to 2 Kings) was written during Josiah's reign in the late 7th cent., and composed with the use of other earlier sources, including a brief chronicle of king's names, their age at the beginning of their reign, and their mother's names. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah )

- No physical evidence has been found of the glorious early 1st mill. kingdom of the briefly united lands of Israel and Judah under David, Solomon, and Rehoboam described in the Bible. There is proof however that David existed and had founded a dynasty; the Tell Dan stele refers to a king of the 'House of David'. (I saw the stele when it was brought to Montreal [!] in '03. pacmusee.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/detail/archaeology-and-the-... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Dan_Stele ). Many modern historians now believe that after Israel had been devastated by the Assyrians in the 720s BC, when Sargon II carried 27,000 Israelites away into captivity, the population of Jerusalem swelled 10-fold with the arrival of refugees from the Israeli north, and that it was then that Judah became a state (in a fashion; it became a vassal- or client-state of the Assyrians) with all the trappings of a state, standardization of weights and measures, diversification of trades, etc. But in the late 7th cent., Assyria retreated from the region in its conflict with the Babylonians and the Medes to the east, and upon gaining a new (but all too brief) independence, the Judaean leadership became ambitious to gain control over the land and peoples of Israel to the north. King Josiah, 630-609 BC, a descendant of the Davidic line, laid plans for a pan-Israelite, unified kingdom. At the time of his renovation of the temple, 'a book of the law' was discovered within it (which some scholars believe was the book of Deuteronomy), and Josiah made several 'reforms', including the destruction and prohibition of all other Judaean places of worship and all other forms of religion other than the cult of Yahweh, centralizing religious authority and political administration in Jerusalem. In fact, the centralization of the cult is one of the ideas set out in Deuteronomy (which might raise questions as to whether or not the book was really 'found' in the temple, again if the book allegedly found was Deuteronomy). And a common history was to be elaborated in the early books of the bible with the combination of traditions in the north with those in the south. It's fair to say that the Bible became something of an ancient library and cultural repository for the Judaean people. To further validate the rule of Josiah, he of the Davidic line, in Israel proper, the authors of the early books of the bible expanded on the early history of Judah, Jerusalem, David, Solomon, et al (something not uncommon in any record of a history of early rulers first passed down through oral tradition over centuries, or even decades), presenting David and Solomon, Judaean kings or chieftains based in Jerusalem when it was "a small village" atop and along part of a ridge covering only 3 to 4 ha.s (according to archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Ronny Reich), as rulers of a great empire of vast wealth incl. the much richer and stronger northern kingdom of Israel following its conquest by Joshua in the 11th or 12th cent.s BC (with which the archaeological record is entirely inconsistent at that time), and romancing Sabaean queens and hanging with Hiram, the Phoenician king of Tyre, a city which truly was a big, awe-inspiring deal then. Josiah and the authors of this early history had a political agenda. Finkelstein holds that "the conquests of Joshua delineates the territories that Josiah wished to take over, and the great empire of David and Solomon is the model for the great Israelite empire to come."

(I should add that the early books of the Bible written in the time of Josiah and following were revolutionary as they were amongst the first authoritative, sacred texts to be written anywhere. [The Vedas might have been recorded earlier.] This development was a huge incentive to the spread of literacy throughout Judaean society.)

 

- In the Book of Ezekiel (28: 1-4), Yahweh conveys a warning to Hiram not to let success go to his head and claim that he is a god, "in the seat of gods, in the midst of the sea". To give (much) credit to Hiram, he continues: "Behold, you are wiser than Daniel! ... By your great wisdom in trade you have increased your riches. ..." (28:12-13) You were "the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. ..." But wealth leads to pride, and the proud are doomed. (28: 6-9): "I will bring ... the most terrible of the nations [the Assyrians]; and they shall ... defile your splendour. They shall throw you down into the pit ... (etc.)."

(If it was believed in the 6th or 7th cent. BC when the Book of Ezekiel was written that Hiram had assisted in the construction of the 1st temple > 300 years earlier, that could be sufficient basis for all the attention paid to him by Ezekiel and biblical authors. Any Lebanese cedar used would have been purchased in Tyre, the southernmost Phoenician city-state, so there could have been a connection /b/ Jerusalem and Tyre if not with Hiram directly.) It's ironic if Hiram is best known today for what the authors of the Old testament wrote about him to give heft to David and Solomon in the 7th or 6th cent. BC. David and Solomon have long since returned the favour.

 

- Update Nov. 2017: These past 2 weeks I've been reading some in vol. II of Amélie Kuhrt's encyclopedic 'The Ancient Near East,' from '95, which predates the article that was a basis for much of what I'd written above re the aggrandizement of David and Solomon. She confirms (although, again, 22 years back) that there's nothing in the archaeological record which supports the accounts in the books of Kings and Samuel of the brief but glorious 10th cent. united kingdom of Israel and Judah, although the Tel Dan stele confirms the existence of a dynasty or 'house' in the late 800s sired by David. But she notes that this shouldn't be surprising as so little in the way of written evidence of anything from that period has been found in the region, and as Jerusalem itself had been built over and rebuilt over as much as it has in the millenia since then. And so absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. ("It must be stressed that it is above all due to the accounts in the Old Testament that a reconstruction of the history of Israel and Judah is possible - if we did not have it, Israel and Judah would be little more than names in the Assyrian annals, and Hamath, Sam'al, Bit Agusi, even Moab would be much better known. The reason is that no lengthy monumental inscriptions have been recovered from either Israel or Judah for this period. ... Apart from reference to Israel in an inscription from Moab, and the possible mention of Judah in a stele fragment from Tel Dan, the only certain extra-biblical references to Israel and Judah occur in the Assyrian records." There's also a telling reference in passing to the destruction of Israel in an Egyptian stele in the Cairo museum dating to 1207 BC and the reign of pharoah Merneptah.)

But then Prof. V. J. Stenger had this to say in 2007.: "Some have argued that the remains of Solomon's temple and other signs of a [10th cent. BC] golden age in Jerusalem have been wiped out by later building projects. However, the extensive excavations carried on in Jerusalem in modern times have yielded impressive finds from much earlier periods such as the Middle Bronze Age and Iron Age." www.humanreligions.info/did_king_solomon_exist.html

Then again, "excavations directed by the late Prof. Y. Shiloh, uncovered a monumental 20 m. stepped structure, and dated it to the 12th-10th cent. BC," and which some claim to be a basis of the Jebusite town that David conquered. (Archaeologist Ronny Reich maintains that the structure is a revetment to prevent erosion of that part of the hill or ridge and to stabilize it and the structures built above and @ it.) And there are details in the books of Samuel re David's conquest of Jerusalem which are consistent with features in the 'city of David', the oldest part of town. www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/myth-and-reality-of-king-dav... And more in that vein. www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/palace-king-david.html The truth is out there.

 

- Tyre was the original home of Queen Jezebel, wife of the Israelite king Ahab, condemned by Elijah to be eaten by dogs "by the wall of Jezreel" (as she had falsely accused Naboth of blasphemy and ordered his execution and that of his sons [allegedly so that Ahab could claim Naboth's vineyard]), and who was defenestrated following a coup.

- Europa, a princess and the namesake of a continent, hailed from Tyre as well. She was abducted by Zeus who had taken the form of a white bull and carried her to Crete where she gave birth to Minos, who became king of the Minoan civilization, the first in Europe (which may be why Europe was named after her). Tyre was also ruled by king Pygmalion, whose legendary sister Dido fled from her home in the city to Berber territory in North Africa where she founded Carthage.

- The island withstood sieges by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar and co., and by the Achaemenid Persians (Phoenician sailing prowess became instrumental to the Persian conquest of Egypt early in the history of the Persian empire), until the incredible 7 month siege by Alexander the Great, who built a 1/2 km.-long causeway to the island under cover of his innovative new catapults youtube.com/shorts/sBB3y1xWeTc?si=DbAHf_uPOMpsIzP9 , laid waste to Tyre, crucified 2,000 locals on the shore, and sold 30,000 into slavery. But as you can see here, although Tyre's most glorious period ended with Hellenism, Tyre continued as a great centre. The Roman ruins are impressive, and the Hippodrome here was the largest in the ancient world (in area, but not in seating). Tyre continued to be a wealthy, influential place throughout the Byzantine period. In the era of the crusades, it took several sieges before the city was taken by Christian forces. It was the only city to hold out against Baldwin I of Jerusalem, and it held out against Saladin as well. (Some more re Tyre under the Crusaders here: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/7339147316/in/photostr... )

 

Done