Synopsis: The Great Kings of Carchemish continue ruling over a Hittite rump state in northern Syria as they support the region’s recovery. After an attack by the Assyrian king Ashur-bel-kala, the Carchemish dynasty is supplanted by the house of Suhi. “In that year, in the […]
Tag: Akkadian
Episode C7 – The Heirs of Babylon
Synopsis: Even as Anatolia, Syria and Egypt confronted the Bronze Age Collapse, the eastern kingdoms of Assyria, Babylonia and Elam continued their ancient cycle of dynastic conflict. “Why I – who am a king, son of a king, seed of a king, scion of a […]
Episode C5 – The Sea Peoples
Synopsis: The Sea Peoples cut a swath of devastation across the Levant before their final confrontation with the pharaoh Ramesses III of Egypt. The Hittite Great King Suppiluliuma II abandons the capital of Hattusas before its final destruction. “Regarding what you wrote me before: ‘Enemy […]
Episode R10 – The Bull and the Aten
“I am a faithful servant of the king, and I have not rebelled and I have not sinned, and I do not withhold my tribute, and I do not refuse the requests of my commissioner. Now they wickedly slander me, but let the king, my […]
Episode R6 – The Heroic Age
“I should weary the reader, were I to describe, step by step, the progress of the work, and the discoveries gradually made in various part of the great mound. The labours of one day resembled those of the preceding; but it would be difficult to […]
Episode R5 – Behistun Hat-Trick
“The Major constantly and indefatigably employed himself, from daylight to dark, revising, restoring and adding to his former materials. This was a work of great irksomeness and labour in the confined space he was compelled to stand in, with his body in close proximity to […]
Episode R3 – The Place of God
“My antiquarian studies go on quietly and smoothly, and despite the taunt which you may remember once expressing, of the presumption of an ignoramus like myself attempting to decipher inscriptions which had baffled for centuries the most learned men in Europe, I have made very […]
Episode R2 – Arabia Felix
“His Majesty…has dispatched a few days ago by the vessel Greenland a group of scholars, who will travel by way of the Mediterranean to Constantinople, and thence through Egypt to Arabia Felix, and subsequently return by way of Syria to Europe; they will on all […]
Episode 3 – “Wherever I Went, Let Him Go!”
“Now any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go!” – Sargon the Great In 2,334 BC, Sargon of Akkad forged the world’s first empire and created a legend that would inspire Near Eastern rulers for millennia. The Third […]