Rameses was idolized by later Egyptian kings, and his reign was a high-water mark in the military, cultural and imperial achievements of ancient Egypt. He died in 1213, when he was in his early nineties.
DAVID & SOLOMON
c. 1040–970 BC & c. 1000–928 BC
Blessed be the Lord thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel: because the Lord loved Israel for ever, therefore made he thee king, to do judgment and justice.
The Queen of Sheba to Solomon, 1 Kings 10:8–9
David and Solomon were rulers of the Israelite kingdom in the 10th century BC at the apex of its splendor, power and wealth. David united the Israelite tribes and made Jerusalem their capital while his son Solomon was the founder of Jerusalem’s Temple, the king whose myth transcended the bare bones of biblical history to embrace astonishing abilities as a sage, poet, lover and tamer of nature.
Yet the main source for both is the Bible, probably written centuries later. David was portrayed by the Bible as firstly a holy, ideal king but also as a superb warrior, a poet and harpist, a flawed warlord and adventurer, a collaborator with the Philistines, an adulterer, even a murderer. As an ailing king, he was responsible for the execution of his own rebellious son. The portrait of David is thus a surprisingly rounded and human one.
Born in Bethlehem the son of Jesse, during the reign of King Saul, first monarch of Israel, David was selected by the Prophet Samuel and anointed. Called to court to calm the increasingly demented Saul, he played his harp and won royal favor. When the Philistines invaded, fronted by a giant champion Goliath, David volunteered to fight and though still a boy, killed the champion with a shot from his sling. Now a hero, best friends with Saul’s son Jonathan, he married Saul’s daughter but, faced with the murderous jealousy of the king, he was forced to flee. He even crossed the lines to the Philistines, accepting a generalship and city from their king. When the Philistines again invaded and fought the Israelites at Mount Gilboa, Saul and Jonathan were both killed. David mourned for them in his famous poetical lament. He became King of Judah, ruling from Hebron while one of Saul’s sons ruled the northern tribes of Israel until David united both into his Kingdom of Israel. He attacked the Jebusite city of Jerusalem, which became the new neutral capital of his united kingdom and brought the famed Ark of the Covenant to the city. One day he saw there—bathing on the roof—the beautiful Bathsheba, who was married to one of his generals Uriah the Hittite. David seduced her and had her husband put on the front line in the wars—he was killed. David married Bathsheba. Buying land on the Temple Mount, he planned to build a house of God there, a temple—but God intervened: David was a man of blood and the building of the Temple must wait for his untainted son. In old age, the weakening warlord found it hard to control his seething court with its struggles for the succession. His main problem was his favorite son Absolom, the darling of the crowd, who rebelled against his father, expelling him from Jerusalem. David suppressed the rebellion but Absolom was killed, provoking another heartbreaking lament. According to the biblical account, Solomon was the surviving son of David and Bathsheba, and was anointed king while his father was still alive in order to thwart the conspiratorial aspirations of a half-brother.
After inheriting the kingdom, Solomon soon defeated his foes and built a booming commercial empire, exploiting the strategic location of Palestine—bridging the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Asia and Africa. With armies and merchants, he established a vast network of ports and overland trading routes.
The Bible describes a reign of unparalleled magnificence, in which Solomon reputedly fielded an army of 12,000 cavalrymen and 1400 chariots, and for his pleasure and prestige had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines. Such biblical calculations are undoubtedly exaggerations, but possibly not by much. (In Megiddo alone, the remains have been discovered of stalls said to be for 450 horses.) Using marriage to strengthen alliances, Solomon wed the daughters and sisters of kings. His marriage to the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh, for example, secured him the Canaanite city of Gezer. The biblical report that Solomon granted the visiting Queen of Sheba “all that she desired, whatever she asked” has prompted three thousand years’ worth of rumors that this included a child. Since Sheba was probably a prosperous kingdom that included modern Ethiopia and Yemen, this was another example of Solomon’s shrewd realpolitik.
The biblical pinnacle of Solomon’s achievement was the Temple he built to house the Ark of the Covenant. Described as a building of stone and cedar, with a magnificently carved interior and an exterior covered in gold, it was a wondrous testament to the greatness of God. After seven years’ labor, Solomon was able to dedicate it, and it became the holiest place in the Jewish world, the memory of it cherished for thousands of years at the heart of the Jewish faith: this was the first temple built on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which is also known by Muslims as the Haram-al-Sharif.
Solomon continued to build, and on a colossal scale, with cities and forts springing up throughout the empire. He constructed breathtaking palaces for his wives, a city wall for Jerusalem, and facilities to encourage foreign traders, including pagan shrines to make them feel at home.
Solomon’s 1005 songs and his sayings, collected in the Book of Proverbs, bear witness to his genius and wisdom. Confronted in his court by two women each claiming to be the mother of the same child, Solomon proposed dividing the infant in half, correctly judging that the real mother would abandon her claim rather than see the death of her beloved.
God was said to have granted Solomon power over all living creatures and mastery of the elements. The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, and the Islamic sacred scripture, the Koran, both cite his miraculous ability to speak the language of the birds and ants, and to control the winds. He was said to have a magic carpet and a magic ring, the Seal of Solomon, which gave him power over demons. In the Persian and Arabic stories that, in a later millennium, made up The Arabian Nights, Solomon is the wizard who imprisoned the djinn (genies) in jars and cast them into the sea.
There was, though, a price to pay: Solomon suffered “imperial over-stretch”: exorbitant taxes oppressed the Hebrews. When the king died, his united realm fragmented into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judah—this was, the Bible has it, God’s punishment for Solomon’s breaking of his covenant.
The main sources for David and Solomon are the biblical Books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. There is archaeological proof that David existed, though it is doubtful whether Jerusalem was the glorious capital described in the Bible and whether the Davidic kingdom was an empire extending from the Egyptian border to Damascus. Archaeologists now believe the city was small and the kingdom was more of a tribal federation. On the other hand, 10th century traces have been found in the City of David in Jerusalem, which, thanks to its recently discovered Canaanite remains, was clearly a substantial stronghold. The lack of traces in itself is not decisive—after all the Maccabean kingdom a thousand years later, which covered similar territory to that of David, also left remarkably few traces. The court history of David in the Bible does read like a realistic firsthand account of a king in decline. And the Tel Dan stele, discovered in 1993/4, proves that David was a historical character, using the name “House of David” to describe the Kingdom of Judah ruled by David’s royal descendants.
As for Solomon, there is no archaeological proof of his personal existence. Unlike the rounded portrait of his father, Solomon appears as the legend of an ideal Oriental emperor. There is certainly wishful thinking and perhaps projection in the splendor of his court and brilliance of his life, and it is likely the biblical writers, forming their text four hundred years later, were describing their own Jerusalem, their own Temple, ambitions and nostalgia, in their Solomonic portrait. Little has been found of his Temple in Jerusalem but its biblical description is totally plausible in size and style—typical of temples discovered all over the Middle East. His gold and ivory wealth is credible too—artifacts have been discovered in other Israelite palaces
such as those at Samaria. His famous mines resemble ancient 10th century mines recently discovered in Jordan. The size of his army is feasible—a king of Israel fielded 2000 chariots a century later. As for his fortress cities of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, the ruins there were initially assigned to Solomon’s period but there is now debate as to whether they actually belong to the Kings of Israel a century later. However, new analysis of the stables there suggest that they may be his after all. As for the Temple, it certainly existed within a few years of his death, because Egyptian inscriptions confirm that the Pharaoh Sheshonq invaded Judaea and was paid off with the gold of the Jerusalem Temple. If Solomon’s magnificence is exaggerated, it is likely he did build the Temple.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR II
c. 630–562BC
Then was Nebuchadnezzar full of fury … And he commanded the most mighty men that were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and to cast them into the burning fiery furnace.
Daniel 3:19–20
Nebuchadnezzar was the Lion of Babylon and the Destroyer of Nations. Ruler of the great neo-Babylonian empire from 605 until 562 BC, he was the embodiment of the warrior-king. The Bible records that Nebuchadnezzar was the instrument of God’s vengeance on the errant people of Judaea—a destiny he appears to have embraced with relish.
Born sometime after 630 BC, Nebuchadnezzar was the eldest son of King Nabopolassar (ruled 626–605 BC), the founder of the Chaldean dynasty in Babylon. Nabopolassar had successfully thrown off the yoke of the Assyrian empire to the north, and had even sacked the great city of Nineveh. Boasting of his triumphs, he had spoken of how he had “slaughtered the land of Assyria” and “turned the hostile land into heaps of ruin.”
The young Nebuchadnezzar was involved in his father’s military conquests from an early age, and in 605 he oversaw the defeat of Egyptian forces at Carchemish, a victory that helped make the Babylonians the masters of Syria. Nabopolassar died later that year, and Nebuchadnezzar mounted the throne but immediately faced rebellions around his entire empire—which he crushed with remarkable energy and acumen.
Nebuchadnezzar set about expanding his dominions westward; a marriage alliance with the Median empire to the east had ensured there would be no trouble from that quarter. Between 604 and 601 various local states—including the Jewish kingdom of Judah—submitted to his authority, and Nebuchadnezzar declared his determination to have “no opponent from horizon to sky.” Buoyed by his success, in 601 Nebuchadnezzar decided to take on his greatest rivals, sending his armies into Egypt. But they were repulsed, and this defeat provoked a series of rebellions amongst Nebuchadnezzar’s previously quiescent vassals—most notably Judah.
Nebuchadnezzar returned to his Babylonian homeland, plotting his revenge. After a brief hiatus, he stormed westward once again, carrying almost all before him. In 597 the kingdom of Judah submitted. Nebuchadnezzar had the king, Jehoiachin, deported to Babylon. In 588, Judah, under the king’s uncle Zedekiah, revolted. In 587–586 Nebuchadnezzar marched on defiant Jerusalem, besieged it for months, and finally stormed it, wreaking total destruction. Nebuchadnezzar ordered the city leveled, the people slaughtered, the Jewish Temple razed and Prince Zedekiah was made to witness his sons’ executions before his own eyes were gouged out. The Jews were then deported east, where they mourned Zion “by the rivers of Babylon.”
Nebuchadnezzar’s achievements on the battlefield were accompanied by a surge of domestic construction. Drawing on the slave labor of the various peoples he had subjugated, Nebuchadnezzar had numerous temples and public buildings erected or renovated. The extravagant new royal palace, begun by his father, was completed. And, most famously, the king commissioned the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—one of the wonders of the ancient world—as a present for his wife.
In his chronicles and inscriptions, he stressed above all his devotion to the god of Babylon, Marduk, and his love and promotion of justice for his people: he was a reformer who rebuilt the law courts, banned bribery, prosecuted officials for corruption, and stressed that he would not tolerate anyone who persecuted the poor and powerless. Furthermore, the biblical story of his madness is in fact a historical mistake, made deliberately to taint his reputation by the Bible’s Jewish writers, who hated him. It was actually the last King of Babylon, Nabonidus (556–539 BC)—who left the city for ten years to live in Arabia—who was said to have gone mad before losing his empire to Persia. Nebuchadnezzar died in 562; his son and heir was a failure, assassinated after two years—and his empire scarcely outlived him by twenty years. Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon in 539.
Despite his many benevolent achievements, Nebuchadnezzar is indelibly associated with unbridled conquest and the brutal treatment of subject peoples—the Destroyer of Nations who fulfilled the vision of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah: “He has gone out from his place, to make your land a waste. Your cities will be ruins, without inhabitant.”
CYRUS THE GREAT
590/580–530 BC
I am Cyrus, the Great, the King.
Inscription from Pasargadae
Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, was the founder of a powerful empire that dominated western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean for two centuries. He was a peerless ruler: a bold soldier and conqueror but also a tolerant monarch who recognized the human rights of his subjects, permitted religious freedom and liberated the Jews from slavery. In the ancient world he was lauded as the model of the ideal king, even by the Greeks, and was something of a role model for Alexander the Great. Cyrus’ realm stretched from modern Israel, Armenia and Turkey in the west to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the fringes of the Indian subcontinent in the east.
Cyrus—Kourosh—was born in Persis, in modern-day Iran. His mother was the daughter of Astyages, king of the Medes in western Iran. As with other great heroes, such as Moses or Romulus and Remus, a legend was passed down about Cyrus’ birth (recorded by Greek historian Herodotus amongst others). Astyages had a dream that he interpreted as a sign that Cyrus would grow up to overthrow him: his daughter urinated a golden stream that squirted out his entire kingdom. Then he dreamed that a vine was growing out from between his daughter’s thighs. Clearly his grandson was a threat so he ordered that the infant be put to death. But Astyages’ adviser Harpagus could not bring himself to murder a newborn child, so he gave the baby to a shepherd. By the time Cyrus was ten, his precocious gifts had brought him to the court of Astyages, where his identity was discovered. Astyages allowed the child to live, but had his brutal revenge on Harpagus by tricking him into eating his own son.
Whether true or not, the legend shows that from the start Cyrus was seen as the anointed redeemer of his people. In 559 BC he succeeded his father Cambyses I as head of the Achaemenid dynasty that ruled Persia, which was then restricted to an area of southwest Iran and subject to the Medes. In 554 Cyrus allied himself with Harpagus and led a rebellion against his cruel grandfather Astyages. The revolt gathered momentum during the next four years, and when Cyrus marched against Astyages in 550, the Median soldiers defected. Cyrus captured the land of the Medes and made its capital, Ecbatana, his own.
In 547 he conquered the kingdom of Lydia, (in today’s Turkey) deposing the fabulously wealthy king, Croesus. This extended his domain throughout all Asia Minor, and drew in the Greek cities along the coast of the Aegean Sea. Having secured the western frontiers of his empire, Cyrus turned his attention to Babylonia.
Babylon was the most splendid of the ancient cities, but it was governed by a tyrannical and unpopular king, Nabonidus. Cyrus was welcomed as a liberator when, in 539, he dug a canal to divert the River Euphrates and marched his army into the thousand-year-old capital. With Babylon came vast territories including Syria and Palestine, which gave Cyrus control over most of the Near East.
Within twenty years Cyrus had assembled the greatest empire the world had ever seen. He realized that keeping his vast new domain together would require peaceful diplomacy, rather than oppression and violence. So instead of forcing Persia
n customs and laws on the newly conquered peoples, he set about creating a new concept of world empire, selecting the best elements from different areas to create a better whole. He employed Median advisers, mimicked the dress and cultural influence of the Elamites, and tolerated religious freedom everywhere in return for total political submission. He governed from three capitals: Ecbatana, the Persian capital Pasargadae, and Babylon.
In Babylon he freed the Jews who had been held there in slavery since the 586 BC Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. Cyrus returned them to Jerusalem; paid for their return, and funded the rebuilding of their temple. As a result, he is the only Gentile to be regarded by some Jews as possessing messianic qualities. His reputation was further enhanced by the discovery in the 19th century of the “Cyrus Cylinder,” an artifact inscribed with details of Cyrus’ conquests and his overthrow of tyranny, and declaring his belief in religious toleration and his opposition to slavery. It is recognized by the United Nations as the first charter of human rights. He was no liberal—brutally repressing any political revolts—but he did grant religions tolerance.
Cyrus died on campaign in 530 BC, fighting Tomyris, queen of the Massagetai, who was intent on exacting bloody revenge for the death of her son, who had been held captive by Cyrus. The inscription on Cyrus’ tomb in Pasargadae, which still stands, was: “O man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, for I know you will come, I am Cyrus, who won the Persians their empire. Do not therefore grudge me this little earth that covers my body.” Cyrus was succeeded by his son, Cambyses II, whose short reign resulted in the capture of the only territory in the Near East that Cyrus had not added to his empire: Egypt. The Achaemenid Empire almost fell apart but was refounded by a second Persian empire builder, only distantly related to Cyrus: Darius the Great conquered all of Cyrus’s realms, confirmed Cyrus’s tolerant policies, invaded Ukraine, India and Europe and organized the first imperial postal service and world currency: he was the Augustus of the Persian empire. But he pushed into Greece, where, before his death in 490 BC and was defeated by the Greeks at Marathon. Darius’ successor, his son, Xerxes, failed to crush the Greeks—but his legacy ensured that Cyrus’ empire lasted two centuries.