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If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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D
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E
Hello and welcome to Empire.
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A
With me, Anita Anand and me William Durimpel.
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E
So welcome to our second in the series on the history of Gaza. And you might remember we ended the first episode with the Philistines living in Gaza and the coastal plains around it, their civilization extremely sophisticated. They lived in some of the biggest cities in the region, but at the main Philistine sites and we were talking about Gath, home of Goliath in the last episode. Archaeologists have found that it was beautifully put by William actually that there's a sort of black line that goes across the, you know, the historical record. If you cut down in the layer cake of history, which suggests that this city was violently destroyed, it was burned and it left behind a layer of charcoal which sort of seems to be like a full stop to that civilization there at the time.
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A
Anita, do you know what the inhabitants of Gath were called?
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E
No.
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A
They were called gits.
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E
I did not know that.
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A
When you say someone is a git, that is someone that comes from Gath.
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E
Is that where that comes from?
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A
He's a right git, means he's from Gath. And anyway, someone clearly thought the people of Gath were gets. Because at the end of this period we see this black layer of charcoal and that's where we're going in this episode. Because from this period we see Gaza and the coastal plain around it invaded by a succession of extremely violent and aggressive empires. There's a whole succession and there's a great deal of smiting. So buckle up because this episode is gonna take us through some horrifically violent imperial dust ups. So first of all we have to our wonderful guest, Joe Quinn, who we haven't, I don't think, formally welcomed back properly.
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E
No, let's reintroduce Joe Quinn, the professor of Ancient history at the University of Cambridge and who has been our extremely able guide through this period of history. Can we go back to that thick black line in the historical record? What happened? Do we know what sort of raised Gath or any other place to the ground?
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F
Well, we actually do. It's quite amazing. It's very unusual in ancient history to actually know what happened. But this is an event that is recorded in the Bible that keeps King Hazael of Aram Damascus Destroy Gath around 830 BCE, which is in the Book of Kings. And Aram Damascus is another of these mini polities that emerges in the Levant out of the kind of ruins of the Bronze Age. We were talking about this in the last episode alongside the individual Philistine city kingdoms, alongside the ancient Phoenician city kingdoms, but also alongside the Judites, the Israelites, the Ammonites, these other kind of inland kingdoms that are going on. One of the inland kingdoms is Aram Damascus. So a really kind of dramatic piece of archaeology as well, because I mean there's that incredible destruction layer. There's also a two kilometer long trench dug around the Tel in the final period. So it's almost certainly the last siege of the city. But then Aram Damascus itself falls a century later to Assyria and that's really a whole new phase in this region. And the big empires come back.
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A
So tell us about the Assyrians, because they, the Assyrians went down on. Was it like a wolf on the fold, all this sort of stuff. We have this image of them from the Bible as these sort of ultra aggressive invaders. And that's sort of echoed in their own art. When you go to the British Museum and you look at the ruins of Nineveh, there's a lot of smiting going on there. There's a lot of cities being besieged, there's lots of captured peoples being led off with manacles. There's lots of people being impaled in the Assyrian art. I don't know how anyone managed to eat their dinners in these Assyrian palaces with these disgusting pictures of impaled people wriggling on their spikes and heads kind.
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F
Of hanging out of trees over lovely banquets and so on.
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A
Yeah, so tell us about them. Who are the Assyrians and why were they so uber aggressive?
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F
Yeah, I think they'd be pretty pleased with their public image right now. So this is the largest empire that we've seen yet in Western Asia. It's based in these huge, wealthy cities of northern Mesopotamia, northern Iraq, now east of the Euphrates, you know, far, far inland. And it is hierarchical, it is aggressive, it's very efficient. The Assyrians invented the postal service, for instance, not for, you know, you and I to send letters, but for the military estate purposes. They also kind of laid a whole new road network, the first real road network across western Asia. They invented a mule service to actually deliver these communications. So a mule to the Assyrians was worth more than a human slave. So they have this sort of basically a mule army. But they also, of course, have a real army, a huge army specializing in siege warfare. They're very good with the battering ram. They're also sort of chariots.
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E
When you say huge, I mean, we're talking like 200,000 strong. Really huge.
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F
Every male Assyrian owed military service. It was a completely militarized society. Civil servants all officially had army ranks. So it's basically a military dictatorship, and a very successful one. And I think the thing that's really interesting about the Assyrians is they have this strong notion of universal empire of power over the four quarters of the world. And to them, that's actually that already exists. Their campaigns are just reaffirming their control of the known world. They're not creating it. The very idea of places outside Assyrian control is a symptom of cosmic disorder in this way of thinking. Now, in reality, they aren't much interested in places west of Cyprus, but they're very interested in the Levantine city, as ever, a useful source of tribute, famed old cities. And it's the Assyrians who introduce the strategy of mass deportation that Gets them skills, agricultural labour at the centre of their empire, all this way in land. And it also neutralises opposition on the margins. If you just remove some of the.
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E
People there and those are those images, you know, that are in the British Museum of those manacled people being led off. They are the brightest and the best from whichever area the Assyrians have got to which they are sucking back into their own centre of control to further their own development.
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F
Absolutely. The brightest, the best, sometimes just the strongest. It's just to actually literally get land onto cultivation.
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A
You see those lines of refugees with these people carrying their bags and often taking their sheep and goats with them in these pictures. Anyway, as far as Gaza is concerned, Gaza doesn't suffer as badly as the Israelite cities, is that right, that the Israelites get a rougher deal from the Assyrians? As far as we can tell, yeah.
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F
So we're talking the 730s BC now in the 8th century BCE, and Tiglath Pileser III, one of these very extraordinary campaigning Assyrian kings, he conquers most of the Levant, including all these five Philistine cities that we know about from the Bible and from archaeology and so on. And in most cases he actually spares them afterwards because if the cities themselves don't survive, they're not as much use to him, especially if they're good, poor. So, I mean, there's one occasion, the city of Sidon, the Phoenician city of Sidon rebels and they destroy it. The Assyrians absolutely destroy it. But then they have to build their own port at Sidon and that's a massive faff for an administration based so far away. So their interest in the region is to where they can. They're going to encourage cities and trade and so on, and then skim off what they can.
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E
There are some accounts that, you know, the Assyrian attacks on the Israelites were so severe that 10 of the 12 tribes who'd lived in that northern kingdom almost vanish from history.
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A
The modern Jews are always said to be descended from the last two tribes, the Yehudim and the Judahites, who survive as the Kingdom of Judah. But we get an impression of something different happening on the ports and that's maybe because of what Joe says, that they can't be. They don't want to be faffed around by having to build their own port where there's a perfectly good one at Gaza already. So we get the impression, I think, and Joe tell me if I'm wrong, that the Philistines survive under Assyrian rule as tribute bearing states. And there's a reference to a king, Hanun of Gaza, who rebels against the king of Assyria a bit later with Egyptian support. So there's clearly a sort of semi independent Gaza surviving this onslaught even as the tribes of Israel are being deported.
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F
Absolutely. And I mean, the place that we can really see it is Ashkelon, which is another Philistine port further north near.
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A
Gaza, but just a little bit north.
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F
The problem with Gaza is, of course, it's still completely lived in, inhabited, so there hasn't been that much archaeology, particularly from this era. But we can see Ashkelon, which is going to be very similar. There's winepresses in the city, there's huge amounts of imports from Egypt. There are two wrecks from the 8th, shipwrecks from the 8th century, found by a nuclear submarine about 30 years ago in the deep waters just off Ashkelon. In they're heading from the port of Ashkelon to Egypt, and they're each carrying at least 400 wine amphorae made of local clay that would hold 18 litres each.
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A
My Gaza wine again.
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F
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right back to the wine. But it's still a huge thing. And they're exporting it into the Mediterranean, particularly to Egypt. We have other Philistine cities like Ekron in this period, where there are. There's a lot of olive oil being produced and there's a whole new temple palace complex is built with sorts of Ekron. They have these inland, inland Philistine cities. A great big new palace and temple are built in this period. And so although there were various rebellions reported, they get put down by the Assyrians. Often they're rebellions with Egyptian support. But in general, this isn't actually a terrible period for the Philistines.
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E
Well, I mean, they can't get complacent. I was going to say don't get complacent because the Babylonians wreak havoc among them, don't they?
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F
That's right. The Babylonians really steamroller the place.
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A
This is violent empire number two. We're gonna have five in this episode. Five very violent, aggressive empires. Number one is the Assyrians. Tell us about number two, the Babylonians. Who are they and how come they defeat this incredibly well organized militaristic kingdom of the Assyrians?
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F
Right. So the Assyrian Empire is kind of falling apart towards the end of the seventh century, and in the end they're defeated by their own subjects in Babylon and they put the Assyrians down in Babylon and the Babylonians go on to seize the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. And then their job is to put the Assyrian empire back together again, but this time for their own benefit. So the Babylonians retake the Levant in the last decade of the seventh century, and they really treat the people there abominably. And I'm sure people didn't enjoy being conquered by the Assyrians, but the Babylonians are extraordinary in what they do there.
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E
In which way we want to know what they did, because this is, you know, sometimes, often this turns into a gore fest on this empire podcast.
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A
Severe smiting.
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F
Yeah, they sacked several of the cities completely, including Ashkelon is absolutely razed to the ground and is not rebuilt for another 70 to 80 years. The city of Ekron, the inland city, completely destroyed, never rebuilt. They also have massive deportation campaigns. So the king of Ashkelon is deported, and then his family actually turn up in documents from Babylon itself as receiving rations there as refugees. Other Ashkelonites turn up at the Babylonian court as various musicians, that kind of thing. We even get a Babylonian record of towns in the sort of hinterland of Babylon, the larger region that are called Ashkelon and Gaza. So basically where the people from those cities were deported to. And this is, you know, the really famous deportations that the Babylonians do, of course, are the deportations from Judah, from the kingdom of Judah. That's the Babylonian captivity. But they're doing it to all sorts of other people in the region as well.
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A
And, Jo, are we talking, you know, they're taking the aristocrats and the really useful craftsmen and the rich rulers of. Or are we talking, you know, the whole city left empty with just a few lizards sunning themselves in the ruins? What's your impression?
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F
So, I mean, we don't have absolutely certain evidence for exactly what happens in the Philistine cities, but what it looks like is an awful lot of people are deported, particularly from Gaza and Ashkelon. These deportations are never total. Right. On the other hand, the cities are then left in ruins. So my best guess what usually happens in these situations in the ancient Mediterranean is that many people living in the cities sort of disappear into the countryside, into nearby towns and so on. So I don't think we can assume just from the fact that the cities are destroyed, that that necessarily means that all the people are either destroyed or deported.
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A
And one of the important bits of evidence for that, and this is something we're going to be coming back to again, is that in the next run, in the next phase, people still continue to talk about this coastline, as when the Greeks Come, they call it Palestina.
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F
Yeah. And actually, even before that, even still in the Babylonian period, there are kings of Ashdod and Gaza. There's a Babylonian inscription about contributions to a Babylonian building fund. And the kings of Ashdod and Gaza both contribute to it. Now, what we don't know is whether those are the original kings or new kings imposed by the Babylonians and so on. But those cities certainly continue the Persians after the Babylonians. I mean, the Babylonian empire doesn't last all that long. It's less than a century. When the Persians take over, they actually allow the detainees to come home.
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A
Violent empire number three.
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E
Yeah, Just before we get to violent empire number three, I mean, you made such a strong case, which just seems to be like common sense that, you know, if you are an invading force, why would you want to scorch the earth if you want to carry on using those traders, why did the Babylonians crush and crunch and smite and squash in the way that they did when their predecessors didn't? I mean, were they just not that bright? I mean, what was going on here?
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F
It's a really good question. People have really kind of wondered about this because it is. It seems irrational. So one irrational theory, though, is that what they're doing is trying to neutralize any potential support for Egypt. So Egypt is still their big enemy and that these cities have, traditionally Egypt's been their ally and rebelling against the Egyptians and so on from time to time time. So getting rid of them is. Is. Is one way to neutralize that. Another way to look at it is that the Babylonians don't seem to be nearly as interested in the Mediterranean end of things as the Assyrians have been. And what they're really looking for from these campaigns is loot new labor for their own heartland and their. Their own interests are in different directions. That's another compatible possibility.
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A
One thing I've read, Jo, this is something that you're an expert on. The Phoenicians is one of your main areas of research and one of your previous books. There are some theories that these coastal cities in the southern Levant are repopulated by Phoenicians. Does that hold up to you or is that just a theory?
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F
Yes, yes. Particularly Ashkelon. So when, I mean, Ashkelon is in ruins for basically most of the Babylonian period, perhaps all of it, then in the. Subsequent to the collapse of the Babylonian empire, Ashkelon is beginning to be rebuilt and so on. There are a lot of Phoenician language inscriptions there. We know there's a temple of a goddess called Heavenly Aphrodite, who's a Phoenician goddess.
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A
She turns up in our exhibition in Paris that you'll be going to see this week. There's a nice picture of Aphrodite, a statue of Aphrodite from Gaza.
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F
But, I mean, there are also Greek commentators by this date are writing about the place, and Herodotus says that the Phoenicians live in this place, part of Syria. When he's talking about Ashkelon, he also calls it Palestina in places, which, again.
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A
Implies some measure of continuity that you won't call it Palestine or if there's no Philistines there at all.
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F
I mean, Herodotus has a quite vague idea of the geography of this part of the world, but his basic model is that everywhere is Syria, and the northern coastal part is also called Phoenicia, and the southern coastal part is also called Palestina. And exactly what the boundary is between them seems to depend what day it is.
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A
We're jumping ahead, Jo, because we're going on to the Greeks and we haven't done Violent Empire number three.
- [18:32]
E
We have these headings, Jo. This is just simply titled violent empire number three, the Persians. So we're talking about the 6th century BC. Describe Gaza at this time and who's in charge and what's happening.
- [18:45]
F
We're coming to the end of the Babylonian period. Just as the Babylonian kings killed off the Assyrians before them, the Persians move in as the Babylonians are weakening and kill off the Babylonians, and so Levant falls to them in turn. And Gaza is a particular prize in this era. This is an important phase for the land route down to South Arabia in the hands of the Nabataeans. And the Levant is really important to the Persians, much more so, I think, than to the Babylonians. And especially as they get drawn into conflict with the Greek city states, there's all sorts of of ways of understanding what we now call the Persian wars. Persians themselves may have considered to be basically minor punishment raids, but they do have to operate in the Mediterranean. And it's the Phoenicians and Palestinians, people who live on that coastal part of the Levant, who provide the navy. It becomes strategically an important area to them, and perhaps that's why they don't try to control it too hard. So one thing we know from Persian Gaza is that the city is minting its own coins, kind of modelled actually on those of Athens. Some of them have Phoenician inscriptions. Very mixed area, as always. But they do have. By the 4th century, they do have a Persian military governor.
- [20:07]
A
So, Joe, we know about violent empire number three because one of the people living under it is the father of history, Herodotus, who, despite being a Greek, was the subject of the Persians. Am I right about that?
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F
Yeah, well, he's actually from Caria. He's writing in Greek.
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E
Where is Caria?
- [20:24]
F
It's in Western Turkey.
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E
Okay.
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F
That's the part of the world that Herodotus is from. And so, yeah, he grows up as a subject of the Persian Empire, Persian vassals.
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A
Herodotus, as you say, writes about Gaza. He says it's in the fifth satrapy of the Persians, as you said. He calls it Syria Palestina. It's the part of Syria which is Palestine. And he also says, which is interesting, that on the outskirts of Gaza, to the south, on the way down to Egypt, there are already people that he.
- [20:54]
F
Calls Arabs, not so much on the outskirts of Gaza, but the next port down. He says the ports from Gaza south basically are controlled by, he says, the Arabian. So he means the king of Arabia or the king of the closest Arabians.
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E
So, I mean. Yeah. What exactly does that mean? I mean, just explain what he's talking about. Who is the king of the Arabians in his mind? What's he talking about?
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F
Well, he doesn't say. He just says the Arabian. He's probably a king of. I mean, there are various communities in the peninsula of Arabia in general who could be gathered together under the broader label of Arabian, who also have kind of more specific labels in some of the. Not for Herodotus, but in some of the documents from the time. So these are probably people called Kadarite in some of these documents.
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A
I know that there's a very big misconception abroad that the Arabs arrive in this part of the world on camels in the seventh century with Islam, that they come out of, you know, Mecca and Saudi Arabia and take over this area. Let's just dwell a second before we go to the break on the fact that there are Arabs in this region already many centuries before Islam, that these guys are inland as well as on the coast, that they're trading with frankincense and with perfumes through the desert routes, and that Gaza and Ashkelon beside it are the ports which they export their goods to the wider world. So it isn't that the Arabs suddenly turn up in the seventh century. In fact, you've got Roman emperors, Philip, the Arab, who is described as part of this world. Could you just. Before we Go to the break. Could you just give us an idea of what Arab means at this point? What the pre Islamic history of the Arabs is in Gaza and the regions around it.
- [22:46]
F
We're right on the borders of Arabia here. I mean, the Arabian Peninsula is considered to go up into these deserts. So it's not a question of people moving out of some original place. It's that south of Syria is Arabia from the ancient point of view. So when Syria stops, Arabia starts. These places are always Arabian from that point of view. And there's a long history of Arab engagement with the coastal cities in the Mediterranean and. Yeah, and the Roman Empire subsequently.
- [23:15]
A
So we're going to see in subsequent episodes this very important fact that the 7th century invasions at the time of the rise of Islam. You don't get a massive change of population. It isn't that the Arabs ride it, it's that the language Arabic takes over in this region. And this is an important point because there is this misconcept that the people of Gaza and the people of Palestine are just later rivals on the scene. In fact, they're there at this period and they're coming in as traders.
- [23:43]
F
Right. And even when you look at the language, I mean, Arabic is, you know, what's called technically a Canaanite language. All these languages come out of the same family. Arabic is, you know, close to Aramaic and so on. It's not that far from Hebrew. These are all languages that are coming out of the Levantine area and spreading from there onwards. So, you know, in a way, the language is kind of returning in the later period.
- [24:10]
E
Jo, will you stay with us? We're going to take a break now and when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about, well, another violent empire. A violent empire. Number four, if you're keeping count, and that is the Greeks of Alexander the Great. Join us then.
- [24:26]
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- [26:28]
E
Welcome back. So okay, we've just talked about the Persians. Before that, the Babylonians before that, the Assyrians. Now though, the Greeks are a coming and we're talking about violent empire number four. Alexander the Great turns up. I mean his beef is with the Persians, Joe, but how much does this region kind of get caught up in all of that?
- [26:51]
F
Yeah, so Alexander the Great, Macedonian king, inherits the throne from his father 336 BCE. He also inherits the Greeks from his father. So you know, the Greeks of the first subjects the Macedonians, and he then invades the Persian Empire and he crosses Turkey with his army. He fights the Persian king and then it turns south and he sort of sweeps down the Levantine coast. He's on his way to Egypt essentially, but he seizes the cities in his path, including Tyre. But then he besieges Gaza.
- [27:29]
A
Hang on, before we can't just finish Tyre like That. So the Phoenician city of Tyre resists him and he takes it, and then he crucifies all the survivors. So this is not one of the happier and more sort of funster moments in Alexander the Great's reign. This is a brutal and barbaric taking of the city just to the north of Gaza. So if you're sitting in Gaza and you know these guys are coming at you, you have a choice. Do you surrender and take your chances or do you resist? What do the Gazans do, Jo?
- [27:59]
F
Oh, well, they resist. No, it's remarkable. I mean, Gaza is a Persian fortress at this point, so it's actually the Persian commander who is in charge of the resistance. But the sources, the Greek sources who are commenting on all of this and not from very much later, make a particular point of how brave the people of Gaza are in their defence of the city.
- [28:21]
E
There's a Greek historian called. Is it Polybius?
- [28:24]
A
Polybius.
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E
Polybius. Oh, thank God you're both here. So he's writing about this in 120 BCE, and he talks about this bravery of the Gazans. Although in war they display no more valor than the people of Kuril, Syria, in general, they are far superior as regards acting in unison and keeping their faith. And to put it shortly, they show a courage which is irresistible. And he goes on and on and on, talking about just what stuff they are made of. And even though they'd seen what Alexander had done to Tyre, they still stood up against him.
- [28:56]
A
His lovely little thing at the end of it. He says they resisted the Persians, they resisted the Medes, they stood alone, and at the present time they acted similarly. Therefore, just as it is our duty to make separate mention of the brave men in writing history, so we should give due credit to such whole cities as are wont to act nobly by tradition and principle. And he puts Gaza at the top of that rank. Gaza is the city of the brave.
- [29:22]
E
You can be praised in history. But Alexander doesn't like a resistor, does he? So what does he do when they stand up to him, Joe, what's his response to that?
- [29:30]
F
Well, he puts the whole city under siege for at least two months.
- [29:35]
A
And this is fascinating because this is the first mention we get historically of the soft sands of Gaza and how easy it is to excavate. So the same thing, you know, reading in the papers every day about the mass tunnels and all the stuff that's meant to be going on in them, Alexander the Great finds the same thing, and I'd love to just read a Short reading from one of my favorite history books, which, if you're looking for something to take to a beach and you're going to somewhere classical, take Robin Lane Fox's Alexander the Great, which is a very old book now, but it's still a cracker of a tail. Catapults and siege towers were to be hauled to the top of the embankment on wooden ramps, and the defenders were to be battered from the point which overtook them. At the same time, sappers were to dig tunnels under the walls and cause them to subside, an effective method against cities set on a tell of earth, which was standard practice at this time. In 83 BC, even the Romans were besieging a town in Sri Lanka. The defenders stole out and released a bear and a swarm of wasps down an enemy siege tunne in order to discomfort the diggers. Battered by artillery and rammed from the siege towers, the city walls of Gaza soon subsided into the sappers tunnels as the Macedonians poured in. The natives resisted heroically and Alexander himself sustained two wounds. One came from an Arab who knelt as if in surrender, only to stab with a dagger concealed in his left hand, the other, more serious, from an enemy arrow catapult which cut a bolt through the king's shields and breastplate and embedded itself in his shoulder, causing a wound which was treated with difficulty.
- [31:08]
E
So all action stuff, but nonetheless, I mean, Alexander prevails, doesn't he?
- [31:13]
A
Alexander prevails. And then we get this wonderful description which is one of these rare moments when we actually get a picture of Gaza. Gaza is always something that's being besieged or being attacked, or there's always massacres taking place. But what we get after they've taken the city and after they've done this horrible thing to Batis, who's captured alive and like Hector in the Iliad, knees are broken and he's dragged around in Alexander's chariot round the city walls. Horrible, grim ending. But when they break inside, what they find is they're amazed by the riches of Gaza, because in Greece they are very aware of the price of frankincense. It's a distant and exotic product, and they put tiny amounts onto the shrines of their gods and burn this precious stuff very economically. And there was a moment when Alexander was a boy, when he was ticked off by his tutor Leonidas for scooping up handfuls of precious frankincense and throwing them onto the altar. Leonidas, at least with posterity telling the story, clucks reprovingly Alexander when you've conquered the lands which produce these Aromatics, then you can scatter incense in this profligate manner. And so Alexander, of course, sends a great chariot full of incense to Lydas and says, now you can have as much as you like. But this is the important point. They find that Gaza is just packed with all this wealthy merchandise. It's an incredibly rich city, and even the Macedonians think this is a kind of dazzlingly wealthy place.
- [32:39]
E
And if you love this story, it is part of a big episode that we did on the Nabataeans and the frankincense. It was a nice Christmassy thing that we did. Episode 240. God, we've done a lot of episodes. Episode 214 is all about the Nabataeans and frankincense.
- [32:54]
A
And we passed over quite quickly over Violentembar number four, which was the Persians, if you want to know more about them, Cyrus. And the rise of the Persian empire is episode 97.
- [33:04]
E
So, Jo, back to you, though. What happens in the region after this gigantic figure, Alexander, dies. Because, you know, whenever you have somebody with that much personality, stroke, fist of iron, who leaves the stage, you get something of a vacuum. Is that what happens here as well?
- [33:21]
F
Yeah, exactly. So Alexander dies in June 323. Various theories why. Fever, poison, excessive drinking. He's only 33 years old at the time, and what this unleashes is 20 years of warfare between his generals, basically to sort out who gets what from what remains.
- [33:42]
A
He's alleged to say, it should go to the strongest, doesn't he, when he's dying? That's the story, yeah.
- [33:48]
F
But he doesn't say who that is. It's a problem. So in the end, the southern Levant passes to his Macedonian general, Ptolemy. So he taken the throne of Egypt as that's, you know, most obvious place for Gaza and that region to sit. And it remains a Ptolemaic possession for more than a century until around the year 200. King Antiochus III of the Seleucid Macedonian dynasty, that's a dynasty based in Syria and Mesopotamia, seizes it from the Ptolemies yet again. It's this contested land between these larger empires. And it's an interesting period. What we know about Gaza itself in this period is that like a lot of the eastern Mediterranean, it starts getting interested in Greek things. There are some Greek gods in the city. They have their own gods as well, but they also, and I think this is really interesting, invent a foundation myth that gives them shared origins with the Greeks through Heracles and King Minos. So there's a Sort of. You get these moments of people in the city kind of trying to position themselves in a very complicated world of bigger powers above them, but they're still doing some work to kind of organise who they are in all of this.
- [35:03]
A
And a similar thing is going on up in the hills with the Israelites, isn't it? Because you get the Hasmoneans, who are Hellenized Jewish dynasty, right?
- [35:13]
F
That's right, yeah. So Gaza's next sacking is from this ruler, the Hasmonean ruler, Alexander Janaeus. Janaeus is the Greek version of his Hebrew name. So Yonatan. And it's another siege. Poor Gaza. But yeah, Alexander Janaeus, he's one of these Hasmoneans. It's the priestly dynasty that rules Judea from the 150s. They revolt against the Seleucid king and they basically become autonomous. And Alexander is ruling both as king and as high priest. And the attack on Gaza, in theory it's the punishment because the city's allied with the king of Egypt, but it's really part of a broader expansion under Alexander, so that the Hasmoneans are really asserting Judean control over much of southern Levant in this period.
- [36:01]
E
And Jo, I mean, the Hasmoneans, maybe people haven't heard of that name, but they may have heard of the Maccabees, the Maccabeans, if you like, because that's a very biblical name. I mean, how do these puzzle parts fit together?
- [36:11]
F
Yeah, so the Maccabean revolt is this big revolt against the Seleucid king, and the Hasmoneans are the name of the dynasty that then takes control of Judea. So sort of like the Windsors or something.
- [36:23]
E
Great, thank you, God. That's the clearest explanation I've ever, ever had. Okay, this is another siege of Gaza, then in the offing, you know, they've just got over Alexander's siege and now you've got Alexander Janaeus, who's going to do the same thing. I mean, how destructive is that?
- [36:39]
F
It's pretty destructive. So the later Jewish historian Josephus says that he has the councilmen of Gaza massacred in the temple of Apollo and then he completely destroys the city. Now, that's unlikely given the strategic and economic importance of the port, but it gives a sense of the brutality of this particular defeat.
- [37:04]
A
And as if that isn't enough, we now have just to conclude this violent empire number five, who are our old friends, the Romans? Pompey turns up. So Alexander Janaeus sacks Gaza, and only 30 years after that, we get Pompey in 63 BCE. Take us to Pompey now. Who's he?
- [37:25]
F
He's a Roman general in the last generation of the Roman Republic. This is a period when Rome has been advanced sing relentlessly on the rest of the Mediterranean. It swallowed Carthage, it swallowed Greece, swallowing Turkey. And it's got to basically what the Romans would call Syria. And Pompey basically organizes the whole of the eastern Mediterranean as a roman possession in 63 BCE. So he deposes the final Seleucid king. So this extends the Roman Empire east to the border with the Iranians. At this point the Iranian Parthian Empire, who are the successors of Darius, who Alexander had defeated and Pompey. This is not in terms of the southern Levant. This isn't necessarily particularly violent conquest. So Pompey travels with an army, but he doesn't seem to have to use it much. People already know how dangerous the Romans.
- [38:22]
A
Are and don't interfere.
- [38:23]
F
Yeah, yeah, exactly. They know it's best just to agree to what's being suggested. And actually it's not too bad for Gaza. So Gaza is declared a free city. It has loads local autonomy, which is as good as it's had under many of the previous empires. It's within the Roman province of Syria and it's later rebuilt by the Romans and by the late 50s, so only about 10 years later, it's minting its own coinage again.
- [38:50]
A
Now, as everyone knows, the Romans are a catastrophic thing for the Israelites. The Romans destroy the temple and excessively tax Jewish people. There are multiple Jewish Roman wars, three major Jewish revolts, including the Bar Kochbo revolt of 132 AD, which initially succeeds in expelling the Romans from Judea. Coins were even minted celebrating Jewish freedom from Roman rule. But in 136 AD, the rebellion was crushed by Emperor Hadrian, the same guy who builds Hadrian's Wall. Jews were expelled or enslaved and their towns were destroyed. Yet in nearby Gaza, like in the Assyrian period where the Israelites were getting deported while the Gazans were okay again now in the Roman period, Gazans did not suffer in the same way. And Gaza continues to grow as this very prosperous port. Again trading with Petra, which is now at the peak of its power. All those lovely buildings you see when you go as a tourist down the souk into Petra and see those amazing facades, this is built in at this period at the height of the frankincense trade, when every temple in Europe wants to get its hands on a little bit of frankincense. So they can do proper offerings to gods. And this is all coming through Gaza. What oil is from the Middle east today? Frankincense is at this period. Joe, just before we go, something which I'd love you to explain as best you can, and I know it's a very difficult thing we've seen in this episode, a whole succession of violent empires. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, the Macedonians and the Romans all coming through, making havoc and smashing through. And yet Gaza survives. The city is always there. It may be depopulated briefly, but it's resettled. And the impression we get, I believe, from DNA studies in a very general sense, not in a specific sense, but in general sense, that there is continuity, that it's not a story of that each of these empires comes, slaughters everybody and then you start again from scratch. Give us your impression of how we leave Gaza at this period.
- [40:55]
F
Yeah, so, I mean, everything we've been talking about, the Levant has always been a particular centre of movement, migration, upheaval and so on. There's an awful lot of evidence for discontinuity everywhere. But at the same time, as you say, on a sort of very broad genetic level, there is what we see in the Levant as a whole is more continuity than not. I think it's a question of what that really means. Labels remain. People only last, you know, 100 years at most, anyway. So, you know, what are we going to privilege when we look at the past? I think that's the question.
- [41:33]
A
But Gaza is still, as we saw at the beginning of the period, it's the major port in the southern Levant, Gaza and Ashkelon. And there are elements which survive all these successive saki. It's in the same place, the trade is the same. It's got Arabs coming in and out and some probably living in the city as traders. And it's all set to have a very prosperous future. Because what is a surprise is that at the same time as we have this terrible cataclysm for the Jewish people and the great exile of the Jews from their homeland, we see Gaza flourishing as never before. In the next episode, we're going to look at late Roman and early Byzantine Gaza, when Gaza is a center of knowledge, of learning, and has this extraordinary reputation as second only to Alexandria as a place you want to go and study something we've totally forgotten today, when Gaza is always associated with helplessness and hopelessness and destruction.
- [42:33]
E
Huge thank you to you, Joe. Absolutely wonderful to have you on and recommend Jo's almost award winning book to anyone who's listening. We will be back to pick up the Gaza story. Till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [42:49]
A
And goodbye from me, William Durample.