The Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings
41:11 Share

Thanks for listening to The Ancients. You can get all History Hit podcasts ad-free, early access and bonus episodes, along with hundreds of original history documentaries by subscribing. Head over to historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.

That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront for three months plus taxes and fees. Promote it for new customers for a limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. Slows. Full terms at mintmobile.com. More than 3,000 years ago, a Bronze Age United Nations existed across the Near Eastern world.

Kings, ruling lands thousands of miles apart, interacted with each other via emissaries in some of the earliest surviving examples of diplomacy. They exchanged precious goods, they signed treaties, and even married into each other's families. It was a world that had been shaped by international relations, dominated by this brotherhood of kings.

It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are talking about a time that has been dubbed as the First International Age, when great Bronze Age powers like New Kingdom Egypt, Babylon, the Hittites, when they co-existed, when the Brotherhood of Kings ruled supreme all across the Near Eastern world, and a sophisticated web of diplomatic ties was in place.

To explain all about this remarkable period, well, I was delighted to get Professor Amanda Padani back on the show. Now, Amanda, she has been on the Ancients in the past to talk all things Hammurabi, King of Babylon, but also how to survive in Babylonia everyday life in the Kingdom of Babylon in the second millennium BC. This time we recorded the episode in person because Amanda was over in the UK.

And not wanting to waste the opportunity, Team Ancients, they booked a studio really quickly where I chatted to Amanda all about this Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings. This was a really fun chat and I really do hope you enjoy.

Amanda, what a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It's really a pleasure to be here. And we are doing it in person. The last couple of times we've done Hammurabi and we've done How to Survive in Babylonia Everyday Life. But now we're doing this third episode together in person. Still that kind of time period in that area, isn't it? The ancient Near East. But a time which is sometimes heralded as this first international age. Now, what do we mean by that?

Yes, it's a time when the great powers of the late Bronze Age all came to a peaceful resolution of what had been a quite antagonistic period previously. Obviously, there's a lot of stages to this which we can talk about, but what is really striking about it is for about 200 years, these really major powers who recognized one another as equals were

lived basically at peace with one another through peace treaties, through diplomatic relationships in a way that hadn't been true before and actually wasn't true again afterwards. It's a really fascinating era now.

that you can almost think of as an early attempt at a United Nations around the Mediterranean. It's really intriguing period. So you're saying, just to re-emphasize that, almost this is this ancient Bronze Age, Near Eastern, United Nations similarities. You can see some comparisons there, which is very, very interesting. It really is because I think you often think, when you think of the ancient world, you think of the big empires, like the Assyrian Empire and the Babylonian Empire, Persian Empire. But those were later.

And before that, there had been a time, very early, there had been a time from the beginnings of cities where you have city-states that were interacting with one another and sometimes they were fighting and they did create leagues of city-states that were united, but they tended to be quite small.

And then over time, and we're talking about thousands of years here, you know, as always, from the third millennium to the second millennium BCE, those kingdoms got bigger. They got to be territorial states. And they sort of were heading towards where the empires ended up being, but they didn't yet know really how to run an empire. It wasn't possible at that point to do something like the Neo-Assyrian Empire stretching over hundreds and hundreds of miles. And I think what happened was that

In the process of these powers becoming more and more powerful, they began to recognize that they couldn't conquer each other.

The great power, this is, we're talking about here about maybe 1500, 1450 BC. Right. That Egypt was a great power and Hatti was a great power and Babylonia was a great power and a kingdom called Mitanni in Syria, another great power. And they're all kind of expansionist, they're all pushing against their borders, but they're running up against these other great powers that they couldn't conquer the way they could conquer the local city-states. They just, it wasn't possible.

And at some point they recognized that it was futile to keep trying and that if they created alliances with one another, they could all be better off. And that's what they did.

So you have Egypt as a great power and Hatti, which is in what is now Turkey, is a great power. Babylonia, which is in what is now Iraq, and Mitanni, which is in Syria. These were all great powers that were expanding. They were imperialistic. And the process that this took is fascinating and not very well understood, but I'm sure it was a diplomatic process that they realized that they would be better off

not fighting, but being diplomatic allies. It's quite interesting there. So as you've highlighted, just to really set in stone this context for our chat. So we're almost talking 4,000 years ago. So second millennium BCE. And this area, this is a huge geographic area. So you mentioned Egypt, but also Iraq there. So we are talking about a large area stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean all the way into the heartlands of Mesopotamia. This is thousands of kilometers. It is, yes.

And at the edges of this on the Far East was Elam, which is another major power in what is now Iran. And then the Mycenaean Greeks, who were also not part of the brotherhood as they came to sort of refer to themselves. But these were also great powers that were interacting at least remotely.

with trade and possibly also possibly with diplomats as well. Elam was definitely in communication with Babylonia. Whether they were also in contact with Egypt is unproven. I think they might have been, but we don't have letters from them, so we can't prove that. Interesting, these peripheral players. But actually that kind of leads me on to what I was going to ask next anyway, which if we go away from the periphery and we focus on the center,

Syria, the area of Syria, this seems to be right at the heart. Now, why is this area in the northeast Mediterranean, why is this so important in our story today? I think that Syria, yes, you're right, it's often overlooked for its importance. But one of the very first diplomatic letters ever discovered, the first diplomatic letter ever discovered, the first was in Syria. And it was somewhere between 2400 and 2300.

So a thousand years before this period we're talking about, a letter was written from the king of Ebla to the king of Hamazi. These are two kingdoms. They're small kingdoms, yeah. But they were kingdoms smaller than the ones we're talking about a thousand years later. And the king of Ebla and the king of Hamazi were clearly in contact with one another, again, hundreds of miles apart, because this letter describes that they were sending gifts to one another. They were sending envoys who were traveling between their capital cities, and

and they were calling each other brother. And that became the standard for this international relationship set a thousand years before and continuing in the region of Syria for a thousand years.

And also extending into Babylonia, extending into Anatolia as well over time. But for a long time, that kind of diplomacy had two sort of features. One was if it was a local diplomatic relationship, it tended to be in mutual defense. So Ebla might be allied for a while with a kingdom called Mari, which was downstream from Ebla.

That was because perhaps they shared a mutual enemy and they wanted to fight against them. For a more distant relationship, they weren't afraid of one another attacking. And so in the case of Hamazi, it seems to have been entirely just through diplomacy that they were getting luxury gifts. That was one of the benefits of this. This goes on then for a thousand years. And then you get this really interesting period where there are the great powers starting, as I say, around 1500 AD.

expanding. And Mitanni, which is in Syria, seems to have been the kingdom that established the first diplomatic relationship with Egypt. And so gradually these other kingdoms came into the system.

But the idea that Egypt was going to recognise another power as being an equal is really kind of astounding. When you think of Syria on the map, and I think of Egypt and it's much further south, and I think of Iraq and Mesopotamia, and that's to the east and a bit further south, initially I might think, well, if you're going from somewhere like Babylon to Egypt, why not just go on a straight line? Hmm.

But of course you can't do that because that is the heart of the desert. That's always the north of the Arabian Peninsula. So actually, to get between those two places, you have to do almost a horseshoe shape. And this continues through the whole of ancient history and medieval history too. So that horseshoe shape and where it's right at the heart of that, it's of course, it's Syria. Yes, and also Syria is central because of the ports. So the ports on the coast of Syria are...

become very important in this international the struggle before the diplomacy there was a lot of fighting over controlling ports in the northern Levant which is Syria and with the Hittites wanting to come down and control that area the Mitanni ins controlling it the Egyptians wanting control of it and so again it's not just overland trade and you're absolutely right about that horseshoe shaped

trade route because you can't pass across the desert. They hadn't got domesticated camels yet. And so they were always going through Syria if they were going between these great powers. But also control of the ports was very important. And so Syria does play an important role there too. Fascinating. Well, one other question before we kind of really delve into the heart of this period and we explore things like the roadways and these different types of agreements and diplomacy that emerges through this time is

I want to ask about a particular source we have, which is the Amarna letters. Now, what are these? Because these also seem so vital for being able to unpack this period of this brotherhood of kings. Yes, the Amarna letters were found in the late 19th century in Egypt.

And they were shocking because they were on clay tablets written in cuneiform in the Akkadian language. So that's interesting. And that is not something that originates from Egypt. Not at all. And in fact, until this time, there had been nothing in cuneiform that had been found in Egypt. And they found hundreds of these tablets in the city of Amarna, which was the ancient city of Akhtaten, which was the capital city of the heretic king Akhnaten.

And it was only occupied for a short period of time. It's a very inhospitable place. And once he died and nobody wanted to stay there, it was pretty much abandoned. And when are we talking about Akhenaten in the story of Egypt? Akhenaten came to power in 1353 BCE. And five years after he took the throne, he wanted to move the capital city.

Because he didn't approve of the traditional religion, he wanted his own religion, and he wanted to build a capital city that would be entirely devoted to the god Aten, to whom he was particularly devoted. So in 1348, the capital city begins to be moved to this site of Akhtaten, which is modern Amarna.

He took with him the diplomatic letters that his father had received, Amenhotep III had received, and he put them into a records office in Amarna.

where they stayed. And he added to it over the course of his reign, as he got letters from his allies, more letters were put into this archive. But then in the reign of Tutankhamun, when they wanted to leave Akhtaten, they left all the letters there. And so they simply laid in the ground for about almost 3,500 years until they were found initially by locals who just came across them. And then later excavators found more.

Most of these hundreds of letters were written from the vassals of the king in Canaan to the king. But about 42 of them were written by these international major powers. And a few of them were copies of letters that the Egyptian king had written to his allies. And you're right, we wouldn't know almost any of this without these letters. They are absolutely fascinating. Because what's so striking about them is that

The kings were—oh, there's so much that's so fascinating. The kings were really determined to establish their equality, that no one was better than anyone else. So you find them protesting that, for example, a king named Bonoborias II in Babylonia, he says—

I want you to know I have everything. I don't need anything. I know that in your country you have everything. You don't need anything. So please send me some gold. You know, it's this sort of, he's talking out of one side of his head saying, I don't need anything because I don't want you to think I'm inferior to you. I am absolutely your equal. Everything's okay. Everything's fine. But gold would be nice, you know. And they do this a lot. But the one thing they never write about in the Amarna letters is anything military. They are never military.

Saber-rattling at each other. They are never saying if you don't do this, I'm going to send in my troops not once It's always the biggest threat they have is I will retain your messenger and he can't come home until you do this thing But even then they were really nice to the messengers. It's not that they were somehow held in prison or something they were given banquets and they had lovely houses and they just waited till they were allowed to go home because the the messengers who really were like a secretary of state really they were envoys very important men and

They were the eyes and ears of the king they were representing. And so if they were treated badly, they would go home and say, this king is treating me badly, and that could jeopardize the relationship, which they all treasured. And so you get these kings really being very...

nice to one another, sometimes with a bit of an edge in their voice in the letters. Sort of, why haven't you sent this gold that I've asked for so many times? But for the most part, my brother, you are my ally. They clearly wanted to maintain that alliance very, very much because they got stuff from it. Lots and lots of wealth passing back and forth. And I'll explore that wealth in a bit. But I must also ask, no such thing as a silly question, but using the word brother and...

Also, by this time, if it's the time of Akhenaten, so this is the mid-14th century BC, so this is several centuries after we've already talked about those earlier examples in Syria. So by the time of Akhenaten, this is very much a tried and tested thing. All these routes and connections have been established and diplomatic routeways and so on and so forth. And yet...

The term of calling another king who may have lived more than a thousand kilometers away their brother, that endures. What was so special and important about using the word brother? I think it comes from the fact that the family was so important in this era, right across the ancient Middle East.

that they often referred to, for example, your boss at work would be your father and your friend would be your brother. Your boss would be your father. Yeah, yeah. They would have this sort of familial terms for relationships that we wouldn't think of as familial.

And a brother was always an equal. And you've got to imagine, this is a world where not many people, if they were adults, had surviving parents because life expectancy was very short. And there were very, very close ties between siblings. So a brother was someone who's there for you, he's supporting you, he's your equal. And that they would then use as a sort of metaphor for any relationship that was of equals importance.

but close equals would be a brother. And I think that's, as I say, the very first letter already has this term in it. So we don't know how it got established. We have no records of the beginnings of diplomacy because by the time of that letter in Ebla, it clearly was an established system. There were probably earlier letters yet to be found, but they haven't been found. And perhaps it developed before they were writing letters when they were simply sending messengers.

But by the time that they were writing, they were this idea of being a brother, being an ally. And they didn't have a separate term for ally, actually. Brother was the term for ally. But also, they married one another's daughters. Right. Okay. So they did become father-in-law, son-in-law, but they would still refer to one another as brother. Over time, they did become actual relatives as well as fictive kin. Right.

And then they took pleasure in being able to say, "Dear Akhnaten, my son-in-law." No one ever admitted to being the son-in-law. They wouldn't write, "Your son-in-law." They always wanted the, "I'm your brother." But if they had that relationship, they would emphasize it, that they were, in fact, intermarried. And that meant that there were women traveling across the Middle East who were marrying their husbands, who were, in fact, their father's allies. And those women did know both courts. They had been in both places.

Whereas their fathers had never met. They never traveled to each other's courts. They only sent their surrogates, which was their envoys and their daughters. And I'm really fascinated by these women who

That was their role in life, was to go and marry a foreign prince. But most of them seem to have had quite a lot of agency, as you would say, in that they also were kind of spies for their fathers. They do seem to have written letters back home to say how things were going. Well, that's something also to mention, isn't it? You need to forget this idea of a princess traveling all this way on their own. They would, of course, come with a large entourage of their household, maybe men.

Scholars, I don't know anything like that. But you need to imagine actually there are lots of people who are venturing to and from. And so if you do have that marriage agreement or something similar, you're not just getting a royal princess. You're also getting an entire household too that I'm guessing could affect the whole running of that other royal household of that other kingdom. Yes, I think that's really true. We have an example from the time of Amenhotep III.

where he actually put out a scarab. And he's before Akhenaten. He is, he's his father. He put out a scarab, which was like a press release, about his marriage to a woman named Kiluhepa, who was the princess from Mitanni that he was marrying. And he says that she came with over 300 attendants. It says so on there, yes. Wow.

And we know from another one that there was also the number of 300. So this apparently was quite normal. Most of them women. Most of the attendants seem to have been women, but they also took some men. They took cooks, probably. They also may have, as you say, taken scribes who could record messages to be sent home in their own language. It would have made for such an international court.

And not just in Egypt, which we know about because of the Amarna letters, but all over the place. There's a king named Buna Boreas II, I mentioned him before, from Babylon. And he had three daughters who married three different enormously powerful kings. One of them married Akhenaten, moved to Egypt. One of them married King Supaliliuma, and she moved to Hatti.

And the third one married the king of Elam, and she moved there. Her name was Naparasu. And these three women then, contemporaries, were each one of them bringing presumably a big entourage of Babylonian women with them. And you've got to imagine all of these courts then were multilingual. They were multicultural. They had all of this...

I often think about the food that was being cooked there and the gods that were being worshipped there and the languages that were being spoken. But I think we have to imagine one reason for this international age was that there was so much exposure to people from these other cultures on the parts of the kings that they recognized they were no longer the center of the universe necessarily. If you think about each one of these cultures, they had very much the sense of their own culture was the most important one in the world.

They probably continue to think so. But you can't be surrounded by high culture from all these other regions. And I say high culture meaning elite culture, you know, from these other regions because probably there weren't a lot of the farmers and so forth who were traveling. But they are becoming aware that there are other languages, there are other practices, there are people who think differently from them. And I just think that's a really fascinating moment. ♪

Hey folks, since you're a fan of history, you clearly want to understand how we've ended up with the world that we have. Well, I'd like to tell you about my show. It's called Dan Snow's History Hit. And on that show, you get a daily dose of history and the stories that really explain just about everything that's ever happened. If you want to know the origin stories of the cities we inhabit, what's in our kitchen cupboards, why we've always been drawn to dictators, the deep history that explains what's going on, for example, in the Middle East, well, we've got you covered.

And if you'd rather be regaled with dramatic tales of powerful empires, we do that too. Get a little bit smarter every day with Dan Snow's history hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I have a secret. I wore the wrong foundation for years. Then I discovered Il Makiage. Their AI-powered quiz makes it so easy to find a perfect match.

Take the quiz at ilmakiage.com slash quiz.

That's I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront for three months plus taxes and fees. Promote rate for new customers for a limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. Slows. Full terms at mintmobile.com.

Now, you know me, as we've done episodes before together, I love delving into the detail and we're going to explore that particular period because this feels like the zenith of all of this diplomacy, doesn't it? With the three daughters and so on and so forth. But we did earlier talk about the emergence of this international age and this brotherhood of kings, right?

But of course, that was with the Kingdom of Ebla. That was the end of the third millennium BCE. So that's almost a thousand years before this period of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten and Egypt becoming a big player in it too. Just very briefly, because I know it's a massive question to ask, do

Do we know much about how these early diplomatic dealings, almost a thousand years earlier, evolved to become the zenith of this age almost a thousand years later at the time of New Kingdom Egypt? Yes, it really can be traced right the way through that if you look at the entire second half of the third millennium, first half of the second millennium, which is the period that this continues through,

There's evidence all the way through that they kept the same practices, especially these envoys. For example, at the kingdom of Mari, which is very well attested, I mean, the 18th century BCE, there are letters, lots of letters there from the envoys of a king named Zimri-Lim writing home. They traveled to Babylon. They would go to the court of Hammurabi. We've talked

Hammurabi before. Hammurabi, yes, King of Babylon. And there are letters where they write back and they say, we didn't have good seats at the banquet. There's so much sort of attention to… Three out of five stars. Exactly right. Yeah, the status, were they given the right robes to wear? Who was eating what? And then, of course, they would talk about meeting with the king and what he said, and they would actually record his words as they were negotiating with him. So there are letters from envoys describing…

how the king reacted to Zimri Lim's proposal and what he was proposing in return. So we can see that system was really well established. And it had right from the beginning these five parts to it that continued right through until the International Age and beyond. One of them, as I mentioned, the envoys, the letters is another component that they always carried letters with them.

A third part was that they always carried gifts, almost always. Occasionally you get a letter where there's no gift mentioned at the end, but normally it says, as a greeting gift, the king is sending such and such to his ally. Then there are the princesses. Right from the beginning at Ebla, the princesses were being married to foreign kings.

And finally, peace treaties. And the peace treaties are so interesting, but unfortunately, most of them don't survive. They mention them. They talk about the fact they have a treaty. They talk about the terms of the treaty, but we don't actually have the text of the treaty. There's one from Ebola, but it was with a vassal rather than an equal.

But it gives us a good sense of what that treaty would have been like. Hang on, that's interesting because that's actually completely busted a myth that I always thought that the first known peace treaty in history was after the Battle of Kadesh, which is this big battle between the Egyptians and the Hittites. You're rolling your eyes when I say this. There's a massive...

a hieroglyphic inscription on the side of Karnak Temple in Luxor and that's often held as the first known recorded peace treaty in history and that's the mid to late second millennium BC. It is. The reason that one's important is that it is between two great kings.

And it's from this time period, it's the only one between great kings that we have a copy of that we can read. They mentioned that there were previous ones and they certainly existed, but we can't read them. On the other hand, there was one that we can read from Abla, from a king to his vassal, and it has many of the same kinds of components to it that later peace treaties that we do have included.

There's one that survives from Mari. There's a peace treaty between two equal powers at that time. Again, they weren't great powers, but they were equals and they talk about each other as brothers. There are a number of peace treaties from the time of the Hittites. And then one of them, of course, is the one with Ramses II. And

That one gets the most attention because it is an example that really shows how the great kings dealt with one another. But no, it's not the world's first peace treaty by a long way. Okay, well thank you very much for that. We might explore a bit more about that turbulence in this brotherhood of kings at the same time with these peace treaties in a bit more detail as we go on. But let's go back then to that time we were focusing on this zenith of all these diplomatic talks and dealings with all of these great powers over huge, vast swathes of land.

I've got to ask about the language barrier. Today, English is still the main language for much of the diplomatic dealings. But of course, we've got translators and technology to help with us. Back then, there was no such thing. How did they negotiate? How did they talk with each other? Was there a set language that they used? Yes, there was. The lingua franca was Akkadian, which was the language of Babylonia. Ah.

And it had been the lingua franca for quite a long time. And what's so interesting is that when Egypt was brought into this system, well, first when Hatti was brought into the system, which was earlier, the sort of international group, the Hittites agreed to write in Akkadian. But that's actually not that surprising because they had been writing in cuneiform for some time. And when they learned cuneiform, the scribes learned Akkadian. And so it wouldn't have been that hard for a Hittite scribe to write in Akkadian because it was in their schooling.

Egypt they'd never used cuneiform. They'd never used Akkadian and I think what is so surprising is that the Egyptian kings agreed They didn't say no We're going to write on papyrus and you're just going to have to learn to read hieroglyphs Which would be a sort of an Egyptian thing to do you know these kings were not humble They agreed to go along with the system that existed and that included setting up a school for scribes in Egypt and

to learn cuneiform. And that's recorded, is it? It is. Not just that there was a school, but we have the school tablets that they used to learn cuneiform from Amarna. That's amazing. There's some school texts where, and it was the same curriculum.

Exactly the same curriculum that was used in Syria. And in fact, they can even tell from the way the curriculum was constructed that it was a Mitannian school teacher who set up the school because it was the same curriculum that was being used at the site of Amar, which is the site in Syria. And they were learning particularly Mitannian scribal habits.

And these scribes then had to learn to write in hieroglyphs, and obviously they would have been fluent in Egyptian, but they would have also had to be fluent in Akkadian and to be able to write cuneiform fluently.

The really amazing thing is for many of these scribes, there was a third language they had to learn, which was either Hittite, if they were in Hatti, but if it was Mitanni, they would have to know Hurrian because the Mitannians, although they wrote in Akkadian, their language was Hurrian. So these were multilingual men who were making these journeys. And then they traveled through Canaan and there would have been Canaanite dialects that they would have had to know.

It was a very, very multilingual world, and especially for the envoys and the messengers, they would have had to have been at least bilingual and probably trilingual. And some of them, the people who were the official translators, and there was a title of translator. There's a man named Hane who was a translator who traveled between Egypt and Mitanni. And the Mitannian king, even though Hane was an Egyptian,

goes out of his way to praise Hanay in his letters and says, your translator Hanay is fabulous. But the translator probably had that title because he could write in both languages, whereas the other envoys probably could speak them but probably only could write in the language they were comfortable with. So you've got this system, and if you think about the logistics of it, supposing King Tushrati and Mitanni are sending a letter to King Amenhotep III in Egypt, which he did regularly, he's going to dictate that letter in Hurrian.

His scribe in his court has to write it down in Akkadian because that's the language that's going to be sent. It's taken in Akkadian by the envoys, gets to Egypt. The scribe in Egypt is going to have to translate it from Akkadian into Egyptian so that the king there can understand it. And the same thing's going to happen all over again when they send the letter back. So even though Akkadian was the lingua franca, neither of the kings would have spoken it. They would have spoken their own language. So you've got this process of translation

translation going sometimes three, maybe four, maybe five times in the process of a message going between the two kings, the message there and back. You've got so much translation going on.

And one of the things I've looked into is how sometimes problems develop that way. I was thinking about lost in translation you could get, couldn't you? Yeah, because there's one example that I've been particularly interested in, which is the Mitannian king always writes about love. He says, I love you, you know, basically to the Egyptian king. Your father loved my father. I'm sending this with love. He uses this verb ramu, which means to love in Akkadian, all the time.

None of the other kings do. Nobody responds that way, just the Mitannian king. And he's either just this incredibly loving man, right, to Shrata, or there's a different meaning of the word love in Hurrian than is true in Akkadian and Egyptian. And I think that's part of it. I think because there are other examples of Mitannian kings referring to love in a way that seems a little bit flippant, you know, that it seems a little bit too melodramatic, right?

And interestingly, though, when the other kings used the verb love, it was often a sort of like, if you loved me, you would do this. And there's a sort of, if you were more obedient to me, you would do something, where love seems to be more of a status. Like a vassal would write that he loved the king he was the vassal of, but if

But if you were an equal, you didn't do that. And I think there's a subtlety there that in a way, while he's trying to make himself the equal of the Egyptian king, the Egyptian king might well have been reading this as, uh-oh, you're rather subservient. Do you see? So I think there are subtleties there that, yes, they might have tripped up on in the process of the translation. There we go. Well, we're going to keep going on because we haven't got too much time left. However, there are a few more bases I'd love us to cover.

One thing I'd also like to ask is, let's say you were an envoy and we're going from Egypt, maybe all the way to Babylon. Do we know much about the routeways, about the travel for these people? We can guess. We don't know exactly because unfortunately there's no itinerary. I wish there was. But we know that they traveled north up through the Levant and then they crossed over to the Euphrates. It was easier, of course, to travel down the Euphrates because they could even do that by boat.

But on the way back, going back up the Euphrates, boats weren't terribly helpful because the wind blows in the wrong direction. But we know that there were places that they stopped from very long before. We know that there were inns at about...

24 kilometer distances from one another that was set up because that's about as far as you could travel in a day and So they would have ends to stop at we know that there were things like donkeys available If you needed donkeys you could buy a donkey you could even rent a donkey sometimes and we know that they worried about bandits there were things that there were references to some of these envoys being robbed along the way and

And that that was an international incident. And the king would complain. He would say, it happened in your land and you need to take care and find who these people were. So the very fact it was an international incident suggests it wasn't that common. But I wish we knew the exact route. It would be fascinating to sort of travel it. What we can see, though, for the Egyptians, they would be traveling through lands that were unlike anything like Egypt.

There's one text that isn't from this exact moment, but where they describe that there is a Nile in the sky in the Levant, meaning that they rain, right? The gods provided a Nile in the sky for the people who lived in the Levant. And they saw mountains and trees, and they were very unnerved by the idea you couldn't see the sky when you were walking between the trees. And for an Egyptian, of course, that would never happen. And so their responses to the different lands they went through must have been really, really interesting. Yeah.

I must also ask the kind of nature of the different agreements. You've already mentioned how there have been marriage alliances, with daughters going to faraway courts along with their entourages. And you've talked a bit about the peace treaties, and we'll go into that a bit more in time. But I also would like to ask about this movement of goods, of luxury goods. As you said, a hint to that, sometimes these entourages were robbed going between these different kingdoms. Now, should we just be envisaging with this time, this brotherhood of kings, that these entourages

agreements of moving of goods are just exotic goods between the kings, or is it also the establishing of trade routes and traders and everyday goods going back and forth? What should we be thinking of? That's hard to say. We certainly know about the luxury gift exchange. There isn't much evidence for regular trade, but it almost certainly must have occurred.

Because the letters we have are at the level of the kings and we don't have the equivalent types of letters between the kingdoms at a level that would have been traders showing up.

We don't know, but it certainly was true earlier that there was trade going on in parallel to the luxury gift exchange. And the amounts that the king sent one another was absolutely staggering. And what kinds of goods are we talking about? Well, depending on what was the speciality of the area that they were living in. So Egypt gold, that's what everybody wanted from Egypt was gold, more and more and more gold. And they would sort of claim, you sent my father more gold than you're sending me. Please send me more gold. Not ostrich feathers? Not much. I mean, really, it's...

Almost everything that they asked for from Egypt is gold. Although we know the Egyptians sent more because there are lists of what the Egyptians sent and it wasn't just gold, but that's what the others wanted. And they were very upset sometimes when the gold had been worked. They just wanted raw gold. They wanted gold that they could use for their projects. And sometimes you said, a king would say, you sent me the gold, but it was worked. I need ingots of gold, basically. I just want to be able to use the gold in my way rather than as jewelry. Jewelry is nice, but it's not what I want to turn it into. Yeah.

But if it was in Anatolia, they had silver and the Egyptians didn't have silver. So that was something the Egyptians wanted from Anatolia, from the Hittites, was silver. It was more valuable in Egypt than gold was. The Mesopotamians, they had horses that were particularly prized. They had lapis lazuli, which didn't come from there. It had come all the way from Afghanistan. But coming through Mesopotamia, it was the place where the Egyptians could get it.

Sometimes they would send glass. There are all kinds of textiles. There are lists of these materials that they would send, perfume, that were all exotic to the place that they were living. Bitumen from the Dead Sea, is that at all? Not as a gift, no. That was probably a traded good. But I think there was always a sort of sense of they wanted to show things. We know that actually when the goods arrived,

The king would lay it out so everyone in his court could examine it and see how grand it was and how fabulous that suggested that he was as the recipient of all this wonderful stuff from his ally. Fair enough. Yeah, you don't want to really put bitumen on the floor next to your gold and your lapis lazuli. It doesn't have the same thing. It just looks a bit tacky. Anyway, okay, we're moving on quickly. That's all very, very extraordinary, isn't it? It's amazing.

This endures for centuries, which is mad to think in today's age, 500 years ago, time of the Stuarts, time of the Tudors, and yet back in the second millennium BC, this was continuing over that huge period of time between these great empires, Bronze Age empires.

But is it not always straightforward? Because I mentioned the name Bast of Kadesh earlier and stuff like that. Are there times and are there certain figures, maybe more bellicose warlike figures, who their actions almost cause this brotherhood of kings to come crashing down? Are there times where it's more tense? There definitely were. There's one king in particular, Supaliloma, who I mentioned, the Hittite king. He was much more bellicose than his brothers.

contemporaries, and he did go on a campaign against Mitanni. There was a lot of hostility between Hatti and Mitanni at the time. So even though we talk about it as a time of peace, there were certainly skirmishes, there were wars. And Supeleliumo made the mistake of attacking Egypt at a time, or not Egypt itself, but the Egyptian territories in Canaan at a time when Egypt was weak. And they were able to take over a section of Canaan

And this was considered really horrifying, not just by the Egyptians, but interestingly enough, by the Hittites themselves after Superliliuma's time, because the outcome of it was not just acquiring some land, but also getting the plague. They got prisoners of war that were brought from Egypt at this time back to Hatti, brought the plague with them, and it spread really widely. It was a massive epidemic and Superliliuma died of it.

And his own son claimed that the reason his father died was he broke a treaty. If he hadn't broken that treaty with Egypt, presumably they thought he would have still been alive. So the gods were watching over these treaties and they were taken seriously. Woe be to Supillulium. Yes, exactly. I'm very much struggling with the name, but you know what I mean. I do. Woe be to that man, that Hittite king. Amala, this has been great. I would ask you so many more questions, but one question I will ask to wrap it all up.

Do we know why this all ends? Why this brotherhood of kings? Why it all comes crashing down? Because by the end of the second millennium BCE, we are getting to that time of the well-known phrase, the Bronze Age collapse. Yes, it was a very complicated process.

Other people have written much more eloquently on the end of the Bronze Age than I have. But what one sees is a sort of domino effect, that it wasn't one thing that caused the collapse. There were certainly problems with the climate. We hear about drought in Anatolia. There are requests for grain being sent by the Hittite king needing grain from some of his neighbors. Egypt always had grain, because the Nile wasn't affected by this climatic problem.

But there seems to have been movements of peoples, the famous Sea Peoples who seem to have been moving throughout the region.

They caused some destruction. I think what happened was once there was a break in the system, once the envoys were not regularly traveling, once Mitanni collapsed before the end of this period and was divided between the Hittites and the Assyrians who became independent, and the Assyrians were more antagonistic to the others than the previous had been true. So there's a lot going on. The Middle Assyrian kings start spreading their kingdom more widely,

And it seems as though the whole system was very much more fragile than they realized. And that once one piece of it is gone, it becomes something that's unable to sustain and also something that they were unable to recreate. It never did come back once that, especially at the end of the 12th century with the Bronze Age collapse happened.

You go into a period where there's nothing like it. And once the Neo-Assyrian Empire is established and they do manage to conquer all of these lands, again, it's a very different type of empire. It really did control...

much larger areas than had been true before. And although diplomacy continued, and we see the Neo-Assyrians using diplomacy with the peoples beyond their borders, it's a different kind of world by them. Amanda, nevertheless, I love this idea of this ancient United Nations, and I think this is a brilliant way to end this episode. Now, you have written a book all about this period in much more detail than we could go into today, but it is called? It's called Brotherhood of Kings.

Yes, it covers this period actually all the way from Ebla through the International Age. So the last half of the book or so is on this period. Well, Amanda, it just goes for me to say what a pleasure to do this in person for the first time. And thank you for coming back on the podcast today. Thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Professor Amanda Podani talking all the things this Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings. I hope you enjoy today's episode. It will

It was fantastic to interview Amanda in person for the first time. Now, if you enjoyed this interview, well, I've got good news for you. We have lots of Bronze Age episodes that have proven incredibly popular over the past few years of that Near Eastern interconnected world. We had Eric Klein on earlier this year to talk all about...

First, the Bronze Age collapse, and then what followed, the birth of the Iron Age. If you want more Amanda, where you can check out her episodes on how to survive in ancient Babylonia in the second millennium BC, or even our first episode together, all about King Hammurabi and the rise of the Babylonians. Just search those names in the Ancients Archive and you'll be able to listen to those episodes there.

Now, last thing from me, wherever you listen to The Ancients, whether that be on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following The Ancients, so that you don't miss out when we release new podcasts twice every week. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.