A History of the Middle East (3 page)

It was many centuries before the whole Middle Eastern and North African region (apart from Persia and Turkey) became arabized. In 336
BC
Philip, King of Macedon, united the warring Greek city-states, and it was his son Alexander who launched the astonishing series of conquests which overthrew the magnificent but decadent Persian Empire. Greek thought and culture had already started to penetrate Syria/Palestine and Egypt before Alexander the Great’s arrival. A thousand years of Graeco-Roman civilization on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean had begun.

The Persian/Arabian Gulf was included in Alexander’s empire. When he reached the limits of his eastern conquests, in India in 326
BC
, he set out to return to Persia by land. But he had in mind a great sea-traffic between Babylon, the capital of his eastern empire, and India. So he ordered his admiral, Nearchos, to return to the Euphrates via the Gulf at the head of his huge fleet. Nearchos reported on the existence of two strategic islands at the head of the Gulf. The larger had wild goats and antelope, which were sacred to the Goddess Artemis, and Alexander ordered that it should be named Ikaros after the island in the Aegean Sea which it resembled. A fortress outpost was established which lasted about two hundred years. Today Ikaros is called Failaka and is part of Kuwait.

Alexander’s dream of a vast united Hellenistic empire did not survive his early death, as his conquests were disputed between his generals. But Hellenistic civilization remained dominant in the successor empires which stretched from Persia to Egypt, and the cities which Alexander founded continued to flourish. Egypt prospered under the wise rule of the early Ptolemys. Alexandria, with its library and museum, became a splendid city and the intellectual centre of the world. Palestine for a time came once again under Egyptian rule. The rest of Syria and Asia Minor (Turkey of the present day) fell into the hands of Seleucus, the Persian ruler of Alexander’s former eastern empire. He founded Antioch, which he named after his father, and this became the capital of Syria for the next nine centuries.

Hellenism first began to retreat in Persia, but even here it was a slow process. Two hundred years after Alexander’s death, the Seleucids in Persia were overthrown by the Parthians, a predatory nomadic tribe from the region of the Caspian Sea. The Parthians assimilated Greek government practice and continued to make use of the Greek language in addition to their own. Some Greek cities of Seleucid foundation continued to flourish. Hellenistic influence began to weaken only in the first century
AD
.

In Syria/Palestine Hellenism was more lasting, but its degree of influence varied greatly. As might be expected, it was greatest to the north and west on the Mediterranean coast, where Laodicea (modern Latakia) and Berytus (Beirut) were typical Greek cities. East of Mount Lebanon, towards the Syrian Desert, Hellenistic influence declined. In fact the whole region was a blend of Hellenism and Semitic Aramaic culture in varying proportions. In both the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires the senior civil servants, and the leading businessmen, scholars and intellectuals were Greek. Both empires encouraged immigration from Greece, but the Greeks remained a minority. In their armies the Greeks formed the core or phalanx bearing pikes, but the archers and slingers were Arabs, Kurds and Persians.

Little more than a century after Alexander’s death saw the beginning of the rise to power of the Roman Republic. After the final
defeat of Carthage in 211
BC
, Rome gained mastery over the western Mediterranean. It then turned its attention to the east and invaded Greece. There followed more than 150 years of chaos and war in the eastern Mediterranean region. The rival Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empires fought each other beneath the looming shadow of Rome, and went into a long decline. As always, local powers in Syria took the opportunity to assert themselves.

In Palestine, the small Jewish community enjoyed some freedom to manage its own affairs in the Judaean hills around Jerusalem. The Jewish people were divided between a Hellenized educated upper class which broadly accepted Seleucid rule and a peasantry which clung to their Judaic faith. When, in 168
BC
, the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes ordered the altar of Zeus, ‘the abomination of desolation’, to be set up in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Judas Maccabaeus, the son of a priest, led the fervent Jews in a revolt. Although Judas was killed, his family founded a dynasty of priestprinces – the Hasmonaeans – who gradually extended their rule to cover most of Palestine as the Seleucid Empire disintegrated. They were succeeded under the Romans by the related House of Herod.

Further to the east another independent state was established by the Nabataeans, with their headquarters in Petra (south Jordan) and Madain Saleh (Saudi Arabia). In the second century
BC
their powerful commercial kingdom stretched deep into the Arabian peninsula and flourished by controlling the caravan trade which brought Chinese and Indian spices, perfumes and other luxuries from southern Arabia to Syria and Egypt. The Nabataeans spoke Arabic, but their writing was Aramaic. Their culture was superficially Hellenic. The people of present-day Jordan regard them as their ancestors.

The consolidation of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean was delayed by the civil war and anarchy in Rome. However, in the 60s
BC
the triumvirate of generals Pompey, Caesar and Crassus took power, and Pompey set about establishing Roman power in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean. He invaded Syria and took Jerusalem. But Roman rule was not yet firmly established. The Parthians inflicted a savage defeat on the Roman legions and for a
time occupied Syria. It was not until after both Pompey and Caesar had been assassinated that Caesar’s successor Octavian – the Emperor Augustus, who reigned from 29
BC
to
AD
14 – incorporated the entire Middle East region from Egypt to Asia Minor into the Roman Empire. Only Persia and present-day Iraq remained under Parthian control. Augustus ignored the demands of some of his generals that the defeat of the Roman legions be avenged, preferring to have peace in order to organize Rome’s new eastern provinces.

The eastern Mediterranean region – Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt – settled down to several centuries of the Pax Romana, which in general meant efficiency, good order and justice in accordance with Roman law. The road and tax systems were greatly improved. Egypt became an important supplier of food to the imperial capital and a military base for the Roman armies. The Romans cleared the Red Sea of pirates and revived the trade through it to India. Egypt was a Roman colony in the fullest sense, living under iron military government and paying exorbitant taxes. The Greek ruling class co-operated with the colonial power and retained its privileged position.

Egypt, with its population densely concentrated in the Nile Valley and Delta, lends itself to authoritarian centralized government. Roman rule in Syria was rather more relaxed. In the eastern or ‘Semitic’ half of the region, the Romans allowed the local rulers to retain their autonomy – provided they did not become over-ambitious and threaten the settled populations to the west. It was indirect rule of the kind employed by the British in their empire in Asia and Africa some eighteen centuries later. Thus the Nabataeans continued to control east Jordan and Damascus until in
AD
106 the Emperor Trajan, exasperated by their spirit of independence, brought them under the subjection of Rome. A century later, Palmyra in the central Syrian Desert emulated the Nabataeans in achieving power and prosperity through control of the caravan trade-routes to the east until its queen, Zenobia, defied Roman authority, only to be defeated and to have the region’s autonomy repressed.

The western or Mediterranean region of Syria, with its great and flourishing Greek cities founded under the Seleucids, was more directly incorporated into the Roman Empire. The educated urban population, a fruitful synthesis of Mediterranean and Semitic races, was part of the empire’s professional and intellectual élite. These people mixed easily with the Roman officials, and many acquired Roman citizenship. Many Syrian lawyers, doctors, historians and administrators – not to mention poets and actors – achieved distinction and fame. Hellenized Egyptians played a similar role. Antioch and Alexandria were, after Rome, the two largest and most magnificent cities of the empire. While Latin was the official language of government, Greek was the
lingua franca
. Several of the later Roman emperors were either wholly or partly Syrian, although it has to be said that two of these – Caracalla and Elagabalus, from Homs – were among the least admirable. However, Caracalla can claim credit for the decision to grant Roman citizenship to the whole empire in
AD
212. Philip ‘the Arab’, an able ruler, did something to redeem Syria’s reputation during his brief reign.

Despite the easy racial mixture of the cities, a gulf – and especially a linguistic gulf – remained between the cities and the peasants and tribesmen of the countryside. In Syria these spoke Aramaic; the nomads and semi-nomads on the fringes of Arabia spoke Arabic. In Egypt the majority of the population spoke the ancient Egyptian language. But it was in Palestine that the clash of cultures was most violent, and yet perhaps most productive.

In 40
BC
the Romans appointed Herod from Idumaea (Edom) in southern Palestine as King of Judaea, with Jerusalem as his capital. In his long reign he extended his effective rule over most of Palestine, earning the title of ‘Herod the Great’. An Arab by race, he was a Jew by practice and he saw himself as the protector of the Jews. He rebuilt the Temple of Jerusalem, but as a Hellenizer and a Roman protégé he was detested by the pious Jews. His reign ended in bitterness and violent dispute over his succession in which he ordered the notorious massacre of the innocent infants of Bethlehem. Thus he also became the ogre of Christian tradition, as it was in the little
Herodian kingdom that the Jewish founder of the Christian religion was born, lived and was executed – the founder of the religion which in time triumphantly converted the entire Graeco-Roman world.

Jesus and his Apostles were Jews, and Christianity was originally a movement within Judaism. But the Christian message made little headway among the Jewish people and so it was soon directed towards the gentile world instead. It was the task of the early Christian apologists to define the Christian gospel as both the correction and the fulfilment of Greek and Roman philosophy, and their intellectual achievements in the first three centuries after Christ were considerable. However, the simple message of the Sermon on the Mount made its first appeal to the poor and underprivileged masses of the Graeco-Roman world. Despite official persecution, it thrived and spread – the martyrdom of Jesus providing a model for suffering and endurance. Christianity is thought to have arrived in Egypt with St Mark, before the end of the first century
AD
, and it spread rapidly among the mass of the Egyptian people, although the Greeks and the Hellenized upper class generally remained pagan.

The persecution of Christianity in the empire occurred in waves which were interspersed by periods of toleration, but for three centuries Christianity gained converts. Although still a minority – the majority clinging to the old state religions, of which the cult of the emperor was the most popular – Christians formed a substantial proportion among all classes, including members of the imperial family and the Roman aristocracy, by the time the last wave of persecution was instituted by Diocletian, at the beginning of the fourth century
AD
. They were dynamic and well-organized, and within a few years of Diocletian’s abdication his successor, Constantine the Great, declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. Whether Constantine’s conversion was genuine or whether he had recognized Christianity as the conquering faith is immaterial.

The rise of Christianity was favoured by the decline of the empire. Throughout the third century
AD
the empire had been beset by internal divisions – indeed, for periods it was ruled by rival
emperors – and assaulted from outside its borders by Goths and Persians. At times the empire had seemed on the verge of collapse, until it was rescued once more by an able emperor or army commander. In the east, the Parthian Empire was replaced in
AD
224 by that of the Sassanids from west Persia, who claimed descent from the great dynasty of Cyrus and Darius. The Sassanian Empire lasted for four centuries, in which it was almost constantly at war with the rival great power in the west. Shapar I, the second Sassanid ruler, took the title of ‘King of Kings of Iran and non-Iran’, thus emphasizing his claim to dominion of the world.

In
AD
330, on the ancient site of Byzantium on the Bosporus where Europe meets Asia, Constantine founded the city that bore his name. Constantinople became the capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire – still formally united – and, as the centre of power and wealth shifted eastwards, Constantinople overtook Rome in magnificence. Half a century later, on the death of the Emperor Theodosius, the empire was divided between his two sons. The Christian, Hellenic–oriental Byzantine Empire was born. While the western half of the empire collapsed under the weight of barbarian invasions, Byzantium continued to rule the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

The eastern Roman Empire was able to maintain control over the Middle East region for three centuries. The greatest threat it faced was not from Goths and Germans in Europe but from the aggressive and expansionist Sassanian Persians to the east. However, for at least two hundred years the Byzantines were able to secure peace with the Persians through diplomacy. It was only when Justinian the Great (527–65) decided to devote his energies to the reconquest of the western Roman provinces and the reuniting of the empire – efforts which were partially and temporarily successful – that the Persian danger increased. Between 534 and 628 the Persians repeatedly invaded and occupied Syria and had to be thrown back. In 616 they conquered both Egypt and Asia Minor and laid siege to Constantinople. By the time the Emperor Heraclius defeated the Persians and restored the empire’s frontiers, Byzantium and
Persia, although still the two superpowers of the ancient world, were overstretched and weakened. Meanwhile, in
AD
570 or 571, in obscure and impoverished Arabia an extraordinary man had been born who would plant the seeds of a new and much greater power that would come to overwhelm them. The Prophet Muhammad, who was born in Mecca, one of the largest settled and trading communities in western Arabia, was a man of genius and inspiration who helped to transform the history of mankind – a fact which is acknowledged not only by the one-fifth of the human race who subscribe to the faith that he founded.