Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c13.58

c13.58

This movement of peoples, this sack of the ancient cities by the outer barbarians, is something not confined to India in the centuries immediately after 2000 B.C. In Mesopotamia the kingdom of Sargon of Akkad rapidly disintegrated after the death of his son Naram-sin, when the Guti and other tribes broke in upon the land. Though there was recovery and considerable prosperity, especially in the south, the barbarian attacks were renewed a couple of centuries later, when the contemptuous if frightened scribe wrote in a year-date of the Third Dynasty of Ur of the Amurru, ‘a host whose onslaught was like a hurricane, a people who had never known a city’. It is the period that sees the rise of the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor, while archaeological evidence of folk-movements is clear in Syria and again in North Persia, where in the Hissar III phase the elements alien to the old painted pottery cultures, already beginning to show themselves in Hissar II, dominate the town. In this phase, as in the contemporary sites at Turang Tepe and Shah Tepe, we see the appearance of novel types of tools and weapons and ornaments based on those of Early Dynastic and Akkadian times in Mesopotamia, and now for the first time spreading extensively among the barbarian tribes who had broken down the frontiers of the civilized communities, carrying off loot, a knowledge of new techniques, and doubtless actual craftsmen to their own chieftains' courts.