The Babylonian World (Routledge Worlds)

called the ‘Golden Age’ due to the variety and abundance of available sources, mainly
from Ugarit, Amarna, Boghazköy and Nippur. It has to be taken into account that
the sites or cities in their heydays did not always overlap. The Mitanni power was
the leading power at the beginning of the Amarna period, followed by the Hittites
in the fourteenth century BCand the Assyrians during the thirteenth century BC.

LEVANTINE GATEWAY DURING THE

KASSITE BABYLONIAN PERIOD

The Levantine region was the melting pot for various ancient cultures over several
millennia. While the Hurrians, Mitannis, Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians had
imposed control, with more or less success at different periods, the stability in this
strategically located region was of primary importance. The gateway position of the
Levant insured that it had a great cultural impact even on the politically dominant
states and it explains why various cultural innovations, such as the alphabet, emerged
from this region.

Information from Ugarit

The trade of this ancient Syrian port (now Ras Shamra) has been widely discussed.^15
According to the archives discovered there, Babylonian merchants were active in the
Canaanite (Brinkman 1972 : 275 ) or Levantine area (Yaron 1969 : 70 – 79 ). The indirect
impact of the Babylonians on the Levant is visible at the scribal processes in Ugarit.
This can be seen in the lexical texts discovered which date from the fourteenth and
thirteenth centuries BC. The cuneiform tablets found at Ugarit comprise not only
bilingual (Sumerian–Akkadian) lexical lists, but trilingual ones (Sumerian–Akkadian–
Hittite/Hurrian) and, most importantly, also eight quadrilingual lexical texts (cf.
Huehnergard 1989 : 6 ) in Sumerian–Akkadian–Hurrian/Hittite–Ugarit. These multi-
lingual texts provide evidence of the scale of the activities that took place in this
small, but influential region. The scribal activity in connection with these multilingual
texts had to be enormous in several ways. Scribes had to learn a number of languages
and the usages of the cuneiform in different areas of the Ancient Near East. Even the
five different scripts which were found at Ugarit (Van Soldt 1986 : 196 ) give an
indication of the importance of this city in the international gateway. The syllabary
of the Akkadian from Ugarit definitely comes from the Middle Babylonian (or the
Kassite) period in Babylonia which means that there had to be direct contact between
the two areas, but no documents so far published provide an indication of any special
activity between the Ugaritic city and the Babylonian empire. The more than ten
thousand unpublished economic and other tablets from Nippur during this period
might eventually reveal more. Politically, Egypt, and the Hittites and the Hurrians
in the north dominated the Levant at that time (see Warburton in this volume).
Babylonia and Egypt had very relaxed relations at the time, as indicated by their
diplomatic marriage exchange, so that Babylonia would probably not have tried to
interfere in the Levantine region under the domain of the Egyptians. Kassite Babylonia
formed the backbone for the Late Bronze period in terms of their influence via the
Akkadian language, literature and the cuneiform script, but there are serious gaps in
our records as to the actual activities of Babylonians in the Levant.

— Babylonia and the Levant during the Kassite period —