lover of the goddess Ishtar. Th e kingdom he created was called
Akkad, aft er the name for Agade, its now-lost capital city. Th e
territory of the empire was defi ned primarily by trade routes,
along which the Akkadian government would build for-
tresses to protect travelers, and it was primarily along trade
routes that Akkad directed its aggression. Sargon I and his
successors extended the Akkadian Empire into Anatolia and
Iran, but eventually it became too big to protect, and nomads
invaded along its breadth, causing the empire to collapse in
2193 b.c.e. Still, Sargon left as a legacy the concept of a nation
composed of many cities.
Another big step in thinking about borders and frontiers
came with the Hittite Empire of about 1650–1205 b.c.e. Th e
Hittites settled in Anatolia in about 2000 b.c.e. and estab-
lished Hatti, a nation that, like others in the Near East, had
a nebulous territory determined more by cultural infl uence
than by well-defi ned borders. In 1344 b.c.e. King Suppilu-
liuma I established discipline in its government and ordered
the government’s policies. In 1335 b.c.e. Egypt’s pharaoh
Akhenaten died, and Egypt’s politics became muddled, giv-
ing Suppiluliuma the opportunity to seize lands held by Egypt
in the Levant.
In 1285 b.c.e. Egypt’s Ramses II tried to recover the lost
Egyptian territory, and he and the Hittite ruler Muwattali II
met in battle at Kadesh in Syria; both sides claimed victory,
but Ramses II nearly lost his life, and the Hittites actually
extended their territory southward. Aft er that, Egypt slowly
regained territory until the two sides ended their confl ict in
1258 b.c.e. with a peace treaty that was recorded and copies of
which still exist. In it, the nations carefully defi ned a border
that demarcated the frontiers of each country. Although some
por tions of nationa l borders were still vague as late as t he Per-
sian Empire of 559–330 b.c.e., the trend was toward defi ned
borders and treaties that recognized where they were.
With the completion of the invasion of the Greeks under
Alexander the Great in 326 b.c.e., some portions of national
borders were still vague, and the creation of clearly defi ned
borders in the Near East became a must. At Alexander’s
death the Near East fragmented into small states ruled by
Alexander’s generals. One of these generals, Seleucus I, suc-
ceeded in uniting most of the Asiatic territories Alexander
had conquered into the Seleucid Kingdom (ca. 312–ca. 174
b.c.e.). One of his achievements was to create clearly defi ned
borders among the states and between the Seleucid King-
dom and its neighbors. In about 174 b.c.e. Mithridates I of
the Parthian Empire, originating in Iran, conquered most of
the Seleucid Kingdom.
Th e Parthian Empire endured attacks on both its west-
ern and eastern frontiers, and the fi ghting in the east was so
persistent that a clear border was diffi cult to maintain. In the
west former Greek states had clearly defi ned borders left from
the Seleucid Kingdom. In 100 b.c.e., western Parthia shared
borders with Armenia, Edessa, and the remnant of the Se-
leucid Kingdom in Syria as well as smaller states, each with a
well-established territory and clearly defi ned borders. Rome
Babylonian boundary marker from about 978-943 b.c.e., Sippar,
southern Iraq (© Th e Trustees of the British Museum)borders and frontiers: The Middle East 143was able to pick off these states one at a time and absorb them
into the empire, beginning in 101 b.c.e. with the takeover of
small Cilicia in Anatolia.
Th e structure of well-defi ned borders served Rome well.
Borders enabled Rome to seize individual provinces within
the Parthian Empire on the pretense that it was extending it-
self only to the next border to the east and no farther. Parthia
played this game as well, and states in northern Mesopotamia
and Syria shift ed back and forth between the two countries
until 273 c.e., by which time Rome had reorganized its eastern
holdings into new provinces that included a chunk of the Par-
thian Empire north of the Euphrates River. In about 300 c.e.
Constantine created the Eastern Roman Empire, known as
the Byzantine Empire (ca. 300–1453 c.e.), and established its
Near Eastern border with a new province called Oriens. When
the western empire ended in 476 c.e., the border established
by Constantine I for the eastern empire remained intact.