The Coming of the Greeksians was the pious harassment by would-be Great Kings. The
precedent for imperial rule had been set by Sargon of Akkad
and was rarely forgotten. City kings with ambitions to become
Great Kings (that is, to make other city kings their subjects)
were a feature of the age when Hammurabi was king of Baby-
lon. On the standard chronology, which I shall follow in this
essay, Hammurabi reigned from 1792 until 1750 B.C. (in the
low chronology, those dates must be lowered by sixty-four
years). During his reign, Hammurabi, Rim-Sin of Larsa,
Shamshi-Adad of Ashur, and Zimri-Lim of Mari all demon-
strated their valor and their piety by "going forth" to commit
mayhem. The thinking behind this was that the gods intended
one of the Mesopotamian kings to hold hegemony over the
others, and competition was keen among the kings to deter-
mine who was the divine favorite. Once in motion, the game
spilled over into the Levant and Asia Minor, and the phenom-
enon culminated with the first two imperial Hittite kings,
Hattusilis and Mursilis. Hattusilis I crossed the Taurus range
into Syria in order to sack Aleppo and Alalakh, and his succes-
sor became a legend by traveling almost a thousand miles in
1595 B.C. to sack, ironically, Babylon.
Although it may seem pointless and artificial to define yet
another general phenomenon, I believe it is worthwhile to dis-
tinguish what might be called a "takeover" both from the bar-
barian raid and from the pious atrocity that a Great King
might commit against a city that did not acknowledge his im-
perial rule. For purposes of this essay, I shall use the term
"takeover" for those occasions when outsiders came neither to
plunder nor to extend an imperial network, but rather to estab-
lish control over a population. We must imagine (documents
furnish no details) that the takeover was usually a violent coup
d'etat, but that evidently it was aimed specifically at the reign-
ing king and his army and must have spared the general pop-
ulation. The man who took over seems regularly to have pre-
sented himself as a champion and a servant of the local gods.
What distinguishes our takeover from a common coup d'etat
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