Sesostris I. Aft er his return and an audience with the king,
Sinuhe is reinstated, bathed, and given a house and tomb with
a funerary endowment and a statue. Th us, his life comes to a
good end aft er a long period in the foreign countries. Sinuhe
moves from the periphery of the world back to its center, the
better world. Th e readership of this well-known poem, writ-
ten in about 1950 b.c.e., was the literate class. It emphasizes
the beliefs that Egypt was home for all Egyptians and that
loyalty to the king brings prosperity. Th is text was still being
copied seven centuries later as a school exercise.
Other hints that people went into exile come from other
types of sources. A memorial slab stele from the beginning
of the Twelft h Dynasty describes a kind of police action. Kay,
overseer of the desert hunters, is sent to the western oasis to
bring back fugitives. From the context of the text it seems
clear that these escapees must be people who went into exile
and were not banished people.
An example of an unintended exile is given by the “Tale
of Woe” from the Th ird Intermediate Period, possibly the
late Twenty-fi rst or Twenty-second Dynasty Th e fi rst-person
narrator Wermai, a resident perhaps of Heliopolis in Lower
Egypt, has to fl ee from his hometown as a victim of slander,
charged with misdeeds against the god. He goes into exile in
diff erent regions of Egypt, and he is lonely and hungry. It is
interesting that his exile is within his country but outside his
beloved hometown, a kind of internal exile. He hopes for a
saver, maybe Atum—the solar deity of Heliopolis.
In the “Report of Wenamun,” written in the Twenty-fi rst
Dynasty at the beginning of the Th ird Intermediate Period,
the protagonist Wenamun, an Egyptian diplomat, goes into
unintended foreign exile along the Syro-Palestinian coast. He
undertakes a mission to the Phoenician coast to bring back
wood for the bark of Amun-Re, one of the most important
gods in the Egyptian pantheon and the main god of the main
temple in Wenamun’s hometown, Karnak. Th is routine trip
turns into an odyssey because of the loss of Egyptian power
and infl uence during this time. Wenamun cannot go back for
a long time and has to stay in Syria.
THE MIDDLE EAST
BY AMY HACKNEY BLACKWELL
Climate, water supply, and war were the factors that con-
trolled migration and population movements in the ancient
Near East. Th ese three factors oft en were tied closely to one
another. Water supply was frequently low, and droughts ap-
peared with dismaying regularity. When droughts occurred,
people moved. In many cases, they moved into cities, which
were the best places to fi nd food. When droughts were too
extreme, people moved out of cities into the countryside once
more in search of food.
City-states were the predominant form of settlement in
much of the region, and they oft en vied with one another for
control of precious water resources. Many cities fell to the
armies of other city-states or to wandering nomadic tribes.
Whenever this happened, populations oft en moved. Fre-
quently, ancient rulers would force conquered peoples to leave
their homelands to work as slaves in other places. Conquered
peoples also simply fl ed their native lands, seeking refuge in
the lands of other nations.
Tracking the movements of ancient peoples is diffi cult
for many reasons. Th ere are few historical records, and the
records that do exist are sometimes contradictory or do not
correspond with archaeological evidence. For example, it is
impossible to reconcile the events recorded in the Hebrew Bi-
ble with contemporary Egyptian records and modern archae-
ological fi nds. It is also hard to identify specifi c populations.
Ethnic identities were fl uid, and ethnic groups did not always
travel as a people. One of the best ways to track population
movements is through the dispersion of languages; the path
of a language as it moves through a region can be evidence of
the movement of a population.
Most of the peoples of the ancient Near East were Se-
mitic, meaning that they spoke Semitic languages. Th ese
languages include Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebrew,
Phoenician, Nabataean, and Arabic. Semitic languages fi rst
appeared in the Arabian Peninsula during the fourth millen-
nium b.c.e., perhaps from a point of origin in Africa. Other
peoples in the region spoke Indo-European languages, in-
cluding the Iranian and Anatolian languages. Th ese people
are believed to have traveled into the Middle East from the
Caucasus, central Asia, and the Indus Valley. Still other lan-
guages in the region have no known linguistic relations. Su-
merian, for example, is neither Semitic nor Indo-European,
which makes it diffi cult to determine where the Sumerian
people originated.EARLY HUNTER-GATHERERS
Th e Middle Eastern climate following the last ice age was mild
and allowed people to spread throughout the region between
12,000 and 5000 b.c.e. Th ey congregated in wet areas with
adequate rainfall or access to rivers, because these areas had
the best fruits and vegetables for foraging and the largest pop-
ulations of animals to hunt. Th ey avoided the arid deserts.
Th ese prehistoric people lived as hunter-gatherers
throughout the Fertile Crescent, a region encompassing
Israel, Lebanon, and the fl oodplains of the Tigris and Eu-
phrates rivers from the mountains of Anatolia to the Per-
sian Gulf. Early hunter-gatherers did not live in permanent
homes but instead wandered from place to place following
food sources. Starting in about 10,000 b.c.e., however, peo-
ple living in areas with particularly rich sources of food be-
gan to occupy the same sites throughout the year and build
permanent homes. Over the next 2,000 to 3,000 years they
developed agriculture and learned to breed and raise live-
stock. Agriculture tied people to their farmlands and made
it diffi cult for them to move. Aft er the advent of agriculture,
people moved only if they absolutely had to as the result of
some catastrophe or natural disaster, such as sudden climate
change or war.698 migration and population movements: The Middle East