Hittite and the Development of Alphabetic Writing

The beginning of writing and written records is the beginning of history. At various points in time, cultures and civilizations undertook a conscious redesign of writing systems. The earliest writing systems were ideographic and pictographic. People eventually modified such logographic elements into alphabetic elements, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Germanic runes. In this trend belong also various types of cuneiform writing.

Probably around 3300 B.C., in Ancient Near East, primarily in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, cuneiform writing systems emerged. Historians Warren Held, William Schmalstieg, and Janet Gertz note that

The Hittite cuneiform writing is derived from the Babylonian-Assyrian or Akkadian cuneiform. The cuneiform sings consist of wedge-shaped impressions made on a clay tablet with a stick (cf. Latin cuneus 'wedge'). This stick, a rectangular solid form four to six inches long, measured about 1/4 inches on each side to that each end, of course, had a square shape. It resembled somewhat a foreshortened chopstick. The scribe held the clay tablet in his left hand and in his right hand he held the writing stick with which he made the characters in the wet clay.

Many, even the vast majority, of early writing systems, and cuneiform writing systems in particular, were developed for Semitic languages: Egyptian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Eblaite, Assyrian, and others. Hittite is an exception to this generalization, one of the few, or perhaps the only, Indo-European language to be recorded in cuneiform writing.

Given the predominance of Semitic languages among cuneiform texts, it may well be that a significant percentage of the scribes held the clay tablet in their rights hands. Cuneiform texts needed only for short periods of time, and not for permanent records, may have been inscribed on wax, or wax-coated, tablets; these, of course, are lost to history. On rare occasions, cuneiform characters were chiseled or carved into stone.

Since the writing stick was held at an angle in the right hand the horizontal and oblique wedge-shaped grooves are always deeper and wider at the left and the vertical wedge-shaped grooves are always deeper and wider at the top.

There are five main types of wedge created this way: four narrow wedges and one wide. The four narrow wedges distinguish themselves from each other by orientation on the tablet: a horizontal, a vertical, one with the wide end at the upper left leading to a point in the lower right, and one with the wide end at the lower left leading to a point in the upper right. Theoretically, it would be possible to have had two other such narrow wedges, with the wide ends in the upper right and lower right, but the wrist motion needed to make such wedges would have been very awkward, probably accounting for their absence. The one wide wedge seems to have always the same orientation on the tablet; it is given the technical name Winkelhaken among linguists.

The Winkelhaken was produced by impressing the end of the stick in the clay at a slight angle from the upright position, thereby producing a near triangle, the deepest part of which is the angle at the left. The five types of wedge are combined in various numbers to form a single cuneiform character. These individual wedges are combined in various ways to produce the various cuneiform symbols.

Cuneiform texts present significant interpretive challenges to the modern reader. One such challenge is the frequent use of loan words. Hittite tablets often include, in addition to Hittite words, words from Sumerian, Akkadian, Luwian, Proto-Hittite (known as 'Hattian'), Palaic, Hurrian, and Mitanni (an Indo-Iranian language). Another challenge is that a single cuneiform symbol may have both an alphabetic value, representing a phoneme, and a pictographic value, representing a morpheme - the reader must determine which value is meant in each occurrence of the symbol. Likewise, each symbol can have multiple values, one for each of the languages listed above.

The direction of writing is from left to right and typically the clay tablets have two columns, rarely three. The first column is on the left hand side and the columns follow from left to right. After completing the right-most column the scribe turned the tablet over and continued the right-most column on the opposite side, writing also on the bottom edge of the tablet. The columns on the reverse side follow then in a right to left direction, so that the final column is on the opposite side of the initial column. When finished, the tablet was baked in an oven to harden the clay.

As societies and civilizations undertook to redesign their writing systems from time to time, the net result was to create systems which were quicker and easier to learn. It took less time to learn to read, it took less time to learn to write. As a result, literacy rates increased. Likewise, the actual tasks of reading and writing, as opposed to the learning of them, also took less time. Therefore more was written and more was read.

The abandonment of early pictographic and ideographic systems for cuneiform, and the abandonment of cuneiform for later purely alphabetic systems illustrates this. Consider that in the modern world, the majority of any population can be relatively proficient in reading and writing by the age of five or ten years old. Rates like that were not possible with cuneiform. Thus the invention of the 22-letter consonantal alphabet by the Phoenicians and Hebrews represented significant progress and led to the final abandonment of cuneiform.

The Battle of Lepanto

The Battle of Lepanto in 1571, like the Battle of Tours and Poitiers in 732 A.D., and like the defenses of Vienna in 1529 and in 1683, was an example of Europe successfully deflecting an Islamic invasion. Lepanto, unlike the other examples, was a navy battle. Muslims were expanding from Turkey, marauding along the Mediterranean coastlines. Malta and Sicily were in play, and Greece was the target at the moment.

Philip II of Spain had developed a powerful navy, which was charged with protecting the cargo vessels running import and export between Spain and the Americas. This navy would join others at Lepanto. All the nations with Mediterranean coastlines were exposed to the dangers of raids or invasions: Spain, France, and Italy.

Greece had long been a target for Islamic armies. It represented a strategic position in terms of Mediterranean sea routes, and would be a foothold in Europe. Historian Dorothy Mills writes:

All through the sixteenth century the Turks had been gradually increasing their power in the Mediterranean. In 1571, in response to an appeal made the preceding year by the Pope, Pius V, Philip joined the Papacy and Venice in an alliance against Turkey. The result was the battle of Lepanto. The Spanish and Venetian fleets were under the command of Don John of Austria, the half-brother of Philip. The Turkish fleet, never yet defeated and larger than that commanded by Don John, was beaten with heavy losses and the Italian shores of the Mediterranean were saved from further Turkish attacks.

The Spanish navy's heroic defense of Europe against the attacking Islamic fleet brought glory. That glory would fade in 1588, when the Spain and England squandered the security which the Battle of Lepanto bought for them.

Cyrus: Building an Empire

During the time of Cyrus, Persia went from being a regional national kingdom to being an international empire. Cyrus was not the first king of Persia, and he was not even the first Persian king with that name: although often cited as simply 'Cyrus,' he was more accurately Cyrus II. He was named after his grandfather, Cyrus I. The generation between Cyrus I and Cyrus II was Cambyses: Cambyses was the son of Cyrus I and the father of Cyrus II. Historian John Lee writes that Cyrus accomplished much in

a brief but crucial era of four decades, from 560 to 522 B.C., during which time the Persian kings Cyrus and Cambyses assembled a world-spanning empire. Scholars and others often ask what causes historical change: Do great men and women shape history, or are deeper societal processes and currents responsible, including the lives of those who may have shaped history but are not recorded by it? The likely answer is that we need to combine these perspectives to gain a true understanding of the past.

Cyrus came from Anshan, a city, or city-state, in southwestern Persia, on the coast of the Persian Gulf. Anshan was part of a larger region, Elam, which extended along the Persian Gulf from Anshan to Susa.

The founder of the Persian Empire was Cyrus of Anshan, who came to the throne in 559 B.C. Anshan was a kingdom of Elamite origin that lay in the modern province of Fars in southern Iran.

Many accounts refer to Cyrus's empire as the "Empire of the Persians and the Medes." To which extent was this was a willing merger of equals? Or did the Persians dominate the Medes? Culturally and linguistically, the Medes and the Persians, while distinct, were also similar, and for many historical purposes, we can tolerate conflation and continue to use the concept of "Medes and Persians" without precisely untangling them. In some segments of time, the two groups were largely geographically coextensive. The Zagros Mountains run parallel to the coastline of the Persian Gulf, a few miles inland.

The first stages of Cyrus's reign are difficult to recover. Possibly his first move was to reconquer the old Elamite city of Susa. That victory may brought him into conflict with the Medes in the central Zagros. Babylonian chronicles record wars between the Medes and Anshan in the later 550s.

Cyrus was a political genius, inasmuch as he knew how to accumulate the cooperation and even loyalty of those whom he had conquered. Ecbatana lies northwest of Susa; by making Ecbatana one of Persia's capitals, Cyrus gave the Medes a sense of ownership in the larger empire.

Cyrus ultimately conquered the Medes but then made sure to present himself as a legitimate Median king. He honored the former Median king, Astyages, and perhaps married one of his daughters. Ecbatana, along with Susa, became an important Persian administrative center.

The western extreme of Cyrus's empire was Turkey, also known as Anatolia or Asia Minor. By advancing westward across the Halys River, also known as the Kızılırmak River, Cyrus planted Persian outposts in Ionia, which is the western coast of Turkey. The Halys is roughly in the middle of Anatolia. Here the Persians encountered both Greeks, who'd formed colony cities in Ionia, and Lydians. Lydia was a region just to the east of Ionia, and it was ruled by King Croesus from his city of Sardis.

In 546 B.C., Croesus sent his powerful army eastward across the Halys River, where the Lydians ran into Cyrus. The initial fight was a draw, and because winter was approaching, Croesus withdrew to Sardis, likely planning to return in the spring.

The Persian army was known for its many successes and few failures during Cyrus's reign; its experience in Asia Minor would be no exception.

Instead of hunkering down for the winter, the Persians marched on Sardis. Croesus led his troops out to meet Cyrus, but according to Herodotus, the scent and appearance of Persian camels arrayed on the front line spooked the Lydian horses. After a hard fight, the Persians trapped the Lydians in Sardis.

The fall of Sardis was recorded by Herodotus, who is the source for many details about Cyrus and his empire. Professor John Lee continues:

The walled city of Sardis was formidable, but Cyrus announced that the first man to scale the wall would be rewarded. A Persian named Hyroeades led an assault party up a path he had observed being used by a Lydian; the city fell and Croesus was taken alive.

The expansion to the west would be a source of revenue for the Persians. Both cash and produce could be expected from Anatolian colonies.

Cyrus was generous with Croesus, retaining him in the royal entourage. The Persian king put a garrison in Sardis and sent Lydian gold east to fill his own coffers.

An early revolt foreshadowed more significant challenges which the Persians would face in Turkey. Cyrus managed to maintain his control there; his successors - Darius and Xerxes - would face similar challenges.

Cyrus then hurried back east, but the Lydian governor he left behind almost immediately rebelled, with the help of some Ionian Greek cities. Cyrus sent troops back to Lydia and Ionia. The Persians managed to quell the revolt, but the conquest of Ionia wasn't yet complete.

After expanding westward into Asia Minor, Cyrus turned his attention to other possible acquisitions. After exploring opportunities to the north and east, he looked to Mesopotamia:

Cyrus spent much of the rest of the 540s expanding his empire in central Asia, but the real prize lay in the Tigris and Euphrates valley: the ancient city of Babylon.

By the time Cyrus moved on Babylon, that city was past its prime: the glories of Nebuchadnezzar were merely a memory. Babylon's king, Nabonidus was not particularly popular among his people (he restricted religious freedom among them by discouraging the worship of the Babylonian god Marduk), or among the Jews then held captive in the city. It was easy for Cyrus to win the people's favor by restoring the Marduk religion and by freeing the Jews.

At the time, King Nabonidus ruled Babylon, but some of his subjects allied with Cyrus, including the governor Gobryas. Nabonidus had a strong army and held out against Cyrus for several years. At last, on October 12, 539 B.C., a Persian army under Gobryas entered Babylon; Cyrus himself arrived soon after, and Nabonidus was taken alive.

Cyrus, who was no gentle soul, goes down in history finally as a liberator. Although perhaps unearned, this reputation was cemented by his liberating the Hebrews to return to their homeland, resume their worship, and build a temple. In many ways, Cyrus was an oppressor, an aggressive empire builder, who did not shy away from unprovoked attacks or from massive loss of human life. His personal morality would have been equally dubious - he had concubines in addition to multiple wives, and lived only a generation or two removed from his ancestral practice of human sacrifice. Yet his clear mark in history is as an emancipator:

Cyrus allowed the people of Israel and others who'd been deported to Babylon to return home. To the Hebrew people, he allowed the right of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem.

Cyrus took Persia from one kingdom among many and made it the dominate empire in the world during his time. It would remain in that status under his successors for several generations.

The Origins of the Modern German Nation-State

As a territorial nation-state, Germany is one of the youngest countries in Europe. Germanic culture and language go back thousands of years in history, but it was only in 1871 that the independent kingdoms and city-states were formally joined together in a political process. German unification had been discussed since the time of Napoleon - and even earlier - but a number of obstacles prevented it from happening. One question was about whether there would be a Großdeutch or a Kleindeutsch unification - a 'Greater Germany' including Austria, or a 'Little-German' Empire without it.

The earliest hopes for German unification came from the political left, but it would finally be accomplished by the political right. Historian Herbert Schnädelbach writes:

The subsequent foundation, by Bismarck in 1871 and under Prussian leadership, of a 'Little-German' Empire (that is, one which excluded the Germans of Austria) was preceded by a long period of reaction to 1848, marked by the imposed constitution of 1850 in Prussia and neo-absolutism in Austria, and by the period of what Prussian official history described as 'wars of unification' - the conflicts with Denmark (1864), with Austria and its allied South German states (1866) and with France (1870-1). As a result, Bismarck was able to have the Prussian King proclaimed as German Emperor in Versailles and without participation by the bourgeoisie. German unity was not established in the sense of the political demands of the years before 1848. The German national state was a result of a policy imposed from above, a policy, in Bismarck's words, of 'blood and iron', and this was also one reason for the rejection by many intellectuals of this solution of the national question. For the most part, the bourgeoisie made its peace with this 'Little-German' or Prussian Empire, which represented, constitutionally speaking, a compromise between absolute monarchy and the principle of popular sovereignty: the Imperial constitution was more democratic in several respects than the constitutions of the German Confederation, for instance in regard to universal suffrage.

The uneasy cooperation from the political left ended with World War One, and the Prussian monarchy was no longer in charge of the Empire, which then became a republic. As the left tolerated the Empire until 1918, the right tolerated the Weimar Republic until 1933. This internal tension was exploited by Hitler and the Nazis, who were neither traditional imperial conservatives nor Weimar-style leftists. Detested by both the right and the left, Hitler promised enough to both sides: "German nationalism" to the right, "Worker Socialism" to the left. The official name of the party reveals this insincere and internally contradictory set of parallel promises: "the National Socialist German Workers Party" - notice how 'national' and 'German' alternate with 'socialist' and 'worker' - a stew of rightist and leftist vocabulary. Both sides thought that perhaps uneasy cooperation would again be the best path. Both sides came quickly to understand that they had been duped - but too late.

Hitler's government ruthlessly stamped out any sense of a private sphere. In any meaningful sense, there were, after 1933, no private schools or private medical practices. The government either owned or extensively regulated industrial and banking enterprises. The freedoms which had been preserved under uncomfortable compromises - the imperial era and the Weimar era - were gone.

Voltaire contra Atheism

Like many thinkers during the Enlightenment era, Voltaire held beliefs which were nuanced and complex. Such beliefs are commensurate with his powerful intellect, but have the disadvantage of being easily misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately misunderstood.

Voltaire was a constant and sharp critic of the Roman Catholic church, and of organized religion in general. He ridiculed some religious leaders as hypocrites, and others as simply stupid. He believed that the Bible - the Old and New Testaments - was a flawed book.

Consistent in his critique of all forms of organized religion, Voltaire's play Mahomet is his rendering of an episode in the life of Muhammad. He shows him to be "the founder of a false and barbarous sect," and the plot reveals "the cruelty and errors of a false prophet." The play is primarily an evaluation of Islam, but secondarily an estimation of all institutional religion.

But Voltaire was no atheist. Many readers have mistakenly assumed that his antipathy toward spiritual traditions implied atheism, and many scholars have fostered that misunderstanding by suppressing portions of Voltaire's own writings. British philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer notes:

Voltaire was not himself an atheist but a deist. He thought that he had rational grounds for the belief that there is a necessary eternal supreme intelligent being, by whom the universe is governed. He did not consider it demonstrable that there is such a being, but he thought it vastly more probable than the alternative hypothesis that the order which is discernible in the world and the intelligence and sensitivity which are exhibited not only by human beings but also by many species of animals, are the product of an ultimately fortuitous collection of material atoms. In short, he accepted what is most commonly known as the argument from design.

Voltaire saw belief in God, not as a result of tradition, nor as the result of a divine revelation, but rather as the reasonable conclusion. He found that it was logical to believe in God, just as he found it logical not to accept churches or organized religions. In response to Blaise Pascal, Voltaire wrote:

Simple reasoning will afford us proofs of the truth of the creation; for when we perceive that matter cannot exist, move, etc. of itself, we readily come to know that it must have been assisted; but we can never discover by the bare help of reason, how a body which we see continually subject to change, is to be restored again to the same state as it was in at the time it put on that change: neither will reasoning satisfy us how a man could be produced without the seed peculiar to his species. Hence it follows, that the creation is an object of reason.

Voltaire, however, did more than simultaneously criticize religion and assert the existence of God. He also was actively critical of atheism.

It is at this point that the career of Voltaire and the career of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are tangential to each other. Voltaire, who was born in 1694 and who died in 1778, was older than Goethe, who was born in 1749. When Goethe was a university student, he was an admirer of Voltaire's work. Goethe studied at Leipzig from 1765 to 1768, when he was between 16 and 19 years old; Voltaire would have been between 71 and 74 years old during that time. Additionally, Goethe studied at Strasbourg from 1770 to 1771; he was between 21 and 22 years old then, and Voltaire was between 76 and 77 years old. The young Goethe saw the aging Voltaire as an example of intellectual courage. Goethe relates how Voltaire did not surrender to the increasingly vicious attacks of the atheists:

Those principles, for which he had stood all his life, and to the spread of which he had devoted his days, were no longer held in honour or esteem: nay, that very Deity he acknowledged, and so continued to declare himself free from atheism, was discredited.

Even as Goethe praised the courage with which Voltaire resisted the efforts of those who would "discredit" the concept of God, he also was disappointed in Voltaire's continued attacks on religion.

Voltaire's factious dishonesty and his constant perversion of noble subjects became more and more distasteful to us, and our aversion to him grew daily. He seemed never to have done with degrading religion and the Holy Scriptures on which it rests, for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as they called it, and had thereby awakened in me feelings of irritation.

In a bizarre turn of events, Voltaire's devotion to God and hatred of the church led him to comment on fossils. Because the fossil record suggests that there was a major flood which covered most of the earth's surface at one time, Voltaire rejected the veracity of the fossil record. Voltaire wanted to demonstrate that there had been no flood, because he wanted to undermine the authority of the Old Testament. To deny the evidence presented by fossils, however, took arcane reasoning. Goethe recounts:

when I now learned that, to weaken the tradition of a deluge, he had denied the existence of all fossilized shells, and admitted them only as lusus naturae, he entirely lost my confidence; for my own eyes had shown me on the Bastberg, plainly enough, that I stood on what had been the floor of an ancient sea, among the exuviae of its original inhabitants. These mountains had certainly been once covered with waves, whether before or during the deluge did not concern me; it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been one vast lake, a bay extending further than eye could see; no amount of talk could shake me in this conviction. I hoped, rather, to extend my knowledge of lands and mountains, let the result be what it would.

Voltaire created enemies on both sides: atheists attacked him relentlessly, because he firmly believed in the existence of a creating and logical God; Christians were disappointed in the extremism of his attacks on anything connected with traditional religion.

An Odd Type of Democracy

Pure democracy is very rare, and usually unsuccessful; for this reason, history admits more often of republics. But the democratic principle takes many forms. One of the strangest is when a nation votes to give its monarch the right to veto its vote. This is a political paradox: voting to ensure that the voting does not ensure anything. The English newspaper The Independent reports:

Citizens of the Alpine tax haven Liechtenstein gave their reigning prince a resounding vote of confidence yesterday in a referendum which flatly rejected attempts to curb royal power in one of Europe's most undemocratic countries.

Although The Independent editorializes that the Liechtenstein is "undemocratic," it seems that it was a thoroughly democratic process by which the citizens of that nation chose to give their monarch near-absolute powers.

Proposals to strip Liechtenstein's Prince Hans-Adam II, 67, of his power of parliamentary veto were opposed by 65 per cent of the country's 36,000 subjects in a referendum organised by pro-democracy campaigners.

The results of this election appear unambiguous. One might well wonder why the citizens would vote to render their votes powerless. Perhaps, while each voter trusts his own judgment, most of the voters do not trust the judgment of most of the other voters.

Only 15 per cent voted in favour of the proposal. Sigvard Wohlwend, one of the organisers of the referendum, said he was disappointed by the outcome. He described the prince and his son, Crown Prince Alois, 43, who has been acting in his father's stead since 2004, as "the most powerful monarchs in Europe."

Although living under nearly unrestrained royal power, the citizens of Liechtenstein enjoy a great degree of freedom - understood as the usual mix of civil rights and human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of the market, freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom to assemble, property rights, and low taxes. Many countries with elected governments have, at least according to international "watchdog" organizations, less freedom.

Again quoting Mr. Wohlwend, The Independent continues:

He said the prince of Liechtenstein held the absolute right to veto any decision taken by the parliament and people. "No judges can be appointed without the approval of the prince," he added.

If, with John Locke, we say that a government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, then the monarch of Liechtenstein is legitimate in his claim to be able to veto the results of a popular vote by his subjects, or able to veto a decision made by their elected representatives.

The Crusades Begin

Most historians cite the year 1095 A.D. as the start of the Crusades. This is generally accurate, but several qualifications must be added. First, the concept of a military counterattack into Islamic lands was indeed first proposed in 1095, but no concrete action was taken until 1096. Second, although the term 'Crusades' is usually used in the plural - historians identify variously six or nine or some other number of allegedly distinct Crusades - the counterattack begun in 1096 was arguably one long action. As scholar Harold Lamb writes,

historians have picked out six of the crises of this conflict and have named them the six crusades. In reality it was all just an ebb and flow of the conflict begun by

Islamic attacks against Europe as early as 711 A.D., when Muslims invaded Spain, almost four hundred years prior to the so-called Crusades. After decades of coastal raiding, Islamic armies invaded Italy in 841, and occupied portions of the Italian peninsula for several decades. Massive Muslim armies attempted to invade France in 732, but were repelled by the soldiers under the command of Charles "the Hammer" Martel. Repeat attempts to invade France over the following two centuries alternated with decades in which the Muslims were content to loot and pillage French coastal cities, but not permanently occupy them.

Third, an emphasis upon the concept of counterattack, i.e., a largely defensive maneuver, must be understood as central to the Crusades. Although the Islamic occupational armies were pushed out of Italy by 884, as historian Will Durant notes,

their raids continued, and central Italy lived through a generation of daily fear. In 876 they pillaged the Campagna; Rome was so endangered that the pope paid the Saracens a year bribe of 25,000 mancusi (c. $25,000) to keep the peace. In 884 they burned the great monastery of Monte Cassino to the ground; in sporadic attacks they ravaged the valley of the Anio; finally the combined forces of the pope, the Greek and German emperors, and the cities of southern and central Italy defeated them on the Garigliano (916), and a tragic century of invasion came to an end. Italy, perhaps Christianity, had had a narrow escape; had Rome fallen, the Saracens would have advanced upon Venice; and Venice taken, Constantinople would have been wedged in between two concentrations of Moslem power. On such chances of battle hung the theology of billions of men.

In 1095, Islamic armies still occupied Spain; Muslim raiders were still sacking coastal cities and island around the Mediterranean; Islamic pirates were still marauding among cargo ships in the Adriatic and Aegean. By 1095, Europe had endured almost 400 years of continuous attacks. The time to do something about it had arrived.