The Entire History of the Canaanites (c. 3000–1150 BC)

Abdi-Heba, the ruler of Jerusalem, wrote to the king of Egypt in letters that George Barton, in 1916, dated to the fourteenth century BC. He opened by bowing seven times and seven times more, and then asked what he had done to the king. People were speaking against him at court, he wrote, the Habiru were plundering the king's lands, and without troops those lands would be lost. His letters survive among the clay tablets of the Amarna correspondence, and they let a ruler of Canaan speak in his own voice. This episode follows Canaan through the Bronze Age: the walled towns of the third millennium BC, the larger cities that came after them, Egypt's view of the land, and the Delta town where kings of foreign origin, later called the Hyksos, governed northern Egypt. It visits the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim, where workmen left inscriptions that Alan Gardiner judged almost certainly alphabetic, and reads the annals of Thutmose the Third and the letters the rulers of Canaan sent to Pharaoh. It runs a little over two hours, at an even pace, and it is meant to work as well for background listening as for watching. Chapters 0:00 A Letter from Jerusalem — Abdi-Heba's letters to the king of Egypt, in his own words 9:34 The Walled Towns — Jericho, Megiddo and Tel Yarmuth in the Early Bronze Age, and two ways of dating them 27:31 The Cities Return — the towns of the Middle Bronze Age: earthen ramparts, Hazor, and the wine cellar at Kabri 43:55 The Land of the Enemy — Canaan in Egyptian eyes: the story of Sinuhe, a tomb painting at Beni Hasan, and a soldier's stone 59:29 Kings in the Delta — Tell el-Dab'a, the town later known as Avaris, seen from the Canaanite side 1:16:26 The Miners' Letters — the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim, and the signs Petrie and Gardiner read there 1:30:31 Chiefs Appointed Anew — after Megiddo: the annals of Thutmose the Third, and an Egyptian garrison town at Beth-Shean 1:45:05 Letters to Pharaoh — Labayu, Abdi-Heba and Rib-Hadda write to the king, and the question of the Habiru 1:59:33 What Canaan Left — Canaanite words in the margins of the letters, genomes from Bronze Age Sidon, and a single word from Jerusalem Sources The Amarna letters are quoted from J. A. Knudtzon's edition (1915), with notes by Otto Weber, and the English translations of R. W. Rogers (1912), George A. Barton (1916, 1925) and Percy Handcock (1920). Egyptian records follow James Henry Breasted's Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), and the Sinai mines follow W. M. Flinders Petrie (1906) and Alan Gardiner (1916). Early excavation reports are quoted as their authors' views. Recent findings on the towns, Tell el-Dab'a and ancient genomes come from open-access papers named in the narration. This subject has a particular problem, and it shapes how the narration speaks. Most of what the rulers of Canaan said survives in their letters to Egypt, and each letter argues its writer's case. So what the letters say — who rebelled, who plundered, which lands were lost — is given as the writer's claim, not as an event. The numbers in Egyptian royal records are given as the king's claims. The dates are approximate: Bronze Age chronology is still debated, and the dates in the narration follow the conventional chronology or the named authors. Images 227 items appear on screen, including 23 maps drawn for this episode. The maps are made from Natural Earth data, which is in the public domain. 165 of the 227 are public domain, CC0 or released without known restrictions. The remaining 62 are Creative Commons Attribution, and every one of them is credited in full in the credit roll at the end. Where no photograph of a place was available, the screen shows a map of where it lies rather than a picture of somewhere else. There is no film in this episode. Everything on screen is a still photograph, a printed plate, a museum object, or a map made for this account. The thumbnail is a detail of Norman de Garis Davies's 1931 facsimile (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain) of a painting in the tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan: foreign visitors as an Egyptian painter pictured them, not a self-portrait of the people of Canaan. The narration is synthetic speech. It is not a human reader.