hi everyone so in past episodes we've talked a lot about the history of the land that we call Canaan we've seen it from its earliest days of development up to the time that it became part of the Egyptian Empire a period that stretched at least six or seven thousand years if not more however the events that marked the beginning of the 12th century BCE mainly the arrival of the so-called Sea Peoples the complete collapse of the Hittite Empire and the loss of Egypt's own Imperial possessions in the Levant completely changed the political and demographic landscape of the region forever it essentially created a new Canaanite society that was both deeply divided and impoverished evidence of this is present in both the archaeological record and from the relative absence of references to the region and the textual sources of the Egyptians and the Assyrians however it's in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age collapse that the formation and rise of several new and independent states emerged Israel Judah Moab Edom Ammon and others though sharing many aspects of the same Canaanite culture similar languages religion and as we'll see a common history each of these states eventually developed their own separate identities in this program we'll take a quick look at some of these Iron Age kingdoms that sprung up in central and southern Canaan south of the dead sea was the land called Edom whose name is derived from a word meaning red a reference probably to the color of the area's sandstone mountains archeologists believe that the were Semitic speaking semi-nomadic people who most likely entered into the region of the Negev desert sometime around 1300 BCE they first appear in the written records of Pharaoh Merneptah who claims to have granted many access to the pasture lands of the eastern nile delta this was probably around the Year 1210 or 1205 BCE however for the next few centuries after that there's not much historical or archaeological information about them they do though appear quite frequently in the Hebrew Bible what Christians call the Old Testament where they're one of the subject peoples of King David of Israel eventually when the Kingdom of Israel was split into two Edom became part of Judah by the year 845 BCE they had become independent of Judah only to lose this in the next century to the Assyrians a wealthy land due in part to its copper mines Edom seems to have flourished under a Syrian rule the same low can't be said for its time under the neo-babylonian empire when around 586 BCE the kingdom was completely destroyed whatever remained was later absorbed into the Persian satrapy of Eber nari which basically oversaw the Levant from Damascus east of the Dead Sea was the kingdom of Moab whose first historical reference dates to the reign of pharaoh ramses ii during the Late Bronze Age his inscriptions and records mentioned military campaigns in both Moab and Edom during his reign between the years 1292 1224 BCE though the records state that he campaigned there an actual Kingdom may not have arisen until several centuries later in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament tradition Moab was conquered in what's believed to be the early 10th century BCE by the Israelite King David however about a century later a certain Mesha became king of Moab and regained its independence from Israel we learn about this actually from one of the few contemporary historical sources that coincides with the biblical tradition a black basalt monument called the Mesha stele E or the Moabite stone found in Moab is ancient capital of DeBaun and dating to around eight-30 BCE the steely celebrates mesh has various achievements including establishing Moabite independence from Israel with the help of the God commotions here's a partial translation of the text I am Misha the son of Chemosh the king of Moab the D by night my father was king over Moab for thirty years and I was king after my father and I made this high place for Chemosh in carto because he has delivered me from all Kings and because he has made me look down on all my enemies Omri was the king of Israel and he oppressed Moab for many days for Chemosh was angry with his land and his son succeeded him and he said I will oppress Moab in my days did he say so but I looked down on him and on his house and Israel has gone to ruin yes it has gone to ruin forever [Music] later Assyrian annals state that Moab was one of the lands conquered during the reign of tiglath-pileser the third between the years 734 to 732 BCE like Edom it was absorbed into the neo-babylonian empire and later into the Persian satrapy of a beer nari the kingdom called Amon occupied the region east of the Jordan River and northeast of the Dead Sea it's chief city rabbit Amon is the site of the modern-day Jordanian capital of Amman probably created by the combination of several nearby settlements towards the end of the Late Bronze Age Amman reached its peak between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE as can be seen by the remnants of Rabat amman's great acropolis and lower city most of what we know about Amman comes from the textual sources of others it's mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as both being the enemy and subject of the Israelites though there's little archaeological evidence to go along with the biblical narrative Assyrian records from the 9th century BCE give a bit more detail and it's from them that we have the names of several ammonite kings one of them is a certain basa who fought with the coalition of other Levantine States at the Battle of cacar in 853 BCE against the army of the Assyrian King Salman a Tsar the third though that particular battle ended up in a stalemate eventually Amon did succumb to a Syrian rule until the 6th century BCE when it became a vassal of the neo-babylonian empire however when Babylon was conquered in 539 BCE by Cyrus the Great Amman as a political entity came to an end and was absorbed into the larger Persian satrapy of a beer nari much like the other small kingdoms of the region [Music] another small kingdom that we unfortunately don't know too much about is Gilead it occupied a very strategic position on what's known as the Kings Highway which was a route that linked Damascus with the Gulf of Aqaba according to biblical tradition it was a subject of the Kingdom of Israel until it fell to the Assyrian King tiglath-pileser the third in the year 732 BCE after which many of its people were deported to other parts of the Assyrian Empire and now we come to the two most famous of all of the kingdoms of ancient Canaan those of Israel and Judah the earliest mention of the name Israel is in an early 13th century BCE granite steely a pharaoh Merneptah that was discovered in the egyptian city of Thebes now keep in mind this is not the mention of a kingdom called Israel but a people of that name you may remember from earlier programs that in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age there were many groups of people often on the margins of society who lived outside of the major Canaanite cities and were not part of any kingdom or state the early Israelites are believed to have initially been such a people the nation state or Kingdom of Israel came later on after the Bronze Age collapse and according to some scholars was probably established around the Year 1000 BCE in all honesty the only information that we have about this stage in Israel's history comes from the stories that appear in the Bible about Saul David Solomon and a United Kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital I'm not going to go into much detail with regard to these stories because I'm sure that many of you may already be familiar with them for this program though just know that eventually the Kingdom split into two with Israel in the north centered around its new capital at Samaria and the kingdom of Judah in the south with its capital at Jerusalem while at the moment there's been little archaeological evidence discovered with regard to the earliest history of these two kingdoms their later history is much better documented one of these has to do with the reign of King Omri of Israel most of the scholars I've read put his date at around 885 to 874 BCE so I'm going to use that here his reign is the first for which we have solid evidence of a northern kingdom called Israel historically all Marianas descendents reigned during a very dangerous period in Israel's history because the kingdom was caught between the two great powers of Egypt to its southwest and the Assyrian Empire which was encroaching upon the Levant from the east Omri successor a hab was a member of the great anti Assyrian coalition that fought against shellman nazar the third at the Battle of car car in 853 BCE though temporarily able to maintain their independence from Assyria the kingdom soon got into conflicts with its former era maeín allies and by the time of the usurper king yahoo probably sometime in the 8th 30s BCE Israel was paying tribute to the Assyrians in fact Yahoo is depicted as bowing before the Assyrian King Solomon nazar the third on his famous black obelisk currently in the British Museum for over a century the Assyrians regularly called the Northern Kingdom of Israel the house of Omri and even the usurper Yahoo who was not even a member of that dynasty was called by them son of Omri Jay who was King from about 841 to 814 BCE and from his reign to about 740 BCE the Kingdom of Israel enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy although the Assyrians still claimed sovereignty over them and the other kingdoms in the region things though drastically changed during the regime and heavy-handed rule of the Assyrian King tiglath-pileser the third who reigned between 745 - 727 BCE both Israel and Judah pay tribute rather than incur the wrath of the assyrian king however upon his death the kingdom of israel and others in the Levant took their chances with his sesor shalva nazar v and at least initially began to withhold their tribute this obviously was unacceptable and so the Assyrian army came in full force to punish its rebellious vassals this was the beginning of the end of the Kingdom of Israel it's not exactly clear who was responsible for Israel's final demise as the fall of the capital of Samaria is actually claimed by two Assyrian Kings both of whom were rivals and probably hated each other the first seems to have been shall my nazar v one of the sons of tiglath-pileser the third a Babylonian Chronicle states the following on the 25th day of the month Tibet shall my nazar ascended the throne in Assyria and Akkad he ravaged Samaria the fifth year Shalmaneser died in the month of Tibet for five years Shalmaneser ruled a cod and Assyria on the twelfth day of the month Tibet Sargon ascended the throne in Assyria shellman is ur v died or was killed and soon his brother sargon ii who many believed to have been a usurper became the new king of Assyria Sargon makes the claim that it was he who put the final nail in the coffin of the Kingdom of Israel and in his annals gives us quite a few details of the event in the beginning of my reign when I took my seat on the royal throne and was crowned with a lordly crown the Sumerians who agreed with another hostile King not to continue their slavery and not to deliver tribute and who started hostility I fought with them and completed their defeat 27,000 and 280 people who lived there in with their chariots I carried off a spoil 50 chariots for my royal bodyguard I mustered from among them and the rest of them I settled in the midst of Assyria the city of Samaria irie settled and made it greater than before people of the lands conquered by my own hand I brought there and so ended the Kingdom of Israel it's cousin to the south the kingdom of Judah fared much better it had refrained from antagonizing Assyria outright and was thus spared the latter's wrath during the Levantine rebellions of the early 720s BCE however about two decades later under King Hezekiah Judah along with many Phoenicians and Philistine cities rebelled against Sargon the second son sinakara in 701 BCE Sennacherib came personally to the region and crushed all opposition with the exception of Judah all the Assyrians destroyed the Judean city of Lachish they couldn't conquer the capital of Jerusalem and eventually departed East for Assyria it seems that unrest in Babylonia had compelled Sennacherib to hastily depart East allowing the kingdom of Judah unlike Israel to live to fight another day eventually though Judah submitted to sanok Arab successor Esau hadlen and remained part of the Assyrian network of vassals and tributary states which included tyre by blows Gaza Ashkelon Amnon Edom and Moab for a while after the assyrian empires demise in 610 BCE Judah became a vassal of Egypt this though wasn't for very long in 586 BCE Judah was conquered by the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar ii who destroyed Jerusalem and deported most of its population to Babylonia this began the period known as the Babylonian captivity or exile which ended in 539 BCE when the a kamini Persian king Cyrus ii also known as Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and within a year allowed the Israelites to return home if they wished what happened afterwards is a story for another program thanks so much for stopping by the channel I really appreciate it if you learned something or simply just enjoyed the video please don't hesitate to hit that like button because helps the channel out a lot also check out the history with SCI podcast where I go into more detail with regard to some of the topics discussed here you can also follow history with SCI on Instagram Facebook and Twitter thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode take care and stay safe [Music]