Fantastic Metropolis

The Hyksos in defeat could well have been driven north, where they would have met up with another outrider of their push west, the Mitanni, as well as the Hattusans who ruled in Asia Minor. It’s tempting to notice that the Hattusan kingdom under Labarnas was founded right around the time the Hyksos entered Egypt (roughly 1650 BCE or so), but that the full power of the Hattusa wouldn’t be felt until roughly three hundred years later, as Suppiluliumas I would grow strong enough to raid Babylon. (Over the course of history in Asia Minor and the Middle East, it was often almost an initiation rite for a growing power to raid Babylon.) However, the Hattusans, the Egyptians, the Assyrians and other powers of the region would all be balked by events out in the Mediterranean, as the trading nation of the Minoans would be battered by volcanic eruptions, besieged by the descendents of chariot-riding Indo-Europeans called the Mycenaeans, and ultimately destroyed, sending waves of “sea-peoples” hurtling into the lands of Asia Minor, the coastal region of the Middle East, and Egypt proper.

Chaos again. It has been with us throughout this tale: the orderly grids of Harappa and Mohenjodaro destroyed, and the people lost or sent sweeping to attack their own, create degenerated culture in the ruins of Mohenjodaro which would be lost to time or wash over their neighbors to the west, take up their language, their culture as well, make it new, rush into Egypt like a wave and build and be swept away again, in new forms (Hyksos, Habiru, Hattusa) come crashing into Egypt again, held off at the hill of Har-Meggidon until the next wave of Indo-European charioteers comes sweeping in from, of all places, the sea… Sargon is born of the river and builds an empire, Moses is born of the river and leads his people north to clash with Canaan, Sargon is born again and fights another battle for Babylon, Babylon the always-contested, the great city, the hive of order. Always to be swept away in chaos. Ur rose up, the great ziggurat reaching forth into the sky where the God of Abraham and Isaac first made a covenant with those who would eventually reach into Egypt… is Ur where Seth met the Hyksos? Order attempts to establish itself and Chaos drives it back, forever contesting. Why did the second Sargon feel the need to build Dun-Sharrukin? Why did Akhenaton construct what would become Amarna?

Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth.

—Hesiod, Theogony

When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained.

—Enuma Elish, The First Tablet