Upper Mesopotamia

They built an empire centered on Hattusa from around 1650 before the Common Era.

It peaked in the mid-14th century under a king called Suppiluliuma I, and at its height it covered most of Anatolia plus chunks of Northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia.

It fell around 1178.

And they didn't call themselves Hittites.

And so within the context of the Sunni-Shia struggle, that is an absolutely essential moment.

I might also point out there are all sorts of other conflicts across Syria or the Jazira.

The Jazira's the area of land between the Tigris and the Euphrates River.

There's all sorts of c- other conflicts.

And of course, the other famous one is the role played by the Nizaris.

But we'll continue.

The imagery found at Göbekli Tepe adorning the T-pillars and some small finds, stone vessels, shaft straighteners, et cetera, are, is also found in contemporaneous sites in the Upper Mesopotamian region, thus testifying to a close social network in this core region of the Neolithic Station.

Of Neolithic Station.

Yep, that's a word.

It is one of the great centers of power in the fractured landscape of the Seljuk successor states, ruled by a man whose name would become, in time, nearly as important to Saladin's story as his own father's, Imad ad-Din Zengi.

Zengi is, by the time Ayyub and Shirkuh arrive seeking his service, already one of the most formidable warlords of the Jazira and northern Syria, a man who has built his power through a combination of ruthless military ambition and shrewd political maneuvering, absorbing city after city into a growing sphere of control that stretches from Mosul westward toward Aleppo and beyond.

He is not a gentle man, nor a particularly trusting one, but he is a man who understands the value of capable subordinates, and in Ayyub and Shirkuh, he recognizes precisely that: two brothers of proven ability, recently and conveniently detached from any competing loyalty, now available to be bound entirely to his own service.

The particulars of how Ayyub and Shirkuh first entered Zengi's circle, and how quickly they rose within it, are recounted differently across the sources, with some traditions suggesting a dramatic moment of usefulness.

For a boy growing up watching both men, the contrast would have offered, without either man necessarily intending it as instruction, a kind of living lesson in the different faces authority could wear, the quiet governance of his father inside the walls of Baalbek and the fierce, restless energy of his uncle riding out beyond them.

The world outside those walls, meanwhile, was not standing still.

Zengi's ambitions continued to expand through the early 1140s, and his name grew increasingly feared not only among the fractious Muslim principalities of Syria and the Jazira, but among the Crusader states that had carved out their own footholds along the Levantine coast since the end of the previous century.

It was Zengi who, in 1144, achieved what no Muslim commander had yet managed against the Crusader presence in the region, the recapture of the County of Edessa, the northernmost and most exposed of the Crusader states, a victory that sent shockwaves through Christian Europe and would, within a few years, help provoke the launching of what history would remember as the Second Crusade.

An Encounter with an Englishman.

Between Hassan Kef and Jezira, a distance of thirty-five miles, the scenery is very fine.

The river winds through narrow gorges with steep walls of limestone rock riddled with rock tombs.

Here and there in the black gorges the high turreted rocks would be skirted with bands of vegetation, little spurts of glistening water shooting over the rocky tops as they dashed down to join the river.

Read by Paul Welford.

The Creed of the Koran.

We left Jezirah early next morning.

The scenery was now much tamer.

In 2019, severe drought lowered the water level of the Mosul Dam Reservoir on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, and as the shoreline retreated, something emerged from the receding water that no one had expected to see again.

It was a palace, a palatial complex to be precise, dating to approximately 1400 BCE, the period of the Mitanni Empire, a civilisation that dominated Upper Mesopotamia for several centuries and then largely vanished from the archaeological record, swallowed by the Assyrians and the Hittites and the general entropy of Bronze Age geopolitics.

The palace at Kaimuna had been submerged since the reservoir's creation in the 1980s, buried beneath meters of water in a region where the political and military upheavals of the intervening decades had made systematic archaeological survey effectively impossible.

No one knew it was there.

Since the times of Emperor Caracalla, Palmyra enjoyed the status of a colonia.

However, in the middle decades of the 3rd century AD, when the Sassanids fought Rome for control of Armenia and Upper Mesopotamia, Palmyra attained a heightened political and strategic significance under the leadership of a prominent local aristocrat, Septimius Odonathus.

The instability of warfare in the region threatened Palmyrene trade, and Rome expected the Palmyrenes to provide for their own security.

This inadvertently helped the city to create a martial tradition of its own, and in the 240s and 250s, Odonathus used the reputation he had built up through his successful protection of the caravan routes from raiders, and his position as commander of Palmyra's cavalry and dromedary archers, to secure his dominance over the city and its civic council.

It was a clever move.

Gallienus recognized Odenathus' de facto authority, who was subsequently honored as Restorer of All the East, essentially becoming the viceroy of Rome's most eastern provinces.

This gave him authority over Roman governors and military forces in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, which Odonathus used to great effect to help push the Persians out of the eastern provinces, recapturing Roman fortresses of Carhi and Nisibis.

In a brazen move showing his ambitions, he had declared himself King of Kings, a challenge to the imperial claims of Shapur I of Persia.