Third Dynasty of Ur
This is the Middle Bronze Age in West Asia, about 2100
BC to 1700 BC. It corresponds roughly to
the First Intermediate
Period in Egypt, and just as in Egypt this was a time when West Asia
was broken up into a lot of little kingdoms instead of being one big
empire. In Greece, this is the time when the Indo-European
invaders arrived and destroyed Lerna.
OtherIndo-Europeans, going south instead of west, reached West Asia around the same time as they
reached Greece, about 2000 BC. They settled
in Turkey with their horses,
where they were known as the Hurrians and the Hittites.
In West Asia, it was a time of conflict between the settled people in
the cities of Ur and Uruk and Mari, and the wandering nomads,
the Amorites, to their east and west. The
nomads sometimes traded with the
city people, and sometimes attacked them, and sometimes the city people
attacked the nomads and tried
to make them pay taxes. Gradually
the Amorites became more settled, though they also conquered some of
the cities. Eventually the Amorites made
themselves the rulers of most of the land between the Persian Gulf and
southern Turkey (where they got into fights with the Hittites
and Hurrians), and all down the Mediterranean
coast through Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel. They did not form
a great empire, but Amorite kings ruled cities all over West Asia. At
the end of this period, around 1700 BC, the
Amorites even invaded Egypt,
where they were called the Hyksos,
or foreigners.
For Ur and the cities of the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates (Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers), this was a good time. They had their independence back for a while, though many cities fell under Amorite rule. More great ziggurats were built, in particular at Ur.
It was around this time that another Semitic nomadic group, the Jews, who had been living around Ur, left and wandered west toward the Mediterranean coast.
To find out more about the Third Dynasty of Ur, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Find Out About Mesopotamia: What Life Was Like in Ancient Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, by Lorna Oakes (2004).
Ancient Mesopotamians, by Elena Gambino (2000). For kids, retellings of Mesopotamian stories and lots of context.
Babylonians, by Henry Saggs (2000). Also includes information about the Sumerians and Akkadians.
Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture, by William H. Stiebing (2002). Expensive, and hard to read, but it's a good up to date account.
Hammurabi
Main West Asia history page
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