Model Answers for your Exam 3 Study Guide

1) After the Elamite king, Kindattu, sacked Ur in 2004 B.C., warlords in Mesopotamia fought constantly to gain territory. After two centuries of struggle, the Babylonian Empire rose to prominence when a coalition headed by Hammurabi defeated a coalition of kings from Assyria, Elam, and the independent city-state, Eshnunna. Babylonians astronomers knew the difference between planets and stars and that the Earth traveled around the sun. Babylonians also invented the system of twelve month years, twenty-four hour days, and sixty minute hours. Although enforceable only through his own shortly-lived military might, the Code of Hammurabi provided laws throughout his empire that included protections for “widows and orphans.”

2) Apepi I’s letter to Sequenere was so insulting that it agitated Sequenere to war. In the letter, Apepi I compares Sequenere’s Theban subjects to hippopotami, or disgusting, smelly, roaring, and barbaric animals, suggesting that the Thebans were inferior to his own Hyksos subjects. Sequenere, an indigenous Egyptian, would have been outraged that an intruding foreign king, regarded as uncivilized, had the nerve to compare his native Egyptians to uncivilized hippopotami. Too proud to take these insults, Sequenere gathered his troops and marched towards the Hyksos capital, Avaris, but was promptly killed by Apepi’s border guards. The Hyksos-Theban feud continued after this incident, resulting in the wholesale expulsion of the Hyksos out of Egypt, and exemplifying the destructive power of insults.

3) In the 16th century B.C., the Seventeenth Dynasty in Thebes faced an allied threat from the Nubians to the south and the Hyksos to the north. Kahmose, Ahhotep, and Ahmose eventually pushed the Hyksos back into Canaan, taking the city, Sharuhen, establishing Dynasty 18, and starting the New Kingdom period. Ahmose’s granddaughter, Hatshepsut, competed as co-regent with her stepson and half-nephew, Thutmose III. After her death, Thutmose III conquered one Western Semitic tribe after another in Canaan. By 1450 B.C., the Egyptian empire peaked under Thutmose III, extending all the way to Carchemish on the banks of the Euphrates.

4) The first Hittite records, written about 1790 B.C., tell us about king Anittas of Kussara, who conquered Hattusas and Purushkhanda. A later king, Hattusilis I, moved the capital to Hattusas and named his nephew, Mursilis I, his successor. Mursilis conquered Aleppo and then, just to prove he could, marched on Babylon in 1595, ending Hammurabi’s dynasty. Kassite chiefs filled the vacuum in Babylon that Mursilis left behind and ruled for the next 450 years. A long series of usurpations began when Mursilis was murdered by his cupbearer and brother-in-law, Hantili, shortly after returning victoriously to Hattusas.