17th century BC

This century's Babylonian scribe inherits Atrahasis, the fullest flood story yet told: the gods, driven to fury by human noise and overpopulation rather than human wickedness, resolve to destroy humanity, are foiled by one god's warning to a chosen man, and settle afterward for less drastic controls on population, such as infant mortality and barren women. It is a strikingly practical theology, closer to divine population management than moral judgment, and it will echo for a thousand years in every later flood story Mesopotamian and, eventually, Israelite scribes tell. He also has Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld, in which a goddess strips herself of power piece by piece to enter the land of the dead and must find a substitute to take her place before she can leave, and the Farmer's Instructions, a father's practical advice on plowing and irrigation timed to the agricultural year.

He watches his own kingdom age past its prime. Hammurabi's descendants hold Babylon but not the confidence or reach their ancestor built the dynasty on, and early in the next century a raiding army arrives from Anatolia, sacks the city, and withdraws without staying to rule, ending the dynasty almost as an afterthought to the raiders' own ambitions elsewhere. That raiding power belongs to the Hittites, a people whose language and state have only recently coalesced around Hattusa; their own scribes are producing, in these same decades, the Hittite Laws in an early form, along with myths like Illuyanka and Telipinu that recast older Hattian religious material for a new royal court. A Hittite scribe of this era would know almost nothing of Atrahasis or Inanna's Descent; his own literary world is younger, thinner, and still absorbing outside influence rather than exporting its own.

In Egypt, a Theban official watching the Delta from the weakened south sees a country divided against itself: Hyksos rulers hold the north from Avaris, bringing with them, according to the archaeological and later textual record, new military technology, the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow, that will reshape Egyptian warfare within a generation or two. He copies old Middle Kingdom mathematical problems that scribes elsewhere are now compiling into what will survive as the Rhind Papyrus, but no major new literary work marks this Egyptian century the way Atrahasis marks Babylon's.

A traveler reaching Crete would find something unlike any of this: a palace civilization at Knossos just beginning a distinctive wall-painting tradition, still mostly abstract and architectural rather than the vivid bull-leaping, processional, and marine scenes later palace generations will paint, and, as far as anyone can tell, no literature at all that has left a decipherable trace. Whatever administrative records the Minoans keep are in a script, Linear A, that no one, then or since, has fully read.

None of these worlds yet know Rigveda's hymns, still unwritten and unset in India; none know the Ugaritic alphabet, not yet devised; none know Hammurabi's own code as anything but an aging monument rather than living law, since the political order it describes is now crumbling. What a reader could actually know this century is a scatter of regional literatures, Babylonian myth in its most fully developed form yet, nascent Hittite law and religion, quiet Egyptian continuity under foreign rule in the north, and an Aegean art tradition whose script no one can read, none of them yet aware how thoroughly the coming centuries will draw them into contact and conflict with each other.