By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

Beginning with the history and context of Levantine Bronze Age research, this chapter defines the Levant as a conduit for people, ideas and goods circulating between western Asia, Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Bronze Age as a formative period in social and political evolution. It provides an overview of the two trajectories covered by the volume and establishes the fourth-millennium backdrop of the broader region (western Asia and Egypt).

Beginning with the history and context of Levantine Bronze Age research, this chapter defines the Levant as a conduit for people, ideas and goods circulating between western Asia, Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Bronze Age as a formative period in social and political evolution. It provides an overview of the two trajectories covered by the volume and establishes the fourth-millennium backdrop of the broader region (western Asia and Egypt).