BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES

THE TWO SKELETONS lay buried for more than 2,500 years high on a mountaintop on the Anatolian Plateau. When the woman’s body was discovered, she was lying face down, her left hand covering her face and her right arm outstretched, as if attempting to break her fall. A year later, archaeologists found the man’s body, badly smashed and contorted as if he had first fallen to his knees, then onto his side. Both had likely been trying to escape a massive fire that was set to destroy their city. But as they fled through the city gate, its timber supports ablaze, the entire structure collapsed, stone blocks crushing the man and woman under their weight while the raging fire burned their bodies.

The late seventh and sixth centuries B.C. were a tumultuous period in Anatolia and elsewhere in the Near East, according to later Greek and Persian texts. The year 609 B.C. brought the final fall of the Assyrian Empire, which had dominated much of the region, including the modern countries of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, for more than 1,400 years. Competing local powers tried for decades to fill the power vacuum, until the newly established Persian Empire eventually gained control of much of the area in 550 B.C. “We are in that in-between period when there was a lot of unrest and unease in the Near East,” says archaeologist Scott Branting of the University of Central Florida. “There was a lot of shake-up and people