Page 146 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

sea journey to Crete—and not a few of Hammurabi’s informants
made the journey regularly—the mountains could still be seen,
breaking in cliffs and headlands against the blue waters of the

Upper Sea. It was a fascinating and vaguely foreboding sight to
the Amorites, cultivators of the river plains and traditionally the
descendants of desert nomads.
The traders, though, put such thoughts from them. The

mountains and the people of the mountains were suppliers of pri­
mary products. All the silver and tin and lead, and much of the
copper and gold which was worked in the land of the Twin Riv­
ers came from within the mountains. The villagers of the upper

valleys seasonally left their flocks of sheep and goats, and their
tiny terraced fields, and went to work the outcrops and galleries
and to operate the smelting ovens, amassing ingots—as a not dis­

similar people far away to the north amassed stone axes—against
the periodic coming of the traders. It was not difficult for Ham­
murabi to keep a sharp eye on what went on in the mountains.
The mountain people had lived there, they said, from time

immemorial, and they still worshipped their old gods, gods with
outlandish names like Teshup and Hepa among the Hurrians,
and Shipah and Harbe of the Kassites. But the chieftains and

their warrior-knights were of a different race, and though they
had ruled now for several generations, it was still well known
that they originally came from the north. They spoke a different
language, too, from their subjects (a language of the stock we

call Indo-European), and worshipped other gods, Mithra and
Indra and Veruna, Surya and Marut. They were a proud race,
these chieftains and their warriors, and their pride lay chiefly in

their horses and chariots. They practiced with their chariots all
day long, and at night, in their timber palaces or by the camp­
fires where they lay watching over their herds of mares, they sang
lays of the northern lands, of the endless plains beyond the moun­

tains and of kings asleep in their barrows these three hundred
years and more.
With their light two-wheeled chariots they could, and did,

range widely even in the difficult terrain of the mountains, and
the younger princes often went on month-long journeys to the
chieftains of distant but related tribes. Thus they knew of their