Page 147 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

coasts or me in etnenands towards the eastern coasts of England
These, though, were a hybrid folk, intermarried with fanners and

traders, and perhaps should hardly any longer be considered part

of the family. They certainly knew of their cousins the Achaeans,
who had made their way southwestward into the steep fjord­

lands of Greece. And, closer home, other kinsfolk, who had
crossed the Dardanelles, under the walls of the little fortress of

Troy, and had established their kingdoms in the interior of Asia
Minor, were close enough to be actually visited in their fortresses

overlooking the river Halys.
But mostly the young warriors journeyed to the east. For

there lay their closest kinsfolk, speakers of the same dialect, wor­
shippers of the same gods. These were the tribes of the Aryans,

who had pushed round the north of the Caspian Sea, across the

plains of the Kara Kum, and up the broad valley of the Oxus into
the mountains of the Hindu Kush. From there they looked down

upon the headwaters of the Indus, and were already aware of
the rich cities and cultivated lands of the civilization that held

the valley farther south.
Hammurabi, too, knew, by other channels, of the network

of relationships uniting the Indo-European warriors of the moun­
tains. For the ships from Crete, which brought the eggshell pot­

tery of that island to Ugarit on the Syrian coast and there met
his merchants, had on other voyages met the Achaean settlers on

the coast of Greece. And the merchants bringing copper from Ur

and the other Persian Gulf ports had heard from the Dilmun
ships’ captains of the preparations for defense being made by the

kings of the brick-built cities of the Indus.
That the Achaeans of the west and the Aryans of the east

were related peoples, and the kin of the warrior leaders of the
Hurrians to his north and the Kassites to his east, was strongly

indicated by the fact that they all possessed the prized horse

chariots.
Horses were no longer an unknown thing to the Amorites. t

was a couple of generations or more since they had first appeare
among the newer peoples of the mountains, and in Hammura