Page 148 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

as it was necessary to import grooms ana trainers wiui meii huh.
the mountain tribes. And the older generation looked with dis­

favor on the modem craze for speed at any price. Samsi-Adad,
the old king of Assyria, now dead these ten years, had felt it

necessary to remonstrate with his son for his extravagance in
keeping horses, and the old state councilor of Zimri-lim, the king

of Mari, had begged his master not to show himself behind horses

on the roads of his kingdom.
That the horsemen of the north and east were a threat to

Mesopotamia had long been obvious to Hammurabi. And now
his agents told him of serious movements in the hills. The Kassites

in the mountains of Luristan to the north of the great plain of
Elam, who had once served his turn against Rim-Sin, were said

to be too many for their pastures. And the Hurrians of Armenia

were, he heard, wandering down from their hills into the north­
ern marches of Assyria and Idamaraz and Yamkhad.

Hammurabi was an ambitious man, and he had long been
working with the deliberate aim of uniting the whole of the

Amorite fringe under one rule from the Persian Gulf to the Medi­
terranean. It now looked as though the incursions of the Hurrians

into the northern kingdoms might well forestall his plans. It was
high time to move.

In 1762 b.c. he ordered his armies to march against Esh-

nunna to the north. The young men born about 1790 b.c., now
twenty-eight years old or so, must have formed at this time the

backbone of his army. They had been trained for years with this
day in view, and politically indoctrinated with a personal loyalty

towards Babylonia and its king. For the first time in Mesopotamia

a country, instead of a conglomeration of cities, was going to
war.
Hammurabi led his troops in person, as was the duty and

privilege of a king, and the soldiers would often catch a glimpse
of his dyed sheepskin cloak and grizzled bearded face as he

passe along the ranks in his litter, or driving, like a Sumerian

ng, m his four-wheeled ass chariot. From the frontier at Sip­
par they crossed the sandy grasslands between the Euphrates