Page 157 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

128 The Chariots [1720-1650 b.c.]

existed happily for generations under any number of independ­
ent chieftains, and had felt no necessity to recognize the rule of
a single man. Not until recently, anyway.
Yes, civil war was bad. But foreign invasion was worse.
They were Amorites themselves, and proud of it, long settled in
their grazing lands in the hills of Canaan, to which their fore­
fathers had come from the north approximately two hundred
years ago. They were not of the tribes of Abraham, they digressed
to explain, though they were related, and had come to Canaan
at about the same time. Their listeners knew a lot about the
tribes of Abraham, for some twenty or thirty years earlier, follow­
ing a drought in Canaan, they had crossed the Egyptian fron­
tier and settled with their flocks not far away, on the grasslands
between the delta and the eastern desert. One of their princes, a
man called Yusuf (though he had now assumed an Egyptian
name), had taken service with the pharaoh of the north and was
now overseer of granaries in the delta.
For a while conversation turned to a discussion of whether
it had been these “children of Abraham” that had supplied the
mercenary swordsmen who had driven back the southern usurp­
ers, or whether they had been recruited from farther east. But
the Amorite travelers had talked of foreign invaders. It sounded
interesting, and they were urged to explain.
Well, the Egyptians should understand that the Amorites of
Canaan were no parochial villagers. Admittedly many of their
number had now married into the families of the original inhab­
itants and settled down to farming, but the majority of the tribes
still moved around, and had retained close contact with their
landsmen up north, even as far as their old home of Harran, in
the shadow of the Turkish mountains. And it was there, in the
north, that the invaders had first appeared. They were tribes of
mountaineers calling themselves Hurrians, and the spearhead of
their attacks was a corps of elite warriors fighting from horse
chariots. That they had to explain; for the Egyptian villagers had
only a vague idea of what a cart looked like and had never
heard of a horse before. In the thirty years or so since the Hur-
rian kings had come down out of their mountains, they had oc­
cupied a large area of northern Syria. Harran had fallen, and