Page 162 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1720-1650 b.c.] The Princes of the Desert 133

quest they moved their administrative capital from Memphis to
the northeastern edge of the delta, to Avaris on the coast not far
from the isthmus of Suez. There the king settled; from there he
could rule the lands of both the Nile and the Jordan.
The building of Avaris brought a new and unexpected pros­
perity to the village, a prosperity which even the discriminatory
taxation imposed by the occupation authorities could not entirely
outweigh. For the village now lay on the main highway and wa­
terway between the new capital and the told. A new inn was
built at the other end of the village, and the old one put up a
new wing and enlarged its courtyard. And the little shopkeepers
along the single street, the baker and the charcoal seller and the
bronzesmith and the potter and the carpenter, found that it paid
them to stock the luxury items which travelers always seemed to
be able to afford. There were even some shopkeepers who were
heard to remark that the coming of the new rulers was not an
entirely bad thing. And they learned to speak a sort of Semitic
and were very obsequious to the Hyksos civil servants who
stopped to patronize them. But these collaborators and fellow
travelers were shunned by the majority of the villagers, and they
formed a tight little clique of their own.
They were the only ones now who sat with the travelers at
the inns of an evening, claiming that it was part of the duty of a
man of the world to keep in touch with events beyond the vil­
lage. And indeed quite a lot of news came in in those years, car­
ried by the merchants and barge captains who transported in­
land the cargoes reaching Avaris by caravan from north Syria and
by ship from Crete and Cyprus.
It was from these travelers that they first heard of the con­
quests of King Labarnas of Kussara, a small city-state in the cen­
ter of Asia Minor south of the Halys. Labarnas and his people,
it was said, were northerners of origin, of the same race and
speaking much the same language as the rulers and charioteers
of the Hurrians. It was only a few years since Labarnas had suc­
ceeded his father, Pu-Sarrumas, on the throne of Kussara, but he
had already, in a series of lightning campaigns, conquered al­
most the whole of southern Asia Minor, and his many sons now
ruled in his name over all the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor