Page 169 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

M0 The Chariots

happen. But they happened to, and by the agency of, people; and
if, in studying the trends, we forget the people who imple-
plemented and were influenced by them, we are not really study­
ing history at all.

When Gandash made his decision to lead his Kassites down
from the mountains of Luristan into the Mesopotamian valley
and the kingdom of Hammurabi’s son, he was, more than likely,
influenced by “historical necessity.” But it is doubtful to what de­
gree he was aware of it or influenced by his awareness. Undoubt­

edly one of the principal “trends” of the first third of the Second
Millennium b.c. is the spread of the horse and of the Indo-
European-speaking people who had tamed it. Within the first cen­
tury of the millennium they had spread from their homes on the
Pontic steppes over the whole of the great plains of central and

eastern Europe and central Asia, and were bounded by a colos­
sal ring of natural obstacles, the North Sea, the Rhine, and the
continuous west-east sweep of mountains, the Alps, Carpathians,
Balkans, the Turkish mountains and the Black Sea, the Caucasus

and the Caspian Sea, the Elburz mountains and the Hindu Kush.
The next century and a half saw the penetration of these obsta­
cles, the occupation of England and Holland, the Balkans and
Greece, Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. And in the last hundred
years we have seen the beginning of the “spill-over” into the low­

lands beyond the mountains, into north Syria and Mesopotamia
and the valley of the Indus.
Every move in this long succession of expansions must have
involved decisions by chieftains like Gandash, decisions to move

rather than sit still, and to move in one direction rather than in
another. To what extent did each of these chieftains realize that
he was part of a “trend”?
The importance of answering questions of this sort is the jus­
tification for the division of this book into arbitrary chapters, each

a lifetime long. This division, inconvenient in many ways, does
indicate, within limits, what anyone at any one time might rea­
sonably be expected to know. It has been stated before, and will
be stated again, that people alive at the time covered by one

chapter experienced the events of that chapter in their own per­
sons and that they knew the events of the preceding chapter from