Page 224 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1580-151° B-c-] T^ie Resistance Movement 105
Amorite chieftain of that name, whose original family home had
alternated between north and south Mesopotamia, but who

had migrated into Egypt about three hundred years ago. They
were peaceable enough folk, but no one could say which way
they would jump if the Hyksos king attempted to regain his lost
empire.
In general Amose was not happy, it seemed, about his north­

east frontier. As the young sons of his resistance veterans be­
gan to reach military age and to be taken for army service, the
majority of them found themselves doing their tour of duty in the
dusty plains of the Negeb or the coastal towns of the Gaza
strip. And when they returned home they had a fair idea, picked

up from the crews of coastal craft or the drivers of the donkey
caravans, of the position deep beyond the frontier there.
The Hyksos of Canaan, they said, had strong allies in their
rear. To their north lay the Amorites of the Lebanon, and
north of them again the Amorites of Yamkhad. Some forty years

ago Yamkhad had been conquered by a powerful king who
had appeared out of the mountain country to the northwest, but
his chariots had retired northward again and had not reappeared,
and Yamkhad had recovered. The same mountain king had also

raided and destroyed the greatest of the Amorite nations, Baby­
lonia, on the Euphrates to the eastward. Babylonia had not re­
covered, but was still under the rule of a moderately peaceful
mercantile kingdom around the head of the Persian Gulf. The
most powerful of all the nations to the north was beyond doubt
the Mitanni kingdom of the Hurrians, who occupied with their

chariots the wide plains of the upper Euphrates. But these were
of a different race and language from the Semitic speakers farther
south, and were no danger to Egypt as long as the Semites lay
between.

The older men in the towns and villages along the upper
Nile listened with amused respect to the account given by the
returned soldiers of these nations beyond nations of which they,
in their time, had scarcely heard. They had, after all, had other
things to think about. But now there was peace in Egypt, and

such dangers as there were these days lay beyond the frontier.
Twenty-two years after the coronation of Amose news came