Page 283 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

23° The Argosies [1440-1370 b.c.]

ther Thothmes. His expedition had swelled the slave market at
Knossos, as it had swelled the slave markets throughout the Mid­
dle East, but not a few of the Cretan mercantile agents in the
Levant had been swept into his all-too-widespread net and it
had taken a while to re-establish trading connections. And then
nine years later, in 1439 B«c., when the children were only a year
old, Amenhotep had done the same again. Again he had had a
rebellion in north Syria, up towards the Mitannian frontier, as an
excuse, and again he had stripped the whole of Syria and Leba­
non of everything of value, including manpower. The Cretan
traders began to think it too much of a good tiling, as they saw
the market flooded with slaves and booty.
Since then Syria had not dared to lift a finger against Egypt,
for all the diplomatic blandishments of the kings of Mitanni.
Amenhotep’s boundary stone stood undisturbed on the banks of
the Euphrates beside those of his father and his great-grand­
father, Thothmes III and Thothmes I. The three stones were a
landmark to the caravans bearing the products of Mesopotamia
and the east along the Euphrates route towards Aleppo, Ugarit
—and Crete. But in recent years the merchants traveling along
this route had had other worries besides that of making diplo­
matic gifts to sheikhs claiming to represent both Egypt and Mi­
tanni. At either end of the route there was trouble. The Hur-
rians of Mitanni were pushing a pretender to the throne of
Aleppo, which a score of years earlier had been conquered by
the Hittites, as it had been once before in the reign of Mursilis
the Great. And Babylon, great Babylon itself, which had also in
its day fallen to Mursilis, had fallen again.
It was but rarely that Cretans traveled as far inland as Meso­
potamia, and in their ears Babylon held all the mystery and
glamor of the Orient. It was the queen of the east as Knossos
was the queen of the west. It was the city of the almost leg­
endary Hammurabi, and the capital of the oldest civilization on
earth. Even Egypt, it was popularly believed, was not as old as
the land of the Twin Rivers, and Crete was an upstart by com­
parison, for all its thousand years of history. For a hundred and
fifty years, since Mursilis had brought to an end the dynasty of
Hammurabi, Babylonia had comprised only the southern part of