Page 107 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

guildhall and offices of the alik Dilmun, the guild of merchant
adventurers who owned and captained the boats that sailed to
Dilmun down the Gulf. The sea trade with the east was still as

important as it had been seventy and more years ago, though
it had changed somewhat in character. For one thing, Dilmun
itself had captured a larger share of the trade. The ships from Ur
no longer sailed all the way to Makan at the mouth of the Gulf

to load copper, while only the older merchants could remember
seeing a ship of Makan ownership tied up at the quays. Now

the ships from Makan and the Indus sailed no farther than Dil­
mun, and there transshipped their copper and gold and ivory and
carnelian and lapis lazuli, exchanging it at the great market by
the beach for the silver and wool and piece goods brought from

Sumer by the alik Dilmun. Even Dilmun-owned ships were not
so common in the port of Ur as they once had been, and more

and more of the trade was carried in Ur bottoms, bringing double
profit to the merchant captains and the investors and share­
holders who financed the ventures.
It was an extravagant price the Amorite caravan masters had

to give for these luxury articles of the Indian trade, a price only
agreed to after a whole morning’s haggling and negotiation, and

finally weighed out meticulously in silver against the standard
weights, weights shaped like ducks and often carved of semi­
precious stone. But for all the high price of trade goods the
caravan business was profitable enough in all conscience. Even

copper fetched a good round price on the seaboard of the
Mediterranean, particularly when it was worked up into manu­

factured goods by the renowned coppersmiths of the Amorites.
And the precious stones and ivory of the East were beyond price.
We might well find Terah sitting in the shade of his ware­

house, drinking beer with a fellow countryman from the north,
each using a long bamboo drinking tube from a common pot.
Their talk would range from trade to politics, always a matter

of speculation to the Amorites of Ur.
Most of them had not been many years in Ur. For Ur had un­
til recently lain within the eastern sphere of influence, ruled by
the kings of Isin, who were the allies of the great kingdom of

am at the foot of the Persian mountains. Admittedly the

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