Page 109 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Egypt: or cedar wood from the Lebanon or frankincense from the
deep south.
The return loads were not always the product of peaceful

trading. Even the half-settled Amorites of Mesopotamia were
only a few generations removed from the desert raiders who had
pushed into the river valleys by force of arms, and once back
in the desert they tended to revert to type. Between tribe and

tribe, between family group and family group, there was a con­
stantly shifting pattern of alliances and feuds, held in abeyance

in the river valleys but kept alive by the unsettled nomads of the
great desert. And on the winter journeys the young men of the
cities plunged back joyfully into the old pattern, fiercely guard­
ing their own flocks and baggage trains, raiding zestfully the

possessions of their enemies of the moment, or banding together
to attack an oasis or pillage a township on the fringe of the desert.

They were raiders as well as traders, and only paid for their mer­
chandise if it could not be got cheaper by other means.
If we are right in our guess that the fife of Abraham can be
approximately equated with this second lifetime of the Second

Millennium b.c., then he was about twenty-four years old when
trouble hit the Amorites of Ur. In 1906 b.c. King Gungunum of

Larsa died, very likely killed in battle, and Ur-Ninurta, king of
Isin, regained the overlordship of Ur. If not precisely this event,
it was certainly some such political upheaval which brought the
Amorites in Ur into disfavor, and decided Terah to take his

possessions and leave the city.
This time it was not a trading caravan which left the gates of

Ur and headed north along the banks of the Euphrates. Now it
was a tribe on the move, perhaps three or four hundred strong,
with the old men and women and the younger children traveling

in four-wheeled bullock carts, with large flocks of sheep and goats
grazing as they went, with several hundred pack asses, perhaps
even with heavy goods carried by river boat parallel to the land

movement. Tradition says that they traveled to Harran, and this
can have been no chance destination.
The ancient town of Harran lay six hundred fifty miles

away to the northwest, the whole length of the Euphrates away,
in the foothills of the mountains of eastern Turkey. But for all its