Page 112 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

traders, small walled suburbs with their own administration and
probably their own defense forces.

As the trading caravans of the Amorites of Harran traveled
from karum to karum in these years, they would follow closely
the politics of the areas through which their trade passed. They

would hear of the coalition formed in 1895 by a certain Sumu-
abum, whom Abram might remember having met before, among
the small city-states on the middle Euphrates, and they would

wonder perhaps that he sited the capital of the coalition at his
own little town of Babylon instead of at the historic city of Kish
nearby. And they may perhaps have heard of a people towards

the north of Turkey, a people who were not at that time called
the Hittites though they were later to take that name. If the
caravans heard of them at all, they undoubtedly attached no

importance to the fact that these people’s rulers spoke an un­
known language and were said to have come from the north; or
that they owned a small number of chariots drawn by horses.

We do not know when Abram’s tribe decided to move south
from Harran. Nor do we know why. There may have been com­
mercial pressure from the Assyrians. There may even have been

military pressure from the people who were to become the Hit­
tites. For at a date which is thought by some to be 1872 b.c. the
karum of Kanesh is destroyed by fire. And there is some slight

evidence that its destroyers came from the north.
At that time a man born at the beginning of our second life­
time would be fifty-eight years old. We have assumed for the

purpose of this chapter (most unscientifically, for we have no evi­
dence) that Abram son of Terah was of this generation, and it
would therefore seem that he was in late middle age when he led

his tribe once more on migration, this time south and west, along
the trade and grazing route leading through Canaan to Egypt.
It was again a not unnatural route to take. For Harran lay

not far from the nearest point under the direct cultural influence
of Egypt.
At this time Sesostris HI was pharaoh of Egypt. Some hun­

dred twenty years have passed since Amenemhet I had assumed
the crown as the first pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty. It has
been four generations of increasing prosperity and bureaucracy