Page 113 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

within Egypt, and extending influence abroad. In the time of
the fathers of the present generation, Amenemhet I and his son
Sesostris I had introduced a series of careful measures to reduce
the independence of the hereditary barons of the nomes, the

administrative districts, of the Nile valley. They established in
each nome a taxation officer, responsible to the crown, to super­
vise the collection and transmission of taxes, although the actual

collection was still in the hands of the barons. The introduction
of a census at fifteen-year intervals reduced the possibilities of
graft in the tax returns, while the appointment of a board of ten

judges responsible to the head of the civil service, the vezir,
also served to curb the power of the nobles.
The present lifetime had on the whole been a peaceful time

for the people of Egypt. Sesostris I had died in 1927 b.c., when
those born in 1930 were scarcely more than babes in arms, and
they had grown to manhood during the thirty-two-year reign

of his son Amenemhet II. While Abram in Ur and later in Harran
had been organizing his caravans and raiding his neighbors’
caravans along the trade routes of Mesopotamia and the Syrian

desert, Amenemhet was developing the copper mines of the Sinai
peninsula and the gold mines of the eastern Sudan, a region con­
quered by his grandfather fifty years before. He sent trading

expeditions to Punt at the southern end of the Red Sea, and he
had commercial attaches in the growing cities along the Leba­
nese coast.

Amenemhet II died in 1895 b.c., when Abram, in Harran,
was thirty-five, and was succeeded by his son Sesostris II. Egypt
is now strong and wealthy, with a centralized government which

itself engaged in the production and exchange of raw materials
and manufactured goods. The ships of Sesostris II sailed the
length of the Red Sea and the Levant coast, as far north as Ugarit,

a thriving coastal town well north of the Lebanon. Ugarit is less
than two hundred miles from Harran, and Abram probably
visited it frequently, along the trade route by way of Carchemish
and Aleppo and Alalakh.

It is not impossible that Abram had himself visited Egypt in
his youth. Certainly the Amorite tribes were spreading westward

as well as eastward, and it is during Abram’s lifetime that they