Page 153 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

LI790-1720 B.C.J
jl V>HU/ tt/LO
as a fact. With the horses acquired by the Babylonians had come
renegade Kassite grooms, and now others of their people drifted
over the frontier between the two powers, taking service as labor-

eis in the towns and harvesters in the fields. Many of the sol­
diers who had served Hammurabi and who had taken part in the
battle that saved Babylon from the first Kassite onslaught now
found themselves, as elderly landowners, employing their former
enemies on their estates.

Again the south revolted. In 1736 Iluma-ilu, a noble of the
ancient royal family of Isin, which had lost its throne to the
kings of Larsa over sixty years ago, claimed the kingship of the

south and was accepted by the cities along the Persian Gulf.
Samsu-iluna of Babylon raised another army and marched down
the river to meet him. And this time the spirit of Sumerian inde­
pendence defeated the Babylonian king. Although he could and
did attack and capture the revolting cities, and even sacked the

venerable city of Ur, the army of the rebels was a match for him.
He was attacked in turn, and driven back, even beyond Ham­
murabi’s frontier town of Nippur. And there he was forced to re­

fortify a frontier line originally built by his great-great-great­
grandfather ovei* a hundred years before.
The Babylonians born in 1790 b.c., now sixty years old,
looked back on an empire which had risen and fallen within their

lifetime. They had, it seemed to them, fought in vain under their
great general. The borders of Babylonia lay where they had lain
before their first campaign. To the south the new dynasty of the
sea-lands held the old realm of Larsa. To the north Assyria was

risen again, and the kingdom of the “man of Eshnunna” was
firmly in Kassite hands. Only Mari remained of their conquests,
and beyond Mari the Hurrians held the upper Euphrates in ever-

increasing strength.
The situation was obviously unstable, and sooner or later
must break out into a decisive war. The sixty-year-old strategists
argued fiercely that only a united Mesopotamia could hope to

hold out against the chariot-led armies to the east and the west.
Divided as they were, Assyria was bound to fall to the Hurrians,
Babylonia to the Kassites, and Sumer to Elam. The position could

not possibly remain static.