Page 161 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

132 The Chariots [1720-1650 B.C.]

the villagers whenever the patrols of the occupying power passed
through. But gradually the district emptied, as the refugees
drifted away towards their homes, moving by night and lying up
by day.
The men who straggled back to the village by the levee were
very different from the youths who had marched away in the au­
tumn dawn. They were thinner, more mature—and very bitter.
And the world to which they returned was very different too.
There were no more convivial evenings at the inn. The troops
from Canaan who passed through, in increasing numbers, were
now quartered on the houses of the village, an imposition which
the villagers, for the most part farm laborers and river fishermen
living never very far from the level of bare subsistence, found
very hard to bear. Particularly as the taxes on produce were in­
creased the following year. The merchants still stayed at the inn,
of course, and, after a “dead” period immediately following the
conquest, trade had picked up again and was, if anything,
greater than it had been before. But the men of the village no
longer felt inclined to chat with casual strangers and they kept
away from the inn. Besides, the merchants were now for the most
part Canaanites, or Levantines from the trading cities along the
Syrian coast, cities which had once been practically Egyptian. An
increasing number of the traders, however, were of the tribes of
Abraham, which now occupied a rather special position. For they
were, of course, Amorites, and therefore reckoned officially as be­
longing to the conquering race. But they had lived in Egypt for
a generation, spoke Egyptian as easily as their own Semitic
tongue, and were to some degree accepted by the conquered
Egyptians. They therefore drifted naturally into trade between
north Egypt and the neighboring Asian lands. Many of them, too,
were used as go-betweens by the conquerors, as interpreters and
tax collectors and overseers of forced-labor gangs. They were not
exactly popular.
But the conquerors themselves were hated with a bitter, im­
potent hatred (a hatred which was to reverberate down the cen­
turies). They made no attempt to become Egyptian; on the con­
trary they clearly regarded northern Egypt as a subject province
of their true homeland of Canaan. Some years after their con­