Page 180 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Wide View (I) 141

immediate hearsay, from having talked to people who had lived
through them. The events of perhaps the two preceding chapters
were inaccurately known, idealized, transposed, and perverted;
but they were history, in the sense that they were known to have
occurred. Anything that happened more than three chapters ago
is largely to be regarded as legend, of at least doubtful authen­
ticity. And anything that appears in the next and following chap­
ters has not yet happened.
Thus we have already, a third of our way through the Sec­
ond Millennium b.c., reached the point where the events of the
first lifetime of the millennium are legendary, their main features
known but known as romantic stories rather than as real hap­
pened events.
At the time of Gandash, a hundred years ago now, they were
closer and more real. He probably knew the history of his peo­
ple, could trace his family tree and his tribal connections back
to their original home in south Russia. He was almost certainly
aware, not only that his own ancestors (from approximately his

great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on) had gradually
moved southwards, but also that related people—related in the
sense of blood-brotherhood or descent from a mythical common
ancestor—had moved in other directions. He would know the dis­
tance they had gone, and would in fact have a fair knowledge
of the area held by these interrelated Indo-European speakers,
the battle-ax peoples.
So the “trend” was to that degree a reality for him. Tribal
and intertribal “history” would be full of the exploits of other
chieftains moving ever farther from the original homeland; if he
wished to emulate them there was only one thing he could do,
only one direction he could go. What we see as a “trend” he
would be more likely to see as a “fashion” or as a legitimate am­
bition or as the path of glory. A man of honor could do nothing
else.
But what he could not, of course, know, is whether he would
succeed. His was after all not the only “trend.”
Samsu-iluna, Hammurabi’s son and the ruler of Babylonia at
the time when the Kassites came down, would hardly have as
clear a picture as the Kassite chieftain of the scope and prog­