Page 182 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Wide View (I) *43

through the eyes of those that lived it, we can see that, if Ham­
murabi had moved faster to organize the Amorites into a single
kingdom, the “irresistible march” of the Indo-European speakers
might well have been halted and reversed in the mountains of
Turkey and Persia.
In a way, the Hyksos invasion of Egypt is the latest example
of Amorite expansion, and shows just how much life and
strength and initiative is to be found among the Semitic-speaking
peoples of this period. Had the Hurrians been weaker and Egypt
stronger (which is much the same as saying, had Queen Sebe-
knefrure, a hundred years earlier, not married a commoner and
plunged Egypt into fifty years of civil war), the strength of the
Amorites might well have been turned north rather than south,
and even then reversed the trend of Indo-European expansion.
But we have represented the Hyksos as being themselves
partly Indo-European. There is every reason to believe this to be
the case, and the fact illustrates a trap that it is very necessary
to avoid. Just as easy as it is to talk about trends and movements,
so is it to talk about “races,” as though they meant something.
Let me make it clear that there is no question here of an “Indo-
European race” spreading southward and clashing with a “Se­
mitic race” in the Near East. “Semitic” and “Indo-European” are
names of two groups of languages, the various languages within
each group being so closely related as to suggest a common ori­
gin. The original Semitic language would appear to have devel­
oped in north Arabia, the place of origin of the Amorites, and it
is therefore possible to stretch a point and to call the original
Amorite invaders a Semitic people. Similarly the original Indo-
European language appears to have been spoken by the horse­
men of the Pontic steppes (it is one of those things which cannot
be proven), and these horsemen might perhaps not too im­
properly be called an Indo-European people. Even at that, it
would be most unwise to use the term “race,” since even within
their countries of origin the Amorites and the battle-ax horse­
men were probably a mixture of many races.
In any case, both peoples left their homeland some three
hundred fifty years ago. And much has happened to them since.
The Hurrians and Kassites who came down from the mountains