Page 184 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

1 he Wide view (ij
The case was no different with the Amorites. In south Meso­
potamia they settled among a population of mixed Semitic,
Elamite, and Sumerian speakers; in north Mesopotamia and

Syria, among a population of mixed Semitic-speaking and “Asian”
origin. In the course of the twelve generations which is three
hundred fifty years they must have completely lost whatever ra­
cial purity they may have started with. If it had been possible to

disentangle the complicated racial origins of a typical Human
and a typical Amorite army such as must often have faced each
other on the banks of the northern Euphrates during these
years, both armies would probably have been proved to be pre­

dominantly “Asian” in origin—in race and in physical appear­
ance indistinguishable from each other.
They would not fight each other any less fiercely for that.
They would think of themselves as Amorites and Hurrians—
and the charioteers of the north, for all their “Asian” mothers and

grandmothers, would feel themselves a race apart from both and
akin to the battle-ax peoples beyond the Rhine and the Aryans
beyond the Indus.
The battle-ax people beyond the Rhine were by now no more

pure-bred “Indo-Europeans” than were the rulers of the Hurrians.
Over the length and breadth of Europe five major ways of life
were in process of coming to terms with each other, and in the
process integration and disintegration were the order of the day.

Archaeologically the picture is fairly clear, but the absence of
written documents induces a mental block, hindering the trans­
lation of the archaeological record into history. The people who
crossed the Alps from central Germany into Switzerland were no

less real than the people who crossed the Zagros from Luristan
into Mesopotamia. But the latter we know called themselves Kas-
sites, and they immediately become in our minds a people. The
former we have to be content to call Saxo-Thuringians, and they

obstinately remain a “culture” rather than a people and their
leader refuses to come into focus at all. Of course, we know noth­
ing about him at all—but we know nothing about Gandash ei­
ther, except accidentally his name. And given a name we can

imagine a personality.
Of the five ways of life that now were reacting upon each