Page 205 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

166 The Argosies [1650-1580 b.c.]

rected towards the south, where they were moving in increasing
numbers into the plains of the upper Euphrates, the lands which
they had captured from the Amorites over a hundred years ago.
The Mitanni kings of the Hurrians were probably not too
pleased at the sudden rise of a great power among the former
conglomeration of small tribes in Asia Minor, but their envoys
to the court of Hattusilis protested friendship and pointed out the
advantages of presenting a common front towards the Amorites
to the south.
Hattusilis and his heir needed no exposition of the possibili­
ties which lay open to them in the southeast. They knew very well
the strength and weaknesses of the Semitic-speaking peoples who
held the immensely fertile and attractive plains and coastlands
to the south.
Far to the south lay the greatest Semitic power of all, the
Hyksos kingdom of north Egypt and Palestine. But the Hyksos
were tied up with a permanently rebellious population in Egypt
and had at this time (it is about 1620 b.c.) committed their
full strength to the task of finally conquering southern Egypt and
putting an end to the rival government “of all Egypt” in Thebes.
North and east of Palestine were the Amorite kingdoms, but
strategically their position was very different from what it had
been during the reign of Hammurabi a hundred years or so ago,
when they had presented a united front from the Mediterra­
nean to the Persian Gulf. Those that were left were, it is true, still
in a sort of alliance, of which the leading member was, as always,
Babylonia. In Babylon the great-great-great-grandson of Ham­
murabi, Samsi-ditana, had recently succeeded his father, but the
land was still held in the hundred-year-old stalemate resulting
from the presence of the Kassites in the territory of the former
Amorite kingdom of Eshnunna to the north. And between Baby­
lonia and the Amorite kingdoms of the Lebanon and Yamkhad
the natural route along the Euphrates was barred by the Hur­
rians, and communication went only by Human sufferance, or
by the desert route through Palmyra to the south.
Hattusilis had his eye on Yamkhad in particular. It lay im­
mediately to the south of his vassal state of Kizzuwatna and
comprised the rich plain between the upper Euphrates and the