Page 209 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

pluck their chestnuts out or tne lire.
The war chariots of the Hittites swept down the Euphrates
valley in controlled formation, with scouts ahead and to either

side. It was a dash of five hundred miles from Aleppo to Babylon,
almost twice the distance from Hattusas to Aleppo, and through

hostile, or potentially hostile, country all the way. It could only
succeed by virtue of surprise, and through the ability of the
horsemen to live off the country. But along the Euphrates there

was fodder and water enough and to spare, and the army took
its supplies where it found them. In less than three weeks the

Hittite striking force appeared completely unannounced at the
gates of Babylon.

There was no time to prepare defenses. The walls of Babylon
had, of course, been kept in repair, but King Samsi-ditana had

no standing army of any size, and it was too late to mobilize
his conscripts from the fields. The battle for the gates was sharp
and fierce, and then the invaders were in the streets. Before

evening fell, Babylon was ablaze and the Hittites in control of
the city.

The year is 1595 b.c., and Mursilis (if we may assume for the
purpose of this chapter that he was born in 1650—it cannot be
very far out) is now fifty-five years old. Exactly three hundred

years have passed since Sumu-abum founded the Amorite con­
federacy with Babylon as its center. (As long a period has

elapsed since the Restoration of Charles II. The great days when
Hammurabi had carried the arms of Babylonia to victory and

ruled from the Turkish mountains to the Persian Gulf are as far
in the past as the American War of Independence.) During all

these three hundred years Babylon had never fallen to a
foreign foe. Old men could remember their grandfathers telling
them how, in their boyhood, the Kassites had swept down from

the Persian mountains and threatened the city. But now the

Kassites peacefully farmed their lands east of the Tigris; their
nominal rulers, up in the mountains, showed no desire for further
expansion, and in any case had enough to do manning their

eastern frontier against the warlike tribes (warlike and Indo-
European seemed synonyms these days) who had pushed in from