Page 210 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

open as long as men could remember, and Kassites formed a con-
siderable proportion of the working population of Babylonia. To
the south lay the rebel states at the head of the Gulf, forming the

kingdom of the sea-lands. But they had seceded soon after
the death of Hammurabi, and no one really thought of them as
rebels any longer. They were a separate state, as they had been

for centuries before Hammurabi, and only hotheaded advocates
of a Greater Babylonia still asserted the divine right of the Baby­

lonian kings to rule old Sumer. Babylon had looked to the west,
where their fellow Amorites ruled as far as the Upper Sea, with
the realm of their relatives, the Hyksos kings of Palestine and

Egypt, to the south.
But now out of the west the storm had come, and great Baby­

lon was in flames, Samsi-ditana was slain, and a three-hundred-
year-old dynasty was no more. The people of Babylon, herded

into detention camps outside the walls, had nothing to look for­
ward to but the slave markets in faraway Asia Minor.

Mursilis, as he watched the heaps of booty mounting and
the cattle and prisoners being driven in, had other things to
think about. He was a long way from home, at the end of im­

possibly attenuated lines of communication. He could not hold
Babylon—nor had he ever intended to. His aim, to break the

power that could support a resistance movement in Yamkhad,
had been accomplished. The problem was now to extricate his
forces.

To the south of his line of retirement lay the Syrian desert,

the homeland of the Amorites. And if the kinsmen of the Baby­
lonians, the Hyksos from Palestine or the dimly known tribes of
Arabia, were to desire revenge they could attack from the south­

ern desert at any point on the return march. To the north lay
the Hurrians. He could expect no gratitude from them for the

removal of their principal rival in the east. Now that Babylon was
destroyed, they might well feel that the Hittites, too, would be
safest out of the way.

Weighing the dangers, Mursilis gave orders that the strong­

est flank guard should be stationed on the north.
It was well that he did so. When the smoking ruins of