Page 226 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Resistance Movement 187
[1580-1510 B-c-]
though not always a completely easy peace. The Hyksos pre­
tender to the northeast held his hand and before the end of
Amenhotep’s reign had even officially given up any claim to
Egypt. The pharaoh showed himself regularly, as was fitting, at
the head of his army, and twice even crossed his frontiers. For it
is the duty of a divine pharaoh to spread the fear of Amon to the

unenlightened. One of the campaigns was against the Sudan,
where the tribes had been restive and had raided Egyptian terri­
tory; Amenhotep defeated a Nubian army there and captured its
chief. Some years later he campaigned in the western desert,
deep into Libya, and met no organized resistance from the

small principalities along the coast or the grazing tribes of the
interior. Otherwise he kept the peace, with a well-equipped
army and a watchful eye in the direction of Syria.
It was an uneventful twenty years. But of course for the men
and women who had been born in 1580 b.c. it was the most im­
portant twenty years of their lives, the period when they grew

from being young men and women of twenty-two to being mid­
dle-aged men and women of forty-two. It was the time when
their families were growing up, and when they themselves made
either a success or a failure of their lives.

For most of them success or failure was measured in unambi­
tious terms. To be a success in Egypt involved no more than living
no worse than your parents had lived before you, tilling your
landlord’s fields or keeping your family shop, bringing up your
children to reverence and to be favored by the gods, and bury­
ing your parents, when their time came, in a decent grave in the

cemetery, with all the ordained ceremonial which would ensure
that they safely reached the hereafter to which you yourself
would in your turn come.
But there were some of this generation who, after their

turbulent youth, had greater ambitions and a more restless seek­
ing after this world’s goods. Now that the Egyptians were again
masters in their own house and peace reigned along the frontiers,
there was a considerable increase in the volume of overseas
trade. There was much rebuilding after the wars, and a ready
market for imported luxuries sprang up among the new no­

bility and the prosperous middle classes. The merchants, them­