Page 230 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

j-jggo-1510 b.c.] The Resistance Movement 191

daro, for centuries an open city, had been overrun; and the city
had been stormed and sacked.
One of the merchants took up the tale. He had been in
Mohenjo-daro, he said, with a party of Dilmun traders at the

time of the sack, and he had barely escaped with his life—and
two bags of carnelians. From the citadel he had seen the tall
blond warriors storm along the wide avenues, which might have
been built for chariots, spearing the panic-stricken civilians as
they scattered. The wise ones of the population had taken to the

fields at the onset, abandoning homes and possessions to the
invaders. Those who stayed to salvage something of their wealth
were struck down in the streets and left lying, still clutching
their tusks of ivory or boxes of jewelry. And those who sought
refuge in the underground chambers of the public wells survived
only until the invaders dismounted and, intoxicated with

slaughter, charged down the steps to complete the massacre.
The eyewitness had seen the smoke from the looted and burning
city staining the sky behind him for three whole days, as he
paddled down river in the boat in which he made his escape.
Now no more ships sailed to India from the Persian Gulf,

he said, and no more Indian goods would reach the markets of
the west. For the invaders were no lovers of cities. Unlike the
other Indo-European tribes, the Kassites and Hittites and
Hurrians who were now accepted powers in the world, these
Aryans left a wilderness where they passed, destroying rather

than conquering. The Indian market was definitely closed to
trade.
The merchants of Avaris listened respectfully, but cared
little for tales of recession in Ur and Dilmun. In Egypt trade was
booming as never before, in these twenty years of peace under

Amenhotep.
As Amenhotep grew older, there had been much speculation
about the succession. For all his three royal wives, pharaoh
had no official son. But his daughter by Ahotep, called Amose
after her grandfather, was now grown up, and the man she mar­

ried would be, through her, the natural candidate for the
throne. It had occasioned general satisfaction, therefore, when
the princess Amose had some years ago been married to prince