Page 274 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1510-144° B-c-] The Amber Route 22,1
and he had completely lived down the tale of his years of cap­

tive idleness in Hatshepsut’s palace.
These years had seen no diminution in the prosperity of the
Mediterranean peoples, and even the Egyptian campaigns in
Syria had rarely interfered with the free passage of trade.
Rather the reverse, for the capture of the revolted cities brought
much stored-up wealth into circulation, and gave at the same

time a great impetus to the slave trade.
Ships plied the Mediterranean and the northern European
waters in undiminished numbers, and the river routes across Eu­
rope carried ever larger quantities of bronze to the developing

metal industries of the north. Enterprising traders even pushed
deep into Russia and into central Africa, exchanging the Egyp­
tian glass beads for ivory and furs.
The sailors who had spent their boyhood around 1500 b.c.
in the village on the coast of Sweden were—such of them as still
lived—scattered over the world. They belonged now to the older

generation. They were over fifty, and most of them had made
their fortunes. They were tiring of the sea, and those who had
not found abiding homes and raised families elsewhere now be­
gan to think longingly of their homeland in the north. More and

more of them began to make their way northward across and
around Europe, with their caravans or ships loaded with the pro­
ceeds of a lifetime at sea converted to the ready currency of man­
ufactured goods of bronze or gold.
One at least of them chanced to be present at the rebuilding
of Stonehenge. Coasting along the Britanny coast, he heard ru­

mors of a stone-freighting job farther north and, always on the
lookout for a short haul to cover sailing costs, he followed the
rumor, taking a number of Breton stonemasons, too, as passen­
gers. The report proved ill-founded. When the first stone temple

had been built on the holy site, two hundred years and more
ago, the stones had indeed been brought by sea, across the Bris­
tol Channel from south Wales. And it was this tradition which
had inspired the rumors. But the new and enlarged temple now
going up, while incorporating the Welsh stones, was otherwise
to be built of the local sandstone blocks which lay scattered over