Page 284 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1440-137° ®*cj The Fall of the Sea Kings 231

Mesopotamia, from the city of Babylon itself as far as the head
of the Persian Gulf. To the north and east the land at the foot
of the Persian mountains was held by the people of the moun­
tains, the Kassites. And now news came along the trade route
that the Kassites had emerged in strength from their mountains
and had taken Babylon and the whole Babylonian kingdom. And
now a Kassite king sat upon the throne of Hammurabi. The queen
of the east had fallen to the mountaineers of the north.
To the Cretans the fall of a distant city to a distant con­
queror was of little practical significance—and the ten-year-old
children scarcely grasped what had happened at all. The Achae­
ans of the harbor town, though, made much of it. They resur­
rected the old legend that their ancestors five or six hundred
years ago had inhabited the same land, north of the Caucasus,
as the ancestors of the Kassite kings, and from there had spread
out as conquerors over the whole of Europe and the Middle East.
For a while they acted as though it was they who—by proxy—
had conquered Babylon, and carried themselves with an arro­
gance that rather amused the less farsighted of the Cretans. But
as the caravans continued to come through without interruption
along the Euphrates route, it became clear that the change of
rulers in Mesopotamia in fact changed nothing except the rulers.
And Greeks and Cretans alike turned again to the serious busi­
ness of making money and enjoying life.
The following years brought matters of more immediate
concern to the children. As they reached the age of puberty they
became eligible for initiation into the mysteries of Cretan reli­
gion. They paid their first visits to the caves in the hills, where
the gods and goddesses of the underworld ruled. And there
they made their first offerings and assumed the costume, and re­
sponsibilities and privileges, of manhood and womanhood.
The most eagerly anticipated privilege was that of being al­
lowed to attend the annual festival of the bulls. It was the most
colorful spectacle of the whole year, attended by everyone, Cre­
tan and foreign, with Minos himself in the royal enclosure with
the ladies and gentlemen of the court and the ambassadors and
visiting princes. There was an air of thrilled expectation around
the arena as the preliminary rites of propitiation were performed