Page 287 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

heads of families and reckoning up of dowries and bride prices.
And as often as not youth had its way in the end, for the Cretans

were a lighthearted extrovert people, and the parents spoiled
their children shamelessly.
But even so it was found prudent in quite a number of fam­
ilies to send the young men abroad for a while. They should gain

a little more experience of the world, explained their parents,
before they settled down for good to married life and the fam­
ily business. And they arrived, with letters of introduction to
agents and branch managers and business associates, in Egypt and

Byblos and Ugarit, in Troy and Mycenae and Miletus. And the
agents and associates welcomed them with many expressions of
good will, and sent them off as soon as feasible, with their own
younger sons as guides—and with letters of introduction to sub­

agents—on a nice long sightseeing tour “to get the feel of the
markets.”
More than one of the young merchant princes of Crete, just
out of their teens, was thus in Egypt in 1420 b.c. when Amenho­

tep II died. They understood nothing of Egyptian politics or royal
protocol, and perhaps never really grasped why there was so
much discussion around the succession of Amenhotep’s eldest son
as Thothmes IV. Their Egyptian hosts explained carefully that

the young prince was of course son of the previous pharaoh, but
not by his divine wife and sister Merit-Amon, but by a merely
human wife, princess Tiaa. So much the Cretans, with their own
matriarchal traditions, could to some degree understand. But

when it came to the point that Thothmes’s succession was sup­
ported by the priests of the sun-god Ra at his city near Memphis
but opposed by the priests of the sun-god Amon in Thebes, they

gave up. A multiplicity of sun-gods sounded very like blasphemy,
and rival priesthoods contending for influence over the king was
something outside their experience. They had simply not the
background, said their hosts, to appreciate that the opposition
between the priestly colleges was in fact a reawakening of the

age-old rivalry between north and south Egypt, between the two
capitals of Memphis and Thebes. And they sent their guests out

to see the pyramids. ...
There they were indeed impressed, overawed by the colos-