Page 295 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

passage of years brought no reconciliation. Many of the refugees
had lost their families in Crete, and still had no means of know­

ing whether their wives and sons and daughters had died in
the night of terror, or whether they were even now, years after,
eating out their hearts as slaves in the households and workshops
of Greece. There could be no peace between Achaean and Cre­

tan so long as such memories lay between.
But as the years passed, the exiles built up a new existence
for themselves. On the Lebanese coast they learned the Semitic

language of the Amorite inhabitants, and almost forgot their
own, though they met from time to time to recall in impassioned
or sentimental vein their lost motherland. They were beginning

to grow old now, these Cretans born in 1440 b.c., and their chil­
dren, now themselves grown men, could only dimly remember
the night flight from the burning city. Many of the younger gen­

eration of refugees no longer felt themselves Cretans, finding
more satisfaction in merging their identity with that of their new
country than in vain regrets for a land they had scarcely known
and to which they could not hope to return.

There was, in any case, enough to worry about in Syria, with­
out troubling with a lost cause in the Aegean. Amenhotep of

Egypt had just celebrated, with pomp, his thirty-fourth year as
pharaoh. But he was an old man, and clearly failing. To the north
a new king, called Suppiluliumas, had succeeded to the throne
of the Hittites. He had strengthened the fortifications of Hat-

tusas, his capital, and his army had already had clashes with the
Hurrians of Mitanni. But it was more serious nearer home. En­
couraged by the apparent weakness of the Egyptian overlord,

one of the princes in the interior of Syria, Aziru by name, had
risen in rebellion and was plundering the neighboring vassal
states. Although the mountains of the Lebanon lay between him

and the coast, there was always the danger that the revolt would
involve the coastal cities. The elderly merchants, who could re­
member the rupture of their trading connections forty and more

years ago when the old pharaoh’s father and grandfather had
taken ruthless revenge on the revolting cities of the Levant, and
who now saw the possibility of being personally involved in a
repetition, did all in their power to persuade their rulers to avoid