Page 296 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

a break with Egypt. Their rulers indeed had no desire, after forty
years of profitable vassalage, to mix in political adventures, and

they sent urgent letters to Amenhotep protesting their loyalty and
requesting protection.
Amenhotep, despite his failing strength, answered their
prayer. Though too ill to lead his troops in person, as was a phar­

aoh’s duty and privilege, he sent an army which, without a battle,
drove Aziru into the desert. The elderly exiles of Byblos and the
other coastal cities breathed easily again.
But two years later came news that Amenhotep III was dead,

and that his son had been proclaimed pharaoh as Amenhotep IV.
And the new pharaoh was only eleven years old.
It is 1377 b.c. Those of the older generation of Cretan exiles

who still lived were well into their sixties. They looked into the
past rather than into the future, back to the golden age of their
youth when the world was at peace and Knossos the center of the

world. The future, indeed, looked black. The peace of the seas
had fallen with Knossos, and it began to look increasingly doubt­
ful whether Egypt could, or would, keep the peace on land. As

the years went by, the more conservative of the citizens of the
Levant coast had had high hopes that the young pharaoh, their
overlord, would reveal with growth to manhood the old spirit
of his dynasty and, by a show of force in Syria, confirm the do­

minion of Egypt there against the enemies threatening the coun­
try from within and without. But it became clear that the young
Amenhotep was completely under the influence of his mother,

Queen Teie, and it was even rumored that he had involved him­
self in strife with the priesthood at home.
As the Cretan refugees reached their seventieth year, there

were already reports that Aziru had resumed his plundering,
while the army of Suppiluliumas, the Great King of Hatti, was in
Yamkhad, at the gates of Syria. In their lifetime they had seen

the queen of the east and the queen of the west, Babylon and
Knossos, fall to a northern foe, and now a third foe from the
north overshadowed them. Surely great Egypt, though, could
stem the tide that seemed everywhere to be sweeping south­
ward.