Page 320 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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regime at home and peace abroad were absolutely necessary. A
start was made by reopening the state-controlled trade with
Punt to the south, and once more, convoys sailed the coasts of
Africa, down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. The

northern trade could recover of itself, once relations with the
new northern powers were stabilized. And Horemheb sent his
plenipotentiaries to negotiate with Suppiluliumas.
The envoys left the delta behind them and crossed the
desert of Sinai, with its nomad shepherds grazing the hills south

of the great coast road. They passed the great frontier fortresses
at Sharuhen and Gaza, and continued through the fiercely in­
dependent kingdoms of the Canaanites, lands which less than
thirty-five years ago had been part of the Egyptian empire, and

which still remembered that their forefathers had once con­
quered Egypt. Farther north they went by the rich coastal cities,
Tyre and Sidon, Beirut and Byblos, cities still nominally subject
to tlie old king Aziru in the interior but much more interested
in the flourishing trade with the Achaeans of Greece, Crete, and

Asia Minor. (The older-established trading houses had conven­
iently forgotten that the fathers of these same Achaeans had
once plundered and conquered Crete, whence their own fathers
had come.) And a little farther north, still well within former

Egyptian territory, they reached the outposts of the Hittite
empire in the former realm of Yamkhad, ruled from Aleppo by
the son of the Great King. There they were given an escort, and
passed on into the mountains of Asia Minor, up the Great North

Road to Hattusas. At Aleppo they had heard of the war going on
farther east, where the forces of another of the sons of Sup­
piluliumas, Piyassilis of Carchemish, were supporting a son of
the murdered king Tushratta of Mitanni in a bid to oust his

rival, Shutarna, from the throne of that land.
They found the Great King within his mighty fortified capi­
tal of Hattusas. Suppiluliumas was by now an elderly man and
quite prepared to make a treaty of friendship with Egypt, par­
ticularly as this would recognize his rule over north Syria and

leave him free to settle the affairs of Mitanni as he chose, and to
deploy his main forces in the southeast against Assur-uballit of