Page 321 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

° LA37U-I3<X) B.C.]
Assyria. Both parties were, after all, equally interested in the
revival of trade along the coasts of the Levant and in the easto™
Mediterranean in general. ™

The envoys could return with the desired treaty of friend­
ship—and the latest news, picked up in Aleppo, that a vassal

king had been established by Hittite arms in Mitanni. But within
the year other news came along the Great North Road. A pesti­
lence had broken out in the Hittite capital, and Suppiluliumas,
the Great King, had died, and his son and successor Arnuwandas
had not long survived him. Another of the innumerable sons of

Suppiluliumas had ascended the throne as Mursilis II, but he was
young and faced with an insurrection in western Asia Minor,
where the princes of Arzawa remembered their former inde­
pendence and revolted. It was believed that the powerful kings

of the Achaean confederacy were behind the revolt.
It looked for a while as though the north Syrian empire built
up by Suppiluliumas would disintegrate with his passing. And
indeed the old king of Assyria, Assur-uballit, struck at once into

Mitanni, advancing with his troops clean to the banks of the
Euphrates and the borders of the Hittite dependencies of Aleppo
and Carchemish. But the brothers of the new king, who ruled
these lands, stood firm while Mursilis campaigned in Arzawa.

And before the storm could break, Assur-uballit, too, died. By
1340, when Horemheb had been ruling in Egypt for five years
(and Ankhesenamon, now thirty, had been the same period in
retirement), there was at last peace in Syria, with none of the

great powers strong enough or united enough to venture on a
career of conquest. The merchants of the coastal towns breathed
easily, and began, hesitantly, to reopen the trade routes to the
interior. In increasing numbers ships from the Levant docked at

Avaris and the other delta ports, and trade and manufacture
flourished again in Egypt.
In the years that followed, the ex-queen in the palace, now
middle-aged, led a quiet existence, welcome after her stormy

childhood and brief years as reigning queen. And in the towns
and villages of Egypt a similar time of peace was no less welcome.
Family festivals celebrated marriages and the births of children,
and the yearly festivals of the gods followed one upon the other.