Page 351 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

But business with the north went on as usual, and traders
passing down the coast brought news of similar preparations be­
ing made in the part of the country held by the Hittites. There too
Muwatallis, the Great King, was amassing troops, regular iron-

sworded regiments of the Hittite army, squadrons of the heavy
iron-tired chariots, and companies of mercenaries from all the
peripheral states of Asia Minor. News of the coming trial of

strength had spread abroad, and companies of freebooters were
even arriving by their long ships from the more distant parts of
Europe to take part, on one side or the other, in the struggle that

would decide the supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean.
Some of the privateers came into Ascalon, and the boys of
the town, who thought they knew all the peoples of the world,

had new names and races to add to their list. Cretans and
Achaeans they had met before, and occasional crews of Sicilians
and Spaniards, and even, among these crews, a man or two of

the flaxen-haired races who lived out on the shores of the north
Atlantic. But these were none of them. They called themselves
Shardanians and Dardanians and Philistines and Tekelians, and

they were big, fair, brown-haired warriors with amber-mounted
hilts to their long bronze swords. While the captains bargained
for their sevices with the Egyptian district commander, the

fighting men roamed the streets with predatory eyes on the
goods of the bazaars and on the girls of the town.
It was the boys of the town, however, who attached them­

selves to the newcomers as guides, and made themselves ap­
proximately understood in the broken Achaean that both could
speak after a fashion. They learned that these strangers were from

inland Europe, from the headwaters of the great river called the
Danube. That was the bronze-working region, and there was a
large and growing population there, too large for the country

to feed. Therefore, many of them had banded together and struck
down the amber route to the Adriatic, and down the Danube to
the Black Sea, and across the mountains to northern Greece and

Albania. They had been fortune seekers when they left their
homeland, and it looked now as though Canaan was a good place

to make one’s fortune. In the meantime they could draw a
good ration of barley and fish and cheese as mercenaries to the