Page 357 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

3°4 Bronze and Iron [1300-1230 b.c.]

to settle. They had occupied a good portion of the coast of Libya
and seemed bent on establishing a kingdom there on the western
flank of Egypt.
When the men of Canaan whose lifetime we are following
were about thirty, and the battle of Cadesh was an already dim-
ming memory of their youth (as far behind them as the end of

the Second World War is behind us), the situation drastically
altered along the demarcation line where Canaan was divided
into two states and the two world powers faced each other.
Some six years ago the Great King Muwatallis had died, and
behind the curtain of iron maintained by the iron-armed divi­
sions of the Hittite army there had been a struggle for political
power and the leadership of the empire. Since the Great King
had withdrawn to his northern realm after Cadesh, the conduct

of the Egyptian war had been in the hands of his brother Hattusi-
lis, the viceroy of the eastern regions of the Hittite realm. And
when Muwatallis’s son Urhi-Teshub succeeded his father,
Hattusilis tried first to use him as a puppet and then, finding the
young king too independently minded, had deposed him and
had himself assumed the throne.

Everyone expected that Hattusilis III would take the offen­
sive against Egypt. The Kassite king of Babylon, Kadushman-
Turgu, with his eye on the vigorous king of Assyria, Shalmaneser,
even went so far as to offer his assistance against Egypt.
Thus it came as somewhat of a shock when the news spread
in 1269 b.c. that the Egyptians and the Hittites were negotiating.
Before the year was out, a peace settlement and a pact of mutual

assistance had been engraved on silver between them. For in
truth both Barneses and Hattusilis were tired of the costly and
inconclusive division of the world into opposing spheres of in­
terest. It was doing them no good, and was encouraging the rise
of other potential enemies in their rear and on their flanks.
Barneses was worried by the sea raiders in Libya, and even by the

desert raiders in Sinai. And Hattusilis needed no reminder from
Babylon to keep an eye on Shalmaneser of Assyria.
The men of Canaan were not informed of the terms of the
treaty between the two monarchs, still less of the political factors
behind it. But they were immediately affected by the reduction