Page 365 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

3ia Bronze and Iron [1300-1230 b.c.]

was one of their oldest possessions. In the northwest, in Asia
Minor and in Greece and out in the Mediterranean generally,
things were going from bad to worse. The mid-Europeans, who
had first come down the amber route some fifty years ago and
taken to the sea, were by now a menace not merely to shipping
but to any land with a coastline. Apart from their settlements in
Libya, they had imposed themselves in force on many of the
coastal cities of Greece. They had even taken mighty Mycenae
itself, and their new dynasty there was organizing a confederacy
among both the old Greeks and the new settlers (who were
closely related, anyway, both in tongue and in race). And the sea
raiders had been stirring up trouble on the Aegean shores of
Asia Minor, in the Hittite province of Arzawa. The new king of
the Hittites, Tudhaliyas IV, who had succeeded his father
Hattusilis, had been forced to lead his armies into the west to re­
store order, leaving for a while his main interest, the temple he
was constructing outside Hattusas on the model of Rameses’s new
temple at Thebes.
The old freedom of the seas was a thing of the past, com­
plained the old men. Rarely now did the long-distance deep­
water craft come in from Greece and the Adriatic and the west,
and even the fine pottery of Crete and Mycenae was seldom on
the market and when it did come was correspondingly high in
price. Things were not as they had been in the good old days,
they said.
It seemed a sign that an era was ending when, in 1234 b.c.,
Rameses the Great died. And almost at the same time came the
news that Joshua, the Israeli leader, was dead. Rameses, who
had lived to be over ninety, was succeeded by his eldest surviving
son—his thirteenth—Merenptah. But there was no designated
successor to Joshua. The component tribes of the Israeli con­
federacy showed signs of splitting up, and their Amorite subjects
took the opportunity to rise in revolt and to seize many of the
cities which they had formerly owned. In this they were actively
encouraged by the princes of the Canaan shore.
The Jebusites of Jerusalem, who for years had maintained
their precarious independence within the Israeli-occupied
area, in secret organized the revolt, and city after city succeeded