Page 405 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

342 Bronze and Iron [1160-1090 b.c.]

potamia intact for nearly three hundred years while Babylon
lay supine beneath the foreign yoke of the Kassites. It was only
five years since the Kassite kings had been driven from the
throne of Hammurabi, and even that had not occurred through
any action of the Babylonians themselves, but by the intervention
of the king of Elam.
The Babylonians were not convinced. It rather amazed them
to meet a people who still regarded the Kassites as foreign new­
comers. They had been in Babylon for nearly five hundred years,
and they were still there. Apart from the language, they could

not be distinguished from “native” Babylonians, and most
of them talked more Babylonian than Kassite anyway. Their
gods and their dress and their customs were long ago absorbed
into Babylon, and most Babylonians had a Kassite grandmother
tucked away somewhere, and were by no means ashamed of it.
As for Elam, admittedly they had called in Shutruk-Nahhunte
of Elam to help them overthrow the Kassite kings (who had re­

tained their language and family fairly unmixed), but the
Elamite king had returned to his country four years ago, and
the king in Babylon was as Semitic as even an Assyrian could
wish. Why, even though he lived in Babylon he had begun to
call his family the Second Dynasty of Isin, to recall the almost
legendary kings of Isin who, in the days before the great Ham­
murabi, had fought the Elamite kings of Larsa, Warad-Sin and
Rim-Sin.
Babylonians and Assyrians always quarreled, whenever they

met. It was too easy for them. For they were two people di­
vided by the same language. The small boys who were growing
up in Nineveh and Assur between 1160 and 1150 b.c. would troop
behind any Babylonian they saw in the streets, caricaturing
as loudly as they dared the drawl and the soft consonants with
which the southerners spoke their language. And the Babylonians
winced at the harsh dialect and brash manners of the northerners,
regretting the necessity of having to come upriver to trade their

goods against the cattle and hides and wheat of Assyria, and
looking forward to their return to the civilized life of their towns
and date plantations.
They had not of course been entirely honest about Elam.