Page 407 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

344 Bronze and Iron [1160-1090 B.C.]

called themselves, and Medes, and half a dozen other tribes
besides. From Luristan, and from the borders of India, they were
pushing south towards the Persian Gulf. But unlike their cousins
in Asia Minor they were not, it seemed, anxious to try conclusions
with the old empires, and they had bypassed the eastern frontiers
of Elam. So one didn’t really know whether the new king in
Susa, Shilhak-Inshushinak, might not now try to regain Baby­
lonia. Really it was madness, said the Babylonian traders to
themselves, this mutual suspicion of Assyria and Babylonia.
Only in alliance could they hope to survive in these dangerous
times, and yet alliance seemed impossible, and would doubtless
only come when one of the two countries had conquered the
other.
The boys in Assur knew nothing of the anxious speculations
of the Babylonian traders, and cared less. They didn’t like
Babylonians, and that was that.
The children of Assyria did not, like their elders, regard the
times as dangerous. They had known nothing else in their short
lives, and even the reminiscences of their fathers concerned
little other than the struggles of rival kingdoms and the depre­
dations of roving nations of mountaineers in the north and
desert dwellers in the south. Since Tukulti-Ninurta, their great
king, had conquered Babylon ninety years before and been
murdered seven years later, there had been no peace; the old
days of the great empires, when Hittite and Egyptian had held
the Near East in balance, were nothing more than a fable to this
new generation. War was the natural state; whichever country
was the strongest campaigned almost yearly against its weaker
neighbors, and the only important aim in life was to be the
country that was strongest.
So there was no surprise in the minds of the ten-year-old
boys when the news came that the king of Elam had crossed
his western border with a large army and was burning crops
and villages along the lower Tigris. The main attack, of course,
was aimed towards Babylon, but the young men of Assyria were
called to their regiments all the same, and marched south, with
their bows on their backs, to strengthen the southern frontier.
They were needed. While one contingent of the Elamite