Page 409 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

34^ Bronze and Iron [1160—1090 b.c.]

all the way to the Persian Gulf. Though Babylon had withstood
the siege, the old cities of Ur and Eridu on the lower Euphrates
had fallen to Elam.
The boys of Assur grew to manhood with Elam an ever­
present—and often visible—threat to the southward. The lost
provinces were not to be forgotten, for many of their fathers had
owned farms in the river valley, and Assur itself was full of
refugees, reduced to menial occupations and even to debt slavery,
who once had been free landowners. And almost yearly the
Elamite occupation troops raided north, to reap crops which
they had not sown and to take slaves and cattle.
In their early teens the youths were conscripted to their
military service, learning to handle the bow and the slingshot
and the throwing spear, training in close-quarter fighting with
shield and sword and battle-ax. And the sons of the nobility
joined the chariotry, as was their privilege. Mostly their weapons
were still of bronze, but more and more iron was coming in by
devious means from the west. The great ironworks in Asia Minor
were now in the hands of the Moski and the Phrygians, but
the iron masters were still, of course, Hittites of the old stock,
who took a pride in circumventing the Phrygian embargo on
iron exports.
While some of the young Assyrians joined the regular army,
most served only during the campaigning months of summer,
between sowing and harvest. The rest of the year they plied
their trades, learning from their fathers and elder brothers the
occupation to which by family tradition they belonged. For nine
months of the year they were farmers or ferrymen, carpenters or
tanners, goldsmiths or merchants or millers, greengrocers or cob­
blers or bankers. But for three months they were all soldiers.
And these three months, of sweltering marches over the dusty
sun-parched foothills, of sharp skirmishes and sudden ambushes,
of the scared exhilaration of the massed battleline, and of the
cool nights by the bivouac fires, replete with millet cakes warm
from the embers, brought a sense of comradeship and purpose
unknown in the nine months of civil life. The young soldiers,
combing their incipient beards in the hope of inducing the
tight curls of the spade beards of the seasoned warriors, talked