Page 412 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1160-1090 B.C.] The Wolf on the Fold 349

with them their new riding beast, the camel. The peculiarity
about the camel was that it could go for days without water. Thus
the Aramaeans had the freedom of the desert in a way that the
Amorites, who had come the same way in the generations before
Hammurabi, had never had. They could, and did, appear any­
where out of the waterless wastes, attack a caravan far from the
nearest garrison, and disappear again with no possibility of pur­
suit. And now, secure in their increasing numbers, they were
taking advantage of the preoccupation of Babylon and Assyria
with Elam to settle down around the oases along and to the south
of the Euphrates route. Flourishing Aramaean principalities were
already springing up at Palmyra and Damascus, new towns
which promised to dominate completely the southern trade route
from sea to sea. And they were pushing into the old Mitanni
lands north of the Euphrates, dangerously close to the northern
trade route which was to the Assyrians the lifeline towards the
west. For by this route came the silver on which their currency
was based, and the iron which was becoming more and more
important to their economy.
In this period of armed peace and armed commerce came the
great news that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had the Elamites on
the run. It was a blazing July, when even the uplands of Assyria
lay parched and yellow beneath the sun, that Nebuchadnezzar
took the field in the sweltering humidity of lower Mesopotamia.
And this time the Elamites broke before his attack. The Babylo­
nian envoys who brought the news to Assur read out in the market
places Nebuchadnezzar’s own graphic dispatch telling how the
Babylonian army had pursued the enemy, “with the road like a
furnace underfoot, and the blades of their weapons too hot to
touch”; how they had smitten the rallying Elamites at the Karun
river, well within enemy country; how Hulteludish, king of Elam,
had been slain in flight; and how his capital, Susa, had been taken
and sacked. And the statue of the god of Babylon, Marduk, which
had been carried off in triumph to Susa by Shutruk-Nahhunte
thirty years before, was in triumph borne back to its temple in
Babylon.
The Assyrians were not as enthusiastic over the victory as
they might have been. That their lost provinces should be liber-

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