Page 421 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

inow it echoed to the clash and rumble of an Assyrian army
marching north. z
The central lands of Great Hatti had long been in the hands

of the Phrygians, and now the coup de grace was to be given to
the southern lands which still called themselves Hittite. Halfway
to Hattusas, a hundred eighty miles along the Royal Road, lay

Kanesh and Kumana, the last strongholds of the Hittites. And a
week’s march and a swift assault now placed them in the hands of
the Assyrian king. There was an old tradition that Assyrians had
once lived and traded at Kanesh, seven or eight hundred years

ago, before ever the Hittite empire had existed. And here Tiglath-
pileser laid, with some ceremony, the western boundary stone of
his empire, on the very edge of Phrygian territory. And then he

turned south, to Ugarit and the Mediterranean.
It was with awe that the Assyrian soldiers looked out over
the limitless blue waters of the Upper Sea. They had been

brought up on tales of the exploits of the legendary Samsi-Adad,
who seven hundred years before (equivalent to the time of the
Crusades for us) had led his Assyrians to the shores of the Upper

Sea. Now, for the first time since those heroic days, an Assyrian
army could again dip its standards in the Mediterranean. In
triumph they marched south, to receive the submission of the

cities of the formerly Hittite Levant.
The campaigning season was well advanced, and Tiglath-
pileser returned home with his regiments of household guards.

But for once the bulk of the army remained, to winter in the
coastal cities. At Ugarit and Tyre and Arvad, at Byblos and
Beirut and Sidon, the Assyrian officers quartered themselves on

the richer merchants, keeping their companies handy in requisi­
tioned barracks and warehouses. On the whole they were well
received, for the coastal cities were accustomed to entertaining

strangers and took a foreign occupation in their stride, providing
it did not interfere with business. And the Assyrians had money
in their pockets and soon learned to spend it.
The middle-aged Assyrian officers, seated at the tables of

their hosts, or drinking resined wine in the harbor taverns, found
themselves in a new world, their horizons broadening daily. They
met new races, Egyptians and Greeks and Philistines, and heard