Page 423 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Libyans, incidentally—were taxing and plundering Egyptian
ships at the same time as they were fighting a war with a stubborn

inland nation called Israel. They had just captured one of the
Israeli champions, a man called Samson, and they told jubilantly
how he had been blinded and was working as a slave in Gaza.

The Assyrians soon learned to recognize Egyptians and
Philistines, and Aramaeans from the new kingdom of Damascus,
when they saw them in the bazaars of Tyre or Beirut. But they

never managed properly to distinguish between the various
peoples from the far west, whose ships frequently called in at the
ports. They were the people who brought the olive oil and

resined wine that had occasionally in the past come along the
trade routes to Assyria, together with exotic trade goods such as
amber and sponges, and the Assyrians now learned that these

people lived across the sea, on islands and peninsulas beyond
Asia Minor. They spoke a completely unintelligible language—it
was they who called the Flittites of the Lebanese coast Phoeni­

cians, for example—and many of them were fair-haired, just like
the new Persian tribes in the mountains to the east of Assyria.

They were great drinkers and used, in their cups, to sing in­
terminable songs which, the interpreters said, were about the
sack of an Asian city called Troy about a hundred years ago. The
Assyrians, great sackers of cities themselves, could not under­

stand why such a fuss should be made of the fall of one city, but
the interpreters suggested that it was because the sack of Troy

was the last exploit of these Achaeans, as they called themselves,
before they in their turn had been subjugated. For Achaea had
recently been overrun by tribes from the north, called Dorians,

who claimed a divine right to rule Achaea because they were
descended from an old Achaean hero, Hercules. And the Achaean
princes had been forced out of their country, and had settled in

Cyprus and Asia Minor—not at Troy though, for another north­
ern tribe had crossed into Asia Minor and occupied that site.
It was all very confusing, but without significance to a land

power like Assyria. Obviously no king of this place called Greece
would ever invade Asia or conquer Mesopotamia. The world

could safely ignore Greece.
It was almost with regret that the Assyrian garrisons re­