Page 429 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

met constantly to make plans to cope with the unrest in the south
and east. But it was more and more difficult to hold the troubles
in check.

The southlands, across the mountains, had always been the
lands of opportunity. There lay the wealthy kingdoms of the city
dwellers and thence came the merchants, bringing weapons and

ornaments of iron and bronze, bronze caldrons and ivory-inlaid
furniture, wine and dates and fine cloths, incense and spices
and jewelry. The merchants came every year to the great horse

fairs, held on the open plain by Maikop, and they bought horses
by the hundred, loading them with bales of felt and furs and
hides for the journey south. And many of the young men of the

people went south with the horses, as they had done from time
immemorial, to serve a term as drivers and horse trainers and

mounted archers in the armies of the southern lands.
During the last thirty or forty years the recruiting and re­
mount officers from the south had been particularly active. For
there had been war across the mountains. The new kingdom of

Urartu north of Lake Van had been fighting for its life against the
Assyrians in the northern plains of Mesopotamia. Tiglathpileser,

the great king of Assyria who had recently died, had campaigned
deep into the mountains, inflicting defeat after defeat on the
Urartians, whom they called the Na’iru. There had been attrac­

tive opportunities for mercenary service during those years, and
the people had gone south in large numbers. They had served, of
course, on both sides, for they had no interest in either part and

went wherever the pay or the prospect of booty was greatest.
In the course of the wars hundreds of refugees had fled
across the mountains to the country of the plains, and now that

Tiglathpileser was dead many of the young men of their own
people, now no longer so young, were returning, bringing with

them their wealth and their outlandish acquired customs and
their foreign wives. The country, in fact, was getting dangerously
overcrowded—particularly as a result of the loss of the eastern

grazing grounds.
They had known the nations to the eastward for generations.

These nations had always been there, and always been uncom­
fortable neighbors. They had long claimed rights to grazing