Page 435 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

father as a brave warrior, a brilliant horseman, and a skilled
patrol commander, and his outburst was treated as worthy of
serious reply. The valleys of the Tigris and the Nile, his father

said soberly, were political unities in a way that the Danube was
not—yet. Admittedly Mesopotamia had split up again, after the
death of his old commander Tiglathpileser (his son shuddered

at the name), into the age-old rivalry between Assyria and
Babylon; and admittedly since the death of the last Raineses
Egypt too had been divided into north and south, with ap­

parently unending civil war between rival pharaohs. But any king
who was also a competent general could unite each of the valleys,
because there was a historical background for unity. On the

Danube that historical background was still for the future to
create. The king ruled the upper reaches of the Danube and the
Drave, and his sovereignty extended loosely into Thracian coun­

try, the great plain of the middle river. But that was all.
Then, too, the Nile valley and Mesopotamia were densely
populated, with rich cities, whereas the deserts surrounding them

were only sparsely inhabited, however warlike the inhabitants
might be. The farmers of Europe had never developed anything
larger than wooden market towns like Nyrax along their rivers,

and their upland was comparatively thickly populated by half­
settled herdsmen, who could be neither ignored nor easily
incorporated in an empire. It could be done perhaps, but if his

son contemplated a Celtic Empire—and he smiled slightly—he
would do well to try to win the herdsmen of the Alpine foothills

to the idea first.
The Nile and the Tigris, anyway, had something else which
the Danube had not. They had iron. In fact, everyone in the east
had iron by now. Even insignificant nations like the Philistines

and the Israelites in Palestine fought their unending wars with
iron swords. And the Danube valley could never hope to compete

as a power among powers by pitting bronze weapons against
weapons of iron. They could not even hope to prevail against
smaller and nearer nations who possessed iron, the Dorians of
Greece, for example, or the new Etruscan colonies in Italy. What

were the possibilities, the Master of the Horse asked, turning to