Page 7 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

TCLeere has long been a place vacant, on the history

shelves of the world, for a volume covering the Second Millen­
nium b.c. That millennium is the span of time in which some of
the most well-known events in man’s history occurred, in which
some of the most renowned persons of antiquity lived. It is the
period of Stonehenge and the Hyksos, of the Minoan and Indus
valley civilizations, of the Hittites and the Argonauts and the
Philistines, of the Trojan War and the Exodus, of Hammurabi and
Abraham, Akhenaten and Tutankhamon and Rameses the Great,

Moses and Saul and Samson and Agamemnon and Theseus and
Tiglathpileser. Everyone has heard these names—and yet the his­
tory of the period remains vague, a jumble of disconnected stories.
This situation is out of date. For ten or twenty years we have
had sufficient material at our disposal to write a connected history
of this ‘lost” thousand years. All the same, this book is not the
missing history volume. But it is an attempt to pull together into
a connected whole all the well-known facts and figures of this
thousand years, to place them at least into a chronological frame­
work, to show who did what, and when, and where.
I have always found the time scale very difficult to grasp in
conventional written history. In any history covering a thousand
years or more there is a tendency for the author to jump easily

over gaps of time in which nothing of significance happens. And
this has worried me. When the historian casually writes “fifty
years later,” I have always had to stop and remind myself that if
I had been twenty in the last paragraph I should now be seventy,
and if I had been fifty I should now be dead. Similarly, that two