Page 97 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

completely drives out the other. Language is therefore no cri­
terion of race, and it would be incorrect to describe the
battle-ax people as Indo-Europeans. It will nevertheless be done
frequently in the following pages; what is meant in fact is a peo­

ple speaking an Indo-European tongue and containing a signifi­
cant admixture of the Caucasian stock to which the battle-ax
people belonged. They are to be, after all, one of the principal

actors on the stage of the Second Millennium b.c., and it is neces­
sary for them to have a name. We do not know what they called

themselves. They had no writing, and they have no history, save
what the archaeologist can recover.
In the lifetime following 2000 b.c. the spread of the toma­
hawk-wielding “Indo-Europeans” is the most significant thing

that is occurring. It would not have appeared so to the inhabit­
ants of the agricultural and trading civilizations to the south. To

them the movements of peoples beyond the innumerable moun­
tain ranges of eastern Turkey and western Persia, with the great
bulwark of the Caucasus beyond, are of little interest, and their

own domestic quarrels assume an importance which domestic
quarrels always do to the people intimately concerned.
In southern Mesopotamia, where, sixteen years before the

millennium opens, the rule of Ur over the whole area had been
overthrown, the king of Isin, Ishbi-Irra, relying on his alliance
with the rulers of Elam to the east, faces uneasily the king of

Larsa, Naplanum, who is backed by his kinsfolk, the Amorites
of the Syrian desert. Before the children born in 2000 b.c. are

grown to manhood, Isin has lost its southernmost possessions, the
cities of Ur and Eridu, to Larsa. It is of little importance—except
to the inhabitants of those cities. They are to change hands many

times during this and the following lifetime.
In Egypt the strong minister of state, Amenemhet, who has
been the de facto ruler of the land since the beginning of the

millennium, finally ten years or so later deposes the last ruler of
the Eleventh Dynasty, Mentuhotep V, and assumes the crown of
upper and lower Egypt as the first pharaoh of the Twelfth

Dynasty. It is a bloodless revolution and brings little change to
the people of Egypt. It is more important to the people of Pales­

tine and Syria, over whom in the following years Amenemhet