The Hapiru

Lower Egypt Peter Sutcliffe Lookalike Competition (Dressage)

c.1800 BC - 1100 BC (Before the Co-Op)

Depending on the sources in which you find them referred to, the Hapiru (Mesopotamia), Habiru (Sumerian), Apiru (Egypt) or Hackypoo (Letterbocks) was the collective name given to rag-taggle band of nomads, rebels, outlaws, mercenaries, slaves, migrant labourers and general heed-the-baals who knocked about in the Fertile Crescent before it became a track on Bad Religion's 1992 album Generator.

'Fertile Crescent' – f’nar, knnrk, pfff. Like a wonky fadge, man.

So they were radgies, basically; lawless, socially inferior big kids. People on the fringes of settled society. Throcktonians. They'd tarmac your kibbutz (badly) if the price was right, chin people (and everyone they kna) over the slightest transgression - real or imagined, twoc a camel train just to get a chase off the sand bizzies and claim ancient lands from the people of Wa’al-botl.

Scholars are divided on many aspects of the Hapiru but they all agree that they depinitely, depinitely existed. Ancient texts discovered in the Witchy’s Wood area document tales of ritual fires, drinking rites and violence against existing tribal boundaries. The nearby ‘Devil’s Rock’ hints at a darker (and larger) underbelly: regretful teenage hairstyles, temple vandalism and bizarre love triangles*.

Of course all this was all a long time ago and the Hapiru in their original form are long gone, but closer inspection reveals traces of them wherever you look, providing you look in the right places. They’re not so peripatetic these days, preferring to stay in permanent camps around the flats and in the Briar Badlands. The ancient shrine to their god, ‘the Centurion’ was destroyed in a withering battle with their bitter enemies the Coouncil, but its essential tenets live on in the community’s commitment to being chorers, drink-munchers, starters and pagga-havers. 

Ya gan, like?

They walk among us: lock up your dogs, leave a light on and divvint say nowt to nee-one -  else ye be biblically ladged.