The Ancient East | Page 6

expansion later on. The earliest of these to
appear on the scene established an imperial dominion of a kind which
we shall not observe again till Asia falls to the Greeks; for it was
established in Asia by a non-Asiatic power. In the earlier years of the
fifteenth century a Pharaoh of the strong Eighteenth Dynasty,
Thothmes III, having overrun almost all Syria up to Carchemish on the
Euphrates, established in the southern part of that country an imperial
organization which converted his conquests for a time into provincial
dependencies of Egypt. Of the fact we have full evidence in the
archives of Thothmes' dynastic successors, found by Flinders Petrie at
Amarna; for they include many reports from officials and client princes
in Palestine and Phoenicia.
If, however, the word empire is to be applied (as in fact we have
applied it in respect of early Babylonia) to a sphere of habitual raiding,
where the exclusive right of one power to plunder is acknowledged
implicitly or explicitly by the raided and by surrounding peoples, this
"Empire" of Egypt must both be set back nearly a hundred years before
Thothmes III and also be credited with wider limits than those of south
Syria. Invasions of Semitic Syria right up to the Euphrates were first
conducted by Pharaohs in the early part of the sixteenth century as a
sequel to the collapse of the power of the Semitic "Hyksos" in Egypt.
They were wars partly of revenge, partly of natural Egyptian expansion
into a neighbouring fertile territory, which at last lay open, and was
claimed by no other imperial power, while the weak Kassites ruled

Babylon, and the independence of Assyria was in embryo. But the
earlier Egyptian armies seem to have gone forth to Syria simply to
ravage and levy blackmail. They avoided all fenced places, and
returned to the Nile leaving no one to hold the ravaged territory. No
Pharaoh before the successor of Queen Hatshepsut made Palestine and
Phoenicia his own. It was Thothmes III who first reduced such
strongholds as Megiddo, and occupied the Syrian towns up to Arvad on
the shore and almost to Kadesh inland--he who by means of a few forts,
garrisoned perhaps by Egyptian or Nubian troops and certainly in some
instances by mercenaries drawn from Mediterranean islands and coasts,
so kept the fear of himself in the minds of native chiefs that they paid
regular tribute to his collectors and enforced the peace of Egypt on all
and sundry Hebrews and Amorites who might try to raid from east or
north.
In upper Syria, however, he and his successors appear to have
attempted little more than Thothmes I had done, that is to say, they
made periodical armed progresses through the fertile parts, here and
there taking a town, but for the most part taking only blackmail. Some
strong places, such as Kadesh, it is probable they never entered at all.
Their raids, however, were frequent and effective enough for all Syria
to come to be regarded by surrounding kings and kinglets as an
Egyptian sphere of influence within which it was best to acknowledge
Pharaoh's rights and to placate him by timely presents. So thought and
acted the kings of Mitanni across Euphrates, the kings of Hatti beyond
Taurus, and the distant Iranians of the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia.
Until the latter years of Thothmes' third successor, Amenhetep III, who
ruled in the end of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the
fourteenth, the Egyptian peace was observed and Pharaoh's claim to
Syria was respected. Moreover, an interesting experiment appears to
have been made to tighten Egypt's hold on her foreign province. Young
Syrian princes were brought for education to the Nile, in the hope that
when sent back to their homes they would be loyal viceroys of Pharaoh:
but the experiment seems to have produced no better ultimate effect
than similar experiments tried subsequently by imperial nations from
the Romans to ourselves.

[Plate 2: ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMENHETEP III]
Beyond this conception of imperial organization the Egyptians never
advanced. Neither effective military occupation nor effective
administration of Syria by an Egyptian military or civil staff was so
much as thought of. Traces of the cultural influence of Egypt on the
Syrian civilization of the time (so far as excavation has revealed its
remains) are few and far between; and we must conclude that the
number of genuine Egyptians who resided in, or even passed through,
the Asiatic province was very small. Unadventurous by nature, and
disinclined to embark on foreign trade, the Nilots were content to leave
Syria in vicarious hands, so they derived some profit from it. It needed,
therefore, only the appearance of some vigorous and numerous tribe in
the province itself, or of some covetous power