Shortly after this he wrote another letter to Akhnaton making various complaints, and stating that his messengers had been robbed in territory belonging to the Pharaoh, who must therefore make good their losses. A third letter makes similar complaints, and hints at future trouble. Meanwhile the King of Mitanni was on none too friendly terms with Akhnaton, and appears to have detained the Pharaoh’s envoy, named Mani, thereby causing Akhnaton considerable anxiety. There was, in fact, a general tendency to disparage the Egyptian king, which must have been exceedingly galling to Akhnaton, who had the power to let loose upon Asia an army which would silence all insult, but did not find such a step consistent with his principles. In a letter which he wrote to one of the Syrian princes whose fidelity was doubtful, Akhnaton ends his despatch with the words: “I am very well, I the sun in the heavens, and my chariots and soldiers are exceedingly numerous; and from Upper Egypt even unto Lower Egypt, and from the place where the sun riseth even unto the place where he setteth, the whole country is in good cause and content.” Thus we see that Akhnaton knew his power, and wished that others should know it; and it is therefore the more surprising that, as we shall presently find, he never chose to use it.
[VII.]
THE LAST TWO YEARS OF THE REIGN OF AKHNATON.
“I know, he said, what you like is to look at the mountains, or to go up among them and kill things. But I like the running water in a quiet garden, with a rose reflected in it, and the nightingale singing to it. Listen!”—Mirza Mahomed in ‘The Story of Valeh and Hadijeh.’
1. THE HITTITE INVASION OF SYRIA.
The eastern end of the Mediterranean is bounded on the south by Egypt and the desert, on the east by Palestine and Syria, and on the north by Asia Minor, these roughly forming the three sides of a square. The conquests of the great warrior-Pharaoh Thothmes III. had carried the Egyptian power as far as the north-east corner of this formation—that is to say, to the point where Syria meets Asia Minor. The island of Cyprus is in shape not unlike a hand with index finger extended; and this finger may be said to be pointing to the limit of Egyptian conquest, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Amanus Mountains. The kingdom of Mitanni, the home of Queen Nefertiti, was situated on the banks of the Euphrates some distance inland from these mountains; and as it acted as a buffer state between the Egyptian possessions in Syria and the unconquered lands beyond, the Pharaohs had taken care to unite themselves by marriage, as we have seen, with its rulers. Behind Mitanni to the north-east, the friendly kingdoms later known as Assyria marked the limits of the known world; while to the north the hostile lands of Asia Minor lay in the possession of the Hittites, a warlike confederacy of peoples, perhaps the ancestors of the modern Armenians. From these hardy warriors the greatest danger to the Egyptian Empire in Syria was to be expected; and the statesmen of Egypt must have cast many an anxious look towards those forbidding mountains which loomed beyond Mitanni. A southern movement of the Hittites, indications of which were already very apparent, would bring them swarming over and around the Amanus Mountains, either along the eastern and inland route through Mitanni, or along the western route beside the sea and over the Lebanon, or again, midway between these two routes, past the great cities of Tunip, Kadesh, and others, which stood to block the way.
When Akhnaton ascended the throne, Seplel was king of the Hittites, and was by way of being friendly to Egypt. Some of his people, however, crossed the frontiers of Mitanni and were repulsed by Dushratta, the king of that country, who was father-in-law to Akhnaton. This caused some coldness between Seplel and the Pharaoh; and although the former sent an embassy to the City of the Horizon, the correspondence between the two monarchs presently ceased. The young idealist of Egypt seems to have held warfare in horror; and the Hittites were so essentially a fighting race that Akhnaton could have had no friendly feelings towards them. Soon we find that these Hittites, unable to overflow into the land of Mitanni, have moved along the eastern route and have seized the land of Amki, which lay on the sea-coast between the Amanus Mountains and the Lebanon. This movement might have been stopped by Aziru, an Amorite prince who ruled the territory between Amki and Mitanni, and whose duty, as an Egyptian vassal, was to check the southern incursions of the Hittites. But Aziru, like his father Abdashirta before him, was a man as ambitious as he was faithless, and his dealings both with the Hittites and with the Egyptians during the following years were unscrupulous in the extreme. It was his policy to play the one nation against the other, and to extend the scope of his own power at the expense of both.