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 on its borders, to end such an empire. Both had appeared before Amenhetep's death--the Amorites in mid Syria, and a newly consolidated Hatti power on the confines of the north. The inevitable crisis was met with no new measures by his son, the famous Akhenaten, and before the middle of the fourteenth century the foreign empire of Egypt had crumbled to nothing but a sphere of influence in southernmost Palestine, having lasted, for better or worse, something less than two hundred years. It was revived, indeed, by the kings of the Dynasty succeeding, but had even less chance of duration than of old. Rameses II, in dividing it to his own great disadvantage with the Hatti king by a Treaty whose provisions are known to us from surviving documents of both parties, confessed Egyptian impotence to make good any contested claim; and by the end of the thirteenth century the hand of Pharaoh was withdrawn from Asia, even from that ancient appanage of Egypt, the peninsula of Sinai. Some subsequent Egyptian kings would make raids into Syria, but none was able, or very desirous, to establish there a permanent Empire.

SECTION 3. EMPIRE OF THE HATTI

[Plate 3: HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY 13TH CENTURY B.C.]

The empire which pressed back the Egyptians is the last but one which we have to consider before 1000 B.C. It has long been known that the Hittites, variously called Kheta by Egyptians and Heth or Hatti by Semites and by themselves, developed into a power in westernmost Asia at least as early as the fifteenth century; but it was not until their cuneiform archives were discovered in 1907 at Boghazkeui in northern Cappadocia that the imperial nature of their power, the centre from which it was exerted, and the succession of the rulers who wielded it became clear. It will be remembered that a great Hatti raid broke the imperial sway of the First Babylonian Dynasty about 1800 B.C. Whence those raiders came we have still to learn. But, since a Hatti people, well enough organized to invade, conquer and impose its garrisons, and (much more significant) its own peculiar civilization, on distant territories, was seated at Boghazkeui (it is best to use this modern name till better assured of an ancient one) in the fifteenth century, we may reasonably believe Eastern Asia Minor to have been the homeland of the Hatti three centuries before. As an imperial power they enter history with a king whom his own archives name Subbiluliuma (but Egyptian records, Sapararu), and they vanish something less than two centuries later. The northern half of Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and probably almost all Asia Minor were conquered by the Hatti before 1350 B.C. and rendered tributary; Egypt was forced out of Asia; the Semitic settlements on the twin rivers and the tribes in the desert were constrained to deference or defence. A century and a half later the Hatti had returned into a darkness even deeper than that from which they emerged. The last king of Boghazkeui, of whose archives any part has come to light, is one Arnaunta, reigning in the end of the thirteenth century. He may well have had successors whose documents may yet be found; but on the other hand, we know from Assyrian annals, dated only a little later, that a people, possibly kin to the Hatti and certainly civilized by them, but called by another name, Mushkaya or Mushki (we shall say more of them presently), overran most, if not all, the Hatti realm by the middle of the twelfth century. And since, moreover, the excavated ruins at both Boghazkeui, the capital of the Hatti, and Carchemish, their chief southern dependency, show unmistakable signs of destruction and of a subsequent general reconstruction, which on archaeological grounds must be dated not much later than Arnaunta's time, it seems probable that the history of Hatti empire closed with that king. What happened subsequently to surviving detachments of this once imperial people and to other communities so near akin by blood or civilization, that the Assyrians, when speaking generally of western foes or subjects, long continued to call them Hatti, we shall consider presently.

SECTION 4. EARLY ASSYRIAN EMPIRE

Remains Assyria, which before 1000 B.C. had twice conquered an empire of the same kind as that credited to the First Babylonian Dynasty and twice recoiled. The early Assyrian expansions are, historically, the most noteworthy of the early West Asian Empires because, unlike the rest, they were preludes to an ultimate territorial overlordship which would come nearer to anticipating Macedonian and Roman imperial systems than any others precedent. Assyria, rather than Babylon or Egypt, heads the list of aspirants to the Mastership of the World.

There will be so much to say of the third and subsequent expansion of Assyria, that her earlier empires may be passed over briefly. The middle Tigris basin seems to have received a large influx of Semites of the Canaanitic wave at least as early as Babylonia, and thanks to various causes--to the absence of a prior local civilization as advanced as the Sumerian, to greater distance from such enterprising fomenters of disturbance as Elam and Arabia, and to a more invigorating climate--these Semites settled down more quickly and thoroughly into an agricultural society than the Babylonians and developed it in greater purity. Their earliest social centre was Asshur in the southern part of their territory. There, in proximity to Babylonia, they fell inevitably under the domination of the latter; but after the fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon and the subsequent decline of southern Semitic vigour, a tendency manifested itself among the northern Semites to develop their nationality about more central points. Calah, higher up the river, replaced Asshur in the thirteenth century B.C., only to be replaced in turn by Nineveh, a little further still upstream; and ultimately Assyria, though it had taken its name from the southern city, came to be consolidated round a north Mesopotamian capital into a power able to impose vassalage on Babylon and to send imperial raiders to the Mediterranean, and to the Great Lakes of Armenia. The first of her kings to attain this sort of imperial position was Shalmaneser I, who early in the thirteenth century B.C. appears to have crushed the last strength of the north Mesopotamian powers of Mitanni and Khani and laid the way open to the west lands. The Hatti power, however, tried hard to close the passages and it was not until its catastrophe and the retirement of those who brought it about--the Mushki and their allies--that about 1100 Tiglath Pileser I could lead his Assyrian raiders into Syria, and even, perhaps, a short distance across Taurus. Why his empire died with him we do not know precisely. A new invasion of Arabian Semites, the Aramaeans, whom he attacked at Mt. Bishri (Tell Basher), may have been the cause. But, in any case, the fact is certain. The sons of the great king, who had reached Phoenician Aradus and there embarked vaingloriously on shipboard to claim mastery of the Western Sea, were reduced to little better than vassals of their father's former vassal, Babylon; and up to the close of the eleventh century Assyria had not revived.

SECTION 5. NEW FORCES IN 1000 B.C.