* Letter of Burnaburiash to Amenôthes IV.
** Letter from the King of Alasia to Amenôthes III., where,
whilst pretending to have nothing else in view than making a
present to his royal brother, he proposes to make an
exchange of some bronze for the products of Egypt,
especially for gold.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a photograph
taken by Emil Brugsch-
Bey.
From such instances we can well understand the jealous, watch which these sovereigns exercised, lest any individual connected with corporations of workmen should leave the kingdom and establish himself in another country without special permission. Any emigrant who opened a workshop and initiated his new compatriots in the technique or professional secrets of his craft, was regarded by the authorities as the most dangerous of all evil-doers. By thus introducing his trade into a rival state, he deprived his own people of a good customer, and thus rendered himself liable to the penalties inflicted on those who were guilty of treason. His savings were confiscated, his house razed to the ground, and his whole family—parents, wives, and children—treated as partakers in his crime. As for himself, if justice succeeded in overtaking him, he was punished with death, or at least with mutilation, such as the loss of eyes and ears, or amputation of the feet. This severity did not prevent the frequent occurrence of such cases, and it was found necessary to deal with them by the insertion of a special extradition clause in treaties of peace and other alliances. The two contracting parties decided against conceding the right of habitation to skilled workmen who should take refuge with either party on the territory of the other, and they agreed to seize such workmen forthwith, and mutually restore them, but under the express condition that neither they nor any of their belongings should incur any penalty for the desertion of their country. It would be curious to know if all the arrangements agreed to by the kings of those times were sanctioned, as in the above instance, by properly drawn up agreements. Certain expressions occur in their correspondence which seem to prove that this was the case, and that the relations between them, of which we can catch traces, resulted not merely from a state of things which, according to their ideas, did not necessitate any diplomatic sanction, but from conventions agreed to after some war, or entered on without any previous struggle, when there was no question at issue between the two states.*
* The treaty of Ramses II. with the King of the Khâti, the
only one which has come down to us, was a renewal of other
treaties effected one after the other between the fathers
and grandfathers of the two contracting sovereigns. Some of
the Tel el-Amarna letters probably refer to treaties of this
kind; e.g. that of Burnaburiash of Babylon, who says that
since the time of Karaîndash there had been an exchange of
ambassadors and friendship between the sovereigns of Chaldoa
and of Egypt, and also that of Dushratta of Mitanni, who
reminds Queen Tîi of the secret negotiations which had taken
place between him and Amenôthes III.
When once the Syrian conquest had been effected, Egypt gave permanency to its results by means of a series of international decrees, which officially established the constitution of her empire, and brought about her concerted action with the Asiatic powers.
She already occupied an important position among them, when Thûtmosis III. died, on the last day of Phamenoth, in the IVth year of his reign.* He was buried, probably, at Deîr el-Baharî, in the family tomb wherein the most illustrious members of his house had been laid to rest since the time of Thûtmosis I. His mummy was not securely hidden away, for towards the close of the XXth dynasty it was torn out of the coffin by robbers, who stripped it and rifled it of the jewels with which it was covered, injuring it in their haste to carry away the spoil. It was subsequently re-interred, and has remained undisturbed until the present day; but before re-burial some renovation of the wrappings was necessary, and as portions of the body had become loose, the restorers, in order to give the mummy the necessary firmness, compressed it between four oar-shaped slips of wood, painted white, and placed, three inside the wrappings and one outside, under the bands which confined the winding-sheet.
* Dr. Mahler has, with great precision, fixed the date of
the accession of Thûtmosis III, as the 20th of March, 1503,
and that of his death as the 14th of February, 1449 b.c. I
do not think that the data furnished to Dr. Mahler by
Brugsch will admit of such exact conclusions being drawn
from them, and I should fix the fifty-four years of the
reign of Thûtmosis III. in a less decided manner, between
1550 and 1490 b.c., allowing, as I have said before, for an
error of half a century more or less in the dates which go
back to the time of the second Theban empire.