In spite of all this, some head-strong native princes never relinquished the hope of freedom, and no sooner had they made good the breaches in their walls as far as they were able, than they entered once more on this unequal contest, though at the risk of bringing irreparable disaster on their country. The majority of them, after one such struggle, resigned themselves to the inevitable, and fulfilled their feudal obligations regularly. They paid their fixed contribution, furnished rations and stores to the army when passing through their territory, and informed the ministers at Thebes of any intrigues among their neighbours.* Years elapsed before they could so far forget the failure of their first attempt to regain independence, as to venture to make a second, and expose themselves to fresh reverses.
The administration of so vast an empire entailed but a small expenditure on the Egyptians, and required the offices of merely a few functionaries.** The garrisons which they kept up in foreign provinces lived on the country, and were composed mainly of light troops, archers, a certain proportion of heavy infantry, and a few minor detachments of chariotry dispersed among the principal fortresses.***
* We find in the Annals, in addition to the enumeration of
the tributes, the mention of the foraging arrangements which
the chiefs were compelled to make for the army on its
passage. We find among the tablets letters from Aziru
denouncing the intrigues of the Khâti; letters also of
Ribaddu pointing out the misdeeds of Abdashirti, and other
communications of the same nature, which demonstrate the
supervision exercised by the petty Syrian princes over each
other.
** Under Thûtmosis III. we have among others “Mir,” or “Nasi
sîtû mihâtîtû,” “governors of the northern countries,” the
Thûtîi who became afterwards a hero of romance. The
individuals who bore this title held a middle rank in the
Egyptian hierarchy.
*** The archers—pidâtid, pidâti, pidâte—and the
chariotry quartered in Syria are often mentioned in the Tel
el-Amarna correspondence. Steindorff has recognised the term
-ddû aûîtû, meaning infantry, in the word ûeû, ûiû, of the
Tel el-Amarna tablets.
The officers in command had orders to interfere as little as possible in local affairs, and to leave the natives to dispute or even to fight among themselves unhindered, so long as their quarrels did not threaten the security of the Pharaoh.* It was never part of the policy of Egypt to insist on her foreign subjects keeping an unbroken peace among themselves. If, theoretically, she did not recognise the right of private warfare, she at all events tolerated its practice. It mattered little to her whether some particular province passed out of the possession of a certain Eibaddû into that of a certain Azîru, or vice versa, so long as both Eibaddû and Azîru remained her faithful slaves. She never sought to repress their incessant quarrelling until such time as it threatened to take the form of an insurrection against her own power. Then alone did she throw off her neutrality; taking the side of one or other of the dissentients, she would grant him, as a pledge of help, ten, twenty, thirty, or even more archers.**
* A half at least of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence treats
of provincial wars between the kings of towns and countries
subject to Egypt—wars of Abdashirti and his son Azîru
against the cities of the Phoenician coast, wars of
Abdikhiba, or Abdi-Tabba, King of Jerusalem, against the
chiefs of the neighbouring cities.
** Abimilki (Abisharri) demands on one occasion from the
King of Egypt ten men to defend Tyre, on another occasion
twenty; the town of Gula requisitioned thirty or forty to
guard it. Delattre thinks that these are rhetorical
expressions answering to a general word, just as if we
should say “a handful of men”; the difference of value in
the figures is to me a proof of their reality.
No doubt the discipline and personal courage of these veterans exercised a certain influence on the turn of events, but they were after all a mere handful of men, and their individual action in the combat would scarcely ever have been sufficient to decide the result; the actual importance of their support, in spite of their numerical inferiority, lay in the moral weight they brought to the side on which they fought, since they represented the whole army of the Pharaoh which lay behind them, and their presence in a camp always ensured final success. The vanquished party had the right of appeal to the sovereign, through whom he might obtain a mitigation of the lot which his successful adversary had prepared for him; it was to the interest of Egypt to keep the balance of power as evenly as possible between the various states which looked to her, and when she prevented one or other of the princes from completely crushing his rivals, she was minimising the danger which might soon arise from the vassal whom she had allowed to extend his territory at the expense of others.
These relations gave rise to a perpetual exchange of letters and petitions between the court of Thebes and the northern and southern provinces, in which all the petty kings of Africa and Asia, of whatever colour or race, set forth, either openly or covertly, their ambitions and their fears, imploring a favour or begging for a subsidy, revealing the real or suspected intrigues of their fellow-chiefs, and while loudly proclaiming their own loyalty, denouncing the perfidy and the secret projects of their neighbours. As the Ethiopian peoples did not, apparently, possess an alphabet of their own, half of the correspondence which concerned them was carried on in Egyptian, and written on papyrus. In Syria, however, where Babylonian civilization maintained itself in spite of its conquest by Thûtmosis, cuneiform writing was still employed, and tablets of dried clay.* It had, therefore, been found necessary to establish in the Pharaoh’s palace a department for this service, in which the scribes should be competent to decipher the Chaldæan character. Dictionaries and easy mythological texts had been procured for their instruction, by means of which they had learned the meaning of words and the construction of sentences. Having once mastered the mechanism of the syllabary, they set to work to translate the despatches, marking on the back of each the date and the place from whence it came, and if necessary making a draft of the reply.** In these the Pharaoh does not appear, as a rule, to have insisted on the endless titles which we find so lavishly used in his inscriptions, but the shortened protocol employed shows that the theory of his divinity was as fully acknowledged by strangers as it was by his own subjects. They greet him as their sun, the god before whom they prostrate themselves seven times seven, while they are his slaves, his dogs, and the dust beneath his feet.***
* A discovery made by the fellahîn, in 1887, at Tel el-
Arnarna, in the rums of the palace of Khûniaton, brought to
light a portion of the correspondence between Asiatic
monarchs, whether vassals or independent of Egypt, with the
officers of Amenôthes III. and IV., and with these Pharaohs
themselves.
** Several of these registrations are still to be read on
the backs of the tablets at Berlin, London, and Gîzeh.
***The protocols of the letters of Abdashirti may be taken
as an example, or those of Abimilki to Pharaoh, sometimes
there is a development of the protocol which assumes
panegyrical features similar to those met with in Egypt.
The runners to whom these documents were entrusted, and who delivered them with their own hand, were not, as a rule, persons of any consideration; but for missions of grave importance “the king’s messengers” were employed, whose functions in time became extended to a remarkable degree. Those who were restricted to a limited sphere of activity were called “the king’s messengers for the regions of the south,” or “the king’s messengers for the regions of the north,” according to their proficiency in the idiom and customs of Africa or of Asia. Others were deemed capable of undertaking missions wherever they might be required, and were, therefore, designated by the bold title of “the king’s messengers for all lands.” In this case extended powers were conferred upon them, and they were permitted to cut short the disputes between two cities in some province they had to inspect, to excuse from tribute, to receive presents and hostages, and even princesses destined for the harem of the Pharaoh, and also to grant the support of troops to such as could give adequate reason for seeking it.* Their tasks were always of a delicate and not infrequently of a perilous nature, and constantly exposed them to the danger of being robbed by highwaymen or maltreated by some insubordinate vassal, at times even running the risk of mutilation or assassination by the way.**
* The Tel el-Amarna correspondence shows the messengers in
the time of Amenôthes III. and IV. as receiving tribute, as
bringing an army to the succour of a chief in difficulties,
as threatening with the anger of the Pharaoh the princes o£
doubtful loyalty, as giving to a faithful vassal compliments
and honours from his suzerain, as charged with the
conveyance of a gift of slaves, or of escorting a princess
to the harem of the Pharaoh.
** A letter of Ribaddu, in the time of Amenôthes III.,
represents a royal messenger as blockaded in By bios by the
rebels.