Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered, their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth accounting for. It all went.
But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the seas about their island.
So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians along those other river-courses established as a great power in the east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that country of Syria and Palestine which—especially Palestine, because it is south of Syria—lies right in the course which the great empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other. Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible position that must have been. Syria and Palestine, as you know, were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.
And for the moment, in or about 1500 B.C., the Israelites as a nation are not in Palestine at all. They are in the land of Goshen, undergoing that oppression of which you know. Within 300 years or so they will make their Exodus and begin their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, to re-appear in the story, under the leadership of Joshua; conquering the Canaanites and so establishing themselves right in the most dangerous position of all, in Palestine, on the highway between the two great empires.
CHAPTER VI
THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES
It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign "shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine and unite and not go on fighting among themselves, if they meant to be strong enough to resist the attacks of their neighbours. Whether that was the reason or not, the records seem to show that just at this time there began to be far less fighting between the big landowners; and the king, Pharaoh, began to have more power in his own hands, and to be able to give effect to his will, by means of his vizier or prime minister, and the rest of his officers over all the country.
Thus more strong by being united, the Egyptians drove out the Hyksos. They also took forcible measures against the African tribes that were pressing them on the south, and established their power right up to the fourth cataract on the Nile, a long way farther south than the boundary of the more ancient empire. Against Nubia, farther south again, and against Libya, on their west, they fought effectively, and thus we may suppose that they made themselves more safe than they ever had been before from invasion by these African peoples.
There were two great kings of the name of Thothmes or Tethmosis, of this eighteenth dynasty, under whom most of these big achievements were done—Thothmes I. and Thothmes III. The second Thothmes reigned for a year or two only. Thothmes I. led the Egyptian armies up through Palestine, overcame Syria, and went as a conqueror as far east as the Euphrates, where he set up a column, with an account of it all, to commemorate his victories.