The so-called expulsion of the Hyksos mainly consisted in the removal of a foreign dynast and his troops, and not in the expatriation of a whole people; yet the battles which this result entailed had hardened the Egyptians into a warlike race, and the national army thus created gave the kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties a weapon which they utilised for centuries afterwards, partly to reduce broad stretches of foreign territory to their sovereignty or supremacy, partly also from time to time to impose new constitutions on the reduced territories, and to pillage to the fullest extent districts whose inhabitants had proved rebellious. In the most important centres they subdued, they placed Egyptian garrisons, introduced Egyptian officials to collect taxes as they became due, erected strongholds in places where, for strategical reasons, they seemed likely to be of advantage; a king of the XXth Dynasty even goes so far as to boast of having raised a temple to Amen in Canaan. They are animated, however, by no set intention to incorporate one province after another with their empire; their nearest concern is to press as far north as possible, to the North Syrian foreland of the Euphrates. They succeeded from time to time, although always for a short space only, in procuring free communication with the banks of the great mysterious torrent which did not run north as did their own Nile at home, but flowed in the direction of the distant south. Here was the turning-point of the trade route along which the “bluestone of Babel” and so many other rare products of Mesopotamia found their way to the “wretched” Ruthennu, the inhabitants of Syria. Thus at a comparatively cheap rate could be produced a number of the coveted articles which the commerce between northern Syria and the Canaanite country had made expensive.
Concerning events that take place in Phœnicia the Egyptian monuments of this time give us little information. Aahmes seems to have visited this scene of action, for by the country of Zahi, which is mentioned in an inscription of his, the Egyptians understand that slice of Syria to which Phœnicia belongs.
Without compromising themselves by a useless defence, the cities of Phœnicia already appear to have done homage to Tehutimes I, and to have discharged tribute. They must have been well content for the sovereigns of Egypt to rout the robber hordes of the mountains in Lebanon and Bekaa, and for a foreign jurisdiction and a foreign power to restore peace and order in northern Syria by the force of arms. True, they themselves did not always escape from these encounters with impunity. Tehutimes III repeatedly entered Phœnicia at the head of his army. On his return from Tunep in the twenty-ninth year of his reign, he sacked at harvest time the whole country of Zahi. The great corn stores lying ready to be threshed were commandeered, and an equal store of wine and oil. In the thirty-fourth year he took two cities of the land of Zahi, and in one of his last campaigns he destroyed the city of Arkali, i.e., Akko. In the reports of the campaigns of Tehutimes III there is no mention of Tyre and Sidon. By the term “dwellers in the harbour” (their overthrow being alluded to in a poetical description of the power of this monarch) we should, however, comprehend the inhabitants of the coast towns of Phœnicia. Gaza and Joppa are repeatedly mentioned at this time.
In the annals of Tehutimes III, Keft ships and Kepuna ships laden with timber are mentioned. In the poetical description of victory mentioned above, the land of Kefa is placed together with Asebi, i.e., with Cyprus or with a territorial portion of this island. We may hazard the conclusion that in Kefa are comprehended the islands of the “great sea,” i.e., of the Mediterranean; at all events it is not to be looked for in Phœnicia. Otherwise Tehutimes III would have included Kefa as the scene of his achievements in the annals along with Zahi and the lands of the Ruthennu. Moreover, the Keft people, represented by the Egyptians, do not in the slightest degree resemble the Canaanites. Clearly the Egyptian artists do not find in them the characteristic features which they are so fond of representing in the Semites of Anterior Asia, even until they pass into the régime of caricature.
The successor of Tehutimes III was Amenhotep II, of whose campaign in Syria we have but fragmentary evidence. His rule and that of his son Tehutimes IV lasted but a short while. Then came Amenhotep III, who reigned more than thirty-six years, and to him succeeded Amenhotep IV, called Khun-aten, the strangest of all the Pharaohs, who held his court not at Thebes, but in a new imperial capitol which he built for himself in the city known to-day as Tel-el-Amarna. He it was who had thoughts of converting the Egyptian religion to a monotheistic system. A particularly lucky stroke of fate has saved from ruin at Tel-el-Amarna a number of historical documents of the most valuable nature, which belonged to the state archives of Khun-aten, and which have only recently come to light from the hidden repositories in which they were preserved from destruction.
[ca. 1400-1200 B.C.]
It was the discovery of these tablets that first gave the means for estimating correctly the extension of Babylonian civilisation in Anterior Asia even at this period. In those Syrian districts which were completely under the dominion of Egypt, men used the Babylonian cuneiform character and the Semitic idiom of Babylonia in written intercourse with the Egyptian court, and like the Aramaic in the Persian epoch, this idiom was the official language of diplomatic negotiations, and was consequently studied even in Egypt itself.
The confusion which followed in Egypt on the decease of the unwarlike Khun-aten, facilitated a gradual increase in the power of the kingdom of the Kheta, already forwarded by the policy of that prince and his predecessor which had been directed rather to maintaining their possessions than to an extension of power. The peoples of Syria were left to themselves until, under Hor-em-heb, Egypt again began to acquire internal cohesion; Seti I, however, was the first who was able to reconquer much of the lost territory. He managed to advance through Syria, to the frontiers of the Kheta kingdom, and to return home with a rich booty. His son and successor, Ramses II, renewed the struggle for the possession of northern Palestine, and conducted, with varying success and through long years, a war against the Kheta and their allies. Finally a treaty of peace was concluded between the two powers, by which little more was left to the Egyptians than the dominion over the coast lands of Palestine, in which they were from henceforth able,—at least while Ramses II ruled,—to maintain themselves undisturbed. A strip of the Phœnician coast may also have remained under the suzerainty of this Pharaoh.
The arrangement with the Kheta remained in effect, not merely down to the close of the long reign of Ramses II, but also during that of his son Meneptah, and placed the districts of Syria where Egypt retained a free hand in a state of dependence for several generations. One of the Pharaohs of the XXth Dynasty, Ramses III, also succeeded in re-establishing for a short time the dominion of Egypt, at least in the south of Palestine. In the eighth year of this king’s reign, the kingdom of the Kheta succumbed to the onslaught of a national migration for which a host of tribes from distant countries had joined together. Carrying their wives and children with them, the invaders made their way through Syria to the eastern frontier of Egypt. Amongst the tribes from which this enterprise started the Egyptians make mention of the Pursta (Pulista?). It is not impossible that this name denotes that same people to whom Palestine owes its name, the foreign nation of the Philistines. The assertion that the Askalonians, i.e., the Philistines, destroyed Sidon, is not to be taken quite literally, and only to be regarded as referring to the devastation and plundering of a part of Phœnicia. The repulse of the Pursta and their allies is one of the last signs of life still displayed by the effete Egypt of the period of the XXth Dynasty. The later Ramessides soon entirely lost that dominion over the districts of southern Palestine which Ramses II could still call his own. Centuries went by before armed intervention in the affairs of Syria could be again ventured on from the Nile Valley.
By the sixteenth century B.C., and before that date, though how much earlier it is impossible to say, the Phœnicians were familiar with the whole of the Ægean Sea, which they had probably reached in the first instance by way of the south coast of Asia Minor and the island of Rhodes. From the harbours of Rhodes it was a simple matter to sail to the smaller isles of the archipelago, and so, by easy stages, to the Ægean coasts of Greece and Asia Minor. It is probable that, in pursuit of their commercial enterprises, they visited every nook and corner of this part of the Mediterranean, establishing factories where the conditions were favourable, and trading-stations on islands near the shore, or at such points on the mainland as seemed least liable to attack, instructing the natives in the art of mining where minerals were to be had, or taking the work in hand themselves.