SECTION 2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT
During the long interval since the fall of the First Babylonian Dynasty, however, Western Asia had not been left masterless. Three other imperial powers had waxed and waned in her borders, of which one was destined to a second expansion later on. The earliest of these to appear on the scene established an imperial dominion of a kind which we shall not observe again till Asia falls to the Greeks; for it was established in Asia by a non-Asiatic power. In the earlier years of the fifteenth century a Pharaoh of the strong Eighteenth Dynasty, Thothmes III, having overrun almost all Syria up to Carchemish on the Euphrates, established in the southern part of that country an imperial organization which converted his conquests for a time into provincial dependencies of Egypt. Of the fact we have full evidence in the archives of Thothmes' dynastic successors, found by Flinders Petrie at Amarna; for they include many reports from officials and client princes in Palestine and Phoenicia.
If, however, the word empire is to be applied (as in fact we have applied it in respect of early Babylonia) to a sphere of habitual raiding, where the exclusive right of one power to plunder is acknowledged implicitly or explicitly by the raided and by surrounding peoples, this "Empire" of Egypt must both be set back nearly a hundred years before Thothmes III and also be credited with wider limits than those of south Syria. Invasions of Semitic Syria right up to the Euphrates were first conducted by Pharaohs in the early part of the sixteenth century as a sequel to the collapse of the power of the Semitic "Hyksos" in Egypt. They were wars partly of revenge, partly of natural Egyptian expansion into a neighbouring fertile territory, which at last lay open, and was claimed by no other imperial power, while the weak Kassites ruled Babylon, and the independence of Assyria was in embryo. But the earlier Egyptian armies seem to have gone forth to Syria simply to ravage and levy blackmail. They avoided all fenced places, and returned to the Nile leaving no one to hold the ravaged territory. No Pharaoh before the successor of Queen Hatshepsut made Palestine and Phoenicia his own. It was Thothmes III who first reduced such strongholds as Megiddo, and occupied the Syrian towns up to Arvad on the shore and almost to Kadesh inland - he who by means of a few forts, garrisoned perhaps by Egyptian or Nubian troops and certainly in some instances by mercenaries drawn from Mediterranean islands and coasts, so kept the fear of himself in the minds of native chiefs that they paid regular tribute to his collectors and enforced the peace of Egypt on all and sundry Hebrews and Amorites who might try to raid from east or north.
In upper Syria, however, he and his successors appear to have attempted little more than Thothmes I had done, that is to say, they made periodical armed progresses through the fertile parts, here and there taking a town, but for the most part taking only blackmail. Some strong places, such as Kadesh, it is probable they never entered at all. Their raids, however, were frequent and effective enough for all Syria to come to be regarded by surrounding kings and kinglets as an Egyptian sphere of influence within which it was best to acknowledge Pharaoh's rights and to placate him by timely presents. So thought and acted the kings of Mitanni across Euphrates, the kings of Hatti beyond Taurus, and the distant Iranians of the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia.
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.