POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE TELL EL AMARNA PERIOD.

However favourably the religious reform of King Napkhuria may be estimated on its own merits, it by no means strengthened the authority of Egypt in Asia. Of course it could have in no way been the cause of the state of affairs in Syria and Canaan; perhaps Amenophis III., whatever his own great slackness, simply inherited the confusion in this part of his empire. The heaviest blows could not in the long run prevent the Habiri from returning to the attack again and again at brief intervals. Their need of expansion was greater than their fear, and, after all, it mattered little to Pharaoh whether the Habirite or the Canaanite paid tribute in Palestine as soon as the intruder was prepared to acknowledge his rights. Napkhuria’s great weakness was his obvious partiality for those of his officials who had become Aten worshippers, and the eagerness of these men to exploit the royal favour was in proportion to their disbelief in the permanence of the movement for reform.

In their Babylonian form the Tell el Amarna tablets are in the first place the product of the diplomatic custom of the time, but in many details of their contents they show that the civilisation of Western Asia had for centuries been based on a Babylonian foundation. With the lack of exact information so frequently to be deplored in Egyptian accounts, the wordy narratives of the campaigns of Thutmosis III. scarcely enable us to determine exactly from which of the greater powers he had succeeded in wresting districts of Syria and Palestine. As regards the political situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty a change probably attended by long internecine struggles Babylonia seems to have lost its western possessions on the Mediterranean, and we may rather suppose that it was the kings of Mitani who ruled these territories in the time of Thutmosis III.

Mitani, though still an extensive power, had seen its best days at any rate when Tushratta with difficulty ascended the throne of his fathers. The name “Hanirabbat” by which it was known to all its neighbours, must be the older name, and also that of the original province to which later acquisitions had been united. It is an established fact that Eastern Cappadocia, the mountainous province of Melitene on the Upper Euphrates, was still known as Hanirabbat about 690 B.C., and that, on the other hand, Mitani, in the narrower sense of the term, must have corresponded to the later Macedonian province of Mygdonia, i.e., Mesopotamia proper. We have seen, however, that Ninua, afterwards the Assyrian capital Nineveh, was part of the dominion of Tushratta, otherwise he could hardly have sent Ishtar, the goddess of that city, to Egypt. The subsequent capital of Assyria may have been the most easterly possession of the kingdom of Hanirabbat-Mitani, the centre of gravity of which lay farther westward. In the letters there is a remark of the king of Alashia recommending Pharaoh to exchange no more gifts with “the kings of the Hittites and of Shankhar.” Mitani is, perhaps, here named Shankhar from its dependencies in Asia Minor, or we may suppose it to have been the name of Tushratta’s residence.

In contrast to the Hittite empire, which was pressing forward from the neck of Asia Minor through the passes of Issus into Syria, and was rapidly increasing in power, Mitani stood on the eve of its fall. Babylonians and Hittites were alike watching to pluck the ripe fruit, and perhaps it lacked little to decide Tushratta, instead of fighting once more for the crown, to capitulate to the invading Hittites and see the end of the kingdom of Mitani. The great “love” of this king for Egypt was not, therefore, called forth merely by the glitter of gold, but also by dire political necessity. The catastrophe occurred some few decades after the correspondence comes to an end for us. Mitani vanished from the states of Western Asia and gave place to small Aramaic kingdoms, while the eastern boundary, together with Ninua, was seized by Assyria as the first step to her subsequent suzerainty in the East.

But still more swiftly overtaken of fate was the XVIIIth Dynasty in Egypt. Napkhuria did not even see the completion of his city at Tell el Amarna, for he died in 1370 B.C. His reform followed him, and the victorious champions of Amon could raze to the ground the hated City of the Sun’s Disk. They must already have been on the march when in a happy moment it occurred to a keeper of the royal archives to conceal the clay tablets in the earth and thus save them for remote posterity.