Page:PhilipK.Hitti-SyriaAShortHistory.djvu/48

Rh swords and horse-drawn chariots, they dominated Syria throughout the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries and conquered Egypt about 1730 B.C. They imposed on both countries a military ruling class which concentrated wealth and power in an aristocracy of chariot warriors. But they were not merely crude terrorists. They were expert metallurgists, skilled craftsmen in faience and inlaid bone and ivory, better potters and builders than their predecessors, patrons of surgery and mathematics. Expelled from Egypt about 1580 by Ahmose I, they retired into Syria, organized a federation of Semitic princes and were again defeated at Megiddo (Armageddon) in 1468 by Thutmose III. Thutmose fought continuously and successfully to break their power and reincorporate southern Syria in the Egyptian empire.

Egyptian administration of Syria aimed chiefly at preserving order and maintaining strong hold on the main highways, for which garrisons were used, and at exacting tribute handled by officials resident in key cities and by a network of travelling tax-collectors. The details of internal administration were left to native chieftains, who kept control over their own armed forces. Few Egyptians migrated to Syria, but many Syrian men and girls went to Egypt, taking with them religious ideas, artistic techniques and motifs, and such products as the tasselled lute, embroidered cloths and elegant vases.

One component of the Hyksos horde was the Hurrians (biblical Horites), a still unidentified people neither Semitic nor Indo-European in language. Under Indo-European kings they established, about 1500 B.C., a strong state called Mitanni east of the upper Euphrates, but after two centuries it was divided between the still stronger Hittites of Anatolia and the powerful Assyrians of Mesopotamia.

The Hittites were a mixture of Anatolian aborigines and Indo-European invaders who had overrun them about 2000 B.C. The facial type, represented by prominent nose Rh