Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/22

20 in the time of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty. The foreign rule of the Hyksos or Shepherd princes had been overthrown, Egypt had recovered its independence, and its kings determined to retaliate upon Asia the sufferings brought upon their own country by the Asiatic invader. The war, which commenced with driving the Asiatic out of the Delta, ended by attacking him in his own lands of Palestine and Syria. Thothmes I. (about B.C. 1600) marched to the banks of the Euphrates and set up 'the boundary of the empire' in the country of Naharina. Naharina was the Biblical Aram Naharaim or 'Syria of the two rivers,' better known, perhaps, as Mesopotamia, and its situation has been ascertained by recent discoveries. It was the district called Mitanni by the Assyrians, who describe it as being 'in front of the land of the Hittites,' on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, between Carchemish and the mouth of the river Balikh. In the age of Thothmes I., it was the leading state in Western Asia. The Hittites had not as yet made themselves formidable, and the most dangerous enemy the Egyptian monarch was called upon to face were the people over whom Chushan-rishathaim was king in later days (Judg. iii. 8). It is not until the reign of his son, Thothmes III., that the Hittites come to the front. They are distinguished as 'Great' and 'Little,' the latter name perhaps denoting the Hittites of the south of Judah. However this may be, Thothmes received tribute from 'the king of the great land of the Kheta,' which consisted of gold, negro-slaves, men-servants and maid-servants, oxen and servants. Whether the Hittites were as yet in possession of Kadesh we do not know. If they were, they would have taken part in the struggle against the Egyptians