Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/23

Rh which took place around the walls of Megiddo, and was decided in favour of Thothmes only after a long series of campaigns.

Before Thothmes died, he had made Egypt mistress of Palestine and Syria as far as the banks of the Euphrates and the land of Naharina. One of the bravest of his captains tells us on the walls of his tomb how he had captured prisoners in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, and had waded through the waters of the Euphrates when his master assaulted the mighty Hittite fortress of Carchemish. Kadesh on the Orontes had already fallen, and for a time all Western Asia did homage to the Egyptian monarch, even the king of Assyria sending him presents and courting, as it would seem, his alliance. The Egyptian empire touched the land of Naharina on the east and the 'great land of the Hittites' on the north.

But neighbours so powerful could not remain long at peace. A fragmentary inscription records that the first campaign of Thothmes IV., the grandson of Thothmes III., was directed against the Hittites, and Amenophis III., the son and successor of Thothmes IV., found it necessary to support himself by entering into matrimonial alliance with the king of Naharina. The marriage had strange consequences for Egypt. The new queen brought with her not only a foreign name and foreign customs, but a foreign faith as well. She refused to worship Amun of Thebes and the other gods of Egypt, and clung to the religion of her fathers, whose supreme object of adoration was the solar disk. The Hittite monuments themselves bear witness to the prevalence of this worship in Northern Syria. The winged solar disk appears above the figure of a king which has been