NA TURE 



[May 19, 1892 



" heretic king " ; among them also is the draft of a de- 

 spatch from Amenophis III. to a king of Karaduniyash. 

 Many of them are of a personal and private nature, and 

 these are, of course, the most interesting, for they reveal 

 details of the family life of the great kings of the East, 

 which the ordinary inscriptions have failed to preserve 

 for us ; the remainder refer to State business, and show 

 beyond all doubt how close was the connection between 

 the kings of Babylonia, Mitani, and Karaduniyash and the 

 kings of Egypt, and also how great was the commerce 

 and intercourse between these countries. It will be re- 

 membered that the Egyptians gained their first foothold 

 in Syria under Amasis I., who, about B.C. 1700, brought 

 the war of independence to a successful close, and j 

 marched into Sharuhen, a city to the south of Gaza, 

 mentioned in Joshua xix. 6. His successor, Amenophis I., 

 made no further advance'into Syria or Mesopotamia ; but 

 Thothmes I., about B.C. 1633, marched into Northern Syria, 

 called Ruthen, and set up a tablet to mark the limit of 

 the frontier of Egypt. His son made no attempt to 

 " enlarge the borders " of Egypt in this direction, and the 

 " wild woman " Hatshepset was too much occupied with 

 fitting out her expedition to Punt to trouble about such 

 things ; but when Thothmes III. ascended the throne of 

 Egypt, about B.C. 1600, he at once set out to crush the 

 rebellion which had broken out all over the country to 

 the north-east of Egypt. Making his way by the penin- 

 sula of Sinai, he passed into Syria, and within a month 

 from the time he set out he defeated the rebels, whose head- 

 quarters were at Megiddo, and captured the city. During 

 the next few years he marched through the country 

 round about, carrying ofif spoil, and establishing the 

 worship of Amen-Ra and other Egyptian gods in 

 the principal cities. At a city on the Euphrates 

 called Ni, he set up a tablet near one set up 

 by his grandfather several years before, and it is clear 

 that his hold upon Western Mesopotamia was no 

 shadowy power. Indeed his conquest of the city of Ninip, 

 and the worship of the gods of Egypt established there 

 by him, is referred to by the inhabitants of that place 

 when they write to Amenophis III. more than one hundred 

 years later. When Amenophis III. ascended the throne 

 of Egypt about B.C. 1500, he was, thanks to the bloody 

 victories of his predecessors, able to assume the 

 sovereignty of Western Mesopotamia and Syria without 

 much fighting, and it seems that his expeditions to these 

 parts were undertaken as much for the sake of the lion 

 hunts which he conducted there as for the purposes of 

 conquest. He boasts on his scarabs that in the first ten 

 years of his reign he slew 102 lions with his own hand. 

 That the country of Mitani offered fine opportunities 

 for sport we know from one inscription which says that 

 Thothmes III. slew 120 elephants there; and Tiglath- 

 Pileser I. (B.C. 11 20) boasts in his annals that on foot he 

 slew 120 lions with his own hand in Mitani (Rawlinson^ 

 "Cuneiform Inscriptions," i. pi. 16, 76-79). While on one 

 of these semi-warHke expeditions he fell in love with a 

 fair-haired, blue-eyed, graceful girl named Thi, the 

 daughter of parents whose names were luaa and Thuaa, 

 and she was brought to Egypt in the tenth year of the 

 king's reign, accompanied by another wife of Amenophis, 

 and 317 of her ladies. Thi was evidently the Egyptian 

 monarch's favourite wife ; she became par excellence the 

 NO. I 177, VOL. 46] 



" Queen of Egypt," and her son Amenophis IV. became 

 King of Egypt. Amenophis III. also married a sister and 

 daughter of Kallimma-Sin, King of Karaduniyash, and 

 made proposals for another of his daughters, named Suk- 

 harti, while she was still a child, and he took to wife also the 

 sister and daughter of Tushratta, the King of Mitani. A 

 letter from Burraburiyash also reveals the hitherto 

 unknown fact that his son married a daughter of the King 

 of Egypt. One of the most interesting of these tablets is the 

 draft of a letter from Amenophis III. to Kallimma-Sin, King 

 of Karaduniyash, a country conterminous with Assyria ; it 

 is the only known letter of Amenophis in Babylonian, and 

 is written upon a tablet of Nile mud. The subject of the 

 letter is a proposal for the hand of Sukharti, whose father, 

 Kallimma-Sin, writes back to Egypt asking what has 

 become of his sister who married the King of Egypt 

 many years before ? In reply to this Amenophis invited 

 Kallimma-Sin to send messengers to see and to converse 

 with the lady, and to carry back news of her to her brother. 

 An embassy was sent to Egypt, but its members were too 

 young to be able to remember what the lady had been 

 like, and they failed to identify her satisfactorily. Kal- 

 limma-Sin is not unwilling to discuss the marriage of 

 his younger daughter Sukharti, but he points out that 

 he usually gives his daughters to the " kings of Kara- 

 duniyash," who make handsome presents to himself and 

 his messengers. Not to be defeated in his desire by the 

 paltry question of gifts to the wife's relatives, Amenophis 

 says that he is not only willing to give for Sukharti as 

 much as all the other suitors could or would give put 

 together, but he will send a gift to Kallimma-Sin in 

 honour of this king's sister, who is now living with him in 

 Egypt. This point satisfactorily settled, Amenophis 

 proceeds to discuss the proposal of Kallimma-Sin for an 

 Egyptian princess, and he plainly but forcibly tells him 

 that " the daughter of the king of the land of Egypt hath 

 never been given to a ' nobody.' " Kallimma-Sin replies, 

 " Why not ? Thou art king, and canst act as thou 

 pleasest"; but, willing to be satisfied with a lady of less 

 rank than a princess, he adds, " Surely there be daughters 

 of nobles who are beautiful women in Egypt. Now, if 

 thou knowest a beautiful lady, I beseech thee to send her 

 unto me ; for who here could say that she is not a 

 princess?" What Amenophis finally arranged for "his 

 brother Kallimma-Sin " we know not, but it seems that he 

 gave him a large quantity of gold, and that he married 

 Sukharti after all. The letters of Burraburiyash to 

 Amenophis III. are scarcely less interesting, for they refer 

 to old intrigues of the Canaanites, to commercial treaties, 

 and they give some account of this king's gifts to the 

 daughter of Amenophis who was about to marry his son. 

 The most important correspondent of Amenophis in the 

 land of Mitani was Tushratta, whose sister and daughter 

 he married, and who writes to his son-in-law with a 

 mixture of affection and avarice amusing to contemplate. 

 For example, having acknowledged the receipt of a letter 

 from Amenophis, and said that its "contents pleased him 

 so greatly that even if it were possible to dissolve all the 

 friendship which had existed between them in times 

 gone by, the words of this message alone would, for 

 himself, suffice to re-establish their friendship for ever," 

 he next begs him to send him much gold, and artfully refers 

 to a gold libation bowl and vessels profusely decorated with 



