







































Marcu 24, 1923] 
This was, leaving out of account the Sudan in the 
south and the wild Libyan tribes to the west, the 
world as known to the Egyptians. Of Italy, they 
probably had as yet no knowledge. 
Towards the end of the reign of Amenhotep III. a 
revolution broke out in Syria and Palestine. Shub- 
biluliuma or Suppilulius, king of the Hittites, a 
monarch full of guile, aspired to oust Egypt from ‘the 
‘control of Syria and to destroy Mitanni. He found 
tools ready to his hand in certain discontented and 
‘rebellious Amorite princes of the Lebanon and in the 
Pheenicians of Arvad, and stirred up strife. Amenhotep 
quelled the revolt for a time, but it broke out again, 
and when his extraordinary son, Akhenaten, ascended 
the throne, the whole country seethed with turmoil. 
The new king was interested only in his project of 
reforming the Egyptian religion ; he was a man of art 
and of peace, and for the first time in history, perhaps, 
a great king refused to go forth to war, and allowed his 
dominions to fall away from him. 
Palestine and Syria were in chaos. Wandering 
tribes, among them those Khabiri who have been 
credibly identified with the Hebrews, overran the land, 
the Hittite princes of the south revolted, and with 
them certain chiefs of Aryan (? Mitannian) origin who 
also had settled there under the Egyptian dominion. 
The Canaanite chiefs and Phcenician princes who 
remained faithful were gradually borne down in the 
absence of help from Egypt, and at the end of Akhen- 
aten’s reign the whole country had fallen away from the 
ng. 
In Tutankhamen’s day the great prince Huy may 
represent himself on the walls of his tomb, as he does, 
bringing Semitic chiefs to offer tribute to his majesty, 
but we see that this can have been but a farce: the 
king’s writ ran no farther than the coast of the Sheph- 
elah, probably. In the north the Amorites had but 
xchanged one master for another, for they now be- 
came the vassals of the Hittites, albeit under a looser 
control than that of Egypt. The Hittite control of 
Syria continued unchallenged till the days of Seti I. 
and Rameses II., fifty years later, when Egypt essayed 
9 reimpose her yoke on the Semites. Long wars 
ensued, waged directly by Egypt against the Hittites, 
ntil about 1279 B.c. a peace of exhaustion was con- 
cluded between the protagonists, a peace of which we 
have the full protocol, signed and sealed by the Great 
King of Egypt and the Great King of Khatti, couched 
in diplomatic and legal phraseology that might have 
issued from a modern chancellery. It was a com- 
liga study of the physico-chemical relations 
_ on which depend the form in which a pre- 
cipitate is produced has been developed by a number 
of workers in recent years, and its application to the 
precipitation of silver halide has been studied by 
Sheppard and Trivelli. In his earlier work Trivelli 
made a large number of photomicrographs of emulsions 
taken from standard photographic plates and films, 




of the Eastman 
ranklin Institute 
2 Communication No. 165 from the Research Labora 
Kodak Company. From a lecture delivered before the 
of Philadelphia on December 7, 1922. 
NO. 2786, VOL. 111] 
NA TURE 
| promise : 
399 
of her old Asiatic dominion Egypt retained 
only Palestine ; Syria fell to the Hittites and remained 
theirs till, eighty years later, the invasion of the 
Philistines and their seafaring allies from the North 
overthrew the Hittite kingdom and tore Palestine 
itself from Egypt. 
Tutankhamen, then, was confronted across his attenu- 
ated frontier by a far more formidable foe than the 
Babylonian could ever be. Mitanni was gone—de- 
stroyed by Shubbiluliuma after all help from Egypt 
had proved vain. Assyria, trusting in the prowess of 
her soldiers, kept her independence of both Babylon — 
and Khatti; Shubbiluliuma seems prudently to have 
let her be. Her king, Ashur-uballit, was a long-lived 
and probably a politic as well as a doughty ruler. 
Somewhat later, in the time of Rameses II., Shal- 
maneser, king of Assyria, was a much more powerful 
monarch than the Babylonian Kadashman-turgu, and 
it was partly in apprehension of his power, probably, 
that Rameses and Khattusilis, the Hittite ruler, finally 
compromised their differences. 
The collision of different national civilisations at this 
time produced none of the mutual approximations that 
might have been expected. Only Egypt began to 
show signs, more accentuated later, of Semitic in- 
fluence in her culture. Babylon, however, shows no 
signs of Egyptian influence, the Hittites perhaps a 
little, the Mycenzans more. But there is no landslide 
in any direction anywhere. Each people remained 
faithful to its traditions. There were colonies of 
Mycenean artists, as of Semitic and even Hittite 
craftsmen in Egypt. But though the Egyptians prized 
and used Greek products, we find ne direct imitation of 
Minoan art even in the free and untrammelled Egyptian 
art of Akhenaten’s time. though the works of the 
Minoan artists must have appealed to the realistic and 
truth-loving king. There is no trace of Minoan or of 
Mesopotamian influence yet in any of the objects of 
Egyptian art discovered in Tutankhamen’s tomb of 
which photographs have been published: the weird 
heads, for example, of one of the gilded couches that 
have been thought to be Mesopotamian in aspect are 
merely heads of the Egyptian goddess Thoueris in her 
fierce and typhonic character. We should, in fact, 
expect Mesopotamian influence less than Minoan or 
even Hittite. The Thoueris-head was adapted by the 
Minoans for the heads of their water-demons. 
Such, in brief survey, are the main characteristics of 
the outer world known to Tutankhamen and his people, 
and of Egypt’s relations with it. 
Recent Advances in Be ctographic Theory! 
By Dr. C. E. K. MEEs. 
one of which is reproduced in Fig. 1. It will be seen 
that the silver bromide grains, of which the emulsion 
is composed, are of very varied sizes, there being 
present a large number of small grains, down to the 
limit of those visible with a microscope, and a smaller 
number of large grains, including some of very much 
greater area than the smallest grains present. The 
largest grains are all polygons, with angles of 60° and 
120°. There is a tendency to round off the corners 
and edges of the small grains, so that the smallest 
grains appear to be more or less spherical. 
