with posting-houses, at each of which relays of horses were kept in
readiness, as well as "the necessary provision of bread of various
sorts, oil, balsam, wine, honey, and fruits." The quarries of the
Lebanon were further required to furnish the Pharaoh with limestone for
his buildings in Egypt and elsewhere.

Two years later Thothmes was again in Syria. He made his way as far as
the Euphrates, and there on the eastern bank erected a stele by the side
of one which his father Thothmes II. had already set up. The stele was
an imperial boundary-stone marking the frontier of the Egyptian empire.
It was just such another stele that Hadad-ezer of Zobah was intending to
restore in the same place when he was met and defeated by David (2 Sam.
viii. 3).

The Pharaoh now took ship and descended the Euphrates, "conquering the
towns and ploughing up the fields of the king of Naharaim." He then
re-ascended the stream to the city of Ni, where he placed another stele,
in proof that the boundary of Egypt had been extended thus far.
Elephants still existed in the neighbourhood, as they continued to do
four and a half centuries later in the time of the Assyrian king
Tiglath-pileser I. Thothmes amused himself by hunting them, and no less
than 120 were slain.

On his way home the tribute and "yearly tax" of the inhabitants of the
Lebanon was brought to him, and the corvée-work annually required from
them was also fixed. Thothmes indulged his taste for natural history by
receiving as part of the tribute various birds which were peculiar to
Syria, or at all events were unknown in Egypt, and which, we are told,
"were dearer to the king than anything else." He had already established
zoological and botanical gardens in Thebes, and the strange animals and