SECTION 2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT

During the long interval since the fall of the First Babylonian Dynasty,
however, Western Asia had not been left masterless. Three other imperial
powers had waxed and waned in her borders, of which one was destined to
a second expansion later on. The earliest of these to appear on the
scene established an imperial dominion of a kind which we shall not
observe again till Asia falls to the Greeks; for it was established in
Asia by a non-Asiatic power. In the earlier years of the fifteenth
century a Pharaoh of the strong Eighteenth Dynasty, Thothmes III, having
overrun almost all Syria up to Carchemish on the Euphrates, established
in the southern part of that country an imperial organization which
converted his conquests for a time into provincial dependencies of
Egypt. Of the fact we have full evidence in the archives of Thothmes'
dynastic successors, found by Flinders Petrie at Amarna; for they
include many reports from officials and client princes in Palestine and
Phoenicia.

If, however, the word empire is to be applied (as in fact we have
applied it in respect of early Babylonia) to a sphere of habitual
raiding, where the exclusive right of one power to plunder is
acknowledged implicitly or explicitly by the raided and by surrounding
peoples, this "Empire" of Egypt must both be set back nearly a hundred
years before Thothmes III and also be credited with wider limits than
those of south Syria. Invasions of Semitic Syria right up to the
Euphrates were first conducted by Pharaohs in the early part of the
sixteenth century as a sequel to the collapse of the power of the
Semitic "Hyksos" in Egypt. They were wars partly of revenge, partly of