ong run prevent the Habiri
from returning to the attack again and again at brief intervals. Their
need of expansion was greater than their fear, and, after all, it mattered
little to Pharaoh whether the Habirite or the Canaanite paid tribute in
Palestine as soon as the intruder was prepared to acknowledge his rights.
Napkhuria's great weakness was his obvious partiality for those of his
officials who had become Aten worshippers, and the eagerness of these men
to exploit the royal favour was in proportion to their disbelief in the
permanence of the movement for reform.

In their Babylonian form the Tell el Amarna tablets are in the first place
the product of the diplomatic custom of the time, but in many details of
their contents they show that the civilisation of Western Asia had for
centuries been based on a Babylonian foundation. With the lack of exact
information so frequently to be deplored in Egyptian accounts, the wordy
narratives of the campaigns of Thutmosis III. scarcely enable us to
determine exactly from which of the greater powers he had succeeded in
wresting districts of Syria and Palestine. As regards the political
situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty--a change
probably attended by long internecine struggles--Babylonia seems to have
lost its western possessions on the Mediterranean, and we may rather
suppose that it was the kings of Mitani who ruled these territories in the
time of Thutmosis III.

Mitani, though still an extensive power, had seen its best days at any
rate when Tushratta with difficulty ascended the throne of his fathers.
The name "Hanirabbat" by which it was known to all its neighbours, must be
the older name, and also that of the original province to which later
acquisitions had been united. It is an established fact that Eastern
Cappadocia, the mountainous province of Melitene on the Upper Euphrates,
was still known as Hanirabbat about 690 B.C., and that, on the other hand,
Mitani, in the narrower sense of the term, must have corresponded to the
later Macedonian province of Mygdonia, _i.e._, Mesopotamia proper. We have
seen, however, that Ninua, afterwards the Assyrian capital Nineveh, was
part of the dominion of Tushratta, otherwise he could hardly have sent
Ishtar, the goddess of that city, to Egypt. The subsequent capital of
Assyria may have been the most easterly possession of the kingdom of
Hanirabbat-Mitani, the centre of gravity of which lay farther westwa