s were ever hovering on his north-western
frontier, ready when opportunity offered to win back Cappadocia.
Eastward, Assyria was threatening to become a dangerous rival. He had
himself to pay tribute to Egypt, and Egypt was subsidizing his enemy.
It was imperative on his part, therefore, to take action without
delay. The power of Assyria had to be crippled; its revenues were
required for the Mitannian exchequer. So Saushatar raided Assyria
during the closing years of the reign of Thothmes III, or soon after
his successor, Amenhotep II, ascended the Egyptian throne.

Nothing is known from contemporary records regarding this campaign;
but it can be gathered from the references of a later period that the
city of Asshur was captured and plundered; its king, Ashur-nadin-akhe,
ceased corresponding and exchanging gifts with Egypt. That Nineveh
also fell is made clear by the fact that a descendant of Saushatar
(Tushratta) was able to send to a descendant of Thothmes III at Thebes
(Amenhotep III) the image of Ishtar (Shaushka) of Nineveh. Apparently
five successive Mitannian kings were overlords of Assyria during a
period which cannot be estimated at much less than a hundred years.

Our knowledge regarding these events is derived chiefly from the
Tell-el-Amarna letters, and the tablets found by Professor Hugo
Winckler at Boghaz-Koei in Cappadocia, Asia Minor.

The Tell-el-Amarna letters were discovered among the ruins of the
palace of the famous Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaton, of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, who died about 1358 B.C. During the winter of 1887-8 an
Egyptian woman was excavating soil for her garden, when she happened
upon the cellar of Akhenaton's foreign office in which the official
correspondence had been stored. The "letters" were baked clay tablets
inscribed with cuneiform alphabetical signs in the Babylonian-Assyrian
language, which, like French in modern times, was the language of
international diplomacy for many centuries in Western Asia after the
Hyksos period.

The Egyptian natives, ever so eager to sell antiquities so as to make
a fortune and retire for life, offered some specimens of the tablets
for sale. One or two were sent to Paris, where they were promptly
declared to be forgeries, with the result that for a time the
inscribed bricks were not a marketable commodity. Ere their value was
discovered, the natives had packed them into sacks, with the result
that many were damaged and some completely destroyed