Page 233 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

94 The Argosies [1580-1510 b.c.]
and hastily sending arrears of tribute, and the Hurrians retiring

before him. Finally he halted on the banks of the Euphrates itself,
conscious of the fact that he had led an Egyptian army farther
into the eastern lands than any pharaoh before him. And on the
Euphrates he set up his boundary stones, a full fifteen hundred
miles from those he had planted by the fourth cataract of the

Nile (the distance from San Francisco to Kansas City, or from
London to Istanbul). This time he left no garrison, but accepted
the submission of the local princes and confirmed them in their
territory as the vassals of Egypt.
He returned to Thebes in triumph, lord—without a single

battle—of more territory than any king of Egypt before him
(and indeed, though he did not know it, lord of the greatest em­
pire that the world had up to that time seen).
In the following years a landmark disappeared and a new
landmark took its place at Thebes. Thothmes decided that the

temple of Amon to the north of the city, at which he and his father
and his grandfather had been crowned, was too small to house
the majesty of the divine father of the ruler of so large an empire.
He gave orders for it to be pulled down, and for a new temple of

a more fitting size to be erected on its site. Over the next ten
years the temple of Karnak grew in all its magnificence, to the
wonder and admiration of the elderly men and women who
could dimly remember Amose’s coronation at the former shrine.
Thothmes made no more wars. He was rumored to be ill,

though he still carried out all his official duties. But as the years
went by, and Egypt’s prosperity grew with the tribute now com­
ing in regularly from its dependencies to the north and the south,
and from the trade that followed the flag, Thothmes left Thebes

ever less often.
Much had changed within the palace. The old heroine of the
revolution, the great-grandmother of the pharaoh, Ahotep, had at
last died, over a hundred years old, and of Thothmes’s four chil­
dren by Amose three had died, including both the young princes

on whom he had relied for the succession. Only princess Hat-
shepsut remained in the line of succession, though there was a
boy by a secondary wife, called Thothmes after his father. The
pharaoh was clearly relying more and more on the quick judg­

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