Page 259 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1510-144° B-c-J
sent to lead it. There was much speculation as what would be

the outcome and how it would affect the Levant trade.
Before the year was out, they knew the outcome. Hatshepsut
was dead, and the prisoner of the palace sat upon her throne.
Thothmes had merely been biding his time, and with an army at

his back had proved a very different opponent from the weakling
who for twenty-two years had never left the palace grounds. He
had given orders that all mention of his stepmother was to be
erased from the records, and that his reign was to be reckoned
from his first proclamation twenty-two years before. Hatshepsut

was to be expunged from history.
During the next twenty years the Swedish sailors working
out of Knossos, and many another Cretan crew as well, saw much

of Thothmes III and his army. During these years the Egyptian
king made sixteen campaigns in Palestine and Syria. After the
first, in which he defeated a confederate Syrian army at Me­
giddo in Palestine and reconquered the coastal cities, he used
these cities as supply bases for his later campaigns farther to the

north and east. It was a profitable charter service for the Cretan
and Levantine coastal vessels, building up the stores at Gaza
and Jaffa and Byblos, transporting grain and hides and bulk sup­
plies of arrowheads and spearheads and shields, sandals and

tents and harness, all the items required by the quartermaster
general, who, as much as anyone, was responsible for the success
of the pharaoh’s campaigns. Chariots and horses they did not
need to carry north, although these by now formed an important

arm of the Egyptian forces; for two thousand horses and nearly
a thousand chariots had been captured at the fall of Megiddo
during the first campaign.
Each summer the pharaoh drove northward with his army,

confirming the loyal princes in their cities, appointing new vas­
sals in the place of rebel princes who had fled north, ravaging
the market gardens and cornlands of such cities as held out
against him, and, where practicable, besieging and storming the
cities themselves. He rarely met an army in the open field during

these years, but each year he advanced a little farther, and peo­
ple were already likening him to his grandfather, the first
inothmes.