Page 305 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Egypt, Horemheb, frequently visited Akhetaten, and Princess
Ankh-esenpa-Aten met him often at court as she grew older and
began, as the custom was, to attend her parents’ council meetings.

He was not worried about the state of Egypt, he said, but he had
much to say about the state of the northeast frontier. And the
emissaries who came with him, from the vassal princes of Pales­

tine and Syria, reinforced his tale of troubles.
There was civil war in Syria. Aziru, the Amorite prince who
had been driven into the desert by Amenhotep III, had re­

turned to his kingdom some years back and had gradually ex­
tended his rule over the nearer cities, in open defiance of the
power of Egypt. The loyal kingdoms were too weak to hold him

in check, and their envoys and letters begged repeatedly for a
punitive expedition from Egypt. But this Akhenaten refused to
send. He had also received envoys from Aziru, and Aziru had

protested his devotion to the great god Aten and his intention
of introducing the worship of the new sun-god throughout his
realm. Even the young princess, not yet ten years old, could see

the incompatibility between the envoys’ tales of Aziru’s treat­
ment of captured cities, and the universal love and brotherhood
which should reign wherever Aten was worshipped. But her

father, she was beginning to realize, had a stubborn streak, and
he refused to make war on his first avowed convert abroad.
The court at Akhetaten was full of envoys in these years

from the lands beyond Syria. Because there, it seemed—or at
least Horemheb explained—beyond the border of the Egyptian
empire a struggle for power was going on.

Until less than ten years ago, he said, there had only been
one power of importance north of the vassal states of Syria, the
Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni beyond the Euphrates. And the

Mitanni kings had long ago made their peace with Egypt and
sent their daughters to Egypt as pharaoh’s wives. The children
nodded, for Princess Tatukhipa, who had joined their grand­
father’s harem as a young girl some twenty years ago and who

still spoke Egyptian with a strong accent, was in fact a great

friend of theirs.
Apart from Mitanni, went on the vizier, there was of cours
Babylon, but Babylon, once the mightiest power in the east, ha