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By Root 579 0

compare favorably with the activities of other kings who did not spend half their lives abroad. Rekhmire mentions the king’s omnipotence; some of this can be written off as court flattery, but there is no doubt that Thutmose made good use of his annual six months in Egypt. He toured the country, inspecting canals, buildings, and harvests, and he ordered careful records kept of his campaigns and their results. Of all his building activities the most famous are the great obelisks. They have had a curious history; not one of them stands in Egypt today, but they have literally carried Thutmose’s name to the four corners of the earth. The obelisk in Central Park in New York once towered above Thutmose’s temple at Heliopolis; its former mate stands on the Thames Embankment in London.

Another of Thutmose’s architectural achievements came to light only forty years ago. It is at Deir el Bahri, squeezed in between the larger temple of Hatshepsut and the ruins of the earlier Seventeenth Dynasty temple. An avalanche had buried it completely until the Polish-Egyptian expedition found and excavated it.

I can’t resist giving another example of how preconceptions color Egyptological interpretation; surely, some scholars argued, Thutmose would not have tucked his temple so cozily close to Hatshepsut’s if he had detested her. On the other hand, one might argue that he felt it necessary to leave his mark at Deir el Bahri too, instead of allowing her structure to dominate it. I suspect he had more sensible reasons, but I don’t know what they were.

When he returned from the Second Battle of Kadesh, Thutmose III had another ten or twelve years of life remaining to him. During this time he occupied himself with such minor details as Nubia, which was now pouring fantastic amounts of gold into the Egyptian treasury. He himself visited the south countries in his fiftieth year, and his domains stretched from the Euphrates to the Fourth Cataract—the largest empire Egypt had or would ever have.

Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the life of this man was not the empire itself, but the changes that the empire was to produce in Egypt. Almost every aspect of life was affected; and some of the changes were to bear fruit in a far future day, and in a way that even Thutmose the Great could not have anticipated.

Some of the results are fairly obvious. The army was no longer an amateur militia, hastily assembled for specific campaigns. Since Ahmose there had been a hard core of professional fighters, with the Medjay of Nubia as its elite; these men served as the royal bodyguard and city police in time of peace. But an army that has fought yearly for twenty years has lost its amateur standing; the men knew their craft and their officers, and the ones who survived brought home wealth such as their fathers had never seen. The empire, so hard-won, had to be held. This meant garrisons, though not large ones, in foreign cities. The army organization was complex; quartermaster, signal corps, and general accounting had come into being, along with chariotry, infantry, and naval forces. For the first time the professional fighting man, as a group and as an individual, becomes a force in the state.

Another obvious result of empire was the effect of the enormous wealth pouring into Egypt from the north and south. The nouveau riche acquired expensive tastes and demanded foreign products. No wealthy house hold was complete without an Asiatic slave or two, and sophisticated Egyptians sprinkled their speech with foreign words and even turned to the worship of new gods.

New people and new ideas often have a favorable effect upon the culture they invade; in the optimum cases the new and the old give birth to a civilization higher than either of its parents. But one of the consequences of foreign ideas in Egypt was not so attractive. This was the effect upon Egyptian art. Craftsmen and painters had developed their skills early, and the canons of taste were beautifully harmonious. The avalanche of new techniques that came from the conquered lands and from other