From the Tell el-Amarna correspondence we see how the kings of Mitanni, Assyria and Babylon gave their daughters to the Egyptian king in marriage and sought to secure his friendship and alliance. Apparently Egypt considered it beneath her dignity to bestow her princesses in return, for in one of his letters to Amen-hetep III. Kadashman-Enlil remonstrates with the King of Egypt for refusing him one of his daughters and threatens to withhold his own daughter in retaliation.[16] Another of the letters illustrates in a still more striking manner the intimate international intercourse of the period. At the height of its power the kingdom of Mitanni appears to have annexed the southern districts of Assyria, and for a time to have exercised control over Nineveh, as Hammurabi of Babylon had done in an earlier age. It was in his character of suzerain that Dushratta sent the holy statue of Ishtar of Nineveh to Egypt, as a mark of his esteem for Amen-hetep III. We have recovered the letter he sent with the goddess, in which he writes concerning her:[17] " Indeed in the time of my father the lady Ishtar went into that land; and, just as she dwelt there formerly and they honoured her, so now may my brother honour her ten times more than before. May my brother honour her and may he allow her to return with joy." We thus gather that this was not the first time Ishtar had visited Egypt, and we may infer from such a custom the belief that a deity, when stopping in a foreign country with his or her own consent, would, if properly treated, confer favour and prosperity upon that land. We shall see later on that Rameses II. sent his own god Khonsu on a similar mission to Khatti, in order to cure the epileptic daughter of the Hittite king, who was believed to be possessed by a devil.[18] We could not have more striking proofs of international intercourse. Not only did the rulers of the great states exchange their daughters but even their gods.