In upper Syria, however, he and his successors appear to have attempted little more than Thothmes I had done, that is to say, they made periodical armed progresses through the fertile parts, here and there taking a town, but for the most part taking only blackmail. Some strong places, such as Kadesh, it is probable they never entered at all. Their raids, however, were frequent and effective enough for all Syria to come to be regarded by surrounding kings and kinglets as an Egyptian sphere of influence within which it was best to acknowledge Pharaoh's rights and to placate him by timely presents. So thought and acted the kings of Mitanni across Euphrates, the kings of Hatti beyond Taurus, and the distant Iranians of the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia. Until the latter years of Thothmes' third successor, Amenhetep III, who ruled in the end of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth, the Egyptian peace was observed and Pharaoh's claim to Syria was respected. Moreover, an interesting experiment appears to have been made to tighten Egypt's hold on her foreign province. Young Syrian princes were brought for education to the Nile, in the hope that when sent back to their homes they would be loyal viceroys of Pharaoh: but the experiment seems to have produced no better ultimate effect than similar experiments tried subsequently by imperial nations from the Romans to ourselves. [Plate 2: ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMENHETEP III] Beyond this conception of imperial organization the Egyptians never advanced. Neither effective military occupation nor effective administration of Syria by an Egyptian military or civil staff was so much as thought of. Traces of the cultural influence of Egypt on the Syrian civilization of the time (so far as excavation has revealed its remains) are few and far between; and we must conclude that the number of genuine Egyptians who resided in, or even passed through, the Asiatic province was very small. Unadventurous by nature, and disinclined to embark on foreign trade, the Nilots were content to leave Syria in vicarious hands, so they derived some profit from it. It needed, therefore, only the appearance of some vigorous and numerous tribe in the province itself, or of some covetous power on its borders, to end such an empire. Both had appeared before Amenhetep's death--the Amorites in mid Syria, and a newly consolidated Hatti power on the confines of the north. The inevitable crisis was met with no new measures by his son, the famous Akhenaten, and before the middle of the fourteenth century the foreign empire of Egypt had crumbled to nothing but a sphere of influence in southernmost Palestine, having lasted, for better or worse, something less than two hundred years. It was revived, indeed, by the kings of the Dynasty succeeding, but had even less chance of duration than of old. Rameses II, in dividing it to his own great disadvantage with the Hatti king by a Treaty whose provisions are known