About the year B.C. 1500 the throne of Egypt fell to the young brother of Queen Hatshepsut, Thutmosis III., and under his vigorous rule the country rose to a height of power never again equalled. Amenophis II. succeeded to an empire which extended from the Sudan to the Euphrates and to the Greek Islands; and when he died he left these great possessions almost intact to his son, Thutmosis IV., the grandfather of Akhnaton. It is important to notice the chronology of this period. The mummy of Thutmosis IV. has been shown by Dr. Elliot Smith to be that of a man of not more than twenty-six years of age; but we know that his son Amenophis III. was old enough to hunt lions at about the time of his father’s death, and that he was already married to Queen Tiy a year later. Thus one must suppose that Thutmosis IV. was a father at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and that Amenophis III. was married to Tiy at about the same age. The wife of Thutmosis IV. was probably a Syrian princess, and it must have been during her regency that Amenophis III. married Tiy, who was not of royal blood. Amenophis and Tiy introduced into Egypt the luxuries of Asia; and during their brilliant reign the Nile Valley was more open to Syrian influence than it had ever been before. The language of Babylon was perhaps the Court tongue, and the correspondence was written in cuneiform instead of in the hieratic script of Egypt. Amenophis III., as has been said, was probably partly Asiatic; and there is, perhaps, some reason to suppose that Yuaa, the father of Queen Tiy, was also a Syrian. One has, therefore, to picture the Egyptian Court at this time as being saturated with foreign ideas, which clashed with those of the orthodox Egyptians.