The coming of the Hyksos had wrought a great change, and had broken down the barriers of isolation. And the mighty wave of national energy, which, gathering strength as it rose, swept away the foe, did not thus spend all its force. A longing arose for retribution, conquest, empire; the avenging campaign of Thothmes I. had stimulated rather than satisfied a national craving for glory and for wealth. The Pharaohs now emerge from the seclusion of the valley of the Nile, and enter that blood-stained arena—the battle-field of the nations—the Syrian and Mesopotamian lands. But the brilliant successes and far-reaching supremacy of the Egyptian arms ended at last in disaster and decline, from which there was no power of recovery. Far enough, however, were any such gloomy forebodings from the thoughts of King Thothmes III., when he mounted his war-chariot and assembled his troops upon the field of Zoan. The tributes promised to his father by the conquered princes had for a long time ceased to be paid. They knew that a female sovereign held the sceptre, and the tribes that had acknowledged the father’s supremacy cast off all fealty to the daughter. The town of Gaza alone had remained faithful to the Egyptian allegiance. Here Thothmes took up his quarters for the night on the twenty-third anniversary of his accession (dating _i.e._ from his brother’s death). Next morning he left the city, ‘full of power and strength, to conquer the miserable enemy, and to extend the frontiers of Egypt, as his father Amen-Ra had promised him.’ The country known to us as Palestine or Syria was then, as at a later date, divided into several petty kingdoms, each with a fortified capital of its own. The general name by which its inhabitants were known to the Egyptians was that of the Rutennu, and at this moment their various tribes were allied against Egypt under the leadership of the King of Kadesh, and, encamped within and around Megiddo, they were waiting the attack of King Thothmes.