However favourably the religious reform of King Napkhuria may be estimated on its own merits, it by no means strengthened the authority of Egypt in Asia. Of course it could have in no way been the cause of the state of affairs in Syria and Canaan; perhaps Amenophis III., whatever his own great slackness, simply inherited the confusion in this part of his empire. The heaviest blows could not in the long run prevent the Habiri from returning to the attack again and again at brief intervals. Their need of expansion was greater than their fear, and, after all, it mattered little to Pharaoh whether the Habirite or the Canaanite paid tribute in Palestine as soon as the intruder was prepared to acknowledge his rights. Napkhuria’s great weakness was his obvious partiality for those of his officials who had become Aten worshippers, and the eagerness of these men to exploit the royal favour was in proportion to their disbelief in the permanence of the movement for reform. In their Babylonian form the Tell el Amarna tablets are in the first place the product of the diplomatic custom of the time, but in many details of their contents they show that the civilisation of Western Asia had for centuries been based on a Babylonian foundation. With the lack of exact information so frequently to be deplored in Egyptian accounts, the wordy narratives of the campaigns of Thutmosis III. scarcely enable us to determine exactly from which of the greater powers he had succeeded in wresting districts of Syria and Palestine. As regards the political situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty—a change probably attended by long internecine struggles—Babylonia seems to have lost its western possessions on the Mediterranean, and we may rather suppose that it was the kings of Mitani who ruled these territories in the time of Thutmosis III.