Mitani, though still an extensive power, had seen its best days at any rate when Tushratta with difficulty ascended the throne of his fathers. The name “Hanirabbat” by which it was known to all its neighbours, must be the older name, and also that of the original province to which later acquisitions had been united. It is an established fact that Eastern Cappadocia, the mountainous province of Melitene on the Upper Euphrates, was still known as Hanirabbat about 690 B.C., and that, on the other hand, Mitani, in the narrower sense of the term, must have corresponded to the later Macedonian province of Mygdonia, _i.e._, Mesopotamia proper. We have seen, however, that Ninua, afterwards the Assyrian capital Nineveh, was part of the dominion of Tushratta, otherwise he could hardly have sent Ishtar, the goddess of that city, to Egypt. The subsequent capital of Assyria may have been the most easterly possession of the kingdom of Hanirabbat-Mitani, the centre of gravity of which lay farther westward. In the letters there is a remark of the king of Alashia recommending Pharaoh to exchange no more gifts with “the kings of the Hittites and of Shankhar.” Mitani is, perhaps, here named Shankhar from its dependencies in Asia Minor, or we may suppose it to have been the name of Tushratta’s residence. In contrast to the Hittite empire, which was pressing forward from the neck of Asia Minor through the passes of Issus into Syria, and was rapidly increasing in power, Mitani stood on the eve of its fall. Babylonians and Hittites were alike watching to pluck the ripe fruit, and perhaps it lacked little to decide Tushratta, instead of fighting once more for the crown, to capitulate to the invading Hittites and see the end of the kingdom of Mitani. The great “love” of this king for Egypt was not, therefore, called forth merely by the glitter of gold, but also by dire political necessity. The catastrophe occurred some few decades after the correspondence comes to an end for us. Mitani vanished from the states of Western Asia and gave place to small Aramaic kingdoms, while the eastern boundary, together with Ninua, was seized by Assyria as the first step to her subsequent suzerainty in the East. But still more swiftly overtaken of fate was the XVIIIth Dynasty in Egypt. Napkhuria did not even see the completion of his city at Tell el Amarna, for he died in 1370 B.C. His reform followed him, and the victorious champions of Amon could raze to the ground the hated City of the Sun’s Disk. They must already have been on the march when in a happy moment it occurred to a keeper of the royal archives to conceal the clay tablets in the earth and thus save them for remote posterity. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX The best translation of the Tell el Amarna tablets available for English readers is that from the German of H. Winckler, published by Luzac, London, 1896.