Nineveh was not now (about B.C. 1500) the capital of Assyria, which was lower down the Tigris, at Asshur or Kileh Sherghat, but was only a provincial town of some magnitude.  Still it was within the dominions of the Assyrian monarch of the time, and any attack upon it would have been an insult and a challenge to the great power of Upper Mesopotamia, which ruled from the alluvium to the mountains.  It is certain that the king of Assyria did not accept the challenge, but preferred to avoid an encounter with the Egyptian troops.  Both at this time and subsequently he sent envoys with rich presents to court the favour of Thothmes, who accepted the gifts as “tribute,” and counted “the chief of Assuru” among his tributaries.  Submission was also made to him at the same time by the “prince of Senkara,” a name which still exists in the lower Babylonian marsh region.  Among the gifts which this prince sent was “lapis lazuli of Babylon.”  It is an exaggeration to represent the expedition as having resulted in the conquest of the great empires of Assyria and Babylon; but it is quite true to say that it startled and shook those empires, that it filled them with a great fear of what might be coming, and brought Egypt into the position of the principal military power of the time.  Assyrian influence especially was checked and curtailed.  There is reason to believe, from the Egyptian remains found at Arban on the Khabour,[17] that Thothmes added to the Egyptian empire the entire region between the Euphrates and its great eastern affluent—­a broad tract of valuable territory—­and occupied it with permanent garrisons.  The Assyrian monarch bought off the further hostility of his dangerous neighbour by an annual embassy which conveyed rich gifts to the court of the Pharaohs, gifts that were not reciprocated.  Among these we find enumerated gold and silver ornaments, lapis lazuli, vases of Assyrian stone (alabaster?), slaves, chariots adorned with gold and silver, silver dishes and silver beaten out into sheets, incense, wine, honey, ivory, cedar and sycomore wood, mulberry trees, vines, and fig trees, buffaloes, bulls, and a gold habergeon with a border of lapis lazuli.

A curious episode of the expedition is related by Amenemheb, an officer who accompanied it, and was in personal attendance upon the Egyptian monarch.  It appears that in the time of Thothmes III. the elephant haunted the woods and jungles of the Mesopotamian region, as he now does those of the peninsula of Hindustan.  The huge unwieldy beasts were especially abundant in the neighbourhood of Ni or Nini, the country between the middle Tigris and the Zagros range.  As Amenemhat I. had delighted in the chase of the lion and the crocodile, so Thothmes III. no sooner found a number of elephants within his reach than he proceeded to hunt and kill them, mainly no doubt for the sport, but partly in order to obtain their tusks.  No fewer than a hundred and twenty are said to have been killed or taken.  On one occasion, however, the