The next year Kadesh on the Orontes, near the Lake of Horns, was attacked and destroyed, its trees were cut down and its corn carried away.  From Kadesh Thothmes proceeded to the land of Phoenicia, and took the cities of Zemar (now Sumra) and Arvad.  The heirs of four of the conquered princes were carried as hostages to Egypt, “so that when one of these kings should die, then the Pharaoh should take his son and put him in his stead.”

In B.C. 1472 the land of the Amorites was reduced, or rather that part of it which was known as Takhis, the Thahash of Genesis xxii. 24, on the shores of the Lake of Merna, in which we should probably see the Lake of Homs.  Nearly 500 prisoners were led to Egypt.  The Syrian princes now came to offer their gifts to the conqueror, bringing with them, among other things, more than 760 pounds of silver, 19 chariots covered with silver ornaments, and 41 leathern collars covered with bronze scales.  At the same time the whole country was thoroughly organized under the new Egyptian administration.  Military roads were constructed and provided with posting-houses, at each of which relays of horses were kept in readiness, as well as “the necessary provision of bread of various sorts, oil, balsam, wine, honey, and fruits.”  The quarries of the Lebanon were further required to furnish the Pharaoh with limestone for his buildings in Egypt and elsewhere.

Two years later Thothmes was again in Syria.  He made his way as far as the Euphrates, and there on the eastern bank erected a stele by the side of one which his father Thothmes II. had already set up.  The stele was an imperial boundary-stone marking the frontier of the Egyptian empire.  It was just such another stele that Hadad-ezer of Zobah was intending to restore in the same place when he was met and defeated by David (2 Sam. viii. 3).

The Pharaoh now took ship and descended the Euphrates, “conquering the towns and ploughing up the fields of the king of Naharaim.”  He then re-ascended the stream to the city of Ni, where he placed another stele, in proof that the boundary of Egypt had been extended thus far.  Elephants still existed in the neighbourhood, as they continued to do four and a half centuries later in the time of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. Thothmes amused himself by hunting them, and no less than 120 were slain.

On his way home the tribute and “yearly tax” of the inhabitants of the Lebanon was brought to him, and the corvee-work annually required from them was also fixed.  Thothmes indulged his taste for natural history by receiving as part of the tribute various birds which were peculiar to Syria, or at all events were unknown in Egypt, and which, we are told, “were dearer to the king than anything else.”  He had already established zoological and botanical gardens in Thebes, and the strange animals and plants which his campaigns furnished for them were depicted on the walls of one of the chambers in the temple he built at Karnak.