All Naharaim had submitted to him:  Zahi, Alasia, and the Amurru had passed under his government from that of the Pharaohs; Carchemish, Tunipa, Nii, Hamath, figured among his royal cities, and Qodshu was the defence of his southern frontier.  His progress towards the east was not less considerable.  Mitanni, Arzapi, and the principalities of the Euphrates as far as the Balikh, possibly even to the Khabur,* paid him homage:  beyond this, Assyria and Chaldaea barred his way.  Here, as on his other frontiers, fortune brought him face to face with the most formidable powers of the Asiatic world.

* The text of the poem of Pentauirit mentions, among the countries confederate with the Khati, all Naharaim; that is to say, the country on either side of the Euphrates, embracing Mitanni and the principalities named in the Amarna correspondence, and in addition some provinces whose sites have not yet been discovered, but which may be placed without much risk of error to the north of the Taurus.

The latter prince was obliged to capture Qodshu, and to conquer the people of the Lebanon.  Had he sufficient forces at his disposal to triumph over them, or only enough to hold his ground?  Both hypotheses could have been answered in the affirmative if each one of these great powers, confiding in its own resources, had attacked him separately.  The Amorites, the people of Zahi, Alasia, and Naharaim, together with recruits from Hittite tribes, would then have put him in a position to resist, and even to carry off victory with a high hand in the final struggle.  But an alliance between Assyria or Babylon and Thebes was always possible.  There had been such things before, in the time of Thut-mosis IV. and in that of Amenothes III., but they were lukewarm agreements, and their effect was not much to boast of, for the two parties to the covenant had then no common enemy to deal with, and their mutual interests were not, therefore, bound up with their united action.  The circumstances were very different now.  The rapid growth of a nascent kingdom, the restless spirit of its people, its trespasses on domains in which the older powers had been accustomed to hold the upper hand,—­did not all this tend to transform the convention, more commercial than military, with which up to this time they had been content, into an offensive and defensive treaty?  If they decided to act in concert, how could Sapalulu or his successors, seeing that he was obliged to defend himself on two frontiers at the same moment, muster sufficient resources to withstand the double assault?  The Hittites, as we know them more especially from the hieroglyphic inscriptions, might be regarded as the lords only of Northern Syria, and their power be measured merely by the extent of territory which they occupied to the south of the Taurus and on the two banks of the Middle Euphrates.  But this does not by any means represent the real facts.  This was but the half of their empire; the rest extended to the westward