"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 monarch ran
a great risk. He was engaged in the pursuit of a herd, when the "rogue,"
or leading elephant, turned and made a rush at t