The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The Hittites learned to write from the merchants of Assur who lived nearby; their early inscriptions and accounts are all in the cuneiform script used by the ancient Assyrians. By 1790, the chief of the Hittite city of Kussara was keeping his own records. The Hittites had entered history.1

  This chief, Anittas, had inherited a very small two-city kingdom from his father, who had managed to conquer the nearby (and unsuspecting) city of Nesa by mounting a nighttime raid on it and kidnapping its king. In his father’s day, Anittas had served as official Lord of the Watchtower, a job which required him to keep track of the reports from all the lookouts, who were spaced around the border of the tiny kingdom in watchtowers.2 When his father died, Anittas—who at that time called himself merely the “prince of Kussara”—began his own wars of conquest. He campaigned against the nearby strong city of Hattusas, which he finally sacked when it continued to resist him.3 He also cursed it, the same fate which may have overtaken Agade: “On its site I sowed weeds,” he announced. “May the Storm God strike down anyone who becomes king after me and resettles Hattusa!”4 Then he turned towards the city of Purushkhanda, which occupied, among the Hittite peoples, much the same place as Nippur occupied in the land of Sumer: it was a capital of the mind, a city whose ruler could claim a sort of moral authority over the cities of others. The king of Purushkhanda, perhaps with one eye on the distant column of smoke rising from Hattusas, surrendered without a fight.

  Like his contemporary Hammurabi, who was at that moment fighting his way across the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, Anittas had created a nation. “I have conquered every land where the sun rises,” Anittas announced, somewhat grandly, and began to refer to himself not as “prince” but as “great king.”5 He ruled his kingdom for a full forty years, a more than respectable period for any ancient king; he died within a year of Hammurabi, although there is no indication that the two ever exchanged messages.

  26.1 The Hittite Homeland

  The kingdom built by Anittas remained centered at his home city of Kussara until a couple of generations later, when a later king decided to ignore the curse and rebuild Hattusas. There were seven springs nearby, fertile land around it, and a cliff where a palace could be built and easily defended. The site was too good to leave deserted.

  As soon as he had transferred his capital from Kussara to Hattusas, this king became known as Hattusilis I: “the one from Hattuses.”6 He began to make armed expeditions out of Asia Minor, down into the Western Semite kingdoms on the northeastern Mediterranean coast, and captured some of the smaller cities for himself. Anittas had created the Hittite nation, but Hattusilis I made it into an empire that ruled over more than one people. He was a great warrior, possibly the greatest in the world at his time: the Harappan cities were sinking, Hammurabi was dead, in Egypt the kings of Thebes and Avaris were at war, and the reign of Minos was long past.

  Despite his successes, Hattusilis died wretchedly unhappy, not in Hattusas but back in his old home of Kussara, where he had asked to be carried on his deathbed. A Hittite document called the Testament records his deathbed speech to his grandson Mursilis. Hattusilis breaks out in savage condemnation of his son and daughter, who had listened to discontented Hittite nobleman and allowed their minds to be poisoned against him. “They said to you: Revolt against your father,” Hattusilis complains, “and they became rebellious, and they began to conspire.”7

  He has already disinherited the two grown children, and appointed his nephew heir instead. But in his last hours, Hattusilis rejects his nephew as well. He is, according to the Testament, “without compassion…cold and pitiless…heedless of the word of the king.” His character, apparently, is partly his mother’s fault; Hattusilis next turns on this woman, his own sister, and in furiously mixed metaphors calls her a snake in the grass who bellows like a cow.8 The old king chooses another nephew named Mursilis as his heir instead and then dies, after a lifetime of military victories and family disappointments.

  Mursilis, only thirteen or fourteen, was surrounded not only by the regents who were supposed to watch over him, but also by his seething disinherited cousins, uncles, and aunts. Despite this sticky beginning, the young Mursilis managed to survive to the age of accession (no mean feat in those days). He seems to have been lucky in his guardians; one of his regents, the Hittite prince Pimpira, was particularly concerned that he be not just a king, but a just and compassionate king. “Give bread to the one who is hungry,” a Hittite chronicle records Pimpira as ordering, “clothing to the one who is naked; bring those distressed by cold into the heat.”9

  Once on the throne, though, Mursilis was more concerned with the conquest of new land than with the compassionate administration of the empire he already owned. A later Hittite treaty with Aleppo, by way of reviewing the previous relations between the two treatying parties, spells out his next move: “After Hattusilis, Mursilis the great king, the grandson of Hattusilis the great king, destroyed the kingship of Aleppo and Aleppo itself.”10

  Spurred on by his success at Aleppo, Mursilis began to march towards Babylon. He found various Kassite warleaders in his path, but he either conquered or made alliance with them. By 1595, he had arrived at Babylon’s walls. The explosion that followed was more like a damp splutter. Babylon, under the rule of Hammurabi’s great-great-grandson, put up little resistance. According to Mursilis’s own accounts, he overran the city, took its people prisoner, and put the king in chains.11 The final fate of this last descendant of Hammurabi is unknown.

  Mursilis decided not to add Babylon to his empire. He had made his point: he was, like his grandfather, the most powerful conqueror in the world. Babylon was too far away from Hattusas to be governed with any security. Instead, Mursilis left the city desolate and marched back to his capital in victory. When he was well away, Kassite chiefs from nearby moved in to take over the ruins. The Amorite domination of Babylon had ended.73

  Mursilis paraded into Hattusas hauling both captives and treasure with him. Behind the cheers, though, an assassination plot was slowly taking shape.

  The culprit was his cupbearer, Hantili, a trusted official who also happened to be his brother-in-law. In Mursilis’s absence, Hantili had grown accustomed to ruling on behalf of the throne; he was not likely to have welcomed the sudden curtailment to his authority. Not long after Mursilis returned from Babylon, Hantili and another palace official murdered the king, and Hantili took the throne. “They did an evil thing,” the Hittite chronicles tell us. “They killed Mursilis; they shed blood.”12

  Hantili managed to keep the throne for almost three decades, during which the Hittites settled into their role as major players on the world scene. But he had set an unfortunate precedent. As soon as Hantili was dead, a court official killed Hantili’s son and all of his grandsons and seized the throne. He, in turn, was killed by his own son, who was later murdered and replaced by a usurper, who then fell victim himself to assassination.

  The dynastic succession of the Hittites had settled into a game of hunt-the-king. During these years, the royal palace at Hattusas acquired a twenty-five-foot-thick wall around it.13 For the Hittite rulers, life within the borders of the kingdom was more dangerous than any military campaign.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Ahmose Expels the Hyksos

  In Egypt, the pharaoh at Thebes defeats the Hyksos between 1570 and 1546 BC

  AFTER SEQUENERE OF THEBES fell in battle against the Hyksos, his older son Kahmose took the throne.74 Apepi I, the longest lived of the Hyksos kings, was still on the throne, and Kahmose needed to avenge his father’s death.

  His plans had to take account of an unpleasant reality: his Theban kingdom was sandwiched between a hostile power to the north, and that power’s ally in the south. During the chaos just before the Hyksos takeover, the Egyptian governors of Nubia had gone their own way. Native Nubians had risen to official positions, and for years Nubia had been behaving like an independent country. Rather than attempting to subdue them, the Hyksos kin
gs of the Fifteenth Dynasty had made a treaty with them. The Nubians agreed to come to the aid of the north against Theban Egypt, which would then have to fight a two-front war.

  Kahmose of Thebes knew this. When he began to move his soldiers north along the Nile, he also spread out spies all across the south, hoping to intercept any Hyksos attempt to call their Nubian allies to arms. According to Kahmose himself, this strategy was brilliantly successful. In an inscription dedicated to Amun the sun-god, a deity much favored by the Hyksos, Kahmose claims that he conquered his way all the way to Avaris, where the Hyksos, frightened of his approach, “peeped out of the loopholes on their walls, like baby lizards.” Meanwhile, his men managed to intercept the Hyksos messenger on his way down to Nubia. The letter he carried is preserved in Kahmose’s records: “Kahmose has chosen to ruin both our lands, yours and mine,” the Hyksos king told his Nubian counterpart. “Come north, then, and don’t be afraid. He is already right here in my own area…. I will harass him until you arrive, and then you and I will divide up the towns of Egypt.”1

  The capture of this letter was cause for much boasting on the Egyptian side: “I caused the letter to be taken back to Apepi,” Kahmose bragged, “so that my victory should invade his heart and paralyze his limbs.”2 He then marched back to Thebes, claiming victory the entire way and timing his arrival to coincide with the flooding of the Nile.

  This fairly transparent attempt to remind everyone that he was the rightful king of all Egypt, responsible for the rising of the waters, suggests that Kahmose’s victory wasn’t quite as shattering as he claims. If he did indeed terrify the Hyksos with his might, it is difficult to see why he didn’t go on and reclaim the north. At the very least, he could have attempted to occupy Memphis, the secondary Hyksos power center, from which the Hyksos appear to have kept an eye on the southern part of their realm; Avaris was too far north to be an effective center for the administration of the whole country.

  He did neither, which suggests that his attack on Avaris was nothing more than a successful raid. Kahmose had little time to follow up on it. He died in that same year, after a reign of only three years; possibly he was wounded during the campaign, and lingered for a while before succumbing to his injuries. Since he died without sons, his brother Ahmose took the throne.

  He was still very young, and his mother Ahhotep ruled as his regent.

  27.1 Ahmose Against the Hyksos

  Around the same time, the long-lived Apepi I finally died in Avaris. The Hyksos throne was inherited by another king of much less personality; no contemporary records say much about him, and the scribes even disagree on his name. Apparently Queen Ahhotep took advantage of this northern weakness to follow up on her son’s raid with a campaign of her own. In inscriptions, she is called “the one who has looked after her soldiers…has pacified Upper Egypt, and expelled her rebels.”3 She was buried with a ceremonial axe in her coffin, along with three medals, the Egyptian equivalent of medals of valor.

  With this head start, Ahmose, when he inherited the throne, managed to battle his way successfully all the way to Avaris. By the twentieth year of his reign, he had captured both Heliopolis (just south of Avaris) and the eastern border fortress Tjaru. With these southern and eastern strongholds under his control, he was ready to pinch Avaris between the two wings of his army.

  Manetho, quoted in the pages of Josephus, describes the next phase of the war:

  [The Hyksos] built a wall round all [Avaris], which was a large and strong wall, in order to keep all their possessions and their prey within a place of strength. But [Ahmose] made an attempt to take them by force and by a siege, with four hundred and eighty thousand men to lie round about them. When he despaired of taking the place by that siege, they came to an agreement. They would leave Egypt, and go, without any harm done them, wherever they would. After this agreement, they went away with their whole families and effects, not fewer in number than two hundred and forty-thousand, and took their journey from Egypt, through the wilderness.4

  We should take this account with a grain of salt, since Egyptian accounts describe much more bloodshed. The tomb inscriptions of Ahmose’s general (who is, confusingly, also named Ahmose) describe at least three different savage battles at Avaris: “I fought there, and I brought away a hand,” he says proudly. (Egyptian scribes used amputated hands to tot up enemy casualties.) “This was reported to the royal herald, and I was given a medal of valor.”5 Egyptian relief sculptures commemorating the event show warships, battles, and herds of Hyksos led captive. Ruins show that Avaris was sacked. The Hyksos palace was flattened, and a new building, commissioned by pharaoh Ahmose, was built overtop of it.6 Other traces of Hyksos occupation were so thoroughly obliterated that it is exceedingly difficult to reconstruct the details of their reign over Lower Egypt at all.

  Nevertheless, the city’s ruins show no evidence that a general slaughter, often the final phase of a long siege, ever took place at Avaris. Nor are there very many Semitic names in servant lists for the next fifty years, so it is unlikely that many Hyksos were enslaved. So it is indeed possible that a mass exodus, particularly of noncombatants, marked the end of Hyksos domination in Egypt.

  We do know that, after the surrender of Avaris, the pharaoh Ahmose kept on marching north into Canaan, finally halting at Sharuhen near Gaza. Here, General Ahmose helped lead another successful siege. This may well have been a follow-up to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Avaris; if they fled just far enough to hole themselves up in another fortress, Ahmose would not have wanted them to regather their strength anywhere near Egypt.7 Sharuhen was a danger to Egypt in any case. Excavations on its site show that it had become the center of a Western Semitic kingdom, the strongest military headquarters in the south of Canaan.8 Conquering Sharuhen did more than simply make Egypt a little safer from reinvasion; it turned the south of Canaan into an Egyptian province.

  According to General Ahmose’s tomb inscriptions, the siege of Sharuhen took six years.9 If this is true, pharaoh Ahmose probably left his general in charge and headed back home to take care of matters in Memphis, because he died not too long after the capture of Avaris.

  It had taken Ahmose twenty years to take back Lower Egypt, and both Manetho and Josephus give him a rule of twenty-five years. He did not enjoy his position as king of all Egypt for long. But for his reunification of Egypt, and his reassertion of native Egyptian rule over the kingdom, Manetho names him the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty. With this reunification, Egypt enters into a new phase of building, of peace and prosperity, of art and literature: the New Kingdom.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Usurpation and Revenge

  In Egypt, between 1546 and 1446 BC, Tuthmosis III loses the throne to his aunt Hatshepsut but regains it and conquers the Western Semitic lands

  AFTER AHMOSE’S DEATH, his son Amenhotep I took up the reins of power, trampled on the Nubians until they were firmly back within the Egyptian fold, and consolidated his father’s victories. But the family line ended there. Amenhotep remained not only childless, but also unmarried for most of his life. His first wife (and full sister) died young, and Amenhotep did not take another.1

  In an age where pharaohs boasted multiple wives and dozens of concubines, this suggests that Amenhotep’s taste didn’t run to women. Even so, it is unusual that he didn’t marry again. Most ancient rulers who preferred the company of their own sex still managed to produce the heir required for dynastic stability; Amenhotep I remained alone, deeply solitary, and appointed his trusted general to be the next king.

  This general, Tuthmosis, was also his brother-in-law. Technically, this made him a member of the royal family; still, his coronation was a major break in the normal father-to-son succession. The mummies of Ahmose, Tuthmosis I, and two of Tuthmosis I’s descendants—his son Tuthmosis II and great-grandson Tuthmosis IV—have been so well preserved that their features can be clearly seen. The family resemblance in the Tuthmosis line is startling, and markedly different from the face
of Ahmose I.75

  28.1. Kings of Egypt. Ahmose I (top left) does not share the family resemblance of Tuthmosis I, II, and III. Photo credit G. Elliot Smith, Catalogue Général des Antiquités Egyptiennes du Musée du Caire, Cairo

  Tuthmosis I, elderly when he became king, reigned for only six years. Very early in his rule, he began to plan his tomb. For some time, the pyramids, which were supposed to inspire awe, had been less than sacred to rank-and-file Egyptians. Tomb robbers had managed to break into almost every pyramid in Egypt; they were, after all, enormous treasure markers that pointed down to burial chambers stuffed with gold. To avoid losing his grave goods, Tuthmosis I planned a new, secret burial place: a cave with painted walls, just as ornate as the inside of any pyramid, but with a hidden entrance. The valley where his cave was located later became known as the Valley of the Kings.76

  Unlike his predecessor, Tuthmosis I married at least twice. His most royal wife was Amenhotep’s sister, the daughter of the great Ahmose, and mother of two sons and two daughters. But he had also married a lesser wife, who bore him a son.

  When he became pharaoh, Tuthmosis appointed first his elder son, and then his second son, as heir. Both died before him. He had no intention of passing the crown to a trusted friend, and his only living male heir was his son by the lesser wife. So in order to strengthen this son’s dynastic position, Tuthmosis not only appointed him heir, but married him to one of the daughters of his primary wife: the princess Hatshepsut. When Tuthmosis died, after a reign of only six years, his son became Tuthmosis II; Hatshepsut became queen.