War and Trade with
the Pharaohs
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War and Trade with
the Pharaohs
An Archaeological Study of
Ancient Egypt’s Foreign Relations
By
Garry J. Shaw
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Pen & Sword Archaeology
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Garry J. Shaw, 2017
ISBN 978 1 78303 046 0
The right of Garry J. Shaw to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
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Contents
Maps vi
Acknowledgements xi
Preface: Crossroads xii
Chapter 1: Another World (10000–2584 BCE)
1
Chapter 2: Building Foreign Relations (and Pyramids)
(2584–2117 BCE)
13
Chapter 3: A Country Divided (2117–2066 BCE)
32
Chapter 4: An Expanding World (2066–1781 BCE)
41
Chapter 5: The Hyksos and the Kermans: Their Rise and Fall
(1781–1549 BCE)
59
Chapter 6: Meeting the Mitanni and Assimilating Kush
(1549–1388 BCE)
74
Chapter 7: Heresy and Diplomacy (1388–1298 BCE)
96
Chapter 8: The Hittites and the Ramessides
(1298–1187 BCE)
109
Chapter 9: Sea Peoples, Libyans, and the End of the New Kingdom (1187–1064 BCE)
128
Chapter 10: Libyan Pharaohs, the Kingdom of Kush, and the Assyrian Invasion (1064–664 BCE)
144
Chapter 11: Vive La Resistance (664–332 BCE)
160
Endnotes 179
Bibliography 183
Index 203
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Maps vii
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viii War and Trade with the Pharaohs
Map 3: Nubia. Made with Natural Earth.
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Maps ix
Map 4: The Levant. Adapted by the author from a map made with Natural Earth.
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Julie Patenaude for reading and commenting on the
initial drafts of my manuscript (and for providing photographs), and
Henning Franzmeier of the Qantir-Piramesse Project, for giving me
permission to include photographs from the team’s excavations, as well as one of his own photographs. I’m also grateful to everyone at Pen and Sword for giving me the opportunity to write, what I hope, is a readable and useful introduction to Ancient Egypt’s foreign relations. Finally, many thanks to my students at the Bloomsbury Summer School 2015, who took my course
‘Pharaoh’s Friends and Foes: Diplomacy, Trade, Travel, and Warfare’ – your questions and comments helped a great deal during the writing of this book.
This book is dedicated to my brother, Peter Shaw.
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Preface: Crossroads
When we look at a map of Ancient Egypt, its limits create the illu-
sion of a country separated from the rest of the world – a place of
isolation and borders – a thin strip of green in an unforgiving sea
of yellow. Introductions to Ancient Egypt also tend to emphasize the country’s natural barriers: the Mediterranean Sea to the north; the Eastern and Western Deserts; the difficult to navigate Nile Cataracts in the south. But how true is this idea of an isolated Egypt? How connected were the Ancient Egyptians with their neighbours? If they were so isolated, how did they trade? And how did they interact with foreigners in times of war and peace?
Let’s start again with a different approach: rather than regarding Egypt as an isolated piece of north-east Africa – a fertile anomaly in the desert –
what if we view it as a gateway? A hub, connected to the Mediterranean Sea and the world beyond, to Asia via the Sinai, and south – along the Nile, the Red Sea, and desert routes – further into Africa. Throughout ancient history, boats arrived on Egypt’s northern coast and sailed along the Delta’s tributaries to reach the Nile; traders from all directions crossed desert tracks into the Nile Valley; and Egyptians left their homeland to visit neighbouring cultures, trading goods, sharing knowledge, and sometimes waging war.
Many of the boundaries said to isolate the Egyptians were no such thing: Egypt was, in fact, a crossroads. What follows is a story of interactions: of warfare, trade, immigration, and emigration.
Just as Egypt’s isolation is a popular misconception, its unchanging
character is too. Throughout Egyptian history, there were political changes, technological advancements, and religious devel
opments. An Old Kingdom
Egyptian might recognize a Late Period Egyptian as one of his fellow coun-trymen, but they would probably find it hard to relate to one another – too much had happened in the 2,000 years that separated them. Egypt’s interactions with the wider world changed over time too: foreign civilizations emerged and crumbled, empires rose and fell, and periods of warfare gave way to times of friendship. Slowly, but continuously, the Egyptians were changed by their interactions. Nothing happens in a vacuum – we are each the products of decisions taken by people we will never know or meet, many War and Trade with the Pharaohs.indd 12
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Preface: Crossroads xiii
long dead, and the Egyptians were no different. Their society was not isolated, and far from static.
The Egyptians saw their land as crossing a great disc, the fertile land and the River Nile at its centre representing order, balance, and justice, a concept known to them as maat. Surrounding them were foreign lands, representative of disorder ( isfet) , and above were the gods, distant in the sky.
The Egyptians also saw duality everywhere, an interest that probably stems from the prominent divisions in the environment around them: the marked difference between the marshy Delta and the thin path of the Nile Valley to its south led them to separate Lower Egypt (the north) from Upper Egypt (the south). While kemet, the black fertile soil that flanks the Nile, found its opposite in djeseret – ‘the red land’ – the dangerous desert beyond.
Egypt, as a geographic entity, expanded and contracted as the centuries passed. The Sinai was not always under Pharaonic influence, neither was the desert west beyond the Nile Valley. Sometimes the pharaoh’s control ended at the First Cataract, at others it pushed towards the Fourth. The Egyptians had two concepts of ‘borders’: cosmic borders, which could never be crossed, called djer, and physical borders, called tash, often marked by boundary stelae, which designated the political limits of control. But despite such strict terminology, for much of Egyptian history, rather than clear borders, there were ‘borderlands’ between the Egyptians and their neighbouring cultures, places where the ownership of the territory was in flux.
For the purposes of this book, we will regard ‘Ancient Egypt’ as the land stretching from the northern coast of the Delta south to Aswan at the Nile’s First Cataract (the Nile having Six Cataracts – patches where the river is difficult to navigate due to rocks, rapids, or shallows). And to the east and west, I’ll follow the modern definition: the eastern edge being just beyond the Sinai Peninsula, and the western edge just beyond Siwa Oasis.
Foreigners and Warfare
Throughout Egyptian history, and even in prehistory, the Egyptians came into frequent contact with their neighbours, who they referred to as khastyu, literally ‘people from the hill countries,’ but often simply translated as ‘foreigners.’ The Egyptians were intrigued by the geography of the world beyond the Nile Valley, seeing a place of hills and uneven terrain, quite different from the level-terrain of their home. They were also interested in the people of the world, dividing them into four groups: Egyptians, Nubians, Libyans, and Asiatics. These, including themselves, were depicted in standardized, War and Trade with the Pharaohs.indd 13
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stereotyped ways, making them immediately recognizable, as if they were hieroglyphs representing the people of Egypt, the south, west and east, irrespective of how they might appear in real life.
The people of Nubia – an area defined as lying between the First Cataract of the Nile and the Fifth Cataract – were known to the Ancient Egyptians as Nehesyu , and Nubia itself was subdivided into Lower Nubia, called Wawat
– the area between the First Cataract and the Second Cataract – and Upper Nubia, called Kush, from the Second Cataract to the Fifth Cataract. People from the Levant – the strip of land running along the eastern side of the Mediterranean, comprising modern Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria –
and those generally from the east, were called Aamu, translated normally as
‘Asiatics.’ Meanwhile, Libyans – effectively anyone from the west of Egypt
– were called Tjehenu if they lived roughly west of the Delta, and Tjemehu if they lived further south (although the number of Libyan peoples known increases from the New Kingdom). Each ‘people’ of the world was subdivided into many other cultural groups, which we will encounter as we
progress through this book. The Egyptians also identified foreign groups by their clothing or skills; Asiatics could be called ‘shoulder-knot people’
because of their distinctive clothing, and Nubians ‘bowmen’ because of their famed proficiency at archery.
Given the Egyptians’ longstanding (and lucrative) contacts with people
from all directions, even in Predynastic times, it is a curious aspect of their worldview that ‘foreigners’ came to be regarded as the ultimate representatives of disorder – the official antithesis of everything Egyptian. This view remained a key part of Egyptian royal ideology and presentation for over 3,000 years: whether a king fought a military campaign or not, he still had himself depicted smiting an assortment of foreign enemies, smashing their skulls in with his mace or axe; the underside of the pharaoh’s sandals bore images of foreigners, so that with every step, he trampled his enemies; and the phrase ‘nine bows’ referred to the totality of Egypt’s enemies, which as well as being represented as bows, could be shown in art as nine bound foreigners. Wars were presented on temple walls and royal stelae as times of glory, when the pharaohs speared, cut down, smote, and burned their
enemies in the name of the gods. In such scenes, the king is often depicted on a massive scale, riding into battle, crushing his foes, who fall chaotically beneath the hooves of his horses and the wheels of his chariots. Captured enemies were ceremonially executed.
So far, so nasty. You’d think that the Ancient Egyptians hated everything foreign and wanted nothing to do with anyone from beyond their borders.
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Preface: Crossroads xv
We must remember, however, that there was the reality of the Egyptians’
daily interactions with foreigners, and the ideological fiction – repetitive themes used to promote Egypt’s superiority – presented on temple walls
and tombs. One moment, the king could be giving his artisans the go-ahead to carve a massive royal ‘smiting scene’ on his temple gateway – showing him as embodiment of order and destroyer of foreigners; the next, he could be drafting a diplomatic letter to one of his fellow ‘great kings’ elsewhere in the world, expressing brotherhood and friendship. Some kings were served by viziers, butlers, and chief craftsmen (among many other roles) of foreign origin, and foreigners even worked on the royal tombs, not as slaves, but as members of the artisan community.
Foreigners lived in Egyptian society at all levels, from slaves and mercenaries, to merchants and viziers. Travelling around Ancient Egypt, there’d be a good chance that you’d bump into someone of Libyan descent, or from Nubia. Similarly, in the Levant, you might meet Egyptians, perhaps traders or interpreters, soldiers, and diplomats. On a state level, foreigners were treated as enemies, disordered, wretched, and cowardly, but in daily life, the reality of interacting with non-Egyptians was quite different.
Nonetheless, most foreigners entered Egypt as slaves, having been traded or captured as prisoners of war (described as ‘bound for life’); indeed, military raids in Nubia, Libya, and the Levant were sometimes conducted in order to abduct people for work on State projects. Treated as property, these foreign slaves were normally forced to work for households, temples, and building projects; they had no rights (though from the Ramesside Period, they could own property), and passed their status on to their children, but could be freed by their owners.
Ancient Egyptian Chronology
The ‘Pharaonic Peri
od’ of Egyptian history stretches from around 3100
BCE to the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. According to an
Egyptian priest named Manetho, who lived in the third century BCE, thirty dynasties of kings ruled during this nearly 3,000 year span of time (later writers added a thirty-first for the final Persian occupation). Although each dynasty should really represent a single royal family line (a ruling house or single bloodline), Manetho also created a division when a major event occurred; so, for example, King Khasekhemwy, last king of the 2nd Dynasty is the father of King Djoser, first king of the 3rd Dynasty, but Manetho created a division because Djoser erected the first pyramid.
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Though adapted to reflect current research, modern scholars still
use Manetho’s dynastic divisions, and have grouped them into longer
chronological phases, defined by whether Egypt was unified and ruled by a single king (‘kingdoms’), or had entered a period of political disunity, when multiple kings ruled simultaneously (‘intermediate periods’). These are: the Early Dynastic Period, the Old Kingdom, the First Intermediate Period, the Middle Kingdom, the Second Intermediate Period, the New
Kingdom, the Third Intermediate Period, and the Late Period. The phase
before Egypt’s unification under a single king is called the Predynastic Period. Taken together, the general divisions of Egyptian history can be broken down as follows (all dates until 664 BCE, are approximate):
Period
Dynasties
Dates
Predynastic Period
ca. 5000–3100 BCE
Early Dynastic Period
1–2
ca. 3100–2584 BCE
Old Kingdom
3–6
ca. 2584–2117 BCE
First Intermediate Period
7–11 (first half)
ca. 2117–2066 BCE
Middle Kingdom
11–12
ca. 2066–1781 BCE
Second Intermediate Period 13–17
ca. 1781–1549 BCE
New Kingdom
18–20
ca. 1549–1064 BCE
Third Intermediate Period
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