Abdju was the theological center of Seti’s regime, and he went to extraordinary lengths to guarantee its proper functioning in perpetuity. First, he endowed it with substantial land and resources, many of them located in the farthest parts of conquered Nubia (where nobody could object). Next, Seti took a leaf out of Horemheb’s book and promulgated a wide-ranging decree to protect the assets from improper appropriation by other institutions. Carved into the side of a sandstone hill near the third Nile cataract, in the vicinity of a fortified garrison, the Nauri Decree spelled out the penalty for requisitioning or interfering with the annual shipment of produce sent from Kush to Abdju:
As for any overseer of the fortress, scribe of the fortress, or agent of the fortress who boards a boat belonging to the temple and takes … anything of Kush that is being delivered as revenue to the temple, the law is to be enforced against him in the form of one hundred blows, and he is to be fined … at a rate of eighty to one.8
Having thus secured regular shipments of produce to fill the coffers of his temple, Seti set about guaranteeing an eternal supply of gold, the commodity above all others that betokened wealth. He ordered new gold mines to be opened up in Egypt’s remote Eastern Desert, and took a close interest in the production and transport of the mines’ precious ore to the Nile Valley. An inscription at a remote temple in the Wadi Barramiya recounts the king’s personal involvement:
His Majesty surveyed the hill country as far as the mountains, for his heart wished to see the mines from which the fine gold is brought. After His Majesty had walked uphill for many miles, he halted by the wayside to mull things over. He declared, “How irksome is a track without water! What is an expedition to do to relieve their parched throats?”9
His answer was to order the stonecutters to leave their mining posts and instead “dig a well in the mountains, so that it might lift up the weary and refresh the spirit of him who burns in summer.”10
The king’s penchant for innovation was also put to great effect in the preparation of his final resting place, a great royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Not only is it the longest and deepest of all the royal tombs at Thebes, but it was also the first to be decorated throughout: every wall and ceiling of every passage and chamber is covered with the finest paintings and reliefs. This tomb established the decorative program that would be followed by all subsequent tombs in the valley, until the very end of the New Kingdom. Amid such splendor, one masterwork is justly famed—the magnificent vaulted ceiling of the burial chamber, painted with astronomical scenes so as to resemble the very vault of heaven. The Ramesside Dynasty might have been less than a decade old, but Seti I had no doubts about his immortal destiny.
THE TUMBRELS OF WAR
RESTORING SACRED SITES TO MAGNIFICENCE AND ENDOWING THEM with dazzling new monuments was a tried and trusted way of rebuilding Egypt’s domestic standing, but there was still the question of the country’s international reputation. From his background as an army officer, Seti knew that influence on the world stage came from military strength. Yet not since the glory days of Amenhotep II had Egypt won a decisive victory in the Near East. Under Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, attempts to extend or even defend imperial possessions in Syria had been wholly ineffective. Horemheb had tried to reassert Egyptian hegemony, but with mixed results. Egypt’s reputation as a great power was seriously compromised, its overseas territories vulnerable to secession or seizure by the Hittites, and its mastery of trade routes threatened. Action was urgently needed if the Ramessides’ inheritance was not to disappear before their very eyes. Seti had lost no time, launching his first campaign while still crown prince. He had fought his way along the Phoenician coast to reassert Egypt’s traditional sphere of influence and to secure Egypt’s continued access to the Mediterranean harbors, with their garrisons and trading wharfs.
At the start of his sole reign in 1290, he led further campaigns with similar strategic objectives. The first people to feel Egypt’s wrath were the bedouin of northern Sinai. Struggles between their fractious tribes were not a hazard to Egyptian security per se, but they did threaten the country’s main supply lines to its imperial possessions in Syria-Palestine. Seti knew that control of the northern Sinai coastal route was a necessary prerequisite for more ambitious military maneuvers. Having reimposed Egyptian authority in his own backyard, he moved onward into Canaan, regaining control of the key fortified towns of Beth-Shan and Yenoam. He then set the seal on Egypt’s victory by forcing the chiefs of Lebanon to hew wood in his presence—a public act of submission to the pharaoh that also emphasized Egypt’s claim over the region’s abundant natural resources. In earlier times, small-scale local actions of this sort would not have required the personal presence of the king at the head of the army. But Seti recognized the need to project a renewed image of royal power abroad, and was fortunate in possessing the appetite for battle. Sustaining such a policy, however, would lead Egypt ever deeper into the quagmire of international politics, with momentous consequences.
The political map of the Near East in Seti’s time was radically and irrevocably changed from the confident days of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. Under Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, Egypt had achieved a lasting peace with the major power of northern Mesopotamia, the kingdom of Mittani, and had secured the new relationship through a series of diplomatic marriages. The two powers had respected each other’s spheres of influence and had managed to coexist amicably for half a century. Then, early in the reign of Akhenaten, the accession of a belligerent and ambitious ruler of the Hittites had dealt a body blow to the carefully negotiated balance of power. In a series of swift and devastating campaigns, the Hittite king Shuppiluliuma had succeeded in breaking out of his Anatolian heartland to conquer significant swaths of Mittanian-controlled territory, even raiding the Mittanian capital. Egypt had stuck by its friendship with Mittani, but the Mesopotamian kingdom was by that time all but a spent force. A new superpower had arrived on the scene, and Egypt had been totally unprepared.
Under Akhenaten, the pharaonic government’s initial reaction had been not to get involved. This passivity had been a fatal error. The combination of Mittanian weakness and Egyptian hesitancy had then led a number of former vassal states to exploit the power vacuum and push for greater autonomy. Chief among them had been Amurru, a sizeable region of central Syria between the river Orontes and the Mediterranean Sea. As we have seen, the ruler of Amurru, Abdi-Ashirta, had been a shameless wheeler-dealer, quick to take advantage of political rivalries and social instability to advance his own cause. His missives to the Egyptian court form a significant portion of the Amarna Letters archive. Either the Egyptians had not known quite what to make of him or they’d decided a policy of nonintervention was the most sensible course. Yet this disinterest had merely encouraged Abdi-Ashirta in his ambitions, and Amurru had remained outside Egyptian control.
Pharaonic power, once feared and respected throughout the Near East, had had no more success with the wayward state of Kadesh. Its rulers had been a thorn in Egypt’s side ever since the reign of Thutmose III, and they had stayed true to character during Akhenaten’s reign by going over to the enemy side as soon as the Hittite army had come knocking at their gates. An abortive mission to recapture Kadesh had merely underlined Egypt’s weakness. A second attempt on the town during the reign of Tutankhamun had met with similar failure, encouraging the gloating Hittites to consolidate their hold over northern Syria. Aziru of Amurru (Abdi-Ashirta’s son), seeing which way the wind had been blowing, had joined Kadesh in pledging allegiance to the region’s new Hittite overlords. The attempt by Tutankhamun’s widow to engineer a diplomatic marriage to a Hittite prince, to save her from Ay’s clutches, could have brought about a lasting peace between the two rival powers. Instead, Prince Zannanza’s mysterious death had merely provided yet another excuse for Hittite expansion; the prince’s father had vented his wrath on the treacherous Egyptians by attacking Egyptian-held territory in southern Syria.
But the Hittites ha
d not had it all their own way. In a bitter twist of fate, the prisoners of war that had been brought back to the Hittite capital from these punitive raids had carried with them the plague. It had swept through the royal citadel at Hattusa, killing not only the king but his crown prince as well. It was still ravaging the Hittite homeland twenty years later. To the Hittites, it must have seemed that the gods had changed sides. To the Egyptians, these bizarre events far from home seemed to have rekindled the possibility of victory. An uneasy peace had settled over Syria, with Egypt and the Hittites at a stalemate.
So things had stood when Seti I came to the throne. With a soldier’s blood in his veins, he was resolute in his determination to restore Egypt’s tarnished national pride. After a half century of inglorious retreat, it was time for Amun-Ra to be on the march once again. Having reasserted Egyptian control over Phoenicia and Canaan, Seti set his sights on Amurru and Kadesh. Winning them back would strike a symbolically powerful blow to Hittite aspirations and would go a long way to reviving Egypt’s regional reputation. Just a year after recapturing Beth-Shan and Yenoam, Seti’s army struck deep into central Syria. Kadesh was taken, and a triumphant Seti ordered a magnificent victory inscription to be erected in the city. His elation was to be short-lived. As soon as the Egyptian troops had disappeared over the horizon, the perfidious inhabitants of Kadesh returned at once to the Hittite fold. The pharaoh’s forces had rather more success with the province of Amurru—once retaken, it remained loyal to its new Egyptian master. At the end of the campaign, a large part of central Syria had changed sides. Seti had erased the humiliations of previous generations and had set Egypt back on the path of imperial greatness. Or so he hoped. In fact, the Hittites were merely regrouping. They had no intention of taking these setbacks lying down. Marshaling their considerable forces high on the Anatolian plateau, they prepared for all-out war. As the skies darkened over the Near East, the looming showdown between the two superpowers would not be long in coming.
Behind the apparent pluck and resolve of Seti I’s foreign policy there lurks a conundrum. If Egypt and the Hittites had indeed agreed on some sort of accommodation during the reign of Horemheb, as later sources suggest, then Seti’s bold campaigns drove a coach and horses through it. Moreover, his actions set in train a series of increasingly bloody clashes that led not to the restoration of Egyptian supremacy but to long-term losses. In retrospect, Seti’s Asiatic wars look rash and foolish. One possible explanation is that his policy was dictated more by political expediency than by a careful calculation of Egypt’s strategic interests. Rulers throughout history have resorted to stoking a foreign conflict to deflect attention from problems closer to home. And, indeed, there are tantalizing clues from early in Seti’s reign that may suggest an insecurity at the heart of his regime. In the king’s battle reliefs at Ipetsut, an enigmatic figure labeled only as “the group marshaler and fan bearer Mehy” is depicted with unusual prominence, as if playing a key role in the battles and in Seti’s wider offensive strategy.
To have been given such high status on a royal monument, Mehy (the name is an abbreviation for an unknown longer name) must have been one of the most influential figures at court—perhaps occupying a position akin to that of Horemheb during the reign of Tutankhamun or of Paramessu during the reign of Horemheb. It has even been suggested that the mysterious Mehy was Seti’s designated heir, and that the martial king had decided to follow recent precedent by leaving his throne to a fellow army officer.
If so, Seti’s son, the adolescent Prince Ramesses, had other ideas. Within a few years of Mehy’s figure being carved, every instance was systematically erased from the Ipetsut reliefs, to be replaced by Ramesses’s own image. The next generation of the Ramesside Dynasty had no intention of allowing a mere commoner to exercise such influence over the kingdom’s affairs. Ramesses, and he alone, would be recognized by posterity as his father’s true heir and most steadfast supporter. Ramesses, and he alone, would continue Seti’s aggressive foreign policy and fulfill Egypt’s destiny as a great imperial power. Ramesses, and he alone, would confront the Hittites directly in a final struggle for international supremacy.
The pharaoh’s army readied itself as the country marched onward to war.
CHAPTER 16
WAR AND PEACE
BATTLE ROYAL
ON A CRISP MAY MORNING IN 1274, SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, RAMESSES II broke camp and rode out at the head of his army. Behind him, in the chill morning air, slowly but surely, the massive expeditionary force of more than twenty thousand men inched its way along the dusty track, from the ridgetop vantage point where it had spent the night, down into the valley below. After a month on the march—from the Egyptian border to Gaza, through the hill country of Canaan to Megiddo, and thence along the Litani and Beqa valleys—the army’s ultimate destination lay just half a day ahead.
The great town of Kadesh had been a decisive player in the power politics of the Near East for centuries. Situated in the fertile valley of the river Orontes, it commanded one of the few routes that crossed the coastal range to link inland Syria with the Mediterranean coast. It was thus of vital strategic importance for control of the wider region. (Twenty-five centuries later, the Crusaders recognized the same strategic imperative, building the greatest of their castles, Krak des Chevaliers, just a few miles away.)
Back in the days of Thutmose III, the prince of Kadesh had been the leader of the rebels vanquished at Megiddo. In more recent times, Kadesh had successfully played the Egyptians and the Hittites off against each other, switching allegiance from one side to the other. The town’s canny rulers had also taken impressive steps to defend themselves. While they might have been quite happy to act as agents provocateurs in the looming confrontation between the two great powers, they had no wish to see their homes reduced to rubble in the process. Nestled in a fork of the Orontes and one of its tributaries, Kadesh was naturally protected on three sides by water. By cutting a channel to the south of the town, linking the two rivers, the citizens had turned their town, already heavily fortified, into a virtual island, impregnable against attack. Nonetheless, Ramesses had determined to capture Kadesh once and for all, to restore Egypt’s imperial reputation in Syria. After a decade of low-level hostilities, the Egyptian and Hittite forces had settled upon Kadesh as the location for a great set-piece battle that would finally decide permanent supremacy over the important territory of Amurru, which had switched sides so frequently during the previous decades. So it was with a combination of resolution and anticipation that the pharaoh’s army now marched.
The massive force assembled by Ramesses, representing perhaps three-quarters of Egypt’s total military strength, was formed of four divisions, each commanded by a senior royal officer. The king himself was in charge of the lead division, named for the god Amun. Behind him followed the divisions of Ra, Ptah, and Seth. Once on the march, the line of troops stretched for more than a mile, weapons glinting in the sunlight—an awesome sight indeed. As the eldest son and successor of the warrior king Seti I, Ramesses had learned at his father’s side the art of military leadership, and he knew that the sight of him triumphantly arrayed in his golden chariot would both inspire his own troops and strike fear into the heart of the enemy. Indeed, initial reports from the field suggested that the Hittites had taken fright. As the division of Amun marched through dense woods on the south bank of the Orontes, Egyptian scouts intercepted two bedouin tribesmen. Their interrogation yielded astonishing and welcome news: the Hittite army, overawed by Ramesses’s resolve and his fearsome war machine, was keeping its distance and was currently 120 miles away in the land of Aleppo. Fearing deliberate misinformation, the Egyptians cross-questioned the nomads, but they stuck to their story. Everything seemed to be going Ramesses’s way. Buoyed by this unexpected turn of events, the army pressed on toward Kadesh.
Once out of the woods, the division of Amun forded the Orontes near the village of Shabtuna (modern Ribla) and after another three hours’ marching reached their c
ampsite opposite Kadesh. The site was well chosen, with a nearby brook affording welcome refreshment for men and horses alike. While the animals quenched their thirst, the soldiers began to pitch camp. Chariots were parked, tents erected, and shields set up to form a defensive laager. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Hazy in the distance, the fortresslike Kadesh dominated the southeastern horizon.
As soon as Ramesses and his forward division reached the campsite, the intelligence corps dispatched scouts into the surrounding countryside, following established practice, to reconnoiter the land and provide information about enemy movements. Almost immediately, they stumbled upon two Hittite spies engaged in similar activities. It was a stroke of extraordinary luck, the first of several strokes that spring afternoon. The enemy agents were subjected not to a mild interrogation but to fierce beatings. What they revealed under torture was a bombshell. Far from being 120 miles away and chary of battle, the Hittite king Muwatalli II and his forces were at that very moment camped behind Kadesh, the town mound concealing their presence from the Egyptians. Moreover, the Hittite commanders had decided to launch a preemptive strike against the Egyptian army and were preparing to attack at any moment.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 34