Tuthmosis II had suffered from bad health all his life, and his physical weakness was complicated by his wife’s readiness to take over any (or all) of his duties. Hatshepsut is mentioned alongside Tuthmosis II as co-ruler from the very beginning of his reign. Apparently this did nothing for their marriage; Hatshepsut had only one child by her half-brother, a daughter. After this valiant gesture, during which he apparently closed his eyes and thought of Egypt, Tuthmosis II had no more children by Hatshepsut. He preferred the company of a woman named Iset, whom he never married. When Iset gave birth to a son, Tuthmosis II immediately named the illegitimate baby his heir, which was a slap in the face for his wife.
When Tuthmosis II died before the age of thirty-five, his only son—now Tuthmosis III—was still a child. At once Hatshepsut claimed her right, as the baby’s aunt and stepmother, to rule as his regent.
For three or four years at the beginning of the regency, she appears in carvings standing behind the young Tuthmosis III in a properly supporting role. But sometime around 1500, Hatshepsut began to build a huge temple: a mortuary temple, a place of worship which had once stood at the foot of a walkway from a pyramid, and now often served as the primary burial monument itself. This temple was theoretically built in honor of the sun-god Amun. On the east, it faced directly across the Nile at Amun’s other, larger temple, the temple at Karnak.2 Across one wall, Hatshepsut ordered a relief carved: Amun, properly impressive, paying a visit to Hatshepsut’s mother. The implication was that Hatshepsut had been conceived by the god himself.
Playing both sides of the paternity card, she also commissioned an engraving announcing that Tuthmosis I, her earthly father, had ordered her crowned true ruler of Egypt before his death. This coronation had taken place in front of the entire court on New Year’s Day, and showed that Hatshepsut had the right to claim a Horus-name and rule as King of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Since this story was a complete fabrication, someone from the court might have been expected to protest. But no protest is recorded, which suggests that Hatshepsut had managed to convince powerful court officials that she would be a better ruler than Tuthmosis III, now rapidly approaching the age of accession. Certainly she had the strong support of one of the most powerful men in Egypt, the Chief Steward of Amun: Senenmut. She awarded him, over the course of several years, a dizzying array of titles. He became Chief Architect, Steward of the Royal Ship, Overseer of Amun’s Graineries, Overseer of Amun’s Fields, and also Overseer of Amun’s Cows, Amun’s Gardens, and Amun’s Weavers.
This made him powerful, but not popular. Senenmut, it was whispered, was much more to Hatshepsut than an advisor. A scrawled graffiti found on the wall of a cave near Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple shows a very small Senenmut with a very erect member sneaking cautiously up behind a very large and very masculine Hatshepsut: a rude commentary on the powerful female pharaoh and the ambitious steward.3
Hatshepsut never actually deposed the young Tuthmosis III. She simply portrayed herself as the senior of the two rulers. More than one of her statutes show her with the royal headdress and even the formal square beard of a crowned pharaoh. In the mortuary temple, she also had her figure carved celebrating a heb-sed festival, the ritual renewal of power. Tuthmosis III is in these reliefs as well, celebrating alongside the queen. But only Hatshepsut is pictured actually performing the running ritual central to the heb-sed renewal, the ritual that recognizes the pharaoh’s ability to make the waters return.4
Tuthmosis III’s own inscriptions tell us where he spent most of Hatshepsut’s reign: well away from Memphis, sent by his aunt to fight in one campaign or another, mostly in the new northern province of Egypt, where the Western Semitic subjects were always threatening to revolt.
She probably hoped that he would fall in battle. That he didn’t succumb either to injury or to assassination says much for his wariness, and also suggests that the army may have been less enthralled with Hatshepsut than Senenmut and the folks back at home. Certainly Hatshepsut put almost all of her energy into domestic projects, particularly buildings; in the ancient world, the number of buildings a king put up was considered a direct index of his success, and Hatshepsut wanted no question as to her greatness. The army, meanwhile, had no great triumphs—for almost twenty years.5
Twenty-one years after her husband’s death, with her co-ruler and stepson now well into his twenties and hardened by years of fighting in exile, Hatshepsut died. Her steward and factotum Senenmut also died, just afterwards.
There is no direct evidence that Tuthmosis III was involved. But just after the deaths, Tuthmosis III returned from the front and began a savage wiping away of his stepmother’s name. Her titles were scraped off every monument he could find. The reliefs showing her divine appointment were smashed. He had her statutes thrown into a nearby quarry. Hatshepsut had ordered sunward-pointing obelisks built, in honor of Amun; Tuthmosis III did not smash these, perhaps fearing the god’s wrath, but he had walls built around them so that they could not be seen.6 He also ordered Senenmut’s tomb destroyed. He was thirty years old, and it was long past time for him to get to work.
Technically, Tuthmosis III had been king of Egypt for twenty-two years by the time he actually gained the throne. All of those years of impotence had stored up a great deal of ambition. His campaigns, over the next years, were Napoleonic in their intensity.77 He became the anti-Hatshepsut, carrying out his greatest endeavors in the area that she had neglected.
Tuthmosis III appointed a scribe to travel with the army and record his campaigns. This account is long gone, but the parts of it that were copied into other documents show us the pharaoh’s first moves. In the same year that Hatshepsut died, Tuthmosis III made a pass through Canaan. The king of Kadesh, more than halfway along the coast, organized a group of allies to march against the invader. Tuthmosis met them at the city of Megiddo, which stood at a pass through the mountains that ran crossways, cutting off Egypt from Mesopotamia.78
The battle was a rout. Before long, the allies led by the king of Kadesh were retreating back into the city so quickly that soldiers were hauling each other over the walls by their clothing. The Egyptians stopped to plunder the tents outside, which allowed the defenders to swing the gates of Megiddo closed.
Unlike the Assyrians, the Egyptians did not have much experience in attacking city walls; no siege towers or ladders.7 They had to starve the enemy out. Seven miserable months later, the king of Kadesh surrendered, followed by his allies. The Egyptian army returned home in triumph with treasure, armor, chariots, livestock, prisoners, and grain: the first booty of the restored army, post-Hatshepsut. The men who had refused to assassinate Tuthmosis III were now rewarded for their pains.
This campaign appears to have frightened the countryside. Semitic warlords from nearby cities began sending gifts to Tuthmosis III, doing their best to make peace with the angry young man in the south. Those cities that resisted were attacked, and sacked, in Egyptian campaigns that stretched over the next few years. Joppa, on the coast, tried to make a deal instead of surrendering unconditionally; according to a later story, the king of Joppa agreed to visit the Egyptian commander in order to discuss peace terms, was served a banquet, and then was knocked unconscious and stuffed into a back room. The Egyptian commander went out and told the king’s charioteer that the Egyptians had decided to surrender to Joppa, and that the charioteer should return quickly and tell Joppa’s queen that her husband was on his way with prisoners. A procession of captive Egyptians soon appeared on the horizon, carrying baskets of plunder from the Egyptian camp. But each basket contained an armed warrior; when the queen of Joppa threw the gates open, the warriors burst out of their baskets and forced the city to surrender.8
The city of Ardata was conquered and plundered in a more traditional way. The walls were stormed and the gates broken down, upon which the Egyptian troops discovered to their great joy that the cellars were all full of wine. They got drunk every day, until Tuthmosis III had had enough of rejoicing. He o
rdered them to burn the fields and fruit trees, and dragged his soldiers off to the next target.9
28.1 Egypt’s Greatest Northern Extent
Tuthmosis III spent almost two decades campaigning into the northern reaches. He worked his way to Kadesh itself and forced its surrender; he claimed Aleppo; he even seized Carchemish, which brought him to the edge of Asia Minor. By the last years of his reign, Tuthmosis III had succeeded in redeeming the years of his exile. His Egypt stretched almost to the Euphrates, a northern border never matched again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Three-Way Contest
Between 1525 and 1400 BC, the northern Mitanni take away Hittite land in the west and make a treaty with the Egyptians in the south
THE NORTHERN EDGE OF EGYPT, now up near the Euphrates, was never very secure. It was too far away from Memphis, and too close to the Hittites. It also brought the Egyptian border far too close to another enemy.
Centuries earlier—around 2000 BC—a mountain tribe from the slopes of the Zagros had started to wander west. These people, the Hurrians, crossed the Tigris into the center of Mesopotamia and settled in small groups on the edges of cities. By 1700, a few tiny independent Hurrian kingdoms lay in the northern reaches of Mesopotamia, above Assur and Nineveh, and a few Hurrians had wandered even farther west. Hurrian names show up in merchants’ records from the Assyrian trading posts, all the way over in Hittite lands.1
These Hurrians were nothing like an organized nation, and probably would have remained in their separate scattered villages and walled cities, had a new batch of invaders not shown up to organize them. A splinter group of the Aryans who eventually made their way down into India broke off from their kin, sometime before the migration south, and travelled west into Mesopotamia. Welcomed by the Hurrians, they not only settled in and intermarried with them, but bullied their way into becoming the Hurrian ruling class: the maryannu. Maryannu and Hurrians together became the upper and lower strata of a kingdom called, by the surrounding rulers, “the Mitanni.”
The Hurrians were not much for writing, so it is difficult to trace exactly what was going on in their lands between 1700 and 1500. But by the time Tuthmosis III began his northwards drive, the Mitanni kingdom had its own established capital at Washukkanni, a little east of the far northern reaches of the Euphrates. The first maryannu king whose name surfaces from the obscurity is Parattarna, who came to the throne during Hatshepsut’s dominance, probably sometime around 1500. Under his guidance, Hurrian troops marched as far down into Mesopotamia as Assur. This city, which had been swept into the Babylonian kingdom of Hammurabi, had been lost by Samsuiluna; since, it had been ruled by whatever warlord could hold onto it. Now it became a province of the Mitanni kingdom, with its king a vassal serving the Mitanni king.2
29.1 The Mitanni
The Mitanni were not yet strong enough to resist Egypt. In the face of Tuthmosis III’s vigorous forwards push, they backed up; one of Tuthmosis III’s victory monuments stands on the east bank of the Euphrates, well within Mitanni territory. Egyptian excursions into this land yielded few prisoners, though. The Mitanni king and his forces retreated, strategically, away from possible harm.3
In the same year that Tuthmosis III returned to Egypt to die, a king named Saustatar came to the Mitanni throne at Washukkanni.79 He began his own empire-building; his troops marched as far east as the distant bank of the Tigris, as far west as Tarsus on the Asia Minor peninsula, and as far south as Kadesh.
The eastern claim doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone powerful enough to object. But the push west brought Saustatar into conflict with the Hittites; and his push south, through the Western Semitic lands, ran him head-on into Tuthmosis III’s successors.
THE HITTITES, now faced with an aggressive Mitanni king in command of a well-organized army, were not having a good century.
Years of assassinations and constant changes at the palace meant that each new Hittite ruler who came to the throne had to begin from scratch, building support among his own officials and persuading the people of Hattusas that he had the right to rule. This was time-consuming, and left less time and energy for guarding the borders of the empire. Cities on the edge began to break away.4
Seventy-five years before Saustatar’s push west against the Hittite border, a Hittite named Telepinus had tried to solve this problem. Telepinus was not exactly in the royal line. His brother-in-law, himself a man with no claim to the throne, had hired assassins to carry out an extensive clearing of the royal family. The slaughter wiped out not only all of the princes who currently stood in line to the throne, but also all the heirs of an entirely different family who might claim power once the current rulers were out of the way. Telepinus watched as his brother-in-law planned his coronation, but then got word that the king-to-be was also planning to remove Telepinus himself, as a possible threat. Proactively, Telepinus drove his brother-in-law out of town and proclaimed himself king.5
This probably places Telepinus in the best light possible, since this account comes from his own records. However, he was at least well-placed to understand why the Hittite empire was failing: internal struggles over the succession had distracted the rulers from the job of ruling. Early in his reign, he set out to fix this. In a document known as the Edict of Telepinus, he laid out long and detailed rules for the orderly conveying of the crown from one generation to the next. The Hittites, he explained in the preface, could only survive if the rules were properly followed. “A prince, the son of the first rank [that is, of the king’s chief wife], should become king,” he wrote. “If there is no prince of the first rank, a prince of the second rank [son of a lesser wife] can inherit. If there is no prince at all, the husband of a first-rank daughter of the king shall inherit.”6
The Edict also prescribed penalties for various crimes from sorcery to murder, as Hammurabi had done over two hundred years before. Despite his irregular beginnings, Telepinus was trying to impose the rule of law on a kingdom which had operated almost entirely as a military state. For the first time, the Hittites were presented with the challenge of becoming something like a real kingdom.
By the time of Telepinus’s death in 1500, just before Hatshepsut’s seizing of the Egyptian throne, the empire had recovered somewhat from the shattering conflicts of the previous years. Unfortunately, Telepinus’s Edict, like Hammurabi’s Code, did not hold much power without the force of his personality and generalship behind it. His oldest son had died before him, so Telepinus (as prescribed) left the throne to his son-in-law, the husband of his oldest daughter. But this son-in-law soon lost the throne to an assassin, and for the next hundred years the Hittite empire went through another internal struggle during which almost no coherent records were kept. Six kings gained and lost the throne in obscurity, while the edges of the empire again began to flake away. The Hittite army, divided and disorganized, had no chance of resisting Tuthmosis III. When his armies stormed into Carchemish, the Hittites retreated and gave up their land.
Saustatar’s invasion of Hittite territory began shortly afterwards. The Hittite army could not resist the Mitanni either; Saustatar pushed westwards to Tarsus with little difficulty. Aleppo paid tribute to him. So did the Hittite cities of Alalakh and Ugarit.
In the middle of all this, the people of Assur took the opportunity to revolt against their Mitanni overlord. Saustatar, without a lot of patience, sent troops down to remind the city who it belonged to; in a gesture both symbolic and practical, he hauled its gold-studded gate back to the capital city of Washukkanni.7
AS SOON AS the news of Tuthmosis III’s death spread up into the Egyptian-held lands of the north, the Western Semitic cities revolted. Saustatar did everything he could to encourage the revolt against Egypt, including sending his own army down to help out the rebels in Kadesh. Tuthmosis III’s son Amenhotep II, who had just been enthroned, immediately marched an army northwards. By the second year of his reign, he was all the way up near the Mitanni border.
But no major battle to
ok place. The truth was that, under Saustatar, the Mitanni kingdom had grown strong enough to cause Amenhotep II serious trouble. He made a treaty, rather than risk open war.
He did his best in his own land to portray this as a victory: an inscription at Karnak claims that the Mitanni crept to him on hands and knees, asking for peace:
The Chiefs of the Mitanni came to him, their tribute upon their backs, to seek the peace of His Majesty…. A notable event, one not heard of since ancient times. This land which knew not Egypt was asking for His Majesty’s pardon!8
But this was sheer face-saving; Amenhotep II didn’t dare attack. No copy of the treaty has survived, but centuries later, a traditional boundary line between the two countries was still observed; it ran along the Orontes river.9
Within a twelve-year period, both Amenhotep II and Saustatar passed their thrones to their sons. In Egypt, Tuthmosis IV was enthroned; in the Mitanni capital of Washukkanni, Artadama took over. Sometime around 1425, the two kings reestablished the peace sworn out by their fathers. A formal treaty was put into place, and, even more important, Tuthmosis IV agreed to marry one of Artadama’s daughters.
A letter written by Artadama’s grandson, some decades later, explains that Tuthmosis IV wrote to Artadama “and requested for himself the daughter of my grandfather…. he wrote five and six times, but he did not give her; then he wrote to my grandfather for a seventh time, and then [my grandfather] agreed.”10 This is about as unlikely as Amenhotep’s story about the Mitanni abasing themselves in hopes of a treaty. Egyptian pharaohs did not beg for foreign princesses. But the treaty with Egypt had given the Mitanni a whole new respect for their own greatness. Like the palace at Memphis, the Mitanni royal house saw itself as sovereign and mighty, granting its favors graciously to the pleading kings of other countries.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 22
