At dawn, the battle began again. But the element of surprise was now missing, and the experience of the Egyptian soldiers paid off. The fight was a stalemate, and Muwatalli suggested a truce.
Rameses II declined to agree to an ongoing peace, but eventually he did agree to go home with his prisoners and booty, leaving Kadesh in Hittite hands. He then marched back to Egypt and proclaimed victory.
If this doesn’t sound like an overwhelming triumph, it mutated into one later on, when Rameses II had flattering accounts of the battle carved at least nine times onto the walls of Egyptian temples, with plenty of graphic illustrations of Egyptians slaughtering Hittites. Accounts of the battle became school exercises for children to practice their penmanship on, like Caesar’s victories in Gaul centuries later.7 The Battle of Kadesh, even though it was more or less a draw, became an emblem of Egyptian superiority.
34.1. Statue of Rameses II. Rameses II built colossal figures of himself at Abu Simbel. Photo credit Galen R. Frysinger
Which shows how far Egypt had come from its previous greatness. Egypt was still mighty, but it had become an empire that depended on reputation as much as actual strength to keep its position as a world leader. Had Egypt’s army truly been as powerful as it appears in the reliefs of Rameses II, he would not have turned and marched home again, leaving Kadesh in the hands of the Hittites. Instead, Rameses devoted himself to the symbols of dominance; he built, within the safe territories of his own land, more temples, statues, and monuments than any pharaoh before him. So it happens that Rameses II gained a reputation as one of the greatest pharaohs in Egyptian history, when in fact he had lost part of the northern holdings gained by Tuthmosis III, two hundred years before.
THAT OTHER GREAT EMPIRE to the north had its own difficulties. By this point the Hittites seem to have made a treaty with the kings of Babylon, far to the south; at least we can assume so, since Muwatalli sent down to Babylon for a doctor to come and help him with some personal medical problem. A letter has survived, written by Muwatalli’s brother after the king’s death, answering a Babylonian inquiry after the doctor, who had been expected to return to the Babylonian court. (“He married a relative of mine and decided to settle here,” the letter says, more or less, “so quit accusing me of keeping him in jail; what good would an imprisoned doctor do me?”)8
Relations between the Hittites and the Assyrians were less friendly. The new king of Assur, Adad-nirari, was steadily fighting his way north through the territory fractured by the Mitanni flight, claiming it as his own. He also mounted at least one border war with Babylon, to the south, during which Assyria was able to claim a good bit of Babylon’s northern territory. The conquests were impressive enough for Adad-nirari to call himself, in what was becoming a time-honored Assyrian tradition, the King of the World: “Adad-nirari, illustrious prince,” one inscription begins, “honored of the gods, lord, viceroy of the land of the gods, city-founder, destroyer of the mighty hosts of Kassites…who destroys all foes north and south, who tramples down their lands…who captures all people, enlarges boundary and frontier; the king to whose feet Assur…has brought in submission all kings and princes.”9
In the middle of planning a strategy against this growing Assyrian threat to his east, the Hittite king Muwatalli died after a long reign. He left his throne to his son, who promptly stripped the next most powerful man at court—Muwatalli’s brother (and his own uncle)—of his court positions and attempted to exile him. The brother, Hattusilis, declined to be exiled. He rounded up his followers, put the king under guard, and pronounced himself King Hattusilis III.
The longest surviving document from Hattusilis III’s time is a heartfelt argument known as “The Apology,” in which he explains, with more or less circular logic, that (1) the gods had given him the right to rule, and (2) his successful seizing of the throne proved that the gods had given him the right to rule.10 This was not entirely convincing to the Hittites; fragmentary records from Hattusas show that the king spent most of his reign struggling to win a civil war.
Fairly early on, Hattusilis III realized that he could not keep on fighting his own people, the Egyptians to the south, and the increasingly threatening Assyrians to the southeast. The Assyrian Adad-nirari had been succeeded by Shalmaneser I, who was even more aggressive than his predecessor, and who was in the process of taking over the rest of the previously Mitanni territory. Hittite soldiers had joined Aramaean forces in one battle against Shalmaneser I already, and had been pushed backwards: “I killed countless numbers of [the] defeated and widespreading hosts,” Shalmaneser I boasted. “I cut down their hordes, 14,400 of them I overthrew and took as living captives” this meant that he captured and blinded them, a gratuitous bit of cruelty which became standard practice in Assyrian warfare. Shalmaneser also claimed to have captured 180 cities, turning them into ruins: “The army of Hittites and Aramaeans, the allies, I slaughtered like sheep.”11
Assyria on the east would make no peace, so Hattusilis turned to secure his southern border; he decided to negotiate a truce with Egypt.
This was slightly tricky for Egypt’s Rameses II, since the rightful heir to the throne, Muwatalli’s son, had escaped from his uncle’s prison and shown up at the Egyptian court, asking for asylum.12 (He had also written to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser on the same errand, but Shalmaneser was not in the business of providing refuge, and had refused.)
Faced with the perfect opportunity to take over the Hittite empire, Rameses II declined. He sent Muwatalli’s son packing, agreed to a peace with the usurping uncle, and even sealed the terms by marrying two of Hattusilis III’s daughters. The peace was inevitable; Rameses II was no longer in control of most of the Western Semitic territories that had once belonged to Egypt. The petty kings scattered along the Mediterranean coast had not been privileged to see Rameses’s reliefs explaining that the Battle of Kadesh had been a great Egyptian victory. They had simply seen the Egyptians retreating, beaten, and since then had been in constant revolt. There was no way that the Egyptian army could get up to the Hittite land without fighting for every step of the way.
Egypt had been forced into alliance with its enemy. But Rameses II was still working on the spin. He had the treaty, which promised that Egypt would not attack the Hittites, carved into the temple walls at Karnak, with an introductory note explaining that the Hittites had come to him begging for peace. And he refused to send a daughter north to marry a Hittite prince, even though he had plenty to spare; by this time Rameses II, a man who liked women, had well over a hundred children, who trail behind him in temple reliefs as though he were the Pied Piper. Egyptian princesses did not go to foreign lands.
The Hittite version of the treaty, uncovered at Hattusas, remarks that the Egyptians were the first to ask for peace.13
34.2. Mummy of Rameses II. The mummy of Rameses II retains his beaked nose, thanks to its peppercorn stuffing. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Photo credit Scala/Art Resource, NY
WHEN HE DIED, well into his nineties, Rameses II could claim the second longest reign in Egyptian history. He had left his tracks all across Egypt; his temples to Amun and the rest of the pantheon, his monuments and his statues, his cities and his inscriptions were everywhere. His embalmers had the forethought to stuff his distinctively large nose with peppercorns, so that the tight bandaging of his body didn’t flatten it across his face. And so his personality stands out not only from the countryside of Egypt, but from his mummy as well.14
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Battle for Troy
Mycenaeans attack the city of Troy between 1260 and 1230 BC and suffer greatly from their victory
ALL THE WAY OVER on the northwest coast of Asia Minor, the city of Troy stood in a corner of the peninsula that had never been reached by the Hittite kingdom, not even at its greatest.
In the years that Babylon and Assyria, Washukkanni and Hattusas had battled over the right to control the land from the head of the Gulf over to the Mediterranean coast and up almost to the Black
Sea, scores of mountain tribes, desert chieftains, and ancient cities had remained independent, outside the control of the grasping kingdoms. Troy was one of those cities. It had been settled almost two thousand years before, and its king had built walls around his tiny village to protect his people from the grasp of the greedy on the outside. Over centuries, the city burned and was rebuilt, grew shabby and was renovated, shrank and then grew again, over and over, producing layer on layer of occupation.
In the days that Rameses II and Hattusilis III negotiated their treaty, Troy—not so far to the west of the thriving Hittite kingdom—was on its seventh incarnation (called by archaeologists “Troy VIIa”).91 It was a wealthy city, without much need of imported food or goods; Troy stood on a plain with plenty of fertile farmland. There were fish in the nearby waters, and sheep in the meadows, and Troy was famous for the herds of horses which ate its surplus grain.1
Sometime between 1260 and 1230 BC, Troy was ravaged by fire and war. Its walls were broken down, and a slaughter took place; human bones lay unburied in the streets.
THE STORY OF the war’s beginning was set down, five hundred years later, in the Iliad.
Peeled away from the skeleton of divine hostilities, the meat of the tale is straightforward enough. Menelaus, king of the Greek city of Sparta, married a princess from Argos, a city which lay north of his own. This princess, Helen, attracted the roving eye of Paris, son of the king of Troy, a brave enough warrior but a relentless womanizer. (This, incidentally, did not boost his reputation for masculinity among his own countrymen, one way in which the Trojans differed from our own time: “Paris, you pretty boy,” his own brother shouts at him, “you woman-struck seducer!”)2 Paris seduced Helen and then carried her off to Troy. Helen’s husband Menelaus, determined to have his revenge, recruited his brother Agamemnon to help him attack Troy.
Agamemnon was the high king of the Greeks (Homer’s name for his own people is the Achaeans), and so called all of the Greek cities to join their forces together and sail in a united fleet towards Troy, to avenge the insult to his brother (the insult to Helen is not so much in view here). They arrived on the shores of Asia Minor but found themselves stymied by the valor of the Trojan soldiers and the height of Troy’s walls. There they sat, besieging the city for ten long years.
The siege is the setting for the central drama of the Iliad, which is the behavior of the great warrior Achilles, who hailed from Thessaly (a mountainous region on the northern Greek peninsula). At the end of the Iliad, we have learned quite a lot about Achilles, but the Greek army is still sitting outside the walls of Troy, and the king of Troy, Priam, is still on his throne. The war itself takes place offstage. By the beginning of the companion epic, the Odyssey, the siege has ended, Troy has been sacked, and the Greeks are on their long way home.
The tale of Troy’s actual fall to the besieging Greek forces is told in pieces by various Greek poets, but appears in its most complete form much later, in the second book of the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil:
Broken in war and foiled by fate,
With so many years already slipping away, the Greek staff
Constructed a horse….
It was high as a hill, and its ribs were made from planks of pinewood….
…Choosing warriors by lot they secretly
Put them in on the blind side of the horse, until its vast
And cavernous belly was crammed with a party of armed men.3
When the Greeks noisily and obviously depart, the Trojans—taking the horse as an offering to the Roman war-goddess Minerva—haul it into the city (while ignoring various evil omens). They feast in triumph, fall asleep dead drunk, and the Greek warriors climb out of the horse’s belly.
They broke out over a city drowned in drunken sleep;
They killed the sentries and then threw open the gates, admitting
Their main body, and joined in the pre-arranged plan of attack….
…The city’s on fire; the Greeks are masters here.4
Both Virgil and Homer describe this thirteenth-century war using the language and convention, the armor and weapons, the political problems and heroes, of their own time. But once again a poem preserves the kernel of a historical event. Troy was burned, its people slaughtered or put to flight.
So who actually fought this war against Troy?
The city certainly did not fall during Homer’s lifetime, whenever that was. General scholarly opinion has temporarily put him around 800 BC or so; he may have lived a little earlier, but there is no way that he was alive as far back as 1230 BC, which is the latest possible date that archaeology allows for the burning of Troy VIIa. Homer was telling the story of an older time. The details of the epics show us a writer creating historical fiction. The translator E. V. Rieu points out, for example, that Homer’s Nestor (the king of Pylos, the Mycenaean city credited with sending sixty ships to the anti-Troy alliance) drinks from a cup topped with two doves; an identical cup was found in the ruins of Mycenae.5
By 1260 BC, when the dove-topped cup was in use, the Mycenaean kings of Mycenae, Thebes, Athens, and Pylos had built their cities into small kingdoms, surrounded by walls and connected by chariot-smooth roads. Knossos, down across the Sea of Crete, may have once been governed by a Mycenaean ruler, but by 1350 the city had been finally destroyed altogether.92 The city of Mycenae now claimed the largest territory, with Thebes, Pylos, and Athens not far behind. The king of Pylos ruled over so much land that he divided it into sixteen districts, each with a governor and deputy governor who sent the king a tax of bronze each year.6 These great centers carried on an active trade with the Hittites and Egyptians, neither of which made any effort to conquer the cities on the Greek peninsula. The Hittites were not sailors at all, and although the Egyptians were used to boating on the Nile, they disliked the sea, which they called the “Great Green” and generally avoided.7
What sparked off a battle between the Mycenaean cities and the Trojans isn’t known. The quarrel may indeed have involved a captive princess. The diplomatic marriages taking place all over the ancient world show that a great deal of pride was involved in the delicate negotiations; those who sent princesses were inferior, those who accepted them boasted the greater power.
Herodotus, writing later, also tells the story of Helen’s abduction by the son of Priam. In his Histories, he claims to have heard the tale from an independent source: the Persians, who think that the Greeks overreacted.
Although the Persians regard the abduction of women as a criminal act, they also claim that it is stupid to get worked up about it and to seek revenge for the women once they have been abducted; the sensible course, they say, is to pay no attention to it, because it is obvious that the women must have been willing participants in their own abduction, or else it could never have happened.8
This observation (which could demonstrate a rather charmingly high view of women’s agency, but probably doesn’t) leads Herodotus into an explanation of the ongoing hostility between Greeks and Persians:
[T]he Greeks raised a mighty army because of a woman…and then invaded Asia and destroyed Priam and his forces. Ever since then, the Persians have regarded the Greeks as their enemies….They date their hostility towards Greece from the fall of Ilium [the Greek name for Troy].9
This is another anachronism, as Persia didn’t yet exist during the sacking of Troy VIIa. Still, it shows that the cities of the Greek peninsula and those in Asia Minor had hated each other for a long time. Robert Graves has suggested that the kidnapping, though real, was an act of revenge for a previous Mycenaean raid on Trojan land;10 Helen’s abduction fanned a hostility which had existed for years already.
However it began, the Mycenaeans won the struggle, and Troy fell. But not long afterwards, the Mycenaeans began on a long slide downwards from the height of their glory. The cities shrank; they grew shabbier; they grew less secure.
Possibly this had begun even before the siege. Thucydides tells us that the war lasted for so many years because
the Mycenaean attackers didn’t have enough money to supply themselves properly; since they ran out of food, they had to spend part of their time growing food and making piratical raids into the Aegean, rather than fighting nonstop.11
The war with Troy just accelerated the decline. In the Odyssey, we learn that the triumph over Troy was the sort of victory to which the later king Pyrrhus would lend his name: a victory which damaged the winner almost as much as the vanquished. The Odyssey has a mournful tone. In the words of Nestor, king of Pylos, even though the Mycenaeans won, their story is one of sorrow:
This is the story of the woe we endured in that land,
we sons of the Achaeans, unrestrained in fury,
and of all that we bore….
There the best of us were slain…and many other ills
we suffered beside these…
After we had sacked the steep city of Priam,
and had departed in our ships…
even then, Zeus was fashioning for us a ruinous doom.12
The Mycenaean heroes limped home to unsettled households, murdered heirs, thieving nobles, sacked crops, and wives claimed by others. Their arrival brought even more unrest: the “late return” of the heroes home, Thucydides tells us, “caused many revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere.”13 The peak of Mycenaean glory had passed and would not come again.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 26
