So I called my troops out and marched against him; and I won a great victory.11
Tukulti-Ninurta boasted afterwards that he had taken 28,800 Hittites as prisoners of war, a hugely improbable figure. But he certainly carried off thousands of Hittites and brought them back to Assyria. Settling a conquered people in a foreign land weakened their sense of themselves as a nation; an exiled race was less likely to revolt.
The conquest made enough of a splash in the ancient Near East to figure in the oldest Greek chronicles, where Tukulti-Ninurta (under the Greek name Ninus) appears as the distant ancestor of the ruler of Sardis, all the way over in Asia Minor; this was a distant and distorted reflection of Tukulti-Ninurta’s rampage through Hittite territory.96
Tudhaliya himself retreated to his capital city, abandoning the outskirts of his empire. The Hittite military might was fading rapidly. In a letter sent to the vassal king of Ugarit, Tudhaliya complains that the city has not sent in its quota of soldiers for the Hittite army; is Ugarit arming itself for revolt? Another tablet lists all the ships from the city of Carchemish which are no longer in any shape to sail.12 The edges of Tudhaliya’s kingdom were cracking away.
TUKULTI-NINURTA, meanwhile, went back home to face a new problem to the south.
Babylon had had an ambiguous relationship with Assyria for years. Each city had, at various times, claimed the right to rule the other. Babylon and Assur were not only balanced in strength, but also twins in culture. They had once been part of the same empire, under Hammurabi, and the essentially Babylonian stamp on the whole area remained visible. Assyria and Babylon shared the same gods, albeit with occasionally different names; their gods had the same stories; and the Assyrians used Babylonian cuneiform in their inscriptions and annals.13
This likeness made Assyrian kings generally reluctant to sack and burn Babylon, even when they had the chance. But Tukulti-Ninurta was not much inclined to restraint. He boasted in his inscriptions of the fate of all those who defied him: “I filled the caves and ravines of the mountains with their corpses,” he announces, “I made heaps of their corpses, like grain piled beside their gates; their cities I ravaged, I turned them into ruinous hills.”14
Counting on Tukulti-Ninurta’s preoccupation with the Hittites up north, the king of Babylon tried to seize some of the disputed land between the Assyrian and Babylonian borders. We know almost nothing about this king, Kashtiliash IV, except that he was a poor judge of men; Tukulti-Ninurta marched down and plundered Babylon’s temples. In this he broke a long Assyrian tradition of respect for Babylon’s sacred sites. He even took the images of the gods away, a particularly risky move since it was generally thought that sacrilege of this sort would peeve the Assyrian gods as well. “He removed the great lord Marduk from his dwelling-place,” the Assyrian chronicle of the conquest tells us, “and set him on the road to Assur.”15 And he per sonally confronted the Babylonian king in battle: “In the midst of that battle,” his inscriptions announce, “my hand captured Kashtiliash, I trod on his royal neck with my feet like a footstool…. Sumer and Akkad to its farthest border I brought under my sway. On the lower sea of the rising sun I established the frontier of my land.”16 He then proclaimed himself king of Babylon as well as Assyria. For the second time, the identity between the two kingdoms had been merged into one.
Tukulti-Ninurta marched Kashtiliash back to Assur, naked and in chains, and put Babylon itself under the authority of an Assyrian governor. This extended the border of the Assyrian empire from the northern part of the Western Semitic lands all the way down into the south of Mesopotamia. Tukulti-Ninurta, now the only great king in the entire region, embarked on the usual great king activities. He built new temples, fortified Assur’s city walls, and constructed an entirely new royal mini-city for himself, a little north of the main sprawl of Assur; it had its own water supply and its own prison labor force, and could be run without any provision from the capital itself.
Tukulti-Ninurta claimed that the god Assur had desired him to build a new city “where neither house nor dwelling existed.” But his haste to put himself behind walls and away from the people of Assur hints that all was not well. Babylon itself had been shocked by the plunder of the temples: “He put Babylonians to the sword,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “the treasure of Babylon he profanely brought out, and he took the great lord Marduk off to Assyria.”17 Nor had the destruction gone over well with the devout in his own land. The Assyrian epic that Tukulti-Ninurta commissioned to celebrate the victory over Babylon has an unmistakably defensive tone; it goes to great lengths to explain that Tukulti-Ninurta really wanted to have peace with Babylon and tried his best to be friends with Kashtiliash, only the Babylonian king insisted on coming into Assyrian territory to thieve and burn, which is why the gods of Babylon deserted the city and left it for punishment to the Assyrians.18 Clearly the great king was under pressure to explain not only why he sacked Babylon, but why he took its sacred images back to his own capital.
The explanation didn’t convince, and Tukulti-Ninurta’s sacrilege brought about his end. The Babylonian Chronicle tells us, with subdued satisfaction, “As for Tukulti-Ninurta, who had brought evil upon Babylon…his son and the nobles of Assyria revolted, and they cast him from his throne [and imprisoned him in his own palace complex]…and then killed him with a sword.”19 He had reigned as great king for thirty-seven years.
After his death, his son took the throne. In an effort to reverse his father’s misdeeds, he sent the statue of Marduk back down to Babylon,20 but this did not console the outraged Babylonians. Babylon rebelled almost at once, its Assyrian governor fled, and another Kassite nobleman seized the throne and declared the city’s freedom from Assyrian domination.
38.1 Tukulti-Ninurta’s Assyria
At this display of Assyrian weakness, the Elamites (who had never really ceased to be a threat) began to prod at the eastern border of Assyrian land. They came as far in as Nippur, and knocked the Assyrian-appointed king of that city off his throne two separate times.21 They also invaded Babylon with enough force to march through the streets, ascend the temple steps, and nab the statue of Marduk (again), which they took off to Susa in victory. (They also took Hammurabi’s law stele, which remained at Susa until it was uncovered by archaeologists a couple of millennia later.) They kidnapped Babylon’s king, as an afterthought, and took him as well. He was less important than either Marduk’s statue or Hammurabi’s laws, and disappears from the historical record at once.
Tukulti-Ninurta’s son, an entirely unimportant Assyrian king named Assurnadin-apli, was helpless in the face of all this tumult and managed to hold onto his throne for only three years. Although we know little about his death, it probably came before its natural time; he was succeeded not by his son, but by his nephew. This nephew held the throne for only six years before losing it to another uncle, who after five years was forcibly removed (and probably murdered) by a usurper whose only right to the throne was that he claimed a distant descent from the great-great-great-uncle of Tukulti-Ninurta.
Over in Babylon, things were not much better. Another family of uncertain descent, the so-called Second Dynasty of Isin, had taken possession of the throne after the Elamite removal of the reigning sovereign; the first four undistinguished kings rose and fell in the space of fifteen years. And up in Hittite territory, Tudhaliya IV died, probably of old age (a rarity at this point). His sons and cousins quarrelled over the Hittite throne and its tiny raggedy remnant of an empire.
Even down in Egypt, the throne was under attack. The elderly Merneptah’s mummy was scarcely interred when the succession suddenly failed; Merneptah’s son and co-regent, Seti II, was temporarily run off his throne by a half-brother and only got it back after a three-year hiatus. He died shortly afterwards and left the crown to his son, who (judging from his mummy) suffered from polio and died young. At this point, the dead young king’s stepmother Twosret tried to seize power, and the king lists trail off into anarchy. The chaos was aggravated by wand
ering raiders who came down into the Delta, as they generally did when Egypt’s defenses languished. “The land of Egypt was overthrown from without,” a later papyrus reads, “and every man done out of his right…. the land of Egypt was in the hands of chiefs and rulers of towns; each slew his neighbor.”22 The Nineteenth Dynasty had come to an undistinguished end.
The wheel had gone sideways; no one sat on top. After decades of war making, the energy poured into conquest had drained the kingdoms dry.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The End of the New Kingdom
Between 1185 and 1070 BC,
Rameses III defeats the Sea People,
but Egypt declines
AT SOME POINT during the muddle at the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty, a completely unknown king named Setnakhte came to the throne of Egypt and restored order. He may have been a grandson of Rameses II; he may simply have been an army officer with troops under his command. Whoever he was, he led an attack on the Asiatic invaders who were pressing into the Delta, and was so successful that his next move was to claim the crown.
The same papyrus that tells of the unrest at the Nineteenth Dynasty’s end (a papyrus that comes from the reign of Setnakhte’s grandson) credits Setnakhte with temporarily righting the Egyptian mess: not only driving off the usual “vile Asiatics,” but restoring law and order so that local noblemen were no longer fighting with each other over control of land, opening temples which had closed out of fear or poverty, and putting priests back on duty.1 And he did all this, apparently, within the span of three years, at which point he died and left the throne to his son.
This son took the name Rameses III, in imitation of the great pharaoh who had lived a hundred years before. He built a mortuary temple patterned after Rameses II’s; like Rameses II, he added to the various temples of Amun and gifted their priests with land, hoping to make a name for himself as god-chosen. “You, Amun, established me on the throne of my father, as you did for Horus on the throne of Osiris,” reads a prayer composed by Rameses III and written down by his son. “So I made you a house with towers of stone, rising to heaven; I built a wall before it; I filled its treasury with gold and silver, barley and wheat; its lands and its herds were like the sand of the shore.”2
The gifts to Amun didn’t keep invaders away. Like Rameses II, Rameses III found himself fighting a great battle against invaders from the north. Unlike Rameses II, he fought not in the northern provinces of the Western Semitic lands, but at the border of Egypt itself.
RAMESES III had an early hint of trouble coming in the fifth year of his reign, when a peaceful migration swelled suddenly into an attack. Libyan tribes, Africans from the western desert, had been wandering, a few at a time, into Egypt: moving from the dry red land into the black. Since the Hyksos disaster, no foreign people had been allowed to rule themselves within Egypt’s borders. When the Libyans showed signs of gathering together and appointing a king of their own, Rameses III sent his soldiers in to inflict a general slaughter. Shattered, the Libyans fled back into the desert, or were taken into slavery.3
Scarcely had this western threat been dealt with than all hell broke loose to the northeast. Setnakhte’s expulsion of the “Asiatics” had been temporary. The Western Semitic lands were a general seething mess from Troy all the way over to Assur and down to Babylon, with local chiefs asserting their independence, Hittite borders shrinking, Assur and Babylon at odds, the Elamites rampaging along the eastern borders, and—to make matters worse—a growing migration of tribal peoples who were coming in a steady stream into the area from past the Aegean and the Black Sea (from what we would now call the mainland of Eastern Europe). The wanderers of the ancient world were gaining the edge over the organized kingdoms: “The foreign lands burst forth and scattered in the strife,” Rameses III wrote on his temple wall, “no land could stand before them. They laid their hands on countries as far as the circuit of the whole earth.”4
Most of the “whole earth,” as it happened, had been suffering through a decade of on-again, off-again drought, the same famine-producing dryness that probably sent the Libyans into the Delta. To thirsty wanderers, Egypt, with its always-watered lands, began to look like the world’s prize jewel. Not long into Rameses III’s reign, an organized alliance of invaders headed his way.
39.1 Sea Peoples Invade
Invasions of the Delta were nothing new. But this particular invasion force was made up of a startling number of different tribes who swore allegiances with each other, with African tribes, and with Mycenaean seafarers (possibly mercenaries, leaving the Greek peninsula as the Mycenaean cities grew poorer). It is a little difficult to match the names Rameses III used for the invaders with our own names for the peoples in the area. Rameses’s “Weshesh” were probably African tribes; the “Shekelesh” were most likely from the Aegean; the “Peleset” were a seafaring folk of vaguely Aegean origin, who probably came over by way of Crete in the wake of Mycenaean unrest. The Peleset seem to have been responsible for arming the force; Egyptian reliefs of the attackers show the whole force in crested helmets of Cretan style.5
Together, the invaders had a frightening strength. “Not one stood before their hands,” Rameses III wrote, “…and they came with fire, prepared before them, forward to Egypt.”6 And perhaps the most alarming news came from the spies who told Rameses III that the armies, moving forwards towards Egypt, were trailed by oxcarts filled with women and children. These tribes didn’t want to attack and raid Egypt. They wanted to move in and take over.7
The Egyptian soldiers marched up to meet the invasion at the border, and won the first clash. The reliefs carved onto the walls of Rameses III’s mortuary temple gave the pharaoh credit for leading an enormous victory. In the carvings, the rejoicing Egyptian warriors are surrounded by piles of hands; it was customary for soldiers to sever the right hands of the dead and bring them back to the scribes, so that an accurate count of enemy casualties could be recorded.97
But the greater peril, given the Egyptian dislike for the Great Green, was yet to come: invasion by sea.
This second wave of the attack was directed by the experienced sailors in the alliance, probably those from the Aegean. Their skill on water was so great that the Egyptians, who had little sea experience and no fighting ships, knew the whole alliance by the name “Sea People.”
Egyptian paintings of the battle show the Sea People on ships very different from the oar-driven Egyptian craft, which were designed for rivers. These were sailing ships, wind driven, with birds’-head prows.8 Knowing that the Egyptians could never meet the expert sailors who manned them on equal terms, Rameses III filled his riverboats with soldiers until they were “manned completely from bow to stern with valiant warriors,” and then clogged the harbor entrances in the Delta with them, “like a strong wall.” He then lined his foot soldiers along the banks with orders to pelt the incoming enemy ships with arrows and spears. “A wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them,” he boasts.
39.1. Relief at Medinat Habu. An Egyptian scribe counts the severed hands of dead enemies; this scene is found on the victory relief of Rameses III at the temple of Medinet Habu. Photo credit Z. Radovan/www.BibleLandPictures.com
The strategy worked. The sea warriors were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers that faced them. “They were dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach,” the inscriptions conclude, “slain and made heaps from stern to bow of their galleys.”9 Temple paintings show lines of prisoners, manacled and on foot, paraded in front of the victorious Rameses III. The greatest threat since Kadesh had been beaten off.
THE FAULT LINE running through Egypt, temporarily plastered over by victory reliefs and building projects, was still liable to crack open at any point. Rameses III held the throne by right of his father’s coup, and he was not immune to power plays.
Towards the end of his reign, one of his lesser wives hatched a plot to assassinate the king by mob violence. Scribes who recorded the affair during the reign of Rameses’s successor say
that she began a campaign to “stir up the people and incite enmity, in order to make rebellion against their lord.”10 Apparently she hoped that the mob would not only remove Rameses III, but also his appointed successor—his son by another wife—so that her own son would become king.
A harem plot to kill the pharaoh was hardly unknown, but this one was remarkable for the number of people involved. The court recorder lists, among others, the two royal standard-bearers, the butler, and the chief scribe. The overseer of the herds was accused of making wax figures of the king, apparently for use in an Egyptian form of voodoo;11 the chief steward was convicted of spreading dissension. The conspiracy apparently stretched all the way down into Nubia: “Benemwese, formerly captain of archers in Nubia…was brought in because of the letter which his sister, who was in the harem, had written to him, saying, ‘Incite the people to hostility!’”12
The records of the conspiratorial accusations end, in monotonous regularity, with either “He took his own life” or “The punishments of death were executed upon him.” The exceptions were three conspirators who merely had their noses and ears cut off, and a single acquittal: a standard-bearer named Hori, who undoubtedly lived the rest of his years in disbelief that he alone had survived the purge.13
By the time the trials dragged to a close, the intended victim was offstage. Rameses III himself had died of old age.
Over the next eighty years, eight kings named Rameses ruled, most of them in such obscurity and chaos that only fragments of records and inscriptions survive. Egypt held onto its Nubian territories, but one by one its other holdings dropped away. The mines across the Sinai fell silent. Eventually the Nubian gold mines were abandoned by their workmen as well. By the 1140s, Egypt had stopped even trying to defend its Western Semitic holdings; the frontier forts lay just east of the Delta.14 The tombs in the Valley of the Kings had not only been discovered, but plundered by thieves. Libyans near the Delta had taken to attacking Egyptians who strayed near the western border. A court official named Wenamun, attempting to travel up the coast in order to negotiate a good price for cedar logs from Byblos, was set upon and robbed of his money; the thieves had no fear of Egyptian reprisals. Wenamun finally did reach Byblos, but his mission failed. The king of Byblos was not inclined to accept Egyptian credit, which was no longer any good up north. “I am not your servant,” he remarked to Wenamun, “nor am I the servant of the one who sent you. The logs stay here on the shore.”15
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 28
