The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  Having spilled their terrible news, the spies were dragged before an astonished Ramesses, who erupted in fury. He slammed his senior officers for their incompetence and, taking personal charge of events, ordered urgent emergency measures. The royal princes traveling with the king were sent immediately out of danger, fleeing westward, away from the oncoming storm. The vizier was dispatched southward at full speed, to hurry the advance of the division of Ptah, which was only now preparing to ford the Orontes. The message from Ramesses was desperate: “His Majesty is all alone!”1

  Minutes later, the attack came. A huge detachment of twenty-five hundred Hittite chariots, their warriors fearsome in ankle-length mail coats, swept across the river and struck the division of Ra as it was marching northward toward the Egyptian camp. Unlike the Egyptian battle chariots, which were essentially mobile firing platforms, the Hittite chariots were sturdy war machines. Each carried not two but three crew—a driver and two soldiers—armed with stabbing spears for close-range combat. Used en masse, in an organized charge, the Hittite chariotry was devastatingly effective at demolishing ranks of enemy infantry, as the division of Ra now discovered, to its great cost.

  With their dead and dying comrades littering the ground, the surviving Egyptian soldiers panicked and fled headlong toward their camp, the Hittites in hot pursuit. Within moments, the enemy was at the gate. Chariots charged through the unfinished wall of shields to attack the Egyptian generals in their tented headquarters. It was pandemonium. With no time to think, Ramesses acted instinctively, leaping onto his chariot and swinging into action against the Hittite foe. The king was surrounded by his elite bodyguard of Aegean mercenaries, fierce fighting men from the coasts and islands on the western fringes of the Hittite Empire, men whose bravery and resilience had impressed the great powers of the Near East in recent decades. They, not the Nubians of old, were now the hired hands of choice for an Egyptian army. With them at his side, Ramesses darted between his attackers and showed his mastery of the bow and arrow, holding the fort (quite literally) amid chaos and confusion. It would take a miracle to withstand the Hittite onslaught for very long. But then, as if in answer to Ramesses’s desperate prayers, help arrived in the nick of time.

  It was not a miracle but the result of the Egyptians’ tactical genius. While the main Egyptian army had marched overland to Kadesh, a reserve force of elite warriors had been sent by sea, up the Phoenician coast. Its instructions were to land at the Syrian port of Sumur and cut inland via the Eleutherus (modern Nahr el-Kebir) Valley to link up with Ramesses at Kadesh on the day of his arrival. They had done exactly as instructed. As the elite charioteers appeared in a cloud of dust on the horizon, the pharaoh knew help was at hand. Their resolve stiffened by the sudden reinforcements, the Egyptians forced the Hittites to withdraw and made to press home their advantage. Muwatalli, observing the reversal of fortune from a safe distance, sent a second wave of his chariots into the fray. These too were repulsed, and an Egyptian countercharge succeeded in pushing the enemy back toward the Orontes. After falling into the river, many Hittite charioteers were drowned or swept away. Others barely managed to scramble to safety on the opposite bank. The prince of Aleppo, one of Muwatalli’s chief lieutenants, was hauled by his men from the bloody waters, barely alive. The Hittites’ surprise attack had rebounded on them. In a matter of minutes, a certain victory had turned into an ignominious retreat.

  As dusk approached, the Egyptian division of Ptah finally arrived on the scene, in time to round up the surviving Hittite soldiers, make a tally of the enemy dead, and collect the booty abandoned on the battlefield. Egyptian survivors of the carnage limped to their camp, followed, just before nightfall, by the fourth and final army division of Seth. On both sides, it was time to take stock and count the cost. For the Egyptians, dreadful losses on the battlefield had been matched by an equally devastating loss of reputation: their very survival had been in peril, and only the king’s personal charisma, combined with the timely arrival of the reserve force, had prevented the army’s total annihilation. For the Hittites, the scene was equally bleak. King Muwatalli had lost two of his own brothers in the fighting, together with his secretary, the chief of his bodyguard, four leading charioteers, and numerous officers. With neither side victorious, the Battle of Kadesh was not over yet.

  At daybreak, after a fitful night tending the wounded and repairing mangled chariots, the two armies met once more, this time for the planned encounter on the plain in front of Kadesh. Yet the previous day’s fighting had fatally weakened both sides. The Egyptians had sustained heavy losses and could not overcome the might of the Hittite infantry. (It had sat out the initial assault, and was thus rested and resolute.) The Hittites, having lost a sizeable proportion of their chariotry, could not inflict a decisive defeat on the Egyptians. After several hours of bloody battle, with no breakthrough in sight, Ramesses withdrew his forces from the field. He realized he would never succeed in his strategic objective of capturing Kadesh, let alone in defeating the Hittites. Muwatalli, too, realized he could not orchestrate a decisive victory. He sued for peace and sent an envoy to the Egyptian camp with terms for a cease-fire. Ramesses had little option but to accept them. Twenty-four hours after arriving at Kadesh, the Egyptians gathered up their matériel and marched homeward. After two months away, Ramesses’s once mighty army arrived back in the green fields of the Nile delta in late June, exhausted and despondent.

  Yet the king himself seems to have drawn strength from the bruising encounter, not least his own role in saving the day for Egypt. He had snatched, if not victory, then at least survival from the jaws of defeat, and felt ever more certain of his destiny. In keeping with his supremely self-assured—not to say megalomaniac—character, Ramesses now proceeded to turn the whole Kadesh episode to his advantage. In a carefully orchestrated barrage of propaganda—comprising both art and literature—the king broadcast his version of events throughout Egypt. He had the country’s finest writers compose a factual prose account of the battle alongside an epic poem, both designed to celebrate the king’s “great victory” over the Hittites. The texts were inscribed on temple walls and were, no doubt, recited triumphantly and frequently at court. To complement these literary paeans, Ramesses commissioned his artists to devise a stock set of pictorial scenes to capture the main moments of the battle. Chief among these tableaux, of course, was the oversize figure of the valorous monarch, all alone in the Egyptian camp, fending off the enemy single-handedly. So pleased was the king with the result that he had the same series of images carved on the façades of at least five major temples. Poems and pictures—both allowed Ramesses to contrast the incompetence and vacillation of his senior military officers with his own foresight and ability to be coolheaded under fire. For a king whose birthright could have been threatened by an army insider, this must have been the sweetest revenge.

  For modern scholars, the images and words furnish an extraordinary amount of detail, and make the Battle of Kadesh the best-known military encounter in the ancient world. For Ramesses’s contemporaries, however, the accounts announced a return to the vainglorious and bombastic kingship of old. After the heresy of Akhenaten, the ephemeral reigns of his immediate successors, and the military junta of Horemheb and the early Ramessides, a resplendent and triumphalist monarchy was back with a vengeance—even if the truth had to suffer in the process.

  KING OF KINGS

  WHILE STALEMATE AT KADESH HAD SINGULARLY FAILED TO ADVANCE Ramesses II’s strategic aims, the standoff and cessation of hostilites did at least allow him to reap a peace dividend. Resources that might have been expended on foreign military adventures could instead be invested in projects at home.

  In the first two decades of his reign (1279–1259), Ramesses commissioned major new temple buildings throughout his realm, from the Lebanese port of Kebny to Gebel Barkal, in distant Sudan. The king seems to have had a particular preoccupation with Egyptian-controlled Nubia, ordering the construction of new shrines at seven different si
tes. In Egypt proper, architects and masons made impressive additions to the great national temples at Iunu and Herakleopolis, Abdju and Thebes. Today, more standing monuments bear the names of Ramesses II than of any other pharaoh. By a combination of construction and appropriation (taking pains to have his cartouche incised so deeply into the stone that it could never be removed), Ramesses ensured that his name would live forever. He seems to have been driven by a deep desire to surpass all his predecessors, and by a resolute sense of his own uniqueness. One of the king’s favorite myths about himself told how the Seven Hathors (the ancient Egyptian equivalent of the Fates) had watched over his infant cradle and devised an extraordinary destiny for him while he was still a babe in arms. Whether this reveals a thoroughgoing monomania or a pathological inferiority complex is open to debate. What is certain is that Ramesses’s building projects were characterized more by sheer size and brute strength than by any more refined aesthetic. Only in the exquisite decoration of the Theban tomb prepared for his beloved wife Nefertari did Ramesses allow his craftsmen to give free rein to their artistic sensibilities.

  To supply so many simultaneous building projects with the necessary quantities of stone was beyond even Egypt’s prodigious quarrying capacity. So Ramesses resorted to the age-old expedient of demolishing his forebears’ monuments and requisitioning their stone for his own purposes. The chief victims of this wholesale plunder were the temples built by Akhenaten at Thebes and Akhetaten. The small, regular stone blocks that had enabled the heretic king to build his monuments so rapidly now contributed to the monuments’ equally swift demise. Blocks by the thousand were taken from the Aten temples to facilitate the erection of new shrines to the old gods. Ramesses was thus able to kill two birds with one stone: cleansing the land of Akhenaten’s heresy and promoting himself as the champion of Egypt’s traditional deities.

  Since the reign of Amenhotep III ninety years earlier, the greatest stage for the ceremonies of divine kingship had been Luxor Temple, with its gigantic colonnade hall and beautiful open-air courtyard providing a spectacular backdrop to the mysteries of the annual Opet Festival . The temptation to make it yet grander proved irresistible to Ramesses. He added an entire new court and colossal gateway to the temple, decorated with massive scenes of his “triumph” at the Battle of Kadesh. Never shy of improving the monuments of his predecessors, he did not hesitate to change the main axis of Luxor Temple in order to line it up better with Ipetsut and provide a more coherent processional route. Finally, to adorn the new façade of Luxor, Ramesses had installed what would become his trademark—a pair of colossal seated statues of himself, in this case complemented by a pair of towering obelisks. Spectacle, it seems, was all.

  Nowhere is Ramesses’s taste for the theatrical and self-reverential better demonstrated than in the Temple of Ramesses-beloved-of-Amun (modern Abu Simbel) in lower Nubia. The sheer rock face of a sacred mountain, towering over the Nile just north of the second cataract, was the chosen setting for the king’s most remarkable and vainglorious project. The smaller of two temples was officially dedicated to the mother goddess and royal protectress Hathor. Inside, on the back wall of the sanctuary, the Hathor cow is shown emerging from the primeval papyrus swamp, protecting the king in her embrace. Outside, all pretense of piety is dropped, and the decoration concentrates on the king’s great wife Nefertari and her doting husband. On either side of the doorway, a standing statue of the queen is flanked by two colossi of Ramesses, thirty feet high. The larger temple develops this theme further, statues and reliefs of Ramesses dominating the interior and exterior. The façade is formed by four vast seated statues of the king, each measuring nearly seventy feet high. On the pedestal, the king’s name is shown above rows of foreign captives, emphasizing his mastery of all peoples. Inside the temple, scenes depict Ramesses killing the enemies of Egypt and presenting them to the gods—who naturally include his deified self. Indeed, Ramesses’s apotheosis is the dominant theme at Abu Simbel. In desolate, conquered Nubia, where the gods were not watching, the king could give his megalomania free rein.

  The true scale of the king’s self-aggrandizement is revealed in the innermost parts of Abu Simbel. Beyond the pillared hall—each pillar adorned with a colossal standing statue of Ramesses in the guise of Osiris—and the ubiqitous depictions of the Battle of Kadesh lies the holy of holies, deep inside the mountain. This intimate space is dominated by the statues of Egypt’s four chief gods, carved from the living rock. Permanently in the shadows, to one side, sits Ptah, chthonic creator god of Memphis. Next to him are Amun, creator god of Thebes; Ra-Horakhty, the solar deity who combined Ra and Horus; and the deified Ramesses. In his mind and in his monuments, the king was the equal of Egypt’s most ancient and revered deities. Moreover, on two days a year, February 21 and November 21—one of them presumably Ramesses II’s birthday—the first rays of the rising sun penetrated the entrance of the temple and illuminated the statues in the sanctuary, bringing them to life. It must have been a stunning spectacle. Few autocrats in human history have conceived a more dramatic expression of their personality cult.

  Statues of Ramesses II fronting his temple at Abu Simbel WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  After Ipetsut, Luxor, and Abu Simbel, Ramesses’s greatest project was his own mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. The most ambitious monument of its kind since the reign of Amenhotep III, “Ramesses United with Thebes” (known today as the Ramesseum) covered an area of more than eleven and a half acres. Quite unashamedly, every inch of the temple was given over to texts, reliefs, and statuary celebrating the king. Beyond the first great gateway, decorated with scenes of the Battle of Kadesh, the first courtyard was dominated by a series of huge pillars along the north side, each of which had a gigantic statue of Ramesses in front of it. Facing them, on the south side, was a portico and balcony, where the king could appear to his loyal followers on high days and holidays. Beyond a second gateway, bearing yet more battle reliefs, lay a second court, likewise adorned with colossal statues of Ramesses. Dwarfing even these, a vast granite colossus once stood next to the second gateway, until an earthquake felled it in antiquity. Its shattered remains, carved deeply with the king’s throne name, Usermaatra (corrupted to Ozymandias in Greek), inspired the most famous critique of absolute power in the English language.

  The Ramesseum, perhaps more than any other monument, summed up its owner’s unrivaled status not just in spiritual but also in temporal matters. Surrounding the temple on all sides, vast storerooms and granaries provided storage for a significant part of Egypt’s wealth. It would have taken 350 boatloads (a quarter of a million sacks) of grain to fill the granaries completely, enough to support the inhabitants of a medium-size city (such as Thebes) for a year. In effect, the Ramesseum acted as Upper Egypt’s reserve bank. Both practically and symbolically, the nation’s wealth was under royal control. With such vast resources at his disposal, Ramesses could afford to indulge his obsession with monumentality, from the vast colossi of Abu Simbel to the majestic courts of Thebes. Well might he have uttered the immortal words of Shelley’s poem:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  HOUSE PROUD

  NOT CONTENT WITH ERECTING TEMPLES AND USURPING MONUMENTS throughout the length and breadth of Egypt, Ramesses II created an architectural wonder on an even greater scale, one that is now entirely lost from sight. His father, Seti I, had built a small summer palace near the old Hyksos capital of Hutwaret, where the Ramesside royal family had its origins. The young Ramesses must have spent time there, preparing for battle, and as king he set about transforming it into something altogether grander. In two decades of nonstop construction, a vast series of mansions, halls, offices, and barracks grew up around the royal palace, until Ramesses had created an entirely new city, a dynastic capital equal in splendor to Memphis or Thebes. With customary chutzpah, he named it Per-Ramesses, “the house of Ramesses.”

  A des
irable residence it certainly was, with vast living quarters and administrative districts full of palaces, temples, and public buildings. The surrounding countryside was some of the most productive in Egypt, supplying fruit, vegetables, and wine, and providing pasture for great herds of cattle. Scribes wrote wondrously of canals filled with fish, marshlands teeming with waterfowl, fields abundant with green pasture, and granaries overflowing with barley and wheat. The royal quarter, covering four square miles, was located in a natural stronghold on the banks of the Nile, protected by canals and sand promontories. Court poets penned eulogies on the splendor of Ramesses’s palaces, describing pillared halls and decoration of unparalleled richness. Walls, floors, columns, and doorways—all were encrusted with polychrome tile work, depicting rivers and gardens, heraldic motifs, and foreign captives. The steps leading to the throne dais were adorned with prostrate images of the king’s enemies, so that he might tread them underfoot each time he ascended or descended.

  If the royal residence was dazzling, the elite quarter in the suburbs was scarcely less so. The area favored by Per-Ramesses’s wealthiest citizens resembled a Venetian idyll, with canals, large villas, and water gardens. The center of the city was dominated by a vast temple dedicated to the divine trinity, Amun–Ra-Horakhty–Atum. Fronted by four colossal statues of the king, it rivaled Ipetsut in size and splendor. The four cardinal points of the city were placed under the symbolic protection of other major deities. In the south was the temple of Seth, lord of Hutwaret, dating back to Hyksos times. In the north, a shrine was built to honor the ancient cobra goddess of the delta, Wadjet. In the west, a temple celebrated Amun of Thebes. Finally, in the east, pointing the way to Egypt’s empire in the Near East, a sanctuary was dedicated to Astarte—not an Egyptian deity at all but the Syrian goddess of love and war, appropriated into the Egyptian pantheon and given the special role of protecting the horse team that drew the royal chariot.