The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  Even by the standards of New Kingdom Egypt, Per-Ramesses was a cosmopolitan city. As well as a temple to an Asiatic deity, there were overseas legations and entire quarters for foreign mercenaries. The markets and wharfs played host to merchants from throughout the eastern Mediterranean. With its geographic proximity to Palestine, Per-Ramesses must have been a magnet for immigrants seeking a better life, and it is against such a background that the Bible story of the Exodus came to be written. Exodus 1:11 tells how “Pharaoh” put the enslaved Hebrews to work on two great store-cities, Pithom and Raamses. “Pithom,” or Per-Atum, has been identified as modern Tell el-Maskhuta, in the eastern delta, only a day’s journey from Per-Ramesses, while “Raamses” can be none other than the new dynastic capital itself. It is highly likely that Semitic-speaking laborers were employed in the construction of the city, but they were more likely migrant workers rather than slaves (although the working conditions may have made the distinction somewhat academic). As for any exodus of Hebrews, in the reign of Ramesses II or later, the ancient Egyptian sources are silent. The story may therefore have been a conflation of several unrelated historical events. On the other hand, as we have seen, Ramesses was not one to let the truth stand in the way of his news agenda.

  While the court scribes and poets lauded Per-Ramesses as a great royal residence, filled with exuberance and joy, there was also a more menacing side to this most ambitious of royal projects. One of the largest buildings was a vast bronze-smelting factory whose hundreds of workers spent their days making armaments. State-of-the-art high-temperature furnaces were heated by blast pipes worked by bellows. As the molten metal came out, sweating laborers poured it into molds for shields and swords. In dirty, hot, and dangerous conditions, the pharaoh’s people made the weapons for the pharaoh’s army. Another large area of the city was given over to stables, exercise grounds, and repair works for the king’s chariot corps. The royal stud farm provided accommodation for at least 460 horses together with their trainers and grooms. The animals were exercised in a wide, pillared court, while nearby workshops produced and repaired the tack.

  In short, Per-Ramesses was less pleasure dome and more military-industrial complex. The city’s very foundation had been prompted by an upsurge in military activity in the Near East. It was from here that Ramesses set out for Kadesh, to here that he returned, bloodied but unbowed. For all its pleasures and palaces, Per-Ramesses, with its polyglot population, must have been a constant reminder of the king’s unfinished business in Syria-Palestine. Despite having the largest chariot corps in the entire region, Ramesses remained unable to neutralize the Hittite threat. Yet as he sat in his riverside palace, smarting with frustration, the king could have little imagined that events hundreds of miles away were about to deal him the luckiest of hands.

  PEACE IN OUR TIME

  THE INDECISIVE BATTLE OF KADESH HAD BEEN FOLLOWED BY A DECADE of cold war, with the Hittites and the Egyptians facing off against each other, neither able to achieve hegemony. But the two old rivals were no longer the only powers in the region. Beyond the Euphrates, the kingdom of Assyria was in the ascendant. Barely a year after Kadesh, and emboldened by the Hittites’ failure to prevail, an Assyrian army attacked the crucial Hittite ally of Hanigalbat (the remnants of the old Mittanian Kingdom) and made it their vassal. It was a warning shot neither the Hittites nor, for that matter, the Egyptians could afford to ignore. Ramesses launched a series of low-level campaigns in the Near East, determined to shore up Egyptian control over its imperial provinces, to crush opportunistic rebellions that had broken out in the aftermath of Kadesh, and to show the Assyrians that Egypt was still a force to be reckoned with.

  Having overcome dissidents in the hills of Galilee, and having recaptured the important port of Akko, Ramesses could not restrain his bravado and advanced into the erstwhile Egyptian territory of Amurru, now back within the Hittite fold. First one and then another city-state fell to the pharaoh’s army, until Ramesses occupied the middle Orontes Valley, effectively bisecting the Hittites’ southernmost province. It looked as if this rash maneuver might provoke another all-out war, but the sudden death of the Hittite king Muwatalli plunged Egypt’s enemy into a succession crisis, with major repercussions.

  Muwatalli had left the throne to his young son, Prince Urhi-Teshup, who duly acceeded as king. But the new monarch’s uncle, Hattusili, had other ideas. Before long, two rival courts had developed and the ruling elite was riven by divided loyalties. After much bitter infighting, Hattusili prevailed and Urhi-Teshup fled to Egypt, seeking sanctuary at the court of Ramesses II. The pharaoh, who had been watching all these developments from a safe distance, could hardly believe his luck. In his protracted struggle for supremacy with the Hittites, fate had now delivered him, quite unexpectedly, the ultimate bargaining chip. No sooner had Urhi-Teshup fled to Egypt than Hattusili demanded his immediate extradition. Ramesses refused and put his troops in Syria on high alert, in case the Hittites attacked. But his diplomatic antennae suggested such a course of events was unlikely, for a new ruler had just come to power in Assyria with imperialist ambitions of his own. Ramesses calculated, correctly, that the Hittites would be too preoccupied with this threat to their eastern flank to reopen hostilities with Egypt. When the Assyrians invaded Hanigalbat for a second time and liquidated it as a separate territory, the Hittites suddenly found themselves in greater danger than ever before. Only the river Euphrates separated their kingdom from the belligerent and expansionist Assyria. It was time to put national security before national pride.

  An alliance with Assyria was unthinkable, so Hattusili put out discreet feelers in Egypt’s direction, to explore the possibilities of peace with Ramesses. After a year of fraught negotiations accompanied by much shuttle diplomacy, the details of a treaty were hammered out. So, in early December 1259, a decade and a half after the Battle of Kadesh, a high-level delegation set out from the Hittite capital of Hattusa, high on the Anatolian plateau, bound for Per-Ramesses. Alongside the Hittite envoys traveled a representative from Carchemish, the Hittites’ forward base on the banks of the Euphrates; it was a clear indication that cordial relations with Egypt now lay at the heart of Hittite foreign and security policy. After a month traveling the dusty roads of the Near East, the envoys finally arrived in the great delta city and were ushered into the royal audience chamber. Bowing low before Ramesses, the chief Hittite representative presented a great silver tablet, engraved in wedge-shaped cuneiform writing. It was a gift from Hattusili himself, a copy of the comprehensive treaty that from now on would bind the Egyptians and the Hittites in mutual support and friendship. Never to be outdone, Ramesses had the Egyptian version of the treaty engraved on the walls of Ipetsut, to stand as a perpetual record of his diplomatic skill.

  And a remarkable document it was, in either language. After declaring a formal end to hostilities between the two kingdoms, the text celebrated the establishment of friendly relations:

  Behold, Hattusili, the ruler of the Hittites, binds himself by treaty to Usermaatra, chosen-one-of-Ra, the great ruler of Egypt, beginning today, so that perfect peace and brotherhood may be created between us forever—he being in brotherhood and peace with me, and I being in brotherhood and peace with him, forever.2

  The elements of this new relationship were farsighted and wide-ranging: a mutual nonaggression pact, a defensive alliance, an extradition agreement (together with the promise of humane treatment for those extradited), an amnesty for refugees, and, last but by no means least, a clause to safeguard the royal succession and the rights of the monarchy in both kingdoms. With the deposed Urhi-Teshup still on the loose in Egypt, this final measure was a precondition for Hattusili, for it guaranteed his claim to the Hittite kingship and the rights of his heirs. It also played to Ramesses’s dynastic concerns, reflected in his radical decision to promote his (many) sons to high office, the first time for a thousand years that such a policy had been adopted. For Hittites and Egyptians alike, honor was thus served, and both sides cou
ld claim victory. Egypt reluctantly gave up all hope of winning back Amurru, but kept its other Asiatic province, Upe, and confirmed its trading rights in the Lebanese and Syrian ports, as far north as Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra). With the signing of the treaty, the Near East regained a peace not seen since the heady days of the Egypt-Mittani alliance during the reign of Amenhotep III.

  From implacable enemies to the best of friends, Hattusili and Ramesses celebrated the transformation in their relationship with an exchange of congratulatory correspondence. Their wives, too, joined in the love fest, Ramesses’s chief consort, Nefertari, sending expensive jewelry and clothes to her “sister” in Hattusa. The only sour note was the continued presence of Urhi-Teshup in Egypt, but Hattusili could not afford to let this spoil the otherwise friendly relations. Indeed, things were going so well between the two rulers that negotiations were opened regarding the possibility of a diplomatic marriage. For Hattusili and his equally forceful wife Pudukhepa, the marriage of their daughter to the great king of Egypt would serve to strengthen the links between the two royal houses and bolster their own position. Ramesses, by contrast, secure on his throne, was principally interested in the enormous dowry that would accompany the Hittite princess. With a beloved Egyptian wife of his own, he showed little personal interest in the bride-to-be. For him it was a transaction, not a marriage.

  Whatever misgivings she may have had, the Hittite princess had no choice in the matter, and, in the late autumn of 1246, she set out from the fortified citadel of the Hittite kings. Accompanying her were a great retinue of officials and a vast baggage train of gold, silver, bronze, slaves, horses, cattle, and goats. The procession wound its way slowly through the passes of the Taurus Mountains down into the coastal lowlands of southern Anatolia, then over the Amanus range to the plain of Aleppo, and thence southward, following the valley of the river Orontes, past Kadesh, to the border of Egyptian-held territory. At the frontier, Queen Pudukhepa bade farewell to her daughter for the last time. A messenger was dispatched to Per-Ramesses to tell the waiting pharaoh, “They have traversed sheer mountains and treacherous passes to reach Your Majesty’s border.”3 Ramesses immediately dispatched members of his army and officials to meet the cavalcade and escort it through Canaan. The last stop before Egypt itself was a specially built royal palace astride the Sinai coastal road, in which the princess and her attendants could rest and recuperate after their long journey. The brightly colored paintings of flowers and garlands, ornamented with gold leaf, offered a taste of things to come. In February 1245, three months after leaving Hattusa, the procession entered the dazzling city of Per-Ramesses amid scenes of jubilation. After taking delivery of the dowry, Ramesses conferred on his new bride a suitably grandiloquent Egyptian name—Maathorneferura, “she sees [in] Horus [that is, the king] the beauty of Ra”—and then promptly packed her off to one of his harem palaces. Job done.

  A few years later, the princess’s brother, Crown Prince Hishmi-Sharruma, paid a formal visit to Egypt, spending the winter months in the relatively balmy climate of the eastern delta, a welcome relief from the windswept wastes of his homeland. For a man accustomed to the austere buildings of Hattusa, the gaudy decoration of Per-Ramesses must have made a lasting impression. Indeed, when he eventually became king, Hishmi-Sharruma adorned the sanctuaries of his realm with monumental religious art on a scale far greater than any of his predecessors. Even a Hittite, it seems, could fall under Egypt’s unique spell. The crown prince’s visit may have been intended to pave the way for an even higher-level encounter, a full-scale summit between Hattusili and Ramesses. A flurry of correspondence between the two capitals certainly discussed the practicalities of such a meeting, and the pharaoh expressed the hope that he and his Hittite counterpart would “see each other face-to-face.” The bond of friendship between the two lands was stronger than ever, and would last until the very end of the Hittite Kingdom.

  NEW FOES FOR OLD

  THROUGHOUT HIS LONG SIXTY-SEVEN-YEAR REIGN (1279–1213), Ramesses II gave a high priority to securing Egypt’s imperial possessions in the Near East and neutralizing the Hittite threat. At the same time, his security apparatus was alert to another growing danger, not from the north but from the west. The seminomadic tribes of the Libyan desert and their settled kinsmen along the coast had been a persistant irritant since the earliest days of the First Dynasty. A punitive raid or two had always been sufficient to keep them in check and prevent large-scale infiltration of the western delta. But things had changed. Almost nothing is known about the history and archaeology of Libya before the arrival of the Phoenicians in the eighth century B.C., but from references in Egyptian sources it is clear that an advanced civilization had developed by Ramesside times, at least along the North African coast. Imported artifacts point to close trade links across the Mediterranean with the Mycenaeans, who some two centuries earlier had displaced the Minoans as the main Aegean power. The ships that docked at Libyan coastal harbors brought with them great wealth, boosting the local economy and providing the chiefs with unprecedented resources. From long service as mercenaries in the Egyptian army, the Libyans had also learned a thing or two about modern warfare, acquiring the chariot and gaining considerable skill with the bow and arrow. By late in the reign of Ramesses II, the Libyan tribal rulers had gathered both the financial means and the technology to confront Egypt on equal terms. For the pharaoh, it was a deeply unwelcome prospect.

  Ramesses’s instinctive response was to fortify the entire Libyan frontier. His defensive system comprised a series of massive fortresses, built at roughly fifty-mile intervals the length of the western delta border. Each fort was within a day’s chariot ride of its neighbor, and only a couple of days’ ride from Per-Ramesses. Not only did the forts guard the coastal approaches to the delta, but they also enclosed all the major wells in the area, thus denying fresh water to any hostile force. One of the larger forts was even provided with its own temple, to inspire the garrison to feats of courage. In a typically Ramesside gesture, the temple was dedicated to the cult of the deified king.

  The pharaoh’s western wall did its job for a time, and the Libyans failed to break through the line while Ramesses was on the throne. But in the aftermath of his death and the unexpected succession of his thirteenth son, Merenptah (the twelve older sons having predeceased their octogenarian father), the impatient tribal rulers saw their chance. In 1209, the fifth year of the new king’s reign,

  one came to say to His Majesty … that the vile chief of the Libyan enemies, Mery, son of Dedy, has descended …4

  And the vile enemy had done his homework. Utilizing a wide range of strategic alliances, he had contrived a simultaneous revolt in Nubia, to distract Egypt’s southern garrisons, and had augmented his own Libyan army with a large detachment of mercenaries from the Aegean and beyond, “northerners who came from all lands.” These Sea Peoples—pirates and raiders in search of plunder and conquest—brought with them an entirely new type of warfare, based upon heavy infantry deploying close combat weapons, small round shields, and body armor. Massed ranks of such well-armed opponents rendered ineffective the chariotry upon which Egypt and the other great powers of the Near East had depended for their military supremacy. Like the Libyans, some of the Sea Peoples had previously served in the Egyptian army—Aegean mercenaries had made up Ramesses II’s bodyguard at the Battle of Kadesh—and so knew their enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.

  Mery’s battle strategy was based on the simple expedient of divide and rule. If he could attack Egypt on several fronts simultaneously, causing confusion and disrupting lines of communication, he and his forces might hope to prevail. So, after sending a small raiding party along the coast to keep the border garrisons busy, he and the main assault force set off toward Egypt via the oases of the Western Desert: Siwa, Bahariya, and Farafra. The last oasis commanded a network of desert routes that joined the Nile Valley at different points, so by basing his army here, Mery kept the Egyptians guessing about his ultimate intentions. Wh
en he was ready, and sure that the Nubian attack was proceeding as planned, the Libyan chief marched on Egypt in a pincer movement, to prevent a unified counterattack. He led the main force from Farafra, back to Bahariya, and thence to the Fayum, entering the Nile Valley near the pyramids of Dahshur. From there, they headed due north, to the fringes of the western delta. A second detachment left the main army at Bahariya to cross the Nile in Middle Egypt and infiltrate the eastern delta, distracting the Egyptian garrisons at Per-Ramesses and Memphis.

  Just a month after receiving the first news of the Libyan invasion, the pharaoh Merenptah arrived with his army near the town of Perirer to engage the foe. It was midsummer, 1208. Just as Ramesses had fought his toughest battle in the fifth year of his reign, so now his son and successor faced the same challenge. This time, however, the Egyptians were leaving nothing to chance. If the Libyans and Sea Peoples understood the Egyptians’ tactics, the reverse was also true. Merenptah knew that his archers and chariots could not overcome the massed ranks of the enemy infantry in a head-on fight. Instead, he cleverly drew the opposing forces toward the Egyptian lines while archers positioned on either flank directed volley after volley of raking fire against the advancing soldiers. After six hours of carnage, the Libyan coalition was finished. Then came the Egyptian chariot charge, turning defeat into rout and pursuing the fleeing enemy until all were either dead or captured. The booty was considerable: thousands of metal vessels, livestock, and advanced weaponry. To press home his victory and send a powerful message to other would-be attackers, Merenptah ordered a grim piece of psychological warfare. The defeated Libyans who had survived the battle soon wished they had perished at Perirer, for they were herded together and impaled alive on stakes. By the end of the day, flyblown corpses, their entrails sticky and putrid in the summer heat, lined the main desert route south of Memphis—in full view of any retreating Libyans and of the local populace.