It was a grim warning, but even so barbarous a display could not keep Egypt safe for long. Merenptah knew the Libyans would attack again (as they surely did, just three years later). He knew, too, that their co-conspirators, the Sea Peoples, might arrive at any time, and from almost any direction. So he pursued his own grand strategy, reinforcing Ugarit, sending grain to the Hittites to bolster the northern defenses, and even integrating Hittite infantry into the Egyptian army. (The soldiers were supplied with their own distinctive weaponry from the bronze furnaces of Per-Ramesses.) The old enmities of Kadesh were but a distant memory. In the unsettling new world of the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt needed all the friends it could muster.
The commemorative inscription commissioned by Merenptah to celebrate his second victory over the Libyans, three years after Perirer, is famous today not for the details of the battle, nor for the other elements of his defensive strategy, but for a single, fleeting reference in the penultimate line. After defeating the western invaders, the Egyptian army marched straight across the delta and into Palestine, recapturing the key towns of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam. To complete the job and impose security over this key buffer zone, Merenptah’s forces proceeded to massacre a previously unknown rebel tribe in the hill country of Canaan. The tribe called itself Israel. It is the only reference to Israel in any ancient Egyptian inscription, and it reflects the rise of well-armed bands that, despite being unable to defeat the Egyptians in a pitched battle, could nonetheless pose a serious threat to stability. Israel should have been a headline, not a footnote.
The whole of the Near East was in flux. The old certainties were crumbling, new peoples and polities were in the ascendant, new forms of warfare were tipping the balance of power. Despite its glorious military history and its dynasty of warrior pharaohs, Egypt faced a deeply uncertain future.
CHAPTER 17
TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
DISUNITED KINGDOM
IN AN ABSOLUTE MONARCHY, A LONG REIGN COULD PROVE A MIXED blessing. While too rapid a succession of kings could undermine the divine pretensions of the institution and weaken the administration, an extended period of office posed the equal dangers of decadence and atrophy. Ramesses II’s extraordinary reign of sixty-seven years certainly had its positive and negative effects on the government of Egypt. On the plus side, the king’s determination and charisma enabled him to restore Egypt’s reputation as an imperial power, while the plethora of monuments erected during his reign testified to the country’s renewed confidence and prosperity. On the down side, Ramesses’s longevity combined with his extraordinary fecundity—he fathered at least fifty sons and as many daughters—sowed the seeds for major problems in the royal succession in the following decades.
Although Merenptah’s status as the oldest surviving son could scarcely be doubted, and his reign (1213–1204) therefore passed in relative stabililty, no sooner had he died than any number of royal grandchildren came forward to claim the throne. Ramesses II had been determined to reestablish a dynastic model of monarchy after the haphazard succession of the post-Akhenaten era, and had therefore broken with centuries of tradition by granting his many sons influential positions in government. Little wonder that they came to regard themselves as powers in the land, and that their offspring saw the throne as a legitimate goal.
It was no surprise that a major dispute broke out in the senior ranks of the royal family at Merenptah’s death in 1204, with two rival claimants attempting to seize control. On one side there was Merenptah’s eldest son and appointed heir, Seti-Merenptah. Against him stood another of Ramesses II’s many grandsons, Amenmesse. Despite the age-old principle of primogeniture, it was Amenmesse, not Seti-Merenptah, who initially gained the upper hand. He was clearly able to call upon friends in high places, and may even have had a significant section of the army behind him. Amenmesse managed to rule for four years (1204–1200), while Seti-Merenptah sweated it out in some far-flung royal palace, an internal exile in his own kingdom. But the usurper did not have it his own way for long. The balance of power eventually swung back to the legitimate claimant, and Seti-Merenptah was finally able to succeed to his birthright as King Seti II.
The purge began at once. A number of prominent officials who had held office under Amenmesse immediately lost their jobs. Included were two of the highest-ranking men in the kingdom, the high priest of Amun and the vizier. They had backed the wrong man, and now they paid the price. Proscriptions and dismissals swept through the corridors of power, temporarily crippling the administration as Seti removed anyone and everyone who had supported his rival. Nor did he look any more kindly on Amenmesse himself, despite the fact that the two men were first cousins. Every reference to the usurper was ruthlessly expunged. On statues and temple reliefs, the name of Amenmesse was excised and replaced with that of Seti. Since a lasting name ensured immortality, the opposite spelled annihilation. For an Egyptian there could be no worse fate.
Like his father, Merenptah, before him, Seti II was already an old man when he became king, and he was only too aware that he had but a short time to make his mark. The royal quarrymen, masons, and architects went into overdrive as the king sought to leave his legacy in the sacred landscape of Thebes. On the east bank, at Ipetsut, builders began erecting a three-chambered chapel for the sacred barque shrines of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu. It might have been small and insignificant compared to the great columned hall of Seti I and Ramesses II, but it was a monument of sorts, better than nothing. Over on the west bank, the workmen in the Valley of the Kings had never known such a fever of activity as they set to work excavating and decorating not one but three tombs simultaneously—one for Seti, one for his wife Tawosret, and one for his favored chancellor, Bay. With no expansion in the workforce, the pressure was immense, and the valley echoed nonstop with the chisels, shouts, and expletives of the men. It is not surprising that the workmanship was distinctly shoddy.
Time was not on Seti’s side. After just two years on his hard-won throne, he went the way of his father and grandfather before him, to join the royal ancestors in the glorious afterlife. His intended heir, a second Seti-Merenptah, was either already dead or unable to assert his rights to the succession. Instead, with the backing of Chancellor Bay (a fickle friend, if ever there was one), the kingship was handed to a sickly teenager with a withered left leg—not exactly the most prepossessing candidate for pharaoh, but amenable to pressure and undeniably royal. For Egypt’s new monarch, Siptah, was none other than the surviving son of the usurper Amenmesse.
During Seti II’s brief reign, Bay had acted the loyal lieutenant with consummate skill, winning promotion from royal scribe to chancellor, and the rare honor of a tomb in the royal necropolis. It was quite an achievement for any commoner, let alone an outsider of Syrian extraction. Yet, before Seti’s mummy had even been laid to rest, Bay switched allegiance to support the polio-stricken son and heir of Seti’s archnemesis. It was the cruelest betrayal. The kingmaker boasted in public that he “established the king on his father’s seat.”1 In reality, Bay’s only concern was feathering his own nest. The new king was still underage, so a regency council had to be established; for purposes of legitimacy, it was headed by Seti II’s widow Tawosret, but, not very far behind the scenes, Bay pulled the strings.
In the fifth year of the regency, 1193, Tawosret took her revenge. Adopting full kingly titles (as Hatshepsut had done 280 years earlier), she mobilized her band of supporters at court and made her move against Bay. His fall from grace was swift and absolute. He was executed for treason and his name was officially proscribed, so denying him eternal life. Official documents referred to him instead as “the great enemy”2 or, sarcastically, as “the parvenu from Syria.”3 A year later, his protégé, Siptah, was conveniently dead, too. With her enemies deprived of their last rallying point, Tawosret launched a full-scale persecution of the puppet king’s memory. Siptah’s names were erased from his royal tomb, and from hers, to be replaced by those of her late husband, Seti II. The t
riumph of Merenptah’s heirs was complete.
But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Egypt had been rocked by more than a decade of internecine fighting among Ramesses II’s descendants. The country had been unsettled and undermined by coup and countercoup, purge and counterpurge. The government was paralyzed and powerless. There was no male heir to continue the line. Instead, the throne was occupied by a vengeful widow, a woman, an affront to the hallowed ideology of Egyptian monarchy. Not twenty years after Merenptah’s great victory at Perirer, the country had plumbed the depths. And the blame could be laid squarely at the feet of the ruling dynasty. What Egypt needed was a new broom to sweep away the cobwebs of Ramesside rule and reinvigorate the country’s sense of purpose and destiny.
Egypt had experienced such moments before. The crisis following the death of Tutankhamun, while no longer within living memory, offered a recent parallel to the situation the country now confronted. Then, the solution had been to turn to the army. If then, why not now? For the second time in a century, the power brokers in Thebes and Memphis looked to the ranks of the military for a strongman to establish a new dynasty and put Egypt back on an even keel. The candidate they chose fit the bill perfectly. An army commander, responsible for garrison troops, he had exactly the training and background for a successful soldier pharaoh. He already had a son (also in the army), and hence offered dynastic continuity. Even his name, Sethnakht (“Seth is victorious”), seemed tailor-made.
He did not disappoint. Marshaling his forces in 1190, Sethnakht set out to restore order and crush all opposition. Within a matter of months, the military coup was complete: “There was no enemy of His Majesty [left] in any land.”4 To set the seal on his triumph, he launched a barrage of propaganda to match his martial prowess. On a victory monument erected at Abu, Egypt’s traditional southern border, Sethnakht conjured up a bleak picture of life before his arrival on the scene: “This land was in desolation; Egypt had strayed from its trust in god.”5 The account went further, alleging a conspiracy by unnamed Egyptian authorities to take over the country with Asiatic help. This veiled reference to Bay played to the Egyptians’ oldest and strongest prejudice, their hatred and suspicion of foreigners. Sethnakht was thus able to present himself not as a military thug but as a national savior, whom the supreme deity had chosen “above millions, ignoring hundreds of thousands ahead of him.”6 Like Horemheb before him, Sethnakht had his immediate precedessors airbrushed from history; the party line presented him as the legitimate successor of Seti II. It was a sleight of hand, a careful distortion of the truth worthy of a great pharaoh.
Although he was already well past middle age, Sethnakht did not need to worry about his legacy. His son and heir, another Ramesses no less, would see to that. When Ramesses III succeeded as king in 1187, he consciously modeled himself on his great namesake, adopting all the names and royal titles of the victor of Kadesh. He even gave his sons the same names and positions at court as Ramesses II’s sons. And he ordered work to begin on a great mortuary temple in western Thebes, in the mold of the Ramesseum. For officials and ordinary Egyptians alike, it must have seemed like a new dawn, a return to the glorious days of Ozymandias.
History was indeed about to repeat itself, but in a way that Ramesses III neither desired nor expected.
FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF RAMESSES III’S REIGN, WORRYING NEWS BEGAN to reach Egypt from the pharaoh’s emissaries in the Near East. All along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, cities were being sacked and torched, harbors burned and looted, entire nations laid low. While coastal communities had been harried by pirates for decades, this new onslaught was of an entirely different order of magnitude. Most frightening of all, it had come from out of the blue, the sighting of enemy ships on the western horizon being the first warning of an impending attack. By the time the inhabitants of the Mediterranean ports could muster their defenses, their enemies were upon them. As Egypt watched from afar, great cities and civilizations were reduced to rubble, and the cultural achievements of centuries went up in smoke.
The first to fall was the great maritime city of Ugarit. Its altruism was its undoing. The king of Ugarit had dispatched sizeable military forces to southern Anatolia in response to pleas for urgent assistance from neighboring lands already under attack. Ugarit’s soldiers were fighting alongside the Hittites, while its navy was patrolling the coast of Lycia. By being an exemplary ally, Ugarit had unwittingly put itself in the line of fire. Overstretched and underdefended, its remaining forces were hopelessly incapable of defending Ugarit at home when the attack came. In an eleventh-hour attempt to save his entire realm from destruction, the king of Ugarit wrote a desperate letter to his counterpart in Alashiya (Cyprus). Its tone of panic is palpable: “the enemy ships are already here, they have set fire to my towns and have done very great damage in the countryside.”7 It was too late. The clay tablet bearing the king’s letter was never sent. It was found much later, still in the kiln where it had been fired, amid the rubble of the devastated city, a vivid firsthand account penned on the eve of destruction. Ugarit was laid waste, never to be reoccupied. One of the great natural harbors of the Mediterranean was reduced to smoldering ruins.
Next to feel the heat (quite literally) was Egypt’s close ally, the Hittite Kingdom proper. In a desperate flurry of diplomatic correspondence, the last Hittite ruler spoke of fighting a seaborne enemy—not just on the open seas but on the beaches, on the landing grounds, and in the hills. Fearless and indefatigable, the attackers moved ashore and pushed northward, heading for the Hittite capital at Hattusa. Even with soldiers from Ugarit fighting alongside them, the Hittites could not stop the invaders. In a last-ditch effort to halt the advance, the Hittite king invaded his own neighbor, the coastal territory of Tarhuntassa, seeking to engage the enemy before it could reach the Hittite homeland—but to no avail. First Tarhuntassa and then the Hittite Kingdom were defeated and despoiled. Hattusa itself was plundered and burned; the fortified royal citadel proved no match for the invaders.
Elsewhere in Asia Minor, the glittering cities of Miletus and Troy suffered a similar fate. As the enemy swarmed like a killer horde across the eastern Mediterranean, Mersin and Tarsus were ravaged, and devastation was visited upon northern Cyprus. Next, the hostile forces pressed inland to the Orontes Valley, sacking all the important towns along this strategic thoroughfare. Alalakh, Hamath, Qatna, and even Kadesh—all were obliterated. Farther south, the trading centers of Palestine soon succumbed, places such as Akko, Lachish, Ashdod, and Ashkelon—towns that stood astride the great coast road that led southward and westward … to Egypt.
Throughout the Near East, palls of smoke hung in the air where once there had been hubs of commerce and culture. Rich palaces and famous cities lay in ruins. Only Assyria, safe on the far bank of the mighty Euphrates, survived unscathed. By 1179, the eighth year of Ramesses III’s reign, the invaders had the last remaining maritime power of the eastern Mediterranean in their sights:
Countries were simultaneously taken out and devastated. No land could stand before their arms, from the Hittite kingdom, Qode [that is, Cilicia], Carchemish, Arzawa, and Cyprus—they were laid waste, one by one.… And on [the enemy] came toward Egypt.8
By now, the pharaoh’s advisers were well acquainted with the enemy. “The foreign countries plotted together in their islands.… Their league comprised Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh.”9 Though the names might be strange, the phenomenon was all too familiar. The dreaded Sea Peoples had returned. Thirty years earlier, a different coalition of Aegean and Anatolian peoples had conspired with the Libyans in an attempted invasion of Egypt in the reign of Merenptah. Now new bands had joined together in common cause, sweeping aside all before them. Driven from their homelands (unknown, but possibly the western Mediterranean or Anatolia) by drought, famine, and the desire for a better life, and possessed of a fierce and warlike nature, the Sea Peoples had proved an unstoppable force as they moved steadily southward and eastward
, along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Asia Minor, and down the coast of the Near East toward the Sinai and the Nile delta. Alongside battalions of well-armed (and armored) soldiers came women and children in ox-drawn carts, carrying their meager possessions with them. This was a mass migration by desperate and determined people. So far, no city or state had been able to resist. Egypt knew it faced a battle for survival.
At this time of national peril, Ramesses III showed himself the true heir of his great predecessor. As soon as he learned of the impending land invasion that was heading toward Egypt from southern Palestine, he sent orders to the frontier fortresses of the eastern delta to stand firm until reinforcements arrived. Troops were mobilized throughout the country. Their orders were to converge on the eastern border and repel the invaders. But the leaders of the Sea Peoples knew very well that Egypt would be a determined opponent, and had decided to put maximum pressure on the pharaoh’s forces by attacking on two fronts. As the land force moved on the delta from the northeast, a substantial amphibious force of troopships made for the mouth of the main Nile branch, intending to land a second army. This army’s orders, no doubt, were to follow the river upstream toward the commercial and military headquarters at Per-Ramesses. Possession of the eastern delta capital would effectively mean control of the whole of northern Egypt—just as it had for the Hyksos 450 years earlier. As Ramesses and his generals pondered the situation, they realized that Egypt faced not merely a hostile invasion, but the threat of permanent occupation.
The response was an immediate nationwide conscription. At its hour of greatest need, the country needed all able-bodied men to stand together. While the professional army dug in at the northeastern border, the conscripts were dispatched to the coast, to blockade the Nile mouth against the enemy fleet. Ramesses’s own account of the preparations captures very well the tension, drama, and determination of the moment:
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