Egyptian Military Conflict & Influence (original) (raw)
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In the Late Bronze Age, Egypt became the dominating superpower of the Middle East, but its rule over the southern Levant was challenged time and again. The two major battles of Megiddo and Kadesh would seal the fate of the region for centuries to come.
An Empire Rooted in Warfare: The Development of Ancient Egypt's New Kingdom
This updated revision replaces the paper with the same title, published on Academia.edu in 2017. An excerpt: The formation of an Empire in the crucible of warfare leads predictably to ongoing reliance on leadership drawn from the warrior class, which inevitably rises from exigency. Thus it was in the New Kingdom. Of course, Egypt had previous kings who had waged war, but before the New Kingdom there was no standing army; war was an occasional and ancillary obligation. Once formed, the standing army became a career path to kingship.
When we open a book about Ancient Egypt and specifically consult about the two first historical periods from the unification of the two kingdoms (c.3000 BC), we see a number of commemorative palettes a little before the unity, and other ones from that moment onwards, in which the first monarchs from king Narmer, appeared killing the enemy. This is the period known as Early Dynastic, that embraces the two first dynasties of sovereigns (3000-2686 BC) (2), but little or nothing at all is mentioned about war or conflicts with the most important enemies of Egypt: Nubian, Asiatic and Libyan. And still more unlikely is that they spoke about the bellicose conflicts during the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC). When we search for complete books or papers referring to the war in the Old kingdom, we notice that the majority come from the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BC) and specially from the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC)(3). A few mention the bellicose theme during the Early Dynastic and the Old Kingdom, within the military history of Ancient Egypt (4) and finally, extremely rare are the papers that deal specifically with these two first periods(5). Even the authors who talk about war in these periods, generally make negative comments, in the sense that in fact, there was not an important or professional army till the first crisis of the Egyptian State (6) or until the new centralization of the power of the State: the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BC). We will now see some of these comments. According to Shaw and Nicholson: "There was no national or permanent army during the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC), but it is possible that a relatively small group of guards existed. Groups of young men were clearly recruited for expeditions and specific missions, from commercial campaigns to the quarries or mines, to the specific military enterprises"(7). We will later analyze if it was possible to fulfill all the military needs during about eight hundred years with just a palace guard and some new recruits arrived from the nomes. In another paper, Shaw and Boatright, say that: "In the most ancient periods of the history of Egypt (c.3200-2100 BC) the army included mostly people recruited as a specialized part of a major recruitment by force of men, used for the great buildings. Because of the indeterminate and unstable nature of the Egyptian army of the Old and Middle Kingdom, it is difficult to know its real dimension, its composition and organization in such remote times. The number of soldiers that the Egyptian battle accounts give us-like a "tenth of thousand" are not very certain, (…)"(8). Although it is sometimes very difficult to separate, inside the royal Egyptian administration and especially in these periods, the group of workers from the military units using the terminology, we will notice that they were not using the bellicose iconography that many of these scholars seem not to have seen. In the same way, the commentary about the army in the Middle Kingdom is out of time, because there are many written, iconographic, and archaeological sources that show the opposite (9). Shaw, in another paper, returns to the same concept, but a little more variegated: "From the great primeval conflict of the gods Horus and Seth to the well documented battles of Meggido and Kadesh, war was an essential element of Egyptian culture(10). If the stereotypical version of Egypt talks only about priests, scribes and embalmers, the real image must also include the warriors and the generals that maintained stable conditions under which the Egyptian civilization was capable of flourishing. The basement for the pharaonic State itself emerged from the fight of powers within the local chieftains from the Late Predynastic period (11). The great quantity of sources for the study of Egyptian war is quite incomplete, especially in terms of its historical range. For example, we know little about the organization of the Egyptian army till the beginning of the second millennium BC (…)"(12). Here Shaw recognized that we could not have the beatific image of an Egyptian civilization where the unique problem was to construct the gigantic houses of eternity for the pharaohs or to look at the stars to prevent eclipses, but that there were also dangers that menaced this paradisiacal civilization and these
In the beginning was the war. Conflict and the emergence of the Egyptian State
2004
In: Hendrickx, S., Friedman, R., Cialowicz, K. & Chlodnicki, M., (eds.), Egypt at its Origins. Studies in Memory of Barbara Adams, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta vol. 138, ISBN: 90-429-1469-6, Leuven, Peeters, 2004, pp. 689-703. (This copy is the last pre-print proof: page numbering is different. Esta copia es la última prueba de galera: la numeración de páginas es diferente)
The Egyptian Empire, founded at the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty ca. 1560 BC, experienced a lengthy period of economic growth and military success. The rapid expansion of the kingdom north into Asia and upriver into ancient Nubia began earlier when the native state was still divided into various realms and the Hyksos, Asiatic foreigners, controlled the north. The latter, of northern (Palestinian) origin, had been able to take over the Egyptian Delta, the age-old capital of Memphis, and a large portion of Middle Egypt upstream to Cusae. The result was that a native ruling house (Dynasty XVII) controlled only Upper Egypt, having its capital at Thebes and its southern boundary fixed at Aswan at the First Cataract. It was during this time, lasting approximately a century, that the Egyptians forged a far more effective means of centralized governmental control over their limited realm. At the same time the war machine of the Theban state had to deal with conflict to the south (Nubia) as well as with a cold war to the north. By and large, the XVIIth Dynasty managed to develop the use of the new military technology of the horse and chariot as well as other improvements in armament, most of which had come into Egypt from Asia at an earlier time. The Hyksos, in fact, had accelerated this trend owing to the weaknesses of the native Egyptian state of the Late Middle Kingdom (late Dynasty XII–Dynasty XIII) which had already lost control of the Eastern Delta. By the end of Dynasty XVII the Thebans felt themselves able to begin fighting in a regular fashion against their opponents on the Nile – both north and south – and it is at this point that significant transformations of the military commenced. The best way to understand the military system of Pharaonic Egypt at the commencement of the New Kingdom is to analyze the famous war inscriptions of King Kamose, the last Pharaoh of the Dynasty XVII. 1 The narrative was written on two stone stelae and placed within the sacred precinct of the temple of Amun at Karnak. The king expressly commissioned this record to be set up by his treasurer, Neshi, an army commander and overseer of countries, whose figure and name were included at the bottom left of the