Seti I striking prisoners of war with his mace. Karnak, Thebes.
Restoring sacred sites to magnificence and endowing them
with dazzling new monuments was a tried and trusted way of rebuilding Egypt’s
domestic standing, but there was still the question of the country’s
international reputation. From his background as an army officer, Seti knew
that influence on the world stage came from military strength. Yet not since
the glory days of Amenhotep II had Egypt won a decisive victory in the Near
East. Under Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, attempts to extend or even defend
imperial possessions in Syria had been wholly ineffective. Horemheb had tried
to reassert Egyptian hegemony, but with mixed results. Egypt’s reputation as a
great power was seriously compromised, its overseas territories vulnerable to
secession or seizure by the Hittites, and its mastery of trade routes
threatened. Action was urgently needed if the Ramessides’ inheritance was not
to disappear before their very eyes. Seti had lost no time, launching his first
campaign while still crown prince. He had fought his way along the Phoenician
coast to reassert Egypt’s traditional sphere of influence and to secure Egypt’s
continued access to the Mediterranean harbors, with their garrisons and trading
wharfs.
At the start of his sole reign in 1290, he led further
campaigns with similar strategic objectives. The first people to feel Egypt’s
wrath were the bedouin of northern Sinai. Struggles between their fractious
tribes were not a hazard to Egyptian security per se, but they did threaten the
country’s main supply lines to its imperial possessions in Syria-Palestine.
Seti knew that control of the northern Sinai coastal route was a necessary
prerequisite for more ambitious military maneuvers. Having reimposed Egyptian
authority in his own backyard, he moved onward into Canaan, regaining control
of the key fortified towns of Beth-Shan and Yenoam. He then set the seal on
Egypt’s victory by forcing the chiefs of Lebanon to hew wood in his presence—a
public act of submission to the pharaoh that also emphasized Egypt’s claim over
the region’s abundant natural resources. In earlier times, small-scale local
actions of this sort would not have required the personal presence of the king
at the head of the army. But Seti recognized the need to project a renewed
image of royal power abroad, and was fortunate in possessing the appetite for
battle. Sustaining such a policy, however, would lead Egypt ever deeper into
the quagmire of international politics, with momentous consequences.
The political map of the Near East in Seti’s time was
radically and irrevocably changed from the confident days of the late
Eighteenth Dynasty. Under Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, Egypt had achieved a
lasting peace with the major power of northern Mesopotamia, the kingdom of
Mittani, and had secured the new relationship through a series of diplomatic
marriages. The two powers had respected each other’s spheres of influence and
had managed to coexist amicably for half a century.
Then, early in the reign of
Akhenaten, the accession of a belligerent and ambitious ruler of the Hittites
had dealt a body blow to the carefully negotiated balance of power. In a series
of swift and devastating campaigns, the Hittite king Shuppiluliuma had
succeeded in breaking out of his Anatolian heartland to conquer significant
swaths of Mittanian-controlled territory, even raiding the Mittanian capital.
Egypt had stuck by its friendship with Mittani, but the Mesopotamian kingdom
was by that time all but a spent force. A new superpower had arrived on the
scene, and Egypt had been totally unprepared.
Under Akhenaten, the pharaonic government’s initial reaction
had been not to get involved. This passivity had been a fatal error. The
combination of Mittanian weakness and Egyptian hesitancy had then led a number
of former vassal states to exploit the power vacuum and push for greater
autonomy. Chief among them had been Amurru, a sizeable region of central Syria
between the river Orontes and the Mediterranean Sea. As we have seen, the ruler
of Amurru, Abdi-Ashirta, had been a shameless wheeler-dealer, quick to take
advantage of political rivalries and social instability to advance his own
cause. His missives to the Egyptian court form a significant portion of the
Amarna Letters archive. Either the Egyptians had not known quite what to make
of him or they’d decided a policy of nonintervention was the most sensible
course. Yet this disinterest had merely encouraged Abdi-Ashirta in his
ambitions, and Amurru had remained outside Egyptian control.
Pharaonic power, once feared and respected throughout the
Near East, had had no more success with the wayward state of Kadesh. Its rulers
had been a thorn in Egypt’s side ever since the reign of Thutmose III, and they
had stayed true to character during Akhenaten’s reign by going over to the
enemy side as soon as the Hittite army had come knocking at their gates. An
abortive mission to recapture Kadesh had merely underlined Egypt’s weakness. A
second attempt on the town during the reign of Tutankhamun had met with similar
failure, encouraging the gloating Hittites to consolidate their hold over
northern Syria. Aziru of Amurru (Abdi-Ashirta’s son), seeing which way the wind
had been blowing, had joined Kadesh in pledging allegiance to the region’s new
Hittite overlords. The attempt by Tutankhamun’s widow to engineer a diplomatic
marriage to a Hittite prince, to save her from Ay’s clutches, could have
brought about a lasting peace between the two rival powers. Instead, Prince Zannanza’s
mysterious death had merely provided yet another excuse for Hittite expansion;
the prince’s father had vented his wrath on the treacherous Egyptians by
attacking Egyptian-held territory in southern Syria.
But the Hittites had not had it all their own way. In a
bitter twist of fate, the prisoners of war that had been brought back to the
Hittite capital from these punitive raids had carried with them the plague. It
had swept through the royal citadel at Hattusa, killing not only the king but
his crown prince as well. It was still ravaging the Hittite homeland twenty
years later. To the Hittites, it must have seemed that the gods had changed
sides. To the Egyptians, these bizarre events far from home seemed to have
rekindled the possibility of victory. An uneasy peace had settled over Syria,
with Egypt and the Hittites at a stalemate.
So things had stood when Seti I came to the throne. With a
soldier’s blood in his veins, he was resolute in his determination to restore
Egypt’s tarnished national pride. After a half century of inglorious retreat,
it was time for Amun-Ra to be on the march once again. Having reasserted
Egyptian control over Phoenicia and Canaan, Seti set his sights on Amurru and
Kadesh. Winning them back would strike a symbolically powerful blow to Hittite
aspirations and would go a long way to reviving Egypt’s regional reputation.
Just a year after recapturing Beth-Shan and Yenoam, Seti’s army struck deep
into central Syria. Kadesh was taken, and a triumphant Seti ordered a
magnificent victory inscription to be erected in the city. His elation was to
be short-lived. As soon as the Egyptian troops had disappeared over the
horizon, the perfidious inhabitants of Kadesh returned at once to the Hittite
fold. The pharaoh’s forces had rather more success with the province of
Amurru—once retaken, it remained loyal to its new Egyptian master. At the end
of the campaign, a large part of central Syria had changed sides. Seti had
erased the humiliations of previous generations and had set Egypt back on the
path of imperial greatness. Or so he hoped. In fact, the Hittites were merely
regrouping. They had no intention of taking these setbacks lying down.
Marshaling their considerable forces high on the Anatolian plateau, they
prepared for all-out war. As the skies darkened over the Near East, the looming
showdown between the two superpowers would not be long in coming.
Behind the apparent pluck and resolve of Seti I’s foreign
policy there lurks a conundrum. If Egypt and the Hittites had indeed agreed on
some sort of accommodation during the reign of Horemheb, as later sources
suggest, then Seti’s bold campaigns drove a coach and horses through it.
Moreover, his actions set in train a series of increasingly bloody clashes that
led not to the restoration of Egyptian supremacy but to long-term losses. In
retrospect, Seti’s Asiatic wars look rash and foolish. One possible explanation
is that his policy was dictated more by political expediency than by a careful
calculation of Egypt’s strategic interests. Rulers throughout history have
resorted to stoking a foreign conflict to deflect attention from problems
closer to home. And, indeed, there are tantalizing clues from early in Seti’s
reign that may suggest an insecurity at the heart of his regime. In the king’s
battle reliefs at Ipetsut, an enigmatic figure labeled only as “the group
marshaler and fan bearer Mehy” is depicted with unusual prominence, as if
playing a key role in the battles and in Seti’s wider offensive strategy.
To have been given such high status on a royal monument,
Mehy (the name is an abbreviation for an unknown longer name) must have been
one of the most influential figures at court—perhaps occupying a position akin
to that of Horemheb during the reign of Tutankhamun or of Paramessu during the
reign of Horemheb. It has even been suggested that the mysterious Mehy was
Seti’s designated heir, and that the martial king had decided to follow recent
precedent by leaving his throne to a fellow army officer.
If so, Seti’s son, the adolescent Prince Ramesses, had other
ideas. Within a few years of Mehy’s figure being carved, every instance was
systematically erased from the Ipetsut reliefs, to be replaced by Ramesses’s
own image. The next generation of the Ramesside Dynasty had no intention of
allowing a mere commoner to exercise such influence over the kingdom’s affairs.
Ramesses, and he alone, would be recognized by posterity as his father’s true
heir and most steadfast supporter.
Ramesses, and he alone, would continue
Seti’s aggressive foreign policy and fulfill Egypt’s destiny as a great
imperial power. Ramesses, and he alone, would confront the Hittites directly in
a final struggle for international supremacy.
The pharaoh’s army readied itself as the country marched
onward to war.
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