Ramesses III's Wars and Triumphs at Medinet Habu

Ramesses III’s wars and triumphs at Medinet Habu: between narration, history and identity

Giacomo Cavillier

Historical Background 1

The ‘war and triumph’ theme during the Ramesside Age finds its ideal starting point in the fifth year of Ramesses II’s reign, when the Egyptians fought against the Hittites at Kadesh on the Orontes. This battle was described in many religious monuments as a central event in the pharaoh’s reign. Other events like the campaigns in Syria, Canaan, and Nubia, apart from their military significance, also contributed to the royal propaganda. In these cases, the triumph constituted not only a part of the war’s events, but it was the essential political and religious ‘justification’ of the situation ante eventum and the consequential gift to the gods post eventum. The complexity of this phase can be attributed to the different cultural

1 Abbreviations: KRI = Kenneth A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions: Historical and Biographical (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968–99); RITA = K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions: Translated and Annotated: Translations V (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008) and RITANC = Kenneth A. Kitchen, Ramessides Inscriptions: Translated and Annotated: Notes and Com- ments II (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Selected bibliography: Giacomo Cavillier, Il Faraone Guerriero: i sovrani del Nuovo Regno alla conquista dell’Asia, tra mito: strategia bellica e realtà archeologica (Turin: Tirrenia stampatori, 2001); Cavillier “Il bollettino di guerra nella prassi narrativa ramesside,” Stu- dia Asiana 3 (2002): 83–98; Cavillier, Tuthmosi III: Immagine e strategia di un condottiero (Turin: Tirrenia stampatori, 2003); Cavillier, Gli Shardana nell’Egitto Ramesside (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005); Cavillier, La Battaglia di Qadesh: Ramesse II alla conquista dell’Asia (Turin: Tirrenia stampatori, 2006); Cavillier, Migdol: Richerche su modelli di architettura militare di età ramesside: Medinet Habu (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008); Mario Liverani, Antico Oriente: storia, società, economia (Rome: Laterza, 1991); Liverani, Guerra e diplo- mazia nell’Antico Oriente (Rome: Laterza, 1994); Liverani, “Ramesside Egypt in a Chang- ing World: An Institutional Approach,” in L’Impero Ramesside: convegno internazionale in onore di Sergio Donadoni (Rome: Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1997), 101–16; Liverani, Oltre la Bibbia: Storia del popolo di Israele (Bari: Laterza, 2004); Daniel Kahn, “Who is Meddling in Egypt’s Affairs? The Identity of the Asiatics in the Elephantine Stele of Sethnakhte and the Historicity of the Medinet Habu Asiatic War Reliefs,” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2 (2010): 14–23; Ellen F. Morris, The Architecture of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Evolution of Foreign Policy in Egypt’s New Kingdom (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Alexander J. Peden, Egyptian Historical Inscriptions of the Twentieth Dynasty (Jonsered, Sweden: Åströms, 1994); and Anthony J. Spalinger, War In Ancient Egypt: The New Kingdom (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005). 24 giacomo cavillier

JUSTIFICATION

WAR EVENTS Campaigns, battles, sieges

TRIUMPH

Post war events Diplomacy, Commerce, Alliances

Fig. 1. Ramesses II’s narration scheme. aspects of the Egyptian ideology of war as diplomacy, cult, strategy, and politics, where the triumph acts as a link to all micro and macro events that together compose the entire historical situation (fig. 1).2 However, this modus operandi was adopted only in part by Ramesses II’s successor Merneptah, and it terminated under the political instability during the reigns of Amenmesse, Seti II, Siptah, and Tauseret. The partial change in the propaganda ‘scheme’ during Merneptah’s reign is due to the deep changes in the Ancient Near Eastern political mosaic after the peace treaty between Egypt and the Hittite Empire, com- bined with the crisis at the end of the Late Bronze Age (including the city-state kinglets in Syria-Palestine), and the increase of the power of nomadic-tribal cultures in desert regions.3 Merneptah’s enemies were Libyans, Sea Peoples, and Canaanites, all comprising tribes, peoples, and cultures. They had rituals and concepts that differed from the ‘traditional’ great empires, such as in the diplomacy (contacts by correspondence with tribute and gifts), and control of territory. For these ‘opponents’ the schemata available from writ- ten Egyptian texts suggests an attenuation of the link from justification and triumph. If the former assumed the characteristics of the typical Königsnovelle with no political and diplomatic implications ante eventum

2 Cavillier, “Il bollettino di guerra nella prassi narrativa ramesside”; Cavillier, Gli Shar- dana nell’Egitto Ramesside; and Cavillier, La Battaglia di Qadesh: Ramesse II alla conquista dell’Asia, 68–75. 3 Cavillier, Il Faraone Guerriero, 171–183; and Liverani, Oltre la Bibbia, 38–81.