The World

Houses of Hattusa and Rameses

SUN MANIA: NEFERTITI AND THE KING OF HATTI

The new pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, had a strange slit-eyed, angular face with an elongated head and extended torso with androgynous breasts, a potbelly and short legs – or at least was shown this way. Nefertiti, who may have been his first cousin, Tiye’s niece, appeared as his equal everywhere – even in an inscription of her killing foreign prisoners on the royal barge. Nefertiti’s beauty was striking, but here too there was a kink: her statues suggest an elongated skull. Did this new fashion in royal statues express Amenhotep’s divinity or was he presenting his bizarre looks as evidence of divinity?

The cone-headed pharaoh was absorbed by religious matters, as Egyptian power in Syria was being challenged by a rising empire: an aggressive and gifted warrior, Suppiluliuma, was the king of Hatti, whose people were superb charioteers descended from Aryan invaders and who now ruled from the Aegean to the Euphrates. Suppiluliuma, scion of the greatest dynasty of the time, that ruled for almost 500 years, had crushed Greek kingdoms in the west; now he tested Egyptian power by taking Kadesh in northern Syria.

The pharaoh failed to get Kadesh back, but the wars had unleashed hordes of Habiru^* – brigands – who attacked Egyptian allies in Canaan. ‘I’m at war … Send archers!’ begged Abdi-Heba, king of a small beleaguered fortress. ‘If no archers, the king will have no lands.’ The fortress was Jerusalem, making its first appearance in history.

As the Hattians advanced into Canaan and the Habiru marauded, Amenhotep IV launched a religious revolution. He embraced one sun god, Aten, and changed his own name to Akhenaten – Effective for Aten; Nefertiti became Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti – Beauteous are the Joys of Aten (and everyone else had to change their names from Amun to Akhen too). Then he founded a new capital, Akhetaten – Horizon of Aten – between Memphis, the ancient capital, and Thebes.^* The new theology, known sinisterly as the Teaching, downgraded not just Amun but all the other gods popular with the elite and the people, to elevate one god, an idea that may have influenced the writers of the Bible and the religions to come. Even the word ‘gods’ was changed to its singular form. The divine partnership of Akhenaten and Nefertiti had a cosy intimacy to it: illuminated and joined by the rays of the divine sun, they appeared in engravings with three children on their laps. It was the first appearance of a nuclear family as a political–religious statement.

In 1342, the royal family, starred in a spectacular jubilee ‘seated upon the great palanquin of electrum to receive the tribute of Syria and Kush, the West and the East … even the islands in the midst of the sea [the Greeks], presenting tribute’. The foreigners were unimpressed by this sun cult: ‘Why,’ wrote King Ashuruballit of Assyria, ‘should my messengers be made to stay constantly outside to die under the sun?’ The sun was about to lose its dazzle, and its eclipse would bring the most famous of all pharaohs to the throne.

TRANSITIONING: THE MALE NEFERTITI, TUTANKHAMUN’S WIFE AND THE PRINCE OF HATTI

A new male co-pharaoh was named as Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, who was probably the queen transitioning into a male king. But the sun cult depended on one man – and in 1336 Akhenaten died, to be succeeded by a mysterious pharaoh named Smenekhkara, most likely Nefertiti in male guise, who ruled with her own daughter Meritaten as King’s Great Wife. But courtiers were enraged by the sun cult, and knives were out: Nefertiti died – or was killed. Her replacement was a nine-year-old son of Akhenaten by one of his secondary wives: Tutankhaten – Living Image of Aten – who was swiftly married to another of the daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Ankhesenpaaten.

The vanishing of Nefertiti heralded a counter-revolution to undo the Atenists and restore Amun-Ra. The capital returned to Memphis, the new city abandoned; Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, his wife Ankhesenamun.

The pharaoh, five foot six, was not strong – he may have fractured his leg in a chariot accident; he also suffered from malaria and it sounds as if he had a temper. Now he consulted ‘with Amun’, which meant his powerful advisers, Ay, his great-uncle, and the top general Horemheb, who boasted that Tutankhamun promoted him to ‘Lord of the Land’. The boy-pharaoh declared ,‘The temples of the gods and goddesses had fallen into ruin …’ but he himself ‘drove away chaos’. The royal couple were half-siblings, the queen was barely pubescent and two daughters were stillborn (their tiny mummies buried with Tutankhamun, his paternity proved by their DNA). The pharaoh faced the relentless advance of the Hattian king Suppiluliuma. ‘If armies were sent east,’ admitted Tutankhamun, ‘they had no success.’ He sent an army northwards. Suppiluliuma’s chariots routed it.

In 1322, Tutankhamun died at the age of nineteen – whether as a result of malaria, some other infection or murder – but his tomb was not ready, so his entombed regalia was paltry compared to the treasures prepared for kings who died in predictable old age.

Only one of House Ahmose was left: Queen Ankhesenamun, also nineteen, was alone in a vicious court at the mercy of Great-Uncle Ay who was angling to marry her and become pharaoh himself. Overseer of the Army Horemheb had, he claimed, been designated as heir, but he was campaigning in Syria. In a desperate move, the daughter of Nefertiti turned to the other great dynasty.

Great King Suppiluliuma was at war, besieging Carchemish (Türkiye). In a letter, included in The Deeds of Suppiluliuma, an account written by his heir and found among the ruins of Hattusa, teenaged queen Ankhesenamun wrote: ‘My husband has died and I have no son. They say that you have many sons. You might give me one of your sons to become my husband. I would not wish to take one of my subjects [she meant Ay] as husband … I am afraid.’

Suppiluliuma sent a son, Prince Zannanza, through Canaan towards Egypt. But he was too late. The journey took a long time; the old minister Ay was acclaimed pharaoh and married the young queen. But Zannanza was still on his way. We do not know what happened, but Horemheb surely intercepted and murdered him. It was a favour Pharaoh Ay did not forget. No one knows for how long Ankhesenamun survived, but Ay soon died, leaving the throne to Horemheb.

Suppiluliuma was incensed – ‘Oh gods, the people of Egypt did this to me’ – sending his charioteers to ravage Egyptian Canaan. But the soldiers and their prisoners returned with a plague, always a symptom of an interlinked world. Soon afterwards, Suppililiuma died and the crown prince, leaving his domineering Babylonian queen Tawananna ruling an empire beset by rebellion. In 1321, Mursili II, son of Suppiluliuma, grieved: ‘O gods, what have you done? You’ve let plague into Hatti and everyone is dying.’ The pandemic decimated the capital, Hattusa. Out of the chaos in Egypt and Hatti, two potentates emerged who would now clash in the greatest battle of the ancient world.

The day began with a surprise.

CLASH OF THE CHARIOTEERS: RAMESES AND MUWATALLI

In May 1274, north of Kadesh, Rameses II, aged twenty-five, five foot seven, fair-skinned with ginger wavy hair, the monarch of a new dynasty, rode out of his camp in a golden chariot wearing his full regalia, followed by his army of over 20,000 divided into four divisions. His mission: retake Kadesh, a walled city surrounded by water. But his manoeuvres were more leisurely parade than vigilant advance.

The capture and interrogation of two Bedouin confirmed that the Hattian army under King Muwatalli was 120 miles away near Aleppo. Closer to his home base, the Great King of Hatti deployed a much larger force of 47,500, including 3,500 chariots – but they were far away.

Fording the Orontes, the Egyptians set up a new forward camp to begin the siege. Just five years on the throne, Rameses, slim, fit, aquiline, was energetic and confident like his father. The family were new: Tutankhamun’s general Horemheb had had no children: he appointed a commoner as King’s Deputy, Paramessu, a general, whom he then promoted to King’s Son. Paramessu took the regnant name Rameses, but it was his son Seti, another tough, athletic general – still impressive as a mummy – who restored the empire with parvenu vigour. Even while his father was still alive, Seti was storming up the coast of Canaan, where he forced the rulers of Lebanon to cut timber for his navy then seized Kadesh. But the Hattians, now under the impressive team of Muwatalli and his brother, Hattusili, grandsons of Suppiluliuma, seized it back.

When Rameses II succeeded his father – taking the throne name Usermaatra (Ozymandias) – Kadesh was his first priority. Rameses was flamboyant and narcissistic, engraving his name on more monuments than anyone else. He had already begun to build a capital, Per-Rameses – House of Rameses. His tomb builders lived in a workers’ village at Deir el-Medina, proud of their speciality – ‘I am a craftsman,’ wrote one, ‘who excels in his art at the forefront of knowledge.’ In his works, Rameses would define the very word pharaonic.

Maestro of bow and chariot, Rameses first defeated the fleets of the Sherden, raiders of the eastern Mediterranean. Then he turned to Kadesh.

As Rameses set up camp, Muwatalli’s spies were watching, but they were spotted, captured and tortured to reveal alarming news: the Hattians were very close, poised to attack. Rameses was outraged by his generals’ incompetence. He took personal charge, sending the royal princes out of the battle zone, dispatching his vizier to bring up the Ptah division. Before they were ready, the Hattians ambushed them, their chariots smashing into the Amun division commanded by Rameses, who sent out the call: ‘His Majesty is all alone.’ Then they hit the Ra division as it crossed the river. Thousands of chariots crashed into each other. Commanded by Muwatalli, Hattian chariots broke the Egyptian lines with their flimsier chariots; the Egyptians fled. It was a desperate fight in which the pharaoh himself, riding his chariot and firing his bow, was almost killed, only rescued by his Greek guards resplendent in horned helmets and hacking swords. There is no reason to doubt Rameses’ claims that his own personality saved the day. He was lucky: the Children of Hatti started plundering the pharaonic camp. As chariot reinforcements arrived in the nick of time, Rameses, shouting orders from his chariot, rallied his forces for Muwatalli’s charge. Rameses’ counter-attack broke the Hattian lines.

Night fell over the battlefield as the last Egyptian divisions arrived to consolidate the line. At dawn the two kings ordered their frayed armies into a savage frontal combat that ended in stalemate. Rameses withdrew his men; Muwatalli offered negotiations. Yet Muwatalli had won: Kadesh remained Hattian. Once he got home, Rameses transformed the desperate pandemonium of the Hattian ambush into a heroic legend. In no fewer than five massive monuments, he recast Kadesh as a triumph.^*

Rameses shared this glory with one person – Great Wife Nefertari, who now played a special role in making peace between enemies,^* just as in China a queen commanded chariot armies in battle.

WAR QUEENS: LADY HAO OF SHANG, PUDEHEPA OF HATTUSA AND NEFERTARI OF EGYPT

As the charioteers of Rameses and Muwatalli clashed in Syria, the new weaponry had reached north-western China, where Wuding had inherited a realm around the Yellow River gradually built by his family, the Shang, over a few hundred years. Legends depict an earlier Chinese king Yu ‘who controlled the flood’ of the Yellow River, but real history starts with the Shang.

Wuding, the twenty-first of his lineage, was a warrior king who around 1250 BC expanded Shang influence by conquest and marriage: many of his sixty-four wives were princesses of conquered fiefdoms. A favourite wife, Fu Hao, rose within his household to become a commander and high priestess. Wuding expanded into north-eastern China, fighting the other fiefdoms but also the northern peoples, the Guifang – Border Demons – from whom he had learned the arts of crossbow and chariot. Overseeing an agricultural society that also produced bronze crafts, weaponry and silk, the Shang ruled from Yin (near Anyang, Henan Province), aided by scribes who used the earliest Chinese writing from which today’s language derives. While worshipping a supreme god, Di, who may have been the supreme ancestor of the Shang, along with a lesser pantheon, they revered their ancestors as intermediaries and they daily consulted court diviners who used scapulimancy, the cracks on burned ox bones or turtle shells, to answer all the essential questions of life – from the imminence of natural disasters to health, harvest and family.

The bones and shells were burned and the diviners interpreted the cracks, their comments written on the bones, thousands of which survive. Scapulimancy helped people cope with a dangerous, unpredictable world, but the divinations were frustratingly vague.

War was waged partly in order to capture humans to sacrifice and so ensure a serene afterlife: the Shang – contemporary with Rameses in Egypt^* – were buried in a family necropolis of tombs cut into the loess soil, with bronze artefacts and weapons. ‘Offerings to Da Ding’, reads one inscription. ‘Da Jia and Zu Yi, 100 cups of wine, 100 Qiang prisoners, 300 cattle …’. When Shang potentates died, hundreds were killed and buried with them.

Lady Fu Hao, mentioned in 170 oracle bones, may have started as a court diviner, but became the king’s partner. When the king appointed Lady Hao, he consulted the diviners and they confirmed the appointment. Hao won four successive campaigns, mainly against barbarians, but when she died at the age of thirty-three she was buried with sixteen sacrificed slaves and her favourite pets, six dogs.^* The king missed her bitterly, regularly asking her advice in the afterlife.

In 1045, the Shang were said to have been destroyed by their own perverted corruption: King Zhou and his wife Daji floated on pleasure boats on a lake of booze, cavorting with concubines while devising vicious tortures for their enemies, the worst being the Cannon Burning Torment in which victims were fried alive on red-hot metal. Yet these excesses are likely to be the propaganda of the Zhou, a rising dynasty from the west, who destroyed them. At the battle of Muye, they were defeated by King Wu of Zhou. After the Shang couple had committed suicide in the ruins of their burning palace, Wu hunted down the Shang, family and troops, collecting 177,779 ears, then amid the rituals of chanting, bells and flutes he ‘beheaded and sacrificed their little prince and master of the cauldron [and] the leaders of their forty families’, scalping them. The Zhou family now ruled for several centuries, developing the first bureaucracy, the Grand Secretariat. Wu’s son Cheng was challenged by rebellious nobles but was rescued by that rare phenomenon, a benign uncle, Dan, gong (duke) of Zhou.

Once Cheng came of age, the duke of Zhou surrendered power – and later came to define responsible rule and the idea of the Mandate of Heaven: if a dynasty ruled well, they would ensure order, blessed by heaven, but if they abused power, they would lose the Mandate and be replaced.

Back in Syria, a less virtuous uncle, Hattusili, seized the Hattian throne from his nephew. After occupying Dimasqu (Damascus), he stopped to pray at a shrine to Ishtar, where he met and married the priest’s daughter Puduhepa, one of the first women of power whose voices we can hear. The Egyptian war went on until King Hattusili and Queen Puduhepa negotiated a peace treaty with Rameses – the first surviving treaty – that, like many such carve-ups right up to our own times, split Canaan–Syria – and then arranged a marriage between their children. It was Queen Puduhepa who did much of the negotiating while her husband galloped westwards to scourge a vassal, the Mycenaean kingdom of Ahhiyawa. The two had fallen out over Hattusili’s small ally, Wilusa – also known as Ilios or Troy.

In 1250, Hattusili negotiated with the king of Ahhiyawa, Tawagalawa (Eteocles), and in a letter only part of which survives wrote: ‘Now as we have come to an agreement about Wilusa over which we went to war …’. The timing is roughly right for a war in which the Trojans, backed by their Hattian allies, fought the Mycenaeans, possibly descendants of Aryan invaders. Based at Mycenae in the Peloponnese, they were ruled by kings and sword-swinging, chariot-riding warrior aristocrats who wassailed in the draughty halls of fortresses. They now worshipped male and female gods, and their battle-scarred bodies sporting golden masks were buried with bronze swords. But they were also Eurasian traders.^*

The war ended in the burning of Troy, confirmed by archaeological excavations. The backing of Hatti explains why little Troy could defy a coalition of Greeks. But these Hattian letters suggest that the ‘Trojan war’, later celebrated in The Iliad, was, if it happened at all, a sideshow in Hatti’s long struggle to control the Greeks.

Fifteen years after Kadesh, Rameses II and Hattusili III signed an ‘Eternal Peace’, pledging ‘great peace and great brotherhood between themselves for ever’, co-signed by Queen Puduhepa. She not only mediated between the many offspring of the king by concubines, officiated at religious festivals and sat as a judge, but – always acute, sarcastic, haughty – also negotiated the marriage of her daughter to Rameses. Nefertari sent her ‘sister’ a golden twelve-strand necklace and a luxurious dyed garment. But Puduhepa negotiated very frankly with Rameses.

‘My sister, you promised to give me your daughter,’ wrote Rameses. ‘That’s what you wrote. But you’ve withheld her and are angry with me. Why?’

‘I’ve indeed withheld my daughter,’ replied Puduhepa. ‘And you will certainly approve of my reasons. The treasure house of Hatti was burned [by rebels].’ Puduhepa teased Rameses: ‘Does my brother possess nothing at all? … My brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense. That’s not worthy of your reputation or your status.’ No one else in the world would speak to Rameses the Great like that. Then she boasted of her daughter’s charms: ‘With whom shall I compare the daughter of heaven and earth whom I shall give to my brother?’ But ‘I want her made superior to all the other daughters of Great Kings.’

In 1246 BC, Rameses and Puduhepa were ready. ‘Wonderful, wonderful is this situation,’ exclaimed Rameses. ‘The Sun God and the Storm God, the gods of Egypt and Hatti, have granted our two countries peace for ever!’ Puduhepa set off with her daughter, accompanied by a trove of ‘gold, silver, much bronze, slaves, horses without limit, cattle, goats, rams by the myriad!’ Puduhepa bade her daughter goodbye at the frontier and thereafter Rameses ‘loved her more than anything’, but when no children appeared, her father blamed Rameses. ‘You’ve sired no son with my daughter,’ wrote Hattusili. ‘Isn’t it possible?’ Since Rameses had sired over a hundred children, this cast an unfair aspersion. At the apogee of their empires, the super-monarchs were discussing a summit. ‘Though we Great Kings are brothers, one has never seen the other,’ wrote Puduhepa to Rameses, so they decided to meet in Canaan. But the summit never happened. Hattusili faced challenges from the Aegean to the Euphrates, and Rameses ruled for far too long, sixty-seven years, and by the time he died at ninety, twisted by arthritis, tormented with dental problems (all revealed by his mummy), his elderly son had to cope with attacks on all his frontiers^* but especially on the Mediterranean, where all the powers now faced a catastrophe. No one knows what caused it, but it is probable that a synchronicity of climate, natural disaster, pandemics, greed and systemic implosion sparked movements on some faraway steppe that unleashed a stampede migration in which maritime marauders shattered the rich cities of the Mediterranean and western Asia. The raiders sound like Greeks, the Egyptians called them ‘Sea Peoples’ but they came by land too, sporting new iron breastplates and leg greaves, wielding stabbing swords and shields, all made by the smelting of iron ore and meteoric iron to make a stronger metal. Iron had been known for a long time and it is likely that the smelting process developed slowly in many places, starting in India and spreading via the sophisticated blacksmiths of Hatti to Europe and Africa.^*

Egypt and Hatti fought back. Hattusili’s son, Tudaliya IV, attacked the raiders in Alishiya (Cyprus), but he was soon struggling to hold back the horses of the apocalypse. ‘If nobody is left to yoke the horses,’ Tudaliya wrote forlornly, ‘you must show even more support. If the charioteer jumps from the chariot and the valet flees the chamber, and not even a dog is left, your support for your king must be all the greater.’ In Egypt Rameses III claimed to have defeated these invaders in the Nile delta, a triumph celebrated by his gigantist temple-palace – the Mansion of a Million Years of King Rameses – in which enemy penises are depicted, heaped at his feet. But his gravebuilders, living with their families in their special village at Deir el-Medina, were no longer paid: they refused to work and launched a sit-in at the temples – the first strike.

‘Barbarians conspired in their islands,’ wrote Rameses III, ‘no land could withstand their weaponry.’ The Rameses family disintegrated; Egypt fell to Libyan chieftains; Hatti was broken; in Europe, Celts advanced into the west; in the Mediterranean, Greek-speaking peoples settled Aegean coasts. In western Asia, Semitic peoples, many speaking Aramaic, founded new kingdoms: in Canaan, they built thriving trading cities on the coast; in the interior, they formed a kingdom around Damascus, while further south one Semitic tribe, speaking an early version of Hebrew, settled and coalesced into a people who called themselves ‘Israel’. They may already have worshipped a peculiar notion – one deity – who did not reside in a single temple but travelled with them in a mobile shrine.^* Yet these were all tiny peoples. The mayhem was also the opportunity for a northern Iraqi city to build the first empire to dominate all of western Asia: the city was Ashur and the spectacular cruelties of Assyria would terrify the known world.

* These Habiru could be the first mention of ‘Hebrews’, who would emerge later as the Jews.

* The capital’s centrepiece was the House of Aten next to the Pharaoh’s House and the state department, the House of Pharaoh’s Correspondence, guarded by colossi of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Every day the royal family rode in ceremonial chariots from palace to temple, accompanied by priests and protected by baton-wielding bodyguards. The royal artist, ‘The King’s Favourite and Master of Works, the Sculptor Thutmose’, set up a studio, specializing in Nefertitis, sculpting both his famously beautiful teen-queen, her eyes of black painted quartz held in place by beeswax, wearing her blue crown, and the naked adult woman and mother.

* The brash grandiloquent gigantism of his vision endures today in all five – above all his spectacular masterpiece, the Temple of Rameses United with Thebes, eleven acres in size, crowned with a colossus of Rameses. These works expressed not just the plenitude of his power but his apotheosis as a living god.

* Just at this time, a court scribe, Any, wrote advice to his son on how to live, giving a glimpse of Egyptian conservative family values: ‘Truth is sent by God,’ ‘Keep away from rebels’ and ‘Scorn the woman of ill repute, don’t try to sleep with her,’ alongside ‘Give back in abundance the bread your mother gave you: support her as she supported you.’ But the soul and eternity are always on an Egyptian’s mind: ‘Don’t lose yourself in the exterior world to the extent that you neglect the place of your eternal rest.’

* We know much less about Europe, but it was a violent world: Celtic peoples migrated from the east and settled in central Europe. Around this time, 1,400 people including women and children were killed in the Tollense Valley (German–Polish border) in what appears to have been the ambush of a merchant caravan, executed by having their skulls smashed.

* Their bones were placed around her lacquered coffin along with an array of bronze vessels, some engraved with her name, 560 hairpins, 700 pieces of jade, opal and ivory carved into figurines of dragons, phoenixes and elephants, and among 130 weapons her favourite battleaxes. She was not the only female commander of Wuding’s armies, and women commanded Chinese armies at least until the Tang in the seventh century.

* Mycenaeans traded tin from Afghanistan, amber from the Baltic, plying the seas from Greece to Italy and Spain. One of the earliest shipwrecks dated around 1300 BC – studied by the historical science that we might call naufragiology – contains goods from as far away as Babylon and Italy, showing that a Eurasian network already existed.

* The son, Merneptah, dealt with rebellions in Libya, Nubia and Canaan where, among the vanquished Canaanite tribes listed on his inscription, he cites ‘Israel’, the first definite mention of the Jewish people.

* The division of early history into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages was devised in 1825 by the Danish historian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. Sub-Saharan Africa did not experience a prehistoric Bronze Age: tools were made of stone. Then they were made from iron. For some, the sudden influx of iron-working technology supports the argument that the technology reached Africa from outside the continent. But more recently it has been argued that iron-working technology developed independently in one or more centres, possibly Nok (Nigeria) or Kush (Sudan).

* The Israelites immigrated to Canaan from servitude in Egypt many centuries earlier – according to the Bible. Contrary to the biblical story of conquest, it is likely they conquered some local peoples and intermarried with others.