Essay Question:

How did the Egyptians establish and maintain an empire in the Levant?

Essay written by David Rohl (3rd Year Ancient History/Egyptology)

Submitted to Amelie Kuhrt on the 7th March 1990.

There are two major aspects to any discussion of Egyptian hegemony over the Levant in the New Kingdom. First there is the issue of how the pharaohs of the early 18th Dynasty established their control of the region following the so-called 'Hyksos Period' and what the stimuli were for this expansion into the Levant. Second, how did the Egyptians maintain their control in the region over the 350 years or so which make up the period from Ahmose I to Ramesses VI?

The expulsion of the Hyksos

The actual expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt proper is reasonably well documented through the autobiographies of Ahmose sa-Ibana and Ahmose Paennekhbet, inscribed in their el-Kab tombs. From these, and in particular a passage from the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, we can be reasonably confident that the expulsion took place in Year 11 of Ahmose [Goedicke 1986, pp. 37-39] and that the fall of Sharuhen took place before Year 15, following a three-year siege (on the other hand Vandersleyen [1971, p. 34] and Redford [1979, p. 274] opt for fall of Avaris in Year 18 of Ahmose based on the same documentary evidence; whichever date is correct, the simple fact is that the expulsion took place fairly late in the king's reign). I assume here that Sharuhen is to be identified with either Tell el-Fara (south) or Tell el-Ajjul [Kempinski, 1974] rather than the suggestion of H. S. Smith [personal communication] that the city lay in the Mount Carmel region. My preference, along with others [Weinstein, 1981, p. 6; Stewart, 1974, pp. 62-63 etc.], would lie with Tell el-Ajjul, the archaeology of which fits well with the expulsion narratives and the reoccupation of the site by the forces of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III following an abandonment of the site during the early 18th Dynasty [Ahituv, 1975, pp. 60-61].

Any further activity during the remaining years of Ahmose's reign remains undocumented; Goedicke [1986, pp. 44-45] has argued that the single mention of Djahy in Ahmose Paennekhbet's text may, in fact, refer to the Negev and would thus be part of the Sharuhen campaign.

A recent theory has been put forward by Goedicke to provide a non-political impetus for the Egyptian assault on the Hyksos strongholds of the eastern Delta. His proposals focus on the massive eruption of Thera, which he suggests initially caused the earthquake which destroyed Akrotiri and then led to a great tsunamis which devastated much of the eastern Delta during the late Hyksos period/early 18th Dynasty. Goedicke believes that this may have contributed to the success of the Theban campaign against the cities of their asiatic rivals in the north.

Betancourt's high chronology for LM IA [Betancourt, 1987, pp. 45-49], the dendrochronological frost-signature date of 1628 [LaMarche & Hirschboeck, 1984, and Baillie, 1989, pp. 1-8], and the new high calibrated radiocarbon dates for the destruction of Akrotiri [various papers in Thera and the Aegean World III, Vol. II (publication forthcoming)] are all consistent with a natural catastrophe during the Hyksos period, but the resultant dates are too early by around 70 years for Thera to have played any immediate part in the expulsion of the foreigners from Egypt. On the other hand, Warren's date for the end of LM IA (upheld by Coldstream and other respected Aegean archaeologists) of c. 1500 BC [Warren, 1987, pp. 205-11], derived from ceramic archaeology, is too low for Goedicke's proposals, setting the event in the time of Hatshepsut/Thutmose III (this is not strictly the case as Goedicke appears to opt for two events, the latter being at this time; but vulcanologists have shown that Thera erupted in a single event and Goedicke offers no explanation for the earlier catastrophe in his scenario).

The early-18th Dynasty

Perhaps a more important question to ask is how we arrive at what appears to be a southern Palestine dominated by Egypt in the time of Thutmose III (and perhaps as early as Thutmose I) when no record survives which indicates military activity in the area during any of the reigns of the early 18th Dynasty? As Weinstein observes:

“... there is only minimal evidence for Egyptian military activity in Palestine proper after the reign of Ahmose; until the reign of Hatshepsut, most of the Egyptian campaigns seem to have been directed toward Syria.” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 6]

A door-jamb from Karnak, presumed by Redford to be from the reign of Amenhotep I, does lists five toponyms in Syria: Kedem, Tunip, Djaion, Upper Retenu and God's Land; but this is no proof that these cities/regions had been defeated or were in vassalage to the king. They may only represent trading partners with Egypt. What is more, only Upper Retenu could be deemed to have any true connection with Palestine, being the hill country to the east of the coastal plain and Shephelah and the mountain areas north of the Jezreel ('Retenu' itself is too general a term to point specifically to the coastal plain). The rest of the places mentioned (with the possible exception of God's Land – perhaps here representing Punt, although this is not certain) are all located much further to the north in Syria and Lebanon.

All the military activity of Thutmose I also appears to have been directed towards the far north, where he refers to Retenu, Naharin (Mitanni), Niy and the River Euphrates. Thutmose II is known to have had a campaign against the Shasu who are usually located in the Negev region or Edom/Seir. Redford [1967, pp. 60-64] has argued for two campaigns in the reign of Hatshepsut in the Levant, one of which was directed against Gaza, but this is by no means certain and would in any case fail to provide evidence of Egyptian military activity in the coastal plain north of the area first entered by Ahmose.

Indeed, there is not a single text from any of these 18th Dynasty rulers which shows them campaigning in the lowlands of Palestine north of Gaza:

“... there is absolute silence about such activity. It is hard to believe that so much destruction occurred at the hand of Egyptian troops without a single text on the subject.” [Hoffmeier, 1989, p. 189]

The possibility must therefore be considered that, with the defeat of the Hyksos at Sharuhen, Egyptian hegemony over the rest of Palestine was achieved by other than military means. Weinstein suggests that it was common sense for the Egyptians to apply non-military tactics:

“... if Egypt was motivated from the very outset toward building a Levantine empire, it seems incongruous to posit that the Egyptians would totally destroy so many southern and inland cities (thus ruining any possibility for annual tribute from them), while allowing the strategically and economically important northern and western cities to survive and in some cases even prosper.” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 7]

He makes this statement in response to those Levantine archaeologists who still follow Kenyon's somewhat naive scenario of an Egyptian empire forged by the sword and torch:

“There are no certain criteria for connecting the stratigraphical sequence in most sites with the reconquest of Palestine by the Egyptian rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty. It is reasonable to suppose that the destruction of Jericho, Tell Beit Mirsim and Shechem is associated with that event, and that the pottery of the final stages at Jericho and Tell Beit Mirsim can be used as the yardstick for dating levels elsewhere, ...” [Kenyon, 1973, p. 531].

This is far from 'reasonable' and is an assertion which has been shown to be untenable, yet many archaeologists still hold to this picture of LB Palestine as an article of faith. The reality is that the destruction of Jericho probably took place in MB IIB, a full century before that of MB IIC Tell Beit Mirsim and the other sites of the coastal plain [see Kempinski, 1983, pp. 151-65]. Weinstein sums up the state of affairs as it stands today:

“... none of the westernmost sites north of Ashkelon need necessarily have been destroyed or abandoned as early as the mid 16th century B.C. In this respect, these sites are quite different from most of those in the southern and inland parts of Palestine.” [Weinstein, 1981, p.5]

The mid-18th Dynasty

Kenyon goes on painting her imaginative picture:

“Succeeding Egyptian rulers were active in maintaining control in Palestine, and in their campaigns it is highly probable that some towns were captured and possibly destroyed. The archaeological and historical evidence is not, however, sufficiently exact to establish any correlation.” [Kenyon, 1973, p. 527]

We have seen that Egyptian 'activity' in this region is simply not attested in the textual record, and the archaeological evidence is not merely 'not ... sufficiently exact' but totally contradictory, as Weinstein, Hoffmeier and others have clearly shown. As an example, one would expect Egyptian influence in Palestine to be reflected in the ceramic record of the sites in the region, however:

“... the amount of Egyptian pottery in 15th century Palestinian contexts is negligible, while very large quantities of such pottery occur in LB IIB-Iron IA deposits.” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 14]

At this stage it might be pertinent to quote some sound advice from Margaret Drower:

“The hazards which beset the historian are nowhere better illustrated than in the record of the Egyptian conquest of Asia in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Some phases of this achievement are known to us in detail, year by year and even day by day, by the chance survival of the official record, whereas the stirring story of the early exploits of the dynasty, in the sixteenth century when the foundations of the Egyptian empire were laid, can only be guessed at from scraps of evidence – the mere crumbs of history.” [Drower, 1973, p. 431]

It seems that Kenyon apparently did not entertain too many such thoughts when constructing her history of LB Palestine in the Cambridge Ancient History II:1. An example of her complete misinterpretation of the textual and archaeological evidence is demonstrated by some remarks on Thutmose III's campaign against Megiddo:

“... there are detailed records in an inscription at Karnak, in which the capture and destruction of Megiddo figure prominently. With this, archaeological evidence can be equated with some assurance.” [Kenyon, 1973, p. 527]

Nowhere in the annals of Thutmose does it state that Megiddo was destroyed; in fact it is clear from the arrangements which the king made to re-establish government in the region that his policy was not one of destruction and pillage. But Kenyon continues in the same vein:

“It thus seems highly probable that Stratum VII B was the town that was destroyed by Tuthmosis III in 1482 B.C., for it is here claimed that there was thereafter a break in occupation.” [Kenyon, 1973, p. 532]

and then:

“The destruction by Tuthmosis III must have been extremely severe.” [Kenyon, 1973, p. 534]

Weinstein has put the record straight on the so-called destruction of Megiddo by Thutmose III:

“Despite Kenyon's assertion ... that "the destruction by Tuthmosis III must have been extremely severe," there is in fact no obvious destruction level at Megiddo that can be assigned to the early 15th century B.C.” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 11]

Thus far Kenyon has neither textual nor archaeological evidence for her historical reconstruction, indeed:

“... the only Palestinian city mentioned in the topographical list [of the Thutmose annals] that at the present time seems to provide clear evidence of a destruction in the early 15th century is Ta'anach ...” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 11]

From the topographical lists of Thutmose III, which contain 119 names, we can draw one further telling statistic:

“Of the approximately 65-70 names on the topographical list that have been plausibly identified ..., not a single site anywhere in Palestine that had been destroyed and abandoned as the result of campaigns by earlier 18th-Dynasty kings is mentioned. One of the most striking aspects of this list is that it apparently does not record any sites in south-central Palestine, in the eastern Shephelah, in the hill country, or in the southern half of the Jordan Valley.” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 11]

And Hoffmeier adds:

“The list in question certainty was not a record of destroyed cities. Those who have looked to this list for a proof text to help explain a destruction of a tell are making unwarranted assumptions about the list according to Redford and completely ignoring what the text claims.” [Hoffmeier, 1989, pp. 187-188]

With Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV we find that all the military activity is again centred on Syria, whilst Amenhotep III has no record of any campaigns at all. Indeed, from the reign of Thutmose IV the policy was to employ diplomatic marriage as the method of maintaining stability in the empire and ensuring peace with Egypt's major rival, Mitanni. Thus we know of three Mitannian princesses who became the queens of Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, the last of which was also to marry Akhenaten following his father's death.

The el-Amarna period

We now reach an important question concerning the history of Egypt's Levantine empire: did the accession of Akhenaten lead to a loss of control over the petty states of Palestine – cities which then had to be reintegrated into the northern empire by military force during the reigns of Horemheb, Seti I and Ramesses II?

It is currently fashionable to underplay the political significance of the complaints to Pharaoh which dominate the contents of the el-Amarna Letters from Palestine. The basic argument appears to be that we might imagine these complaints from the rulers of the city-states to be typical of all periods of the Egyptian empire's existence; some have even suggested that it may have been the intended policy of the Foreign Office of Pharaoh to leave the squabbling amongst these cities unresolved in order to prevent alliances against Egypt being formed. In my view this is an indefensible scenario. Not only is it too contrived by half, but also politically very naive – any astute political advisor could surely have recognised the policy as a recipe for total disaster. It was surely not in Egypt's interest to encourage factionalism and strife in the very area where stability was a prerequisite for a stable trading network. It is also important to note that no textual evidence survives to support these arguments, and so it is a theory based on silence.

The factors that were really behind this major disaster in Egyptian foreign policy (for that is what it was) were two-fold:

(a) A pharaoh, brought up in the climate of peace and stability during his father's reign, had come to the throne without experience of military campaigns and with a passion for his god, the Aten; his lack of concern for happenings beyond Egypt's borders (and indeed outside his own capital) encouraged the formation of a bureaucracy ill-prepared to bring political problems to the king's attention; and

(b) the rise to prominence in the hill country of a group known to the el-Amarna correspondents as the habiru/SA.GAZ, and their successful attempt to draw political and military support from the rulers of the city states dissatisfied with their roles as vassals of Egypt.

As an example of the consequences of point (a), it has been demonstrated that mining operations even as near as Sinai ceased during Akhenaten's reign. It appears that government in Egypt was in such a state that peaceful expeditions to the mining areas were no longer either safe or feasible:

“... the half-century gap in the late 18th Dynasty – seems reasonably attributable to an inability by the Egyptians to mount and sustain royal expeditions to western Sinai.” [Weinstein: 1981, p. 16]

Both points (a) and (b) are set into sharpest focus in the el-Amarna Letters themselves – undoubtedly one of the best sources for an analysis of 18th Dynasty political history available to modern researchers. The Letters make it quite clear that those rulers who remained loyal to Egypt were eventually swept away in revolts instigated by the habiru, leaving Egypt with minimal influence in the region for two generations. The warnings had been dire from the start but were ignored by the Egyptian court. The words of Abdi-Heba [EA 286] of Jerusalem were no idle threat:

“Lost are all the mayors [i.e. city rulers]; there is not a mayor who remains with the king, my lord. Let the king turn his attention towards the archers so that the archers of the king, my lord, advance. The king no longer has lands. (This) habiru [singular] has pillaged all the land of the king. If there are archers this year the lands of the king, my lord, will remain. But if there are no archers, the lands of the king are lost, my lord.” [Moran, 1987, p. 508]

“And again from the same ruler [EA 288]: The powerful arm of the king has taken the land of Mitanni and the land of Kush, but now the habiru have taken the very towns of the king.” [Moran, 1987, pp. 515-16]

The pharaoh is reminded of the murder of other rulers (?) at the very gateway into Egypt:

“See, Turbazu was killed at the gate of the town of Sile. The king did nothing. See, the servants who were allied with the habiru have smitten Zimredda of Lachish and Yaptih-Hadda was killed at the gate of Sile. The king did nothing. Why did he not demand them to render account?”

This is not simply the mad ravings of one paranoid ruler from the hill-country, for Abdi-Astarti, ruler of another city in the region, also pleads for help from Egypt and mentions the same victims of the revolt [EA 335]:

“Let the king, my lord, be informed that I am quite isolated. Let the king, my lord, be informed that Turbazu and Yaptih-Hadda have been killed: MI-HI-SA, and [...] Lachish. Let the king, my lord, be informed, and the rebel has captured all my [...] Let the king, my lord, be informed that Lachish is hostile, and therefore that the king, my lord, send some archers ...” [Moran, 1987, p. 553]

Milkilu of Gezer, one of the major cities in the plain, begs for help from Egypt to stem the growing revolt [EA 271]. He informs the pharaoh that Shuwardata (probably the king of Gath) is in a similar desperate plight:

“Let the king, my lord, know that the war against me and against Shuwardata is severe. Therefore let the king, my lord, save his land from the power of the habiru. Otherwise, let the king, my lord, send some chariots so as to seek out the terror in order that our servants do not kill us.” [Moran, 1987, p. 495]

Shuwardata's own letter [EA 282] to the king confirms his predicament:

“Let the king, my lord, be informed that I am alone. Let the king, my lord, send a force of archers very urgently so that they can save me (allow me to leave).” [Moran, 1987, p. 504]

Finally, the revolt is complete; this unequivocal fact is spelt out in EA 272 from Shum[...], another ruler from Palestine:

“Let the king, my lord, know that the mayors who were in the domain of my lord have left, and the land of the king, my lord, all of it, has deserted to the habiru.” [Moran, 1987, p. 496]

And from NIN.UR.MAH.MES further confirmation of the disaster:

“Let the king, my lord, know that one has waged war in the land, and the land of the king, my lord is annihilated by desertion to [or, because of the action of] the habiru. Let the king, my lord, have concern for his land, and let the king, my lord, know that the habiru have written to Aijalon and Sarha and the two sons of Milkilu were nearly killed!” [Moran, 1987, p. 497]

In the light of these desperate letters I find it quite impossible to accept that this was the status quo in the Egyptian Levantine empire for all of its existence. Scholarship would be better served if commentators took the evidence at face value rather than trying to invent scenarios designed to compliment the currently fashionable trend to dilute the impact of Akhenaten's disastrous reign. The people of the Ramesside era were in no doubt that the el-Amarna episode did great damage to Egypt, and by calling Akhenaten 'that criminal' the texts speak more emphatically than a thousand words of analytical discussion on the character of his reign – the significance of such a scathing appellation should not be underestimated given the respect which would normally be attributed to an ancestor monarch in Egypt.

The new empire of the 19th Dynasty

Thanks to the new EES/Leiden excavations at Sakkara we now know that Tutankhamun's general, Horemheb, was active in Palestine and that it was in the young king's reign that Egypt began the task of reasserting itself in the political arena of the Levant. Horemheb's Memphite tomb reliefs show Levantine chieftains being brought before the king, their hands tethered, pleading for their lives to be spared. In spite of these dramatic scenes, it seems that this Egyptian success was not repeated to any great extent during the reign of Horemheb himself – at least no texts survive to give us reason to believe that Horemheb's reign was preoccupied with anything other than restoring the country after the chaos of the el-Amarna years and with the dismantling of the monuments of the Aten heresy.

The big push back into Palestine (and south into Nubia) came with the ascent to the throne of Seti I. It was in his reign, and that of his son Ramesses II, that Palestine was bound firmly to Egypt. This was achieved first by conquest and then by the setting up of military garrisons at major centres throughout the region.

At each of the district capitals originally set up in the reign of Thutmose III [Weinstein, 1981, p. 12] a governor was put in place to act on behalf of the king and to deal with the local rulers. This was not a new idea, as the el-Amarna correspondence attests, but this time there was a standing army of professional soldiers available on the spot to police the region and whose agents were on hand to give rapid information to Pharaoh's military advisors when trouble was anticipated. Palestine was now much more Egyptianised than it had ever been before. This set-up also enabled the home-based Egyptian forces to rapidly pass through Palestine up to the main fighting arena of the Syrian plain and Orontes Valley.

The Egyptian sea port at Simyra (Sumer) was re-established on the Lebanese coast to the north of Byblos, at which one of the governors was put in place to attend to Egyptian interest in the Lebanon. The others were at Kumidi (near Lake Chinnereth), overseeing affairs in north Palestine, and at the city of Pi-Canaan (near, or at, Gaza) in the south to control the coastal plain. There was no governorate that I am aware of in the hill country, although an Egyptian style 'governor's residence' has recently been found at Tell es-Sahadiyeh in the Jordan Valley, contemporary with the 19th Dynasty.

The overall policy of the 19th Dynasty rulers was very effective as the archaeology of this period in Palestine attests:

“... there is a major difference between the Egyptian empire in Palestine in the Ramesside period and that in earlier times. More examples of almost every category of Egyptian antiquity occur in Palestine during the LB IIB-Iron IA period than in any comparable span of time during the entire Bronze Age.” [Weinstein, 1981, p. 22]

The Egyptians had learnt their first political lesson concerning their northern neighbours during the long period of oppression at the hands of the 'Hyksos'/Canaanite rulers of the Second Intermediate Period. This had led directly to the more 'internationalist' policy of the New Kingdom of establishing an empire in the north which not only provided wealth from the trading network already in place, but also acted as a buffer zone against military attack from the new Hurrian kingdoms of the far north. The second lesson was learnt during the el-Amarna period when it was made very obvious that Egypt could not rely on the northern empire to take care of its own affairs without the military and administrative intervention of the Residence; in effect Egypt had to become an occupying power.

Conclusions

The archaeological and textual evidence for the beginnings of the 'Egyptian Empire' in the Levant is scarce indeed, with only the expulsion of the Hyksos vaguely documented. The mechanism by which Egypt achieved dominance over Palestine has thus to be interpreted from virtual silence.

There is no certain archaeological evidence that the destructions at the end of MB IIC were the result of Egyptian military activity. New pottery types introduced at the inception of the Late Bronze Age are of Aegean origin and little Egyptian pottery has been identified in post MB stratigraphy. This may suggest that the cultural tendency in the first century of the LB was orientated towards the north and west rather than south to Egypt. Indeed, is it not possible that the Hurrian elements in the population of Palestine, reflected in the names of some of the el-Amarna correspondents, may have arrived in the area around the time of the Hyksos expulsion?

The city destructions in the hill country and Jordan Valley appear to predate those on the coastal plain by about 50 to 100 years and cannot be attributed to the Egyptians on either archaeological or textual grounds. Another source for these destructions should be sought.

There is very little textual evidence for 18th Dynasty military activity in southern Palestine. Nearly all our material refers to campaigns in Syria against Egypt's major regional rival, the Hurrian state of Mitanni.

Thutmose III himself does not record the destruction of Megiddo in his famous text at Karnak. The implication of the narrative is rather that prisoners were taken, but that the cities of the rebellion were left intact with new governors/ kinglets loyal to the pharaoh established to maintain the infrastructure of the empire which had been in place before the rebellion instigated by the ruler of Kadesh. There is absolutely no evidence that Thutmose adopted a burn and destroy policy in any of his campaigns in Palestine. In this, Kenyon, and others who have used this unwarranted assumption to date the LB IIA destructions, are in serious error. Hoffmeier [1989, pp. 183-84] has undertaken a survey of the use of the Egyptian words for 'destroy' (ski/sksk) and 'devastate'/'hack up' (b3/sb3). His findings are that these terms are indeed employed for the destruction of cities and regions to the north, in Syria and Mitanni, but no text relating to Palestine uses these words in respect of seiges and the capture of cities (including the Ahmose sa-Ibana description of the taking of Sharuhen and Thutmose III's capture of Megiddo).

I have also argued, using the only evidence which is directly applicable to the issue, that the el-Amarna period saw an Egyptian loss of control over its Levantine empire and that with the rise of the 19th Dynasty, whose rulers heralded from the area of Egypt nearest to Palestine, a new policy was intoduced which advocated direct military intervention in the Levant, with military bases established in key cities to police the territory.

It was with the collapse of this military based system in the mid-20th Dynasty (probably as a result of the combination of the influx of new population groups into the region and internal political problems in Egypt itself) that the Egyptian northern empire finally came to an end. Pharaonic influence in the region must have remained to a limited degree if simply because of the geography and past history of the region, and this is reflected in the messengers sent to Pharaoh So by king Hoshea of Judah as late as 725 BC [2 Kings 17:4], but Egypt's dominance over Palestine had really come to a close with the death of Ramesses III, the last great pharaoh of the Ramesside line.

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