Battle of Kadesh

Background

In the thirteenth century BC two great powers competed for the cities of the Levant: New Kingdom Egyptian Arms & Weapons and the Hittite empire of Anatolia. The city of Kadesh on the Orontes River, in what is now western Syria, controlled the route between them, and it had passed into the Hittite sphere. In the fifth year of his reign, around 1274 BC, the young pharaoh Ramesses II marched north to take it back with four divisions named for the gods Amun, Ra, Ptah and Set, perhaps 20,000 men in all, with a separate force of troops called the Ne'arin sent up the coast. The Hittite king Muwatalli II gathered an army at least as large from across his empire and its vassals, including a great force of chariots.

The Battle

As the Egyptians approached Kadesh, two Bedouin captured by their scouts told Ramesses that the Hittite army was still far to the north near Aleppo. They had been planted by Muwatalli. Ramesses hurried ahead with the Amun division and made camp northwest of the city, while the other divisions strung out behind him on the march. In fact the Hittite army was hidden behind Kadesh itself. Its chariots crossed the Orontes and struck the Ra division on the move, routing it, then drove on into the Egyptian camp. Ramesses, by his own account abandoned by most of his men, led charge after charge with his household troops against the Hittite chariots, which had lost their order while plundering the camp. The arrival of the Ne'arin from the coast turned the fight, and the Hittites were driven back across the river. A second day of fighting settled nothing. Muwatalli still held Kadesh, and Ramesses, his army battered, marched home.

Weapons

Kadesh was above all a chariot battle; the Egyptian sources claim the Hittites fielded 2,500 chariots. The two sides built them differently. The light Egyptian chariot carried a driver and an archer, who shot with a composite bow of the same Near Eastern type as the Assyrian Composite Bow, and it fought by speed and missile fire. The heavier Hittite chariot carried a third man, a shield bearer, and closed to fight with spears. Egyptian infantry carried spears, shields and the curved Egyptian Khopesh, the sickle-sword that the reliefs place in the pharaoh's own hand; the Ne'arin were probably an elite corps of chariot runners and infantry.

Aftermath

Ramesses covered the walls of his temples at Abu Simbel, Luxor, Karnak, Abydos and the Ramesseum with reliefs and a long poem celebrating the battle as a personal triumph. The Hittite record is more sober, and the strategic result favored Hatti, which kept Kadesh and extended its influence southward. Neither side could win outright. Around 1259 BC Ramesses and Muwatalli's successor Hattusili III signed a treaty of peace and alliance, copies of which survive in both Egyptian and Hittite versions. It is the oldest surviving peace treaty, and a copy hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The Bronze Age world the two empires dominated collapsed about seventy years later.