The Two Superpowers of the Bronze Age

The thirteenth century BC is a period of two colossuses. To the south lies Egypt—ancient, wealthy, self-confident, ruled by a young pharaoh in his fifth year on the throne: Ramses II, who has yet to earn the nickname The Great. To the north, in the heart of Asia Minor, rises the Hittite Empire of King Muwatalli II—a nation of warriors and scholars whose archives will play an unexpectedly large role in this story.

Between them is Syria: a dense network of trading cities and vassal principalities through which the copper, timber, and ambassadors of the age move. Whoever rules Syria holds the door between the two worlds, and the key to it is the fortress of Kadesh on the Orontes River, which has passed through the decades now in one orbit, now in the other.

In the spring of 1274 BC, Ramses led some twenty thousand men north in four corps named after the gods: Amun, Ra, Ptah and Set, to reclaim the citadel for Egypt. Muwatalli was waiting for him with vassals from all over Anatolia: Egyptian sources speak of two thousand five hundred enemy chariots in the first wave and another thousand in reserve—a concentration the likes of which the ancient world had never seen.

The two armies also relied on different designs: the Egyptian chariot was light, with a crew of two—a driver and an archer—and was built for better speed; the Hittite carried three men and relied on a javelin at close range.

The two Bedouins

The outcome of the battle was decided before the first arrow was fired. Two nomads from the Shasu tribe appeared in front of the advancing Egyptian column, posing as deserters and swearing that the Hittite army was far to the north, near Aleppo. The trap was probably the work of Muwatalli himself: his army was actually waiting, hidden behind the Kadesh hill.

Ramses, eager to be the first to besiege the fortress, broke away with only the “Amun” corps and set up camp, while the rest of his units were miles behind, advancing slowly in a marching column. When captured Hittite scouts revealed the truth, it was too late: the enemy chariots crossed the fords of the Orontes, crashed into the “Ra” corps spread out in the open field, and rushed upon the pharaoh’s camp.

The King in the Hoop

The story of the ensuing battle is among the most famous in ancient history. According to Ramses himself – the only one who left a description of the episode – the pharaoh found himself alone in a circle of enemies, called upon the god Amun and led his personal guard in a counterattack.

Behind the solemn tone of the legend, we can also discern how events more likely unfolded. The Hittite charioteers, instead of completing the attack, scatter, lured by the loot in the rich camp. At the critical moment, an elite Egyptian detachment arrives from the west, called in the sources “nearin”, moving through the lands of the Amur (today’s Lebanese coast), and the “Ptah” corps approaches from the south.

Pressed on two sides, the attackers are pushed back across the river, and Muwatalli never lets his numerous infantry into battle – a decision that historians still debate to this day. The next day, the battle dies down without a resolution: Ramses heads south, Kadesh remains Hittite.

Granite versus clay

Here begins the other, more stubborn struggle – that of collective memory. At home, the Egyptian state immortalized the campaign in two works—the “Poem,” associated with the name of the scribe Pentaur, and the shorter “Bulletin”—and repeated them on the walls of half a dozen temples from Karnak to Abu Simbel. In them, the king, alone against thousands, maintained victory with his valor and with the help of the god.

Although from today’s perspective the narrative of the Egyptian sources sounds like political propaganda, it would be unfair to judge these texts as military reports. In the royal ideology of Egypt, the pharaoh is the guarantor of world order and each of his deeds is, in principle, an undeniable triumph.

The curious thing is that in order to highlight the heroism of the pharaoh, the “Poem” conscientiously conveys the danger in which the Egyptian army found itself: the ambush, the severed corps, the surrounded camp. The American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted will reconstruct the battle step by step from these sources.

The Hittites also recorded their version—not on granite, but on clay tablets stored in the palace archives. When the German archaeologist Hugo Winkler excavated their capital Hattusa in the early 20th century, the tablets spoke: the one who retreated was Ramses, Kadesh was Hittite. For the first time, researchers could put the testimonies of both sides of the same ancient battle side by side. The truth, as far as it could be discerned, lay somewhere in between—tactical draw, strategic loss for Egypt—but the methodological lesson proved more valuable than the factual one: history drawn from a single source was not history, but the account of a biased observer.

Eternal Peace

The true significance of the battle is given by the epilogue. The rivalry continued for another fifteen years without a decisive outcome, and a third power rose to the east – Assyria. In 1259, in the twenty-first year of Ramses’ reign, Egypt and the new Hittite king Hattusili III, brother of the late Muwatalli, signed a treaty of eternal peace – the one whose copy is on display today in New York.

The Egyptian version is carved in hieroglyphs at Karnak and the Ramesseum; the Hittite is immortalized in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the era, on a silver tablet, the clay copies of which Winkler discovered in Hattusa.

The clauses sound surprisingly modern: mutual refusal to attack, alliance in case of aggression by a third country, return of fugitives – with the understanding that they will not be punished – probably the earliest written guarantee of mercy for political refugees.

A thousand gods of Hatti and a thousand gods of Egypt were summoned as witnesses to the oath—a guarantee more reliable for the era than any army. And the text is diplomatically silent about the exit from Kadesh.

The peace was also consolidated dynastically: Ramses married Hattusili’s daughter, who took the name Maathorneferura, and the two courts exchanged letters, gifts, and physicians—even the correspondence between the Hittite queen Puduhepa and Nefertari, the pharaoh’s chief wife, has been preserved. The alliance lasted until the very end of the Hittite Empire.

What remains

For military history, Kadesh is the earliest battle that can be reconstructed step by step. For diplomacy, it is proof that peace between equal powers, consolidated by text, clauses, and guarantees, is not a modern invention, but an achievement of more than thirty-two centuries. The lesson for science is that every past has at least two stories and the truth is revealed only when they are compared.

And yet the triumph remains with Ramses. Sixty-six years of reign gave him time to repeat his version of events many times on the most solid material known to antiquity – stone. And today, a century after the Hittite archives were deciphered, tourists in front of Abu Simbel hear first of all about the victory of the pharaoh. There is no deception in this; there is a reminder that battles are won by armies, and the story of them belongs to the one who records them on a more durable medium.

Illustration: The Kadesh Treaty (Hittite version)