During the first years of his reign Merenptah, who must have been fairly advanced in years already, sent several military expeditions abroad, not only to Nubia, but also into Palestine, where he subdued the rebellious vassals of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam; the ‘victory stele’ that records these victories also contains the first reference in Egyptian sources to Israel, albeit not as a country or city, but as a tribe. The major event of Merenptah’s reign occurred in his year 5, however, and the victory stele really deals with this: a campaign against the Libyans. They had been a problem even during his father’s and grandfather’s reigns, but the fortresses Rameses II had built along the western borders of the Delta were obviously unable to prevent the invasion of a massive coalition of Libyan and other tribes led by their
King, Mereye.
The previous decades had seen a great migration in the Aegean and Ionian world that had probably been caused by widespread crop failure and famine. According to a long inscription at Karnak (between the Seventh Pylon and the central part of the temple), Merenptah had actually sent grain to the starving Hittites, still Egypt’s ally in the East. Many important centres of Mycenaean Greece had been violently destroyed and the western fringes of the Hittite empire had begun to collapse. The marauding 'Sea Peoples’, as they were soon to be called in Egypt, had also reached the coast of North Africa between Cyrenaica and Mersa Matruh, which in the Late Bronze Age was seasonally occupied by foreign seafarers sailing from Cyprus via Crete to the Egyptian Delta. In this area, the Sea Peoples joined the Libyan tribes and with a force of some 16,000 men marched on Egypt; since they brought their women and children with them, as well as cattle and other belongings, they were obviously planning to settle in Egypt. They had actually penetrated the western Delta and were moving southwards, threatening Memphis and Heliopolis, when Merenptah confronted them and, in a battle that lasted for six hours, managed to defeat them. The Libyans were destined to fail on this occasion because, as Merenptah says on his victory stele, their king, Mereye, had already been ‘found guilty of his crimes’ by the divine tribunal of Heliopolis, and the god Atum, who presided over the tribunal, had personally handed the sword of victory to his son Merenptah, making the battle nothing less than a ‘holy war’. Thousands of enemies were killed, but great numbers were also captured and settled in military colonies, especially in the Delta, where their descendants would become an increasingly important political factor (see Chapter 12).
The rest of Merenptah’s reign appears to have been peaceful, and the king used it to build at least two temples and a palace in Memphis. He must have realized that he did not have many years left, however, for his mortuary temple on the Theban West Bank is constructed almost exclusively from blocks removed from earlier structures, particularly the nearby temples of Amenhotep III. He died in his ninth year. After his death, trouble over the succession broke out, for, although the next king, Sety II (1200-1194 BC), was almost certainly the eldest son of Merenptah, a rival king, Amenmessu, ruled for a few years, at least in the south of the country. When exactly this happened is still the subject of much controversy; it has been suggested that Amenmessu deposed Sety II for some time between the latter’s years 3 and 5, but others have the trouble set in at the beginning of the reign.
Whatever the truth may be, Sety ruthlessly erased and usurped all of Amenmessu’s cartouches and later texts refer to the rival ruler as ‘the enemy’.
When Sety II died, after a reign of almost six full years, his only son, Saptah (1194-1188 BC), succeeded him. However, Saptah was not a son of Sety’s principal queen, Tausret (1188-1186 bc); instead he had been born to him by a Syrian concubine called Sutailja. More importantly, he was only a young boy who suffered from an atrophied leg caused by poliomyelitis: his stepmother, Tausret, therefore remained ‘great royal wife’ and acted as regent. She was not the only power behind the throne, however, for a powerful official called Bay, described as the ‘chancellor of the entire land’, who was himself a Syrian, appears to have been the true ruler of the country at this date. He is depicted several times with Saptah and Tausret and in some inscriptions he even claims that it was he who ‘established the king on the throne of his father’, an extraordinary phrase normally reserved for the gods. When Saptah died in his sixth regnal year Tausret reigned on as sole ruler for another two years, doubtless with the support of Bay. After Hatshepsut and Nefertiti she was the third queen of the New Kingdom to rule as pharaoh. With her death the 19th Dynasty came to an end.
World History
