The war machine of Egypt became essential for the preservation of the kingdom. In the reign of Seti I, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the Egyptians had to face armed enemies from Libya. Later, under his son Ramesses II (1279-1213 bce), foes in the Mediterranean threatened the coast of Egypt. The Delta capital was also exposed (Dothan and Dothan 1992). Ramesses II campaigned against both foes and built a series of western fortresses.
Both of these enemies became a major threat under pharaohs Merenptah (12131204 bce) and Ramesses III (1187-1156 bce). At least four separate defensive wars were fought, and the attacks undermined the Egyptian state. But the reasons for their success are hard to identify. We must presume that the enemy had more men at arms in proportion to the total population than the Egyptians did.
For the Sea Peoples piracy or trade was their profession, depending upon the relative strength of their potential enemy. The Sea Peoples found it expedient to join with other marauding groups, among which were the Libyans. Owing to overpopulation or to the increasing arid climate of their homelands, the Libyans were intent upon invasion and conquest if they were not allowed to migrate eastward. (See the series of important articles in Oren (2000) concerning the Sea Peoples.)
The Egyptian army was mainly geared to the defense of an empire and small raids, but it was not organized for massive invasions. The war activities of Seti I, Ramesses II, and Merenptah in Palestine eventually necessitated some large actions, but it was impossible to carry on a systematic war against a foe that was not urbanized. Rather, the Egyptians preferred to send small contingents of troops after such opponents, and only infrequently was there a major campaign (Yurko 1986, 1997).
Against the Libyans, fortresses and defensive measures proved ineffective. The Libyans may have been intent upon forging a major state of their own at the expense of the Egyptians (O’Connor 1990). The fact that Ramesses III had to defeat the Libyans on two separate occasions within six years revealed how dangerous the enemy was. The Sea Peoples compounded the Libyan threat by supplying men and arms to the enemy and by waging their own war. Thus the Egyptians were forced to fight on two borders. The eventual successes of Merenptah and Ramesses III depended upon their use of mercenaries. (Manassa (2003) presents a very important study of the war records of Merenptah against the Libyans.)
The estimations of the total population of Egypt are helpful in determining the total number of men-at-arms that Egypt could provide. An approximate figure of 3.2 million is now the accepted total population of Ramesside Egypt (Grandet 1994: 128 n. 8). Archaeological and historical research has tended to lower the earlier estimates. The success of the Libyans in the later Third Intermediate Period (1075-715 bce) tended to indicate that Egypt was not at all highly populated, simply because the Libyans continued to settle in the Nile Valley and soon became farmers, administrators, and eventually leaders.
Ramesses II said that at the battle of Kadesh in 1274 bce the enemy mustered 3,500 chariots (that is, 10,500 men), not counting foot soldiers. The Egyptians would have had roughly the same number. Allowing for an equal number of men and women in Egypt, and setting the population at three million, this would imply that one out of150 Egyptian males participated in this encounter. The ratio is much too high since the peasant population was large, permanently settled, and engaged in agricultural activity that was essential for the war effort. Kemp, for example, posited six people per household, purposely excluding servants from his calculations (Kemp 1989: 308-13; O’Connor 1972: 690-5).
There is a land survey document that covered a geographical area of about 150 kilometers, about 90 miles, in Middle Egypt. It revealed that the categories of persons who rented fields from temples included the following:
Stable masters 22% Soldiers 17%
Ladies 14.5% Priests 12.4%
Small farmers 12% Herdsmen 11%
Sherden mercenaries 7.5% Scribes 3 1/3%
This remarkable analysis reveals that the main cultivators ofthe northern areas ofMiddle Egypt were, in fact, connected to the army. Moreover, less than one-quarter were what we would call professional: the small farmers and herdsmen. Kemp argued that this might have been a local peculiarity of the region, although it reflected the practice of settling army veterans on the land (Kemp 1989: 308-13). But the presence of the stable masters calls to mind one significant Late Egyptian Miscellany which points out that the future charioteer gets his horses from the state, i. e., from the stalls where the stable masters must have worked (see also Katary 1983). No wonder that the stable masters formed such a large and imposing percentage of the total number of cultivators in Middle Egypt.
In this text even the Sherden, related to the Sea Peoples, formed a large group, more than double that of the scribal bureaucracy. Within the military we can derive the following percentages: Sherden mercenaries, 16.2 percent; soldiers, 36.5 percent; and stable-masters, 47.3 percent. The land in this survey was owned by the temples and the state. The document did not take into consideration other plots that were privately owned. Recent attempts to make a more exact statistical survey conclude that the account dealt with only one-fifth of the total arable land in Middle Egypt. Still, the percentage of the renters of this temple-owned land who were in the army was high, and a possible solution for this surprising concentration might be to interpret the stable masters as non-combatant troops, who were to maintain the horses for the chariotry.
World History
