To the king, my lord, my sun, say: message from Shuwardata, your servant, the ground for your feet. At the feet of the king, my lord and my sun, seven and seven times I throw myself. The king my lord has permitted us to make war against Qiltu, and I have made war: it is saved for me, my city has been restored to me.
Why ever did Abdi-Heba write to the men of Qiltu: ‘Take silver and be my followers!’? Let the king my lord know that Abdi-Heba took my city from my hands. Further, Lab’aya is dead who took our cities, but here is Abdi-Heba who is a second Lab’aya, and takes our cities. May the king think of his servant regarding this fact. I will do nothing, until the king responds with a word to his servant!
(Translation: Ian Hutchesson)
In the New Kingdom, the Egyptians held a loose but persistent hold over the land of Palestine. Shuwardata was one of the vassal kings in the region, apparently ruling a small state in the south of the region. He was one of many in Palestine whose cities had been harassed by rival kings, first Lab’aya of Shechem, and then after Lab’aya’s death by Abdi-Heba, ruler of Jerusalem. Yet rather than defend himself, he waits on the pharaoh before making a move.
This is the world of the Amarna letters, some 350 documents discovered in 1887 in the abandoned palace of Akhenaten at El-Amarna (and thus datable to c.1360-1335). The letters are written in Akkadian cuneiform, the lingua franca of the region, and this in itself is a sign that no one power is strong enough to insist on the use of its own language. (None of the letters, even from the vassals, is in Egyptian, for instance.) The letters record the complex and fluid relationships between the pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten and the rulers of the Ancient Near East, including both ‘great powers’ and vassal states of the pharaoh in Palestine. (See the map on p. 30.) So the state of Mitanni, in northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates, once an enemy of Egypt, is now, in the surviving letters from its king, Tushratta, an ally and the royal families have intermarried. Less stable is the relationship with the Hittites during the reign of Suppiluliuma (see p. 34 above) especially after Suppiluliuma invades Mitanni and reduces it to a vassal state. It is an instability that is eventually to lead to war between Egypt and the Hittites in the following century (see p. 35 above). The Hittites faced another challenge in the resurgent power of Assyria under king Ashur-uballit (1356-1330), who was determined to exploit the power vacuum left by the collapse of Mitanni. This resurgence
Led to protests from another power, the Kassite kingdom of Babylonia, that were quelled by a marriage alliance in which Ashur-uballit’s daughter married the son of the Kassite king.
The letters are always personal, between individual rulers, and so treaties had to be renegotiated on the death of one or other of the parties. As between the ‘great powers’ the kings show a readiness to use force but also an understanding of the fears among rival powers that such force would provoke. Rulers know when they ought to compromise. The sensitive way in which diplomacy is exercised by a rising power is well shown in the two letters in the archive to the pharaoh from Ashur-uballit. In the first he has just asserted his authority and is testing his relationship with Egypt carefully. Will he be accepted by Akhenaten as an equal?
Say to the king of Egypt: This speaks Ashur-uballit, king of Assyria. May everything be well with you, your house, your land, your chariots and your troops. I am sending a messenger to you to visit you and to visit your country. Until now my predecessors did not write; but today I am writing. I am sending you a beautiful chariot, two horses, and a date stone of authentic lapis lazuli, as your greeting gift. Do not delay the messenger whom I have sent to you for a visit. May he pay his visit and then come back to me. (Translation: A. K. Grayson)
This cautious approach makes no mention of the Assyrian king’s own status and does not go so far as to ask for a gift in return as was the custom between equal kings. Yet by the time of the second letter, Ashur-uballit is confident of his position. He refers to himself by the title of ‘great king’ and addresses the pharaoh as his ‘brother’. What is more, he feels confident enough to complain that the pharaoh did not even send him enough gold in a gift to cover the cost of sending his own messengers!
The vassal states of Palestine are in a different position. The area was fragmented between mountain ranges and gorges and no king was likely to become strong enough to become a great power. Yet this was clearly Egypt’s sphere of influence and no outside power would be allowed to threaten her hegemony (hence the eventual confrontation with the Hittites at Qadesh). Egyptian rule was comparatively light, there were local Egyptian administrators, expeditionary forces, and scattered garrisons, and their main concern was to safeguard the flow of tribute. It was common for Palestinians to be brought up in the Egyptian court and then transferred as rulers of an important city in the hope that they would remain loyal. Abdi-Heba, for instance, had been educated in Egypt and placed on the throne of Jerusalem by the pharaoh. Akhenaten seems to have chosen carefully how to exercise his power. A certain amount of rivalry between kings was tolerated but there were limits to the expansion of any one vassal king. So Lab’aya had been eventually captured by the Egyptians, ostensibly to be taken back to Egypt, but killed on the way there by his captors. As Shuwardata’s letter shows vassals knew it was better to ask the pharaoh first before seeking revenge!
The realpolitik of diplomacy was underpinned by exchanges, of sons and daughters in marriage, of gifts between kings, and by trade. Egypt had, in Nubia, a plentiful source of gold, and it was useful as this was the most prized of gifts. The
Bartering of brides was a more delicate matter. The pharaohs refused to let their daughters marry foreigners but they were prepared to buy in brides for their own families. These arrived with great retinues but when Amenhotep III tried to get a second Babylonian princess for himself he was rebuked by the king of Babylon for having shut the first one up in his harem so that she had not been seen for fifteen years. Egyptian gold had to be sent north to seal the deal for the new bride.
These negotiations helped to avoid interstate anarchy. What is remarkable is how successful the Amarna system was in avoiding war. While it was usual for rulers of the great powers to proclaim their strength aggressively, each ruler seems to have accepted that this was often no more than rhetoric and any tensions could be eased by working through diplomatic conventions. There was an understanding that it was in all the states’ interests to keep trade on the move. While the Amarna system was never formalized into a set of stable alliances, it worked remarkably well on an ad hoc basis and has been seen by some historians as representing the birth of international diplomacy.
(See further W L. Moran (ed. and trans.), The Amarna Letters, Baltimore, 2000; Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook (eds.), Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations, Baltimore, 2000.)
Sennedjam was a stone mason who worked on the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. He died in the eleventh year of the reign of Rameses II so may well have been working on the king’s tomb or that of one of his family. His own tomb in the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina was found in 1886 and was undisturbed, his coffin, and those of his wife lynefer and their children, still intact inside the subterranean burial chamber. Other less important members of the family lay buried simply in shrouds.
On the eastern wall of the burial chamber there is a fine set of scenes from farming life. Sennedjam and lynefer are shown harvesting a full field of corn, with a flint sickle, cutting down an equally abundant crop of flax, and ploughing and sowing. In the lower register an irrigation channel runs between an orchard, whose trees, date and figs, are laden with fruit, and a garden full of flowers. Yet the lucky pair are shown labouring in their finest clothes. It soon becomes clear that they do not really have to sweat in the fields. They have a group of shabtis, servants, in the shape of small human figures often with their tools beside them, to aid them. The couple can spend their time at leisure, as they are shown doing in another scene, playing the board game senet.
These wall paintings have provided us with an idealized picture of life in ancient Egypt. This is the afterlife reached by those who have survived the judgement of Osiris and all is harmony and fruitfulness. How different this must have been from the reality of everyday life in Egypt when the floods could never be assured and the ordinary labourers were subject to every kind of misfortune. We seldom hear their voices but there are rare examples where student scribes are warned of the terrible consequences of falling below the standards required, here in the text The Satire of Trades:
Remember the state of the peasant farmer faced with registry of the harvest-tax, when the snake has taken one half of the crop and the hippo has devoured the other half. The mice overrun the field, the locust descends and the cattle eat up. The sparrows bring poverty upon the farmer. What is left on the threshing floor falls to the thieves. . . The tax-official has landed on the river bank to register the harvest tax, with his janitors carrying staves and the Nubians palm rods. They say ‘Give up the grain’ . . . although there is none. They beat him up. . . he is thrown head first down a well. . . So the grain disappears. (Translation: K. Kitchen)
Sennedjam’s afterlife might have been idealized but his actual life was better than most in Egypt. He had a skill and a guaranteed supply of food. His village, at Deir
El-Medina, is one of the most fully excavated sites in Egypt and provides a vivid picture of life in the New Kingdom for the successful craftsman.
World History
