The End of Eden by Graham Phillips

Author:Graham Phillips [Graham Phillips]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bear & Company
Published: 2011-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

9

A Sudden Calm

BECAUSE THE MOST comprehensive historical records of the period have survived from the countries of the Middle East, let’s begin by examining what happened here. A great deal is known about the campaigns of Tuthmosis III since his royal scribe, an Egyptian noble named Thanuny, was also a general in the army. Not only did Thanuny write a firsthand account of Tuthmosis’s military exploits, but it was inscribed for posterity on the walls of the Temple of Karnak, where it still survives. Early in his sole reign, after he had secured Canaan, Tuthmosis could easily have advanced his forces into northern Syria and overrun the kingdom of Mitanni. Not only was the Egyptian army in the region larger and vastly superior, but also its Mitannian counterpart was a ragtag affair, hurriedly and only recently assembled.

To add to this, half the Mitannian army had been wiped out during Shaushtatar’s crazed assault on the Egyptians in Canaan, and the rest was occupied in Assyria. Tuthmosis decided instead to march east toward southern Mesopotamia, however, in the hope of conquering Babylon, at the time the largest city in the world. But the plan went badly wrong. Tuthmosis’s forces became bogged down fighting a guerrilla war with the Semite tribes indigenous to the mountains east of the river Jordan. They surprised the Egyptians with their fanatical resistance, and so impeded their progress that Tuthmosis was ultimately beaten to Babylon by the Hittites.1

Hittite records of the period are found among the thousands of inscribed clay tablets uncovered at Hattusas, now preserved at Turkey’s Ankara Museum. From these we learn that the Hittite king Hantili II had attacked northeast Assyria a few months earlier, but even when his forces were still engaged fighting the Assyrians, he divided his army and led half of it south to invade Babylonia, reaching Babylon without serious opposition. Under normal circumstances, the Egyptian army would have been more than a match for the Hittites, but it was already worn down, having fought its way through Jordan, and was gravely in need of fresh supplies.

There is no reference in the Hittite texts concerning an engagement with the Egyptians at this time, and the inscriptions from the Temple of Karnak contain little detail about Tuthmosis’s foray into southern Mesopotamia. Tuthmosis most likely decided against engaging the Hittites and opted to abandon his Babylonian campaign. The outcome was that he retreated to Canaan, consolidated his hold on that region, then returned to Egypt and concentrated his efforts against Nubia and Libya. The Hittites also withdrew from Babylonia. When Hantili reached Babylon, he found it already sacked, presumably by the Kassites from the Zagros Mountains. With little to plunder and his forces stretched perilously thin along a five-hundred-mile front, he made a strategic withdrawal back to Assyria. It seems that once the Hittites withdrew, the Kassites swept down from the mountains to overwhelm Babylonia. Hittite records reveal that they were firmly entrenched there within a decade, and after a brief period of struggle with the Jordanian Semites, they remained in control of the region for the next four centuries.

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