THE SHATTERED HEAD OF SEQENENRE THE BRAVE
The king stood no chance. His hands were tied behind his back. He was likely to be kneeling. Seqenenre Taa, ruler of southern Egypt, had been captured in battle and now Apophis, Asiatic ruler of northern Egypt, was leading the squad of killers. There were at least five of them. The first blow of the Asiatic axe smashed into Seqenenre’s royal face, severing his left cheek, a wound that would have opened his entire face. A second slash shattered the back of the skull before a javelin penetrated his forehead just above the eye.
It was the sacred hippos of Thebes who provided the pretext. Apophis told Seqenenre that their grunting far away in Thebes was keeping him awake in Avaris (Hutwaret): he ordered them killed, a declaration of war. Seqenenre seized the gauntlet and marched north, leading his troops from the front. But something went wrong. Seqenenre was captured and Apophis devised his public demolition. A final fifth blow from a sword sliced straight into the brain. For those who looked upon the shattered body of the king – as we still can today – it must have seemed as if his family and Egypt itself were finished. In fact, this nadir was the moment the recovery started.
In 1558 BC, when Seqenenre the Brave, son of Senakhtenre Ahmose and his commoner queen Tetisheri, succeeded his father as king in Thebes, Egypt was already broken. The chaos was accelerated by stampede migrations where the movement of one people forced others to advance. Tribes of pale-skinned, dark-eyed, aquiline people on the Black Sea steppes migrated from their pasturelands, driven by changing climate, the lust for conquest and the pressure of other tribes behind them. Speaking an Indo-European language, they were cattle-breeders who had become expert horsemen. Three pieces of technology made them deadly adversaries: the bronze bit meant horses could be controlled; swift chariots with bladed wheels added a heavy punch to their charges; and they could fire composite bows – new killing machines made of laminated wood, sinew and horn – from the saddle at the gallop.
These horsemen galloped westwards into the Balkans and eastwards towards India. They shattered established kingdoms but also settled into them. In Iran, this horde – whom scholars later called Aryans – brought their Avestan language and holy scriptures, the Avesta; in India, the Aryans may have overwhelmed the Indus cities and then settled, merging the Indus Valley culture with their own rituals and language, and formulating the stories, prayers and poems of the Vedas written in what became Sanskrit. Their warlords and priests imposed a hierarchy of castes, the varnas.* This culture long afterwards formed the Sanatana Dharma – Eternal Way – later called Hinduism by Europeans. Some tribes rode southwards through the Caucasus into eastern Türkiye where they founded the kingdom of Hatti – the Hittites of the Bible – while others hit Canaan, stampeding its peoples, known as the Hyksos, to invade Egypt.
Around 1630, an Asiatic warlord Apophis, whose tribes had invaded Egypt, ruled the north from his capital Hutwaret in the Nilotic delta, while Seqenenre held Thebes in the south. Just four years into his reign, Seqenenre was in his prime, tall, athletic, with a head of thick curly black hair (that is still on the skull of his mummy today). Not only did he face Asiatics to the north, a new southern kingdom of Kush had subjugated the Nubian city states. Based at Kerma (Sudan), its kings co-opted the old Egyptian gods, even worshipping Osiris and Horus, as well as Egyptian kings.
Kush left vast monuments. Enriched by their gold mines, ostrich feathers, leopard furs and spices, its kings built massive royal tombs in which hundreds of courtiers and relatives were killed with them. Kushite fortresses were impressive and their main shrine, in Kerma, was a colossal pre-Kushite temple built of mudbrick that still survives.
Somehow the Egyptians reclaimed the carved-up body of Seqenenre, but there was no time to mummify him to the usual standards. His brother Kamose the Strong mourned him: ‘Why do I ponder my strength while … I sit squeezed between an Asiatic and a Nubian, each holding a portion of Egypt?’ But Kamose had a mission: ‘No man can be calm, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatic: I will grapple with him. I’ll rip open his belly! My wish is to rescue Egypt and to kill the Asiatic!’ Kamose attacked his enemies in both directions.
His heir was his young nephew Ahmose, just ten years old, who adored his grandmother. ‘His love for her was greater than anything,’ he declared on the stela he raised at Abdju. But his mother Ahhotep was even more important – King’s Daughter, King’s Great Wife, King’s Mother, she was a commander and international arbiter. Her title ‘The Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut whose reputation is high over every foreign land’ suggests she cultivated links with Aegean peoples.
Egyptian kings had already launched expeditions to ‘hack up Asia’, raiding ‘Iwa’ (Türkiye) and ‘Iasy’ (Cyprus), but Hau-nebut was Crete, with which the Egyptian family had a special relationship. Knossos, Crete’s capital, and its other cities boasted unfortified palatial complexes decorated with ecstatic, playful frescoes of naked male athletes leaping over sacred bulls and bare-chested women in patterned skirts.* A maze in Knossos was surely the basis for the legend of the monstrous Minotaur said to demand the sacrifice of children, but it was not just a legend: children’s bones found with cooking pots suggest these stories were based on reality; and Labyrinthos, the name of the maze, may have been the name of the city itself. For around 250 years, between 1700 and 1450 BC, these Cretans traded throughout the Mediterranean. They brought home Egyptian artefacts, and Cretan griffins and bull-leaping frescoes decorated the palace at Hutwaret. Ahmose may have married a Cretan princess.
Some time around 1500, a volcanic eruption at Thera, the Greek island of Santorini – the most explosive catastrophe in world history, more powerful than the hydrogen bombs, a boom heard thousands of miles away – shot clouds of poisonous sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and sent a tsunami across the Mediterranean, drowning tens of thousands. It changed the climate, blighted harvests and devastated kingdoms. Crete was wounded by Thera, but regained its vigour for a while before warlords from mainland Greece took control. Egypt recovered.
As soon as he came of age, in 1529, Ahmose married his own sister Ahmose-Nefertari and marched on Hutwaret, finishing off the Asiatics then pursuing them across Sinai. When he faced uprisings, his mother Ahhotep crushed the rebels. ‘Give praise to the Lady of the Land,’ Ahmose wrote on his stela at the Temple of Amun at Ipetsut. ‘She has pacified Upper Egypt.’ Ahhotep’s grave goods included a necklace of golden flies – for courage in battle. When Ahmose died in his thirties, his sister-wife Ahmose-Nefertari ruled for their son, Amenhotep, who also married his sister: these incestuous marriages intensified the sanctity of the family and emulated the gods. But ultimately interbreeding was disastrous, destroying the very family they were meant to strengthen.* The Ahmoses faced extinction, a problem they solved by adoption: they chose a general, Thutmose, as heir.
Thutmose had crushed the Nubians and invaded Syria, a hoary but tough commoner who married a daughter of Ahmose, though he retained his non-royal wife Ahmes, mother of his favourite daughter, Hatshepsut.
‘Enraged like a panther’, Thutmose was determined to ‘destroy unrest throughout the foreign lands, to subdue the rebels of the desert region’, and invaded Kush. This was no raid but the deliberate devastation of a kingdom and culture: the king, accompanied by his wife and daughter Hatshepsut, led the army himself. While former kings had been stopped by the rapids on the Nile, Thutmose built a fleet and had the boats, including his personal yacht the Falcon, dragged overland. He defeated Kush in battle, burning the splendid capital Kerma – a triumph celebrated in his inscription boasting of ‘extending the frontiers’ on the sacred rock of the Kushites.