Night fell over the battlefield as the last Egyptian divisions arrived to consolidate the line. At dawn the two kings ordered their frayed armies into a savage frontal combat that ended in stalemate. Rameses withdrew his men; Muwatalli offered negotiations. Yet Muwatalli had won: Kadesh remained Hattian. Once he got home, Rameses transformed the desperate pandemonium of the Hattian ambush into a heroic legend. In no fewer than five massive monuments, he recast Kadesh as a triumph.*
Rameses shared this glory with one person – Great Wife Nefertari, who now played a special role in making peace between enemies,* just as in China a queen commanded chariot armies in battle.
WAR QUEENS: LADY HAO OF SHANG, PUDEHEPA OF HATTUSA AND NEFERTARI OF EGYPT
As the charioteers of Rameses and Muwatalli clashed in Syria, the new weaponry had reached north-western China, where Wuding had inherited a realm around the Yellow River gradually built by his family, the Shang, over a few hundred years. Legends depict an earlier Chinese king Yu ‘who controlled the flood’ of the Yellow River, but real history starts with the Shang.
Wuding, the twenty-first of his lineage, was a warrior king who around 1250 BC expanded Shang influence by conquest and marriage: many of his sixty-four wives were princesses of conquered fiefdoms. A favourite wife, Fu Hao, rose within his household to become a commander and high priestess. Wuding expanded into north-eastern China, fighting the other fiefdoms but also the northern peoples, the Guifang – Border Demons – from whom he had learned the arts of crossbow and chariot. Overseeing an agricultural society that also produced bronze crafts, weaponry and silk, the Shang ruled from Yin (near Anyang, Henan Province), aided by scribes who used the earliest Chinese writing from which today’s language derives. While worshipping a supreme god, Di, who may have been the supreme ancestor of the Shang, along with a lesser pantheon, they revered their ancestors as intermediaries and they daily consulted court diviners who used scapulimancy, the cracks on burned ox bones or turtle shells, to answer all the essential questions of life – from the imminence of natural disasters to health, harvest and family.
The bones and shells were burned and the diviners interpreted the cracks, their comments written on the bones, thousands of which survive. Scapulimancy helped people cope with a dangerous, unpredictable world, but the divinations were frustratingly vague.
War was waged partly in order to capture humans to sacrifice and so ensure a serene afterlife: the Shang – contemporary with Rameses in Egypt* – were buried in a family necropolis of tombs cut into the loess soil, with bronze artefacts and weapons. ‘Offerings to Da Ding’, reads one inscription. ‘Da Jia and Zu Yi, 100 cups of wine, 100 Qiang prisoners, 300 cattle …’. When Shang potentates died, hundreds were killed and buried with them.
Lady Fu Hao, mentioned in 170 oracle bones, may have started as a court diviner, but became the king’s partner. When the king appointed Lady Hao, he consulted the diviners and they confirmed the appointment. Hao won four successive campaigns, mainly against barbarians, but when she died at the age of thirty-three she was buried with sixteen sacrificed slaves and her favourite pets, six dogs.* The king missed her bitterly, regularly asking her advice in the afterlife.
In 1045, the Shang were said to have been destroyed by their own perverted corruption: King Zhou and his wife Daji floated on pleasure boats on a lake of booze, cavorting with concubines while devising vicious tortures for their enemies, the worst being the Cannon Burning Torment in which victims were fried alive on red-hot metal. Yet these excesses are likely to be the propaganda of the Zhou, a rising dynasty from the west, who destroyed them. At the battle of Muye, they were defeated by King Wu of Zhou. After the Shang couple had committed suicide in the ruins of their burning palace, Wu hunted down the Shang, family and troops, collecting 177,779 ears, then amid the rituals of chanting, bells and flutes he ‘beheaded and sacrificed their little prince and master of the cauldron [and] the leaders of their forty families’, scalping them. The Zhou family now ruled for several centuries, developing the first bureaucracy, the Grand Secretariat. Wu’s son Cheng was challenged by rebellious nobles but was rescued by that rare phenomenon, a benign uncle, Dan, gong (duke) of Zhou.
Once Cheng came of age, the duke of Zhou surrendered power – and later came to define responsible rule and the idea of the Mandate of Heaven: if a dynasty ruled well, they would ensure order, blessed by heaven, but if they abused power, they would lose the Mandate and be replaced.
Back in Syria, a less virtuous uncle, Hattusili, seized the Hattian throne from his nephew. After occupying Dimasqu (Damascus), he stopped to pray at a shrine to Ishtar, where he met and married the priest’s daughter Puduhepa, one of the first women of power whose voices we can hear. The Egyptian war went on until King Hattusili and Queen Puduhepa negotiated a peace treaty with Rameses – the first surviving treaty – that, like many such carve-ups right up to our own times, split Canaan–Syria – and then arranged a marriage between their children. It was Queen Puduhepa who did much of the negotiating while her husband galloped westwards to scourge a vassal, the Mycenaean kingdom of Ahhiyawa. The two had fallen out over Hattusili’s small ally, Wilusa – also known as Ilios or Troy.
In 1250, Hattusili negotiated with the king of Ahhiyawa, Tawagalawa (Eteocles), and in a letter only part of which survives wrote: ‘Now as we have come to an agreement about Wilusa over which we went to war …’. The timing is roughly right for a war in which the Trojans, backed by their Hattian allies, fought the Mycenaeans, possibly descendants of Aryan invaders. Based at Mycenae in the Peloponnese, they were ruled by kings and sword-swinging, chariot-riding warrior aristocrats who wassailed in the draughty halls of fortresses. They now worshipped male and female gods, and their battle-scarred bodies sporting golden masks were buried with bronze swords. But they were also Eurasian traders.*
The war ended in the burning of Troy, confirmed by archaeological excavations. The backing of Hatti explains why little Troy could defy a coalition of Greeks. But these Hattian letters suggest that the ‘Trojan war’, later celebrated in The Iliad, was, if it happened at all, a sideshow in Hatti’s long struggle to control the Greeks.
Fifteen years after Kadesh, Rameses II and Hattusili III signed an ‘Eternal Peace’, pledging ‘great peace and great brotherhood between themselves for ever’, co-signed by Queen Puduhepa. She not only mediated between the many offspring of the king by concubines, officiated at religious festivals and sat as a judge, but – always acute, sarcastic, haughty – also negotiated the marriage of her daughter to Rameses. Nefertari sent her ‘sister’ a golden twelve-strand necklace and a luxurious dyed garment. But Puduhepa negotiated very frankly with Rameses.
‘My sister, you promised to give me your daughter,’ wrote Rameses. ‘That’s what you wrote. But you’ve withheld her and are angry with me. Why?’
‘I’ve indeed withheld my daughter,’ replied Puduhepa. ‘And you will certainly approve of my reasons. The treasure house of Hatti was burned [by rebels].’ Puduhepa teased Rameses: ‘Does my brother possess nothing at all? … My brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense. That’s not worthy of your reputation or your status.’ No one else in the world would speak to Rameses the Great like that. Then she boasted of her daughter’s charms: ‘With whom shall I compare the daughter of heaven and earth whom I shall give to my brother?’ But ‘I want her made superior to all the other daughters of Great Kings.’
In 1246 BC, Rameses and Puduhepa were ready. ‘Wonderful, wonderful is this situation,’ exclaimed Rameses. ‘The Sun God and the Storm God, the gods of Egypt and Hatti, have granted our two countries peace for ever!’ Puduhepa set off with her daughter, accompanied by a trove of ‘gold, silver, much bronze, slaves, horses without limit, cattle, goats, rams by the myriad!’ Puduhepa bade her daughter goodbye at the frontier and thereafter Rameses ‘loved her more than anything’, but when no children appeared, her father blamed Rameses. ‘You’ve sired no son with my daughter,’ wrote Hattusili. ‘Isn’t it possible?’ Since Rameses had sired over a hundred children, this cast an unfair aspersion. At the apogee of their empires, the super-monarchs were discussing a summit. ‘Though we Great Kings are brothers, one has never seen the other,’ wrote Puduhepa to Rameses, so they decided to meet in Canaan. But the summit never happened. Hattusili faced challenges from the Aegean to the Euphrates, and Rameses ruled for far too long, sixty-seven years, and by the time he died at ninety, twisted by arthritis, tormented with dental problems (all revealed by his mummy), his elderly son had to cope with attacks on all his frontiers* but especially on the Mediterranean, where all the powers now faced a catastrophe. No one knows what caused it, but it is probable that a synchronicity of climate, natural disaster, pandemics, greed and systemic implosion sparked movements on some faraway steppe that unleashed a stampede migration in which maritime marauders shattered the rich cities of the Mediterranean and western Asia. The raiders sound like Greeks, the Egyptians called them ‘Sea Peoples’ but they came by land too, sporting new iron breastplates and leg greaves, wielding stabbing swords and shields, all made by the smelting of iron ore and meteoric iron to make a stronger metal. Iron had been known for a long time and it is likely that the smelting process developed slowly in many places, starting in India and spreading via the sophisticated blacksmiths of Hatti to Europe and Africa.*