CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES

It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign "shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine and unite and not go on fighting among themselves, if they meant to be strong enough to resist the attacks of their neighbours. Whether that was the reason or not, the records seem to show that just at this time there began to be far less fighting between the big landowners; and the king, Pharaoh, began to have more power in his own hands, and to be able to give effect to his will, by means of his vizier or prime minister, and the rest of his officers over all the country.

Thus more strong by being united, the Egyptians drove out the Hyksos. They also took forcible measures against the African tribes that were pressing them on the south, and established their power right up to the fourth cataract on the Nile, a long way farther south than the boundary of the more ancient empire. Against Nubia, farther south again, and against Libya, on their west, they fought effectively, and thus we may suppose that they made themselves more safe than they ever had been before from invasion by these African peoples.

There were two great kings of the name of Thothmes or Tethmosis, of this eighteenth dynasty, under whom {87} most of these big achievements were done--Thothmes I. and Thothmes III. The second Thothmes reigned for a year or two only. Thothmes I. led the Egyptian armies up through Palestine, overcame Syria, and went as a conqueror as far east as the Euphrates, where he set up a column, with an account of it all, to commemorate his victories.

But Thothmes III. was a more splendid Pharaoh still, and under him Egypt came to the height of its military power. Syria had revolted; so he marched north and utterly defeated the Syrians at Megiddo. Then he turned east and fought his way across the Euphrates, where he set up a column to his own glory beside that of Thothmes I. It is recorded of him that he had presents given him by the king of Babylon, and even by the king of the Hittites--that people from the north who had established themselves in Asia Minor and who were constantly giving trouble down in Syria.

[Sidenote: The Elamites]

And as for Babylon itself, there can be little doubt that at this time it was in the midst of troubles. It was pressed upon thus, as we see, by the growing power of Egypt on the west. Then on the eastern side it was continually being troubled by that powerful nation, the Elamites, whose capital was Susa. I do not want to bother you much about these Elamites, though their power was great and their civilisation an old civilisation. They were important enough to Babylon, because they were constantly giving trouble, very much as the stronger African tribes gave trouble to the Egyptians. But apart from this they do not occupy any very big part in the great story. They were not exactly what we should call world-makers, and it is only the world-makers that we are taking as the actors {88} in our story. They came rather near being world-makers in the great sense, for there was a moment when they seriously threatened to subjugate Babylonia, but the Babylonians just succeeded in defeating them.

And then, of course, there were the Assyrians in the north, already quite independent in reality, though Babylon still claimed a suzerainty over them.

So now continually, for hundreds of years, the story goes on repeating itself in the same way over and over again. The Assyrians begin to get more and more power in the east and they are constantly coming into conflict with the Egyptians who are constantly fighting to retain their hold on that Syria which the wars of the two Thothmes had made an Egyptian province. Syria lies north of Palestine: and Palestine, being nearer to Egypt, was still more insistently claimed by the Egyptians as theirs. You may realise how difficult the position was for these Semitic tribes in Syria and Palestine, between the two empires. The tribes were not united among themselves, so that we can easily imagine (and we know that it actually did so happen) that they tried to save themselves by making alliances with, or admitting themselves as subject to, now one of the big empires and now the other. That is the way the story went for hundreds of years there. The Children of Israel, as you know, were not in the Palestine story at the moment. It was about 1500 B.C. that the very great Pharaoh Thothmes III. came to the throne, at the time when the Israelites were in the land of Goshen. It was not until two or three hundred years later that Moses led them (in Exodus) into the wilderness.

Let us give the date of 1250 B.C. to the Exodus. It will then be about the year 1200, or a little before, {89} that the Israelites must have made their way, conquering, across Jordan and into the land of Canaan.

Now, how did it happen that a people thus still called the Children of Israel could have become so numerous and so powerful as to be able to win these victories?

[Sidenote: The promised land]

In answer to the first question we may say that it was very many years since the coming of Abraham from Chaldæa--more than a thousand years. That gives time for a very large increase in numbers. Then those years of desert wandering might very likely have made them hardy. They had, too, as we know, deep faith in their "god of battles"--the Jehovah--and in the divine promise that they should win this land. And, finally, just at the moment when they came up out of the desert and began their campaign against the peoples of Canaan the great empires happened, as it seems, to have become rather exhausted by their continual strife together, and the tribes of Palestine themselves had been so crushed between the two that perhaps they had not much power of resistance left.

And since there was all this perpetual fighting, it is interesting to see in what manner and with what weapons the fighters fought. The inscriptions tell us a great deal about them.

The people from the east seem to have learnt the use and value of horses in battle earlier than the Egyptians, and fighting from chariots seems to have been an earlier custom than fighting on horseback. It is said that there are no pictures or carvings of an earlier date than the Hyksos showing any of the Egyptians riding on horses, but in the eighteenth dynasty they had their cavalry--that is to say, their {90} mounted soldiers on horseback--as well as their fighters in chariots. The chariots were not very elaborate. They were two-wheeled. The boarding came up fairly high in front, to the height of a man's elbows or thereabouts as he stood upright, but sloped away at the sides towards the back; and the back was often quite open. We see a pair of horses or even three abreast in some of the gravings of the chariots.

The men in them, as I say, stood upright. Often there were two, of whom one was for the driving and the other for the shooting, which was nearly always with the bow and arrow. I suppose we may say that the bow and arrow was their great weapon. Slings were used, as you will know from the story of David and Goliath, but the disadvantage of the sling, as compared with the bow and arrow, except for skirmishing troops, is quite obvious. The slinging requires the twirling of the sling, with the stone in it, round the head, before the stone can be sent frying out; it requires plenty of room, or else, in the twirling, you may easily break the next man's head! So it is only of value to troops in "open formation," that is, with spacious room between one man and the next. It does not do for close formation. The bow and arrow is a far more convenient weapon for this kind of fighting.

[Sidenote: Weapons and armour]

I have said that we often see gravings of one man driving the horses--the charioteer--and of the other using the bow. We also sometimes see that, in horseback fighting, one man, riding on one horse, would lead and control another horse, on which would be riding a man who would then have both his hands and all his attention free for shooting with his bow and arrow. That is not always, nor perhaps most often, {91} what we find. The more usual way was for the rider to control the horse with his own hand on the reins as best he could while he shot his arrows as he had opportunity and time. And they were fine riders, turning round in the saddle--if they had a saddle; but often they are shown riding bareback, and never, till much later, with stirrups--and shooting backwards, over the horse's tail, as he gallops away.

The battle-axe was a very common weapon; and a short sword and a club, sometimes with a stone fixed in its head to give weight to the blow, are also shown. The long spear appears to have come into common use only gradually, and is not seen in the earliest pictures of the fighting, though we do see short spears, for throwing.

It was not at all uncommon for the fighter on foot to have a man with him who carried a large shield, which covered them both. I imagine that an arrangement of that kind is meant when we read, as we do in the Bible, of the "shield-bearer." For a man to carry a shield of such size as this with any ease, it had to be a light shield, and we know that the shields were commonly made of osier, like our baskets, and covered with the skins of oxen or other beasts.

In the earliest times they seem to have worn very little armour, to protect them from arrow or sword strokes, on the body; but helmets, at first soft and padded, but later of metal, to defend the head, were in early use, and they were usually made with a peak at the top and sloping sides which would make a blow glance off them. Bronze, as we have seen, was the metal which they first learnt to work, but as they learnt to make weapons of iron, which was harder and could be worked to a sharper edge, bronze went out of use.

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By the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the great empires began to meet in serious fighting, it is likely that both knew something about the arrangement of their armies into separate bodies of infantry and cavalry, and of the one supporting and helping the other in somewhat like the modern manner.

This, then, would have been their way of fighting when they met in the open field. It was a different matter when they came to the assault of great cities, especially such as Babylon and Nineveh, which were surrounded and protected, as we know, by walls of vast height and thickness. The walls of Nineveh, for instance, were so broad, even on the top, that three chariots could be driven along them, one beside the other, and of course the width at the bottom must have been very much larger. They had the material very ready at hand for the making of these immense walls--in Babylonia and Assyria at all events. They had abundance of clay, and for the greater part of the walls they used the sun-dried bricks. But for the lower parts, which had to bear the weight, they probably used harder bricks, burnt in the kilns, for there are engravings of soldiers with some kind of battering-ram hammering at the bricks from the lower part of the wall of a city which they are attacking. The diggers would be protected, by a shield held over their heads, from the missiles sent down from the wall above.

[Sidenote: Against a walled city]

Then they had ladders for the scaling of these walls when they made the attack. But of course the attackers down below would be at a great disadvantage compared with the defenders on top of the wall. They would have a much better chance if by any means they could hoist themselves up to something like the same height as the defenders. And this they {93} contrived to do by making movable towers of wood, on wheels, which could be pushed along by men who were more or less protected by the towers themselves from the people shooting at them from the top of the wall. On the towers would be bowmen who would shoot at the men on the wall, the shooters in the tower being protected by the walls, except in so far as they had to show themselves in order to shoot their arrows or throw their short spears.

[Illustration: A BATTERING-RAM.]

Another way that they had of hoisting themselves to the same height as the defenders was to build a mound outside the walls. I suppose the earth, as {94} they threw it up, would protect the builders against the arrows shot from the wall. And then, when they had raised the mound high enough, they would sometimes wheel their towers to the top of this, and so it may be that, from the towers on top of the mound, they may actually have had an advantage in height over the defenders on the walls. That would give the opportunity for their own fellow-soldiers below to set up the ladders and attempt the scaling of the walls.

In that way, or in some ways like that, they attacked the walled cities. You may have read words in the Bible that puzzled you about "bringing a tower" against a city, or "casting up a bank" against it, or some such words, and you may now know what they mean. They mean the making of these movable towers for the attack, and throwing up the mounds to bring the attackers to the same height as the defenders. It must have been a much more exciting kind of warfare than the pounding away with artillery at long range of many miles, as is done in war now. It was more like the modern trench war, with bombs and hand-grenades, when the trenches are close up to one another.

That is a kind of general picture of the way in which you may imagine these people making war on each other, constantly making war, in Mesopotamia and in Syria and in Palestine, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I would remind you yet again that, except when the Egyptians were taking a hand in it, it was warfare among nations that were nearly all of the same original stock or race. The Hittites, from the north, were a different people; but most of them had very much the same ideas and the same ways of life; probably they could understand each other's language, so that {95} really when the war had passed over them for the time being the people who were left in the country, looking after their flocks and their herds and their crops, would not see much difference between living under one power or under another. Probably it made very little change in their lives. And that may explain, what otherwise seems almost impossible to understand, how they could survive, how they could go on living at all, in the midst of this perpetual fighting.

We know that the conquerors showed very little mercy. Women and children were massacred or carried off into captivity, to be kept as slaves. But after all that dreadful misery had passed over the land the remnant that remained would go on much as before. Nothing in the whole story is much more wonderful than the way in which the Syrians, for instance, revolted again, very soon after being conquered and subjugated by the first Thothmes; and the endurance of the Jews under the repeated conquest of their country is one of the marvels of history. It is difficult to understand how it was that they were not entirely destroyed as a nation, and that they are among us, and in every country of the world, as people of a very distinct character and nationality to-day. This tenacity and endurance of the Jews has had a very great effect in making the world such as it is now that we are living in it.

[Sidenote: The Philistines]

One of the reasons why the Children of Israel under Joshua were able to get a hold on the land of Canaan is that the Philistines had already made their appearance there. The country of these Philistines was a narrow stretch along the south-eastern edge of the Mediterranean, running down to the border of Egypt. It seems surprising that the Israelites should owe any {96} good thing to the Philistines, because we always find the two peoples at bitter war with each other; but it appears that just before the time of the Israelites' coming up from the southern deserts the Philistines had been making matters very difficult for the Egyptians in what the Egyptians called their province of Palestine, and that this province and the province of Syria also, a little to the north, were not really under any effective Egyptian rule at all at the moment. The tribes were not united together, and were weak in their disunion.

These Philistines were a warlike people. It is not known precisely of what race they were. Some have thought that they were settlers from Crete, which held, as we saw, rule over the sea. Other scholars suppose them to have been, like most of the peoples of that region, a branch of the great Semitic tree which we have seen spreading so widely. But wherever they came from, there they were established along this sea-coast, a people ready to fight by land or sea, ready to go trading, too, no doubt, in their ships, if they could make profit by it--a bold, enterprising people.

And there was another people, settled along another strip, farther north, of the same coast--the Phœnicians. Almost exactly the same account is to be given of them. They, too, were great sailors and navigators, great traders, great pirates. We do not hear so much about them just at this point of the great story which we have now reached: the Philistines play a bigger part in it for the moment. But the Phœnicians, you will see, are far more important really, for in a few hundred years the Philistines are little more heard of. The excellence of the Phœnicians as navigators made a big difference to the story.

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When the Israelites succeeded in pushing their army thus into Palestine, westward of the Jordan river, their victory was by no means complete. It was a long while before they got the better of those Philistines near the coast, and at one time it looked very much as if the Philistines would conquer them. We may suppose that they did not come up out of the desert with much of the equipment necessary for the attack of walled cities, such as I have just described that necessary equipment to be.

[Sidenote: Israel and Judah]

The result of that was that even in the midst of the country which, for the most part, they conquered, there still remained certain strong cities in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps, as they had taken the pasture lands, and all that they most wanted, and as they saw that the capture of these strong places was almost beyond their power, they came to some kind of agreement with the citizens to leave those citizens in possession of the cities, provided they were left in peace elsewhere. However that may be, it is certain that some of those strong fortresses remained untaken by them, and it happened that they were so placed as to divide the country which the Israelites had overrun into two parts. The tribes of Judah and of Simeon settled themselves in the country southward of this line of fortresses, as we may almost call it. The rest of the tribes settled to the north.

I draw your attention to that, because it helps to explain what happened later when the division took place into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The tribes of Judah and Simeon, living in what came to be called Judæa, of which Jerusalem was the capital, were children of Israel, and of Abraham, just as much as those who belonged to the kingdom of Israel so called.

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It is a little confusing; and to save further confusion it will I think be as well that I should now write of these Israelites (including the inhabitants of Judæa) as Hebrews. The exact original meaning of the name Hebrew is not very clear, but it was used at a very early date, and we may use it conveniently to designate the whole of the tribes that were led through their wanderings in the desert by Moses and Aaron, and that came up and crossed over Jordan, under Joshua, and settled in Canaan.

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