Qidš it is, then! The Battle of Qadesh, and what led to it & followed from it…

[Ian Russell Lowell]

Because of the Temple Reliefs of Ramesses II, the Battle of Qadesh figures prominently in any historical discussion about the 'Biblical Age' of wargaming.  I am in the process of completing the third and final article in the series Qadesh Redux, and I have been involved with Graham Evans in co-authoring the Society's incentive game for 2012: Call It Qidš!.  This is a simplified, but hopefully entertaining, set of rules to capture the essence of the battle as recorded by Ramesses.
   However, there are many assumptions made about the Egyptian account, including that the Egyptians won!  To this we can add the 'three-man' chariot debate and others.  We have Hittite references to the context of 'the Battle' (or 'second campaign in Djahi' according to Ramesses' literary record), but these always refer to the War against Amurru and Egypt.  And the Hittites, with some valid evidence, claimed to have won—after all Amurru returned to the Hittite fold, and Ramesses moved south rapidly, hiding out in Sidon.
   Amurru is therefore key to the Hittite understanding of 'The Battle', as it is for Ramesses, as his 'first campaign in Djahi', which seems to have taken up to six months, was intent on securing Amurru, which, under its ruler Benteshina, had withdrawn itself from vassalage under Muwatalli II, the Hittite Great King.
   There is also the question of numbers involved: Ramesses' own detailed accounts are not always taken as a whole—there were clearly, from the Relief captions, many more than 37,000 Hitite and allied troops, as there were two other groups of thr-troops mentioned on the temple wall depictions, as well as the numbers in and around Qidš (i.e. Qadesh, the Hittites nasalised its sound as Kinza) itself.  And Ramesses makes no mention of the number of his own troops.  But again, thanks to his later letter to the Hittite Great King Hattusili III, we might have a better understanding of the Order of Battle.
   Then there is the Peace Treaty, the issue of Assyrian expansion, and the two further attempts north, with the campaigns against Dapur by Ramesses in his 8th and 10th regnal years.

It can be rather a rich recipe for trying to contain in one Forum, but as Eccles stated in The Last Goon Show, "Everybody has to be somewhere!"

[Patrick Waterson]

This sounds good, Ian.

On the numbers question, we can probably with complete safety disregard the '5,000-man division' of the scribe Hori (Papyrus Anastasi I) as being nothing more than a hypothetical garrison, perhaps of a single city, i.e. not a guide to Egyptian army organisation or mobilisation potential for the period.  Hence I would suggest going with whatever figure seems reasonable for Muwatalli's army and then giving Ramses whatever is necessary to make a decent battle. :-)

The course of the battle has the elements of a good wargame: Muwatalli's army smashes into the Army of Ra with surprise, so his player will enjoy the first few turns, then the routing remnants of Ra reach Amun and hopefully rally on it, and then follows a tense battle between the two sides until the arrival of reinforcements.

The Na'arim/Ne'arin/Naharin troops I would suggest can be an allied contingent and can for a bit of variety be based on a Syrian or Assyrian model, and I would suggest giving the Ramses II player a secret choice (made at the start of the game) whether to receive them on a set (historical) turn or make their arrival variable (and hence potentially early or late).  Other reinforcements for both sides can be variable: the Army of Ptah for Ramses and some of that massed infantry on the eastern bank for Muwatalli.  One way to do this might be to allow Muwatalli to have a helping of infantry on a die roll of '1' (roll each turn beginning with turn N), and when he gets his first infantry contingent Ramses similarly starts rolling for the arrival of the Ptah division.  I would suggest these latter variable reinforcements be an optional rule for those who like to live dangerously or explore historical alternatives, as they could decide the game.

These are just some thoughts that may or may not be useful.

Keep up the good work.

Patrick

[Ian Russell Lowell]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for responding and getting the forum started.

Personally, I am not ready to completely dismiss Hori's comments, as I reveal in the Historical Background to the Call It Qidš game, and also in Part 3 of Qadesh Redux.  There are two different reasons for this.

One is the Expedition to Wadi Hammamat under Ramesses IV, which also lists an army contingent of 5,000 troops—I shall come back to what an army contingent is below.  Two is that, I suspect, although it is not an historical letter, the knowledge—especially of military slang shown by Hori—makes me suspect it is based on an historical episode or epidsodes.  If an epidsode, it could refer to Ramesses' first campaign in Djahi, which secured Amurru: the Qadesh Campaign being the second into Djahi, as stated by Ramesses.  Mention of Djahi, Nearin, Sherden etc. are circumstantial clues, but not to be too lightly dismissed.  The defection of Amurru is recorded in the Hittite evidence, and also the campaign, otherwise, is only aluuded to in the two stelae for that year, at Byblos and at Nahr el-Kelb.  One at the beginning and the other at the end of the campaign (really a consolidation of Amurru into the Egyptian sphere).

As I have argued, the Nearin would have been both the advance guard sent my Ramesses, as mentioned in his records, plus, as would be expected the king and his army from Amurru: i.e. Benteshina.  Benteshina was replaced the next year after Ramesses failure to capture Qadesh, and when he also lost Amurru, by Shapili, by a somewhat narked Muwatalli.

Alan Schulman (Military Rank) also reads the broken lines of the contingent requested by Rib-Hadda from Akhenaten (EA 132:56-59) as 50 chariots—50 GIŠ.GIGIR.MEŠ—along side 5,500 men.  The 500 is clear—50me LÚ.MEŠ—but the remainder is however  broken—50m[...] L[...]Š  š[...] / [... ...]-ha.  'Archers'—ÉRIN.MEŠ  / pí-ṭá-ti—a Canaano-Akkadian rendering of pedjet, the usual Egyptian word for soldier.

The 'Army' of Ptah never made it to the battlefield; not at least on the first day.  The 'Army' of Sutekh (Seth) was even further away.

As I have mentioned in Part 2 of Qadesh Redux, Ramesses in his later letter to the Hittite Great King Hattusili II, talks about 3 field armies, one of which is in Taminta and another in Amurru, the third location is unfortunately lost, due to damage, on both extant copies.  If the Nearin is Amurru (and the force was said to 'on the coastline of Amurru', then Taminta, associated with Qadesh, could be the field army said to be there, and comprising of the divisions of Amun and Pre.  The location of the other force could be Takhshi, the northern Bekaa Valley, and be made up of Ptah and Sutekh.

If circa 5,000 is the number of soldiers in a 'field army', such as mentioned in Hori's Letter (Papyrus Anastasi I), that could be the field army that Ramesses took to Amurru in the year before Qadesh.  Not too large a force as he was entering potentially mainly friendly country, at list politically.  However, the next year at Qadesh, the 5,000 numbered as the field armies would each be split in two divisions, Amun & Pre, Ptah and Sutekh.  With some of their leading troops sent ahead to Amurru, probably less.  The Amurru force may have been larger than 5,000 if it accounted for the whole of Benteshina's fighting men, together with their Egyptain 'military advisers'.

The Hittite army was much bigger: not only the 'right' and 'left' wings, the 37,000 numbered by Ramesses; but also the other troops: 'of the camp', 'of shields' (Muwatalli's guard?) and the numbers in and around Qadesh.  Again with the chariot force.  We have two contingents mentioned: 2,500—the three-man—attacking the camp; who may not be the same as those who attacked Pre!  Plus the second wave of 1,000.  However, a battle was fought the second day, inconclusively from ramesses' point of view: it is dismissed in a few paragraphs, mainly taken up by his own mighty prowess.  So the Muwatalli undoubtedly did not use all of his chariot force on day one: the Egyptian account of the Battle of Qadesh, plus he had all of his infantry available, fresh and unbloodied.  Ramesses had two mauled contingents, Amun and Pre, plus the Amurru/Egyptian Nearin who would also have taken casualties.  At best he had half of his original force pristine and prepared for the fight.

Best wishes,

Ian





 

[Ian Russell Lowell]

There are coloured maps available for the Battle of Qadesh: to be found in by pressing the <download> button above and then <qadesh>.  Kindly posted by Mark from my first article of Qadesh Redux.

Ian

[Patrick Waterson]

I can see the thinking behind this interpretation, to which I would raise three objections to such trivial forces representing a main Egyptian army: one philosophical, one operational and one source-based.

The philosophical objection is to the assumption or conclusion that Egypt, a relatively large realm with numerous cities, should have fielded a force no larger than a Roman consular army, i.e. that the entire striking force of Egypt should amount to no more than a proportion of the force habitually fielded by a single Italian city.  To me, this makes no sense.

The operational objection is that if one has a force no larger than a Roman consular army then what possible reason could there be for splitting it into four contingents about a day's march apart?  This also makes no sense (at least to yours truly).

The source-based objection is Diodorus Siculus I.47.6.  In I.47-48, Diodorus describes the reliefs of 'Ozymandias', who is plainly Ramses II Usermaatre.  There are some obvious reservations about taking Diodorus entirely at face value, including the fact that he writes "he says" when referring to the descriptions, as if he was writing down what was said by a 'tour guide', but I.47.6 is of some interest, as it suggests some part of the reliefs not available to us may have provided an OB for Ramses:

Beyond the pylon, he says, there is a peristyle more remarkable than the former one; in it there are all manner of reliefs depicting the war which the king waged against those Bactrians who had revolted; against these he had made a campaign with four hundred thousand foot-soldiers and twenty thousand cavalry, the whole army having been divided into four divisions, all of which were under the command of sons of the king.

Apart from the anomalous 'Bactrians' and absence of reference to chariots, what is of interest is that the army is divided into four divisions, which identifies it as the one participating in the Kadesh campaign.  Exactly where Diodorus got his figures amounting to 420,000 overall is uncertain, but this number would explain why the army was marching in separate, dispersed contingents - 420,000 men take a lot of marching space.  As an observation, if one divides the 20,000 'cavalry' by four, one gets 5,000 man contingents ...

Interesting in this context is Tacitus, Annals II.60.

There yet remained on the towering piles Egyptian inscriptions, with a complete account of the city's past grandeur. One of the aged priests, who was desired to interpret the language of his country, related how once there had dwelt in Thebes seven hundred thousand men of military age, and how with such an army king Rhamses conquered Libya, Ethiopia, Media, Persia, Bactria, and Scythia, and held under his sway the countries inhabited by the Syrians, Armenians, and their neighbours, the Cappadocians, from the Bithynian to the Lycian sea.


The 'Rhamses' here is a faux ami: the reference is actually to Thutmose III (cf. the Lateran obelisk inscription).  What is of interest is the large manpower pool, equivalent to that of Italy in the Second Punic War (Polybius II.24.16), which is also consistent with a 'southern garrison' of 240,000 in the reign of 'Psammetichus' (Herodotus II.30).  A southern army of 250,000 and a northern army of 420,000 are quite consistent with a manpower pool of c.700,000 and with the 160,000 'Hermotybians' and 250,000 'Calasirians' in Herodotus II.165, a somewhat reduced establishment under the Persians once Egypt's glory days has passed.

Hence we might have rather more latitude for Egyptian numbers than is commonly supposed, should be wish to avail ourselves of the opportunity.

Patrick

[aligern]

Patrick, I am not at all sure that the objections to the proposed huge size of ancient armies are  to do with the number of troops that a pharaoh might have on a register or even in garrison, It is more a matter of what numbers can be effectively  trained and used on a battlefield together and what can be fed and watered in any particular place. So 420,000 or even 700,000 might be in forts or working in the countryside feeding themselves. But can the Egyptians march to Asia Minor with that number? Or even half that number?

Thinking of Alexander the Great, if he has 30,000 men then the Persians at Gaugamela can occupy double his frontage and double his depth with 120,000 men. That is an overwhelming superiority. Why would one gather more men in one place? As it is numbers of that magnitude (more than say 50,000) must be very difficult to control and move.
I think that there is a further argument against large forces which is about the perceived balance of the army. If such large numbers are involveds does that not make the chariot force proportionately much smaller.  I think that the number of chariots in ancient armies has been calculated from barrack size and written  ration strength records. If these give relatively small numbers then the armies would beconme very large infantry armies and wouldn't that make chariots a lot less relevant? . So the argument would run that  if there were 5,000 chariots then that would fit with say an infantry force of 20,000 but would be pretty well meaningless in an infantry army of 100,000 ?
Roy

[Patrick Waterson]

Interesting points, Roy.  In essence, there seem to be three questions:

1) Can large armies be supported by the logistics of the period (or what we know of the logistics of the period)?

2) Can large armies be controlled and moved (and would one want quantity or concentrate on quality)?

3) Does a huge mass of infantry make chariots (or the cutting edge troops in an army) more significant or less significant, i.e. do they stand out or are they swamped?

My own tuppence worth goes thus:

1) From what I have been able to ascertain, logistics of the period was largely a matter of sending accredited chaps to cities on one's route to indicate that they should provide or else.  The density of cities in the Fertile Crescent (which seems to have been a lot more fertile back then for various reasons) would spread the load tolerably for even a very large army trundling through, as long as it kept trundling.  Admittedly, this is a very general statement and does not address specifics, but as late as 480 BC Xerxes was making very similar arrangements for his invasion of Greece.

2) Up to the emergence of Greece and Macedon, the general impression seems to be that size mattered.  As late as 374 BC, the Persians mustered 20,000 Greeks and 200,000 Asiatic troops for their invasion of Egypt.  A more successful attempt in 343 BC brought together 300,000.  Of these forces, only the Greek contingents had good fighting value, so to our way of thinking there was no reason for the Persians to bother with the rest.  However, to their way of thinking, a large army was of great value through sheer intimdation, and we see this happening in the Ionian revolt of 499-493 BC - the sheer size of the force assembled by the Persians caused much of the Ionian alliance to unravel.  Control is another question, and the immobility of Darius III's army in the run-up to Gaugamela suggests that it may well have been of a size that made it difficult to move in any meaningful way.  Ramses II's division of his own army into four separate contingents also seems to imply a force too large to handle as one marching entity.

3) 5,000 chariots might be quite meaningful support for 100,000 infantry: let us assume the enemy also has 100,000 infantry, and that both sides draw up, say, ten deep and let fly with javelins, arrows and the like as a means of passing the time.  After this has been going on a bit and both sides are beginning to get a bit shaky and/or short on ammo, trumpets sound and on one flank (or in the centre) 10,000 men open up corridors to let through 5,000 chariots going at a fair clip and making the mother of all drumming noises.  The battered opposition crumble under the impact and the chariots slice through, the just-parted friendly infantry surging forward to finish the job.  Now the chariots are behind the enemy line, and can choose from a number of drive-by options to put the wind up the rear of the remaining 90,000 enemy infantry, and are nicely placed to ride through the latter if and when they start breaking.

Out of interest, and dragging in my old 'Armies and Enemies' book here, Assyrian chariot ratios seem to have been 1 chariot to 10 horses to 100 men, and granted that they had effective cavalry at the time, they seem to have felt it worth fielding as little as one chariot per hundred infantry, so perhaps five chariots per hundred infantry (5,000 chariots with 100,000 men) is not too bad a ratio.

Please feel free to comment. :-)

Patrick

[aligern]

We have debated this one before Patrick so that I doubt that wev are going to chzange each other' minds about ancient numbers. I just don't believe your Persian numbers transmitted by Greek authors. The Greeks paint a picture of huge armies of Persians who are , orientalised as slaves of the Great KIng, driven to fight by their officers' whips.  It seems astonishing to me that later armies for which we have rather better sources are much smaller with 50,000 men being a large army  and more normal forces being 20,000 -30,000 men.
'In Spain large armies starve and small armies get beaten'. I suggest that that applies to Ancient armies just as well as Napoleonic ones. As I said above, I can believe that a state that raises its armies from peasant farmers who provide their own food could have a hiuge army, but I don't see it moving to a battlefield or being effectively deployed and managed.  At one point the Celts put up a large army against Ariovistus in Gaul.  He hides in the marshes and the Celts eat their food and go.  Caesar himself has constant concern for the corn supply. He will not move until it is assured, yet his forces in Gaul are in the 20,000 range. I agree that the Persians can use cities as depots, however, there are reasonable limits to how long   an army can stay near enough the depot to stay fed.  An army of 200,000 is going to eat out an area quickly and if both armies are of that magnitude then facing each other  for any length of time will result in mass starvation. Effectively that is what happened to Napoleon in Russia as the Grand Armee declined from 500,000 to 100,00 men with few of that  decline being due to battle casualties.
As to the proportion of chariots, I would rather see the Near Eastern armies as being of the order '20% cavalry'  I just cannot see a low ratio such as 5% would have chariots as important. The armies would be infantry armies and chariots would be tactically irrelevant.  If they were not then states would reduce the number of infantry and invest in more chariots because that would beat a large unmanoeuvreable army of poorly trained footsloggers.

Roy

[Justin Taylor]

I ran it as a game back in 1997 and recently scanned the photos and put it on my blog

http://3vwargames.blogspot.com/2011/12/kadesh-game-from-1997.html

And yes I based some of it on Ians articles in Slingshot.

[Patrick Waterson]

We have debated this one before Patrick so that I doubt that wev are going to chzange each other' minds about ancient numbers. I just don't believe your Persian numbers transmitted by Greek authors. The Greeks paint a picture of huge armies of Persians who are , orientalised as slaves of the Great KIng, driven to fight by their officers' whips.  It seems astonishing to me that later armies for which we have rather better sources are much smaller with 50,000 men being a large army  and more normal forces being 20,000 -30,000 men.
'In Spain large armies starve and small armies get beaten'. I suggest that that applies to Ancient armies just as well as Napoleonic ones. As I said above, I can believe that a state that raises its armies from peasant farmers who provide their own food could have a hiuge army, but I don't see it moving to a battlefield or being effectively deployed and managed.  At one point the Celts put up a large army against Ariovistus in Gaul.  He hides in the marshes and the Celts eat their food and go.  Caesar himself has constant concern for the corn supply. He will not move until it is assured, yet his forces in Gaul are in the 20,000 range. I agree that the Persians can use cities as depots, however, there are reasonable limits to how long   an army can stay near enough the depot to stay fed.  An army of 200,000 is going to eat out an area quickly and if both armies are of that magnitude then facing each other  for any length of time will result in mass starvation. Effectively that is what happened to Napoleon in Russia as the Grand Armee declined from 500,000 to 100,00 men with few of that  decline being due to battle casualties.
As to the proportion of chariots, I would rather see the Near Eastern armies as being of the order '20% cavalry'  I just cannot see a low ratio such as 5% would have chariots as important. The armies would be infantry armies and chariots would be tactically irrelevant.  If they were not then states would reduce the number of infantry and invest in more chariots because that would beat a large unmanoeuvreable army of poorly trained footsloggers.

Roy

The ultimate question is, of course, not about belief but about accuracy.  Dr Sarah Parchek's recent remote sensing work in Egypt has uncovered 1,250 hitherto unknown towns and cities from the Pharaonic period, the first Near Eastern country (as far as I know) to have so extensive and comprehensive a survey.  I suspect the remainder of the ancient Near East will prove similarly fruitful.

19th century Spain (or Russia) thus appears to be a misleading yardstick: the population density and food yields are much less, communications are much poorer and supply systems poor to nonexistent.  In my humble opinion, too much has been inferred - misleadingly - from Napoleonic practice, on the probably quite erroneous assumption that armies later in date must be larger, more sophisticated and better organised in all respects than those of earlier eras.

Caesar is a case in point: his constant concern is to get corn, either from friendly tribes or cooperative cities or, if all else fails, from 'foraging' in the countryside (e.g. in Britannia, where friendly locals were a bit hard to come by).  Ramses would not have had this problem: like Thutmose III, he would simply have ordered the numerous cities along his route to be forthcoming with the requisite supplies, and the cities would have done so.  It was a different kind of system to those we are used to, where supply is from the point of origin of the troops - in this one, supply is provided by the locals at intermediate destinations - and one that was much more effective at sustaining large forces.

You do make the point that large armies facing each other in a limited area for any length of time are going to eat the locals out of house and home.  Offhand I can think of only one campaign that came close to these circumstances, and that was in 614 BC when Sin-shar-ishkun of Assyria faced a coalition led by Nabopolassar and declined battle for a while (the source is Diodorus, I believe).  Sin-shar-ishkun's acceptance f battle at a disadvantage might indeed have been prompted by his supplies drying up.  Other campaigns appear to be characterised by the armies staying on the move and accepting battle rather than hanging around waiting - behaviour consistent with large armies not wanting to put too big a dent in the local food supply.  Sieges are an obvious challenge, especially as they are a regular occurrence, and the fact that most of them occur next to sea and river routes is perhaps significant, ships and boats being the most effective way of moving a lot of supply quickly.

Regarding chariots, I would use the analogy (admittedly rather loose) of armoured divisions in World War II, notably in the German army.  Of almost 200 divisions in existence in 1941, 20 were armoured divisions (in 1940, the figures were 150-ish of which 10 were armoured).  Armoured divisions were recognised as effective, and more were created throughout the war, but never amounted to more than about 10% of all divisions in the Wehrmacht, and yet were effective out of all proportion to their numbers.  Back in Biblical times, chariots were popular, and anyone who was anyone had them (even the originally carrophobic Hebrews), but cost, training and stud farm capacity were always limiting factors on the size of the chariot force, just as rubber, petrol and strategic metals limited the number of Panzer divisions Germany could deploy and maintain in WW2.  Mass mobilisation always seems to produce a lot of infantry (except among cultures such as Mongols, for obvious reasons) because infantry is comparatively easy to raise and maintain and is OK against 90-95% of the other chap's army, and is preferable to large empty gaps in one's line.  However, except with Greece and to an extent Rome, it was rarely the arm of decision on the battlefield (again a big generalisation, but in the ancient and classical world chariots and cavalry are depicted as the arms of decision and it is probably safe to say that they were).

As you correctly state, Roy, we have debated this elsewhere, but we can air it anyway and see what people think. :-)

Patrick

[Jim Webster]

Of course the big question that the Egyptians would ask about their army was how big did it need to be, and what else could they do with the money.

Given the geographical situation of Egypt, you need troops to deter the tribes in the west, who had limited corridors of access, keep the Kushites in the south passive (which at times seems to have been done as much by cultural imperialism and assimilation as by a large garrison, and patrol the Red Sea littoral.
A 'field army' to support those three, plus allow the Pharoh to go on jollies into Palestine to make his name and keep the tribute coming in completes the set. Any extra is just wasted money that cannot be spent on temples and the court.

One day I'll produce a campaign game which has the main purpose of Pharoh to produce ever more extravagent temples and the winner is the one who achieves this, then we'll see what size the army is 

Jim Webster

[Patrick Waterson]

Your observations on the geographical situation of Egypt are spot on, as Herodotus notes (II.30):

Three garrisons were maintained in Egypt at that time, one in the city of Elephantine against the Ethiopians, another in the Pelusiac Daphnae, against the Syrians and Arabians, and a third, against the Libyans, in Marea.

My impression of the economics of Egypt is that very little of the armed forces-related expenditure (apart from such things as chariot creation) came down to money.  Herodotus tells us of a military class who paid no taxes but turned up for war (reminiscent of feudal service), and although these were provided with rations they were not, as far as we can tell, paid.  Lydian, Carian and Ionian mercenaries were different (they were, after all, mercenaries), but their numbers top out at 30,000 in Herodotus as opposed to the 410,000 Egyptian soldiers of his time.

The attitude to money, or other forms of revenue, was also rather different.  The guiding principle seems to have been to accumulate a surplus until it was needed, and then take what was needed out of the accrued surplus.  Building activities seem to have been geared to foreign tribute in the 18th Dynasty*, and to military success, or at least activity, during the 19th.  (Only the Libyan Dynasty, who seem to have had a much more modern attitude to finance, seem to have managed to bankrupt Egypt).  Hence, if a Pharaoh were playing the proposed game I have a feeling the army would be huge in order to conquer enough foreign lands to generate sufficient tribute to pay for those extravagant temples. ;-)

*Amenhotep III also took steps to tax trade, establishing a customs service.  Coincidentally, he was the major builder of the 18th Dynasty.  And most of what he built was considered good enough to be usurped by Ramses II ...

Patrick