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.
{92}
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.
{97}
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.
{98}
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.
{99}