Thanks for tuning in to Episode 009 - The New Kingdom: Maritime War and Maritime Peace. The 'war' part refers to the first several pharaohs of the New Kingdom, kings who retook Egypt from the Hyksos. Specifically, we'll look at the pharaoh Kamose' retaking of the city of Avaris, partially accomplished by amphibious assault from the Nile. We'll also see the exploits of Thutmose III, but the 'peace' part refers to Queen Hatshepsut, a woman pharaoh who ruled concurrently with Thutmose III. Hatshepsut focused on reestablishing foreign trade, and one of Egypt's most well-known temple reliefs gives us a marvelous look at a voyage to Punt that was organized by Egypt's greatest female pharaoh. Other items from today's episode include a look at Min of the Desert, a full-scale reconstruction based on the Hatshepsut 'Punt' ship depictions, along with boat models from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Episode Transcript

Let’s head back to ancient Egypt and pick up where we left off last time, the Second Intermediate Period. We saw how the Middle Kingdom declined around 1750 BC, a point that was relatively contemporaneous with the death of Hammurabi, the decline of the First Babylonian Empire, and the drying up of Mesopotamian sea trade. While the Persian Gulf trade of Mesopotamia steadily declined over a period of 150 years or so, Egypt entered the Second Intermediate Period rather abruptly. We saw how the decline of the Middle Kingdom may have steadily led to the cliff where that abrupt drop happened, but once it did happen, Egypt’s long-distance sea trade also fell off precipitously.

From the death of Sobekneferu which ended the 12th Dynasty, Egypt underwent a fracturing of power that saw several different dynasties ruling contemporaneously. Then, around 1650 BC, a weakened Egypt was easily invaded by a warring people known as the Hyksos. They actually established their own dynasty, the 15th, and gained a large measure of control over most of Egypt, but since there is practically no maritime evidence connected to the Hyksos, I’ll have to leave a discussion of their invasion to some of the other fine podcasts out there covering ancient history. 

There is one interesting maritime reference connected to the Hyksos, but other than that it’s sufficient to say that Egypt remained fractured and under partial control of the Hyksos until approximately 1550 BC when the last two 17th Dynasty Theban kings— Seqenenre Tao and his son Kamose—led the Egyptians in a final victory over the Hyksos to accomplish Egypt’s liberation. One of those kings, Kamose, is the king who we have to thank for the maritime evidence from the end of the Second Intermediate Period.

Two stelae connected to Kamose both recount the king’s efforts to wrest cities in Middle Egypt from the control of the Hyksos. His strategy was to carry out a ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign against the Middle Egyptian towns that supported the Hyksos, hoping to win them back easily and weaken the morale of the Hyksos without much cost. The Carnarvon Tablet tells us that Kamose wisely utilized the highway of the Nile to move at least part of his army north to the city of Avaris, a focal point of his campaign. 

The tablet records Kamose as saying “I sailed downstream a victor to drive out the Asiatics according to the command of Amun . . . my brave army in front of me like a blast of fire.” 

A second stela attributed to Kamose goes into further detail about how exactly he utilized boats in attacking Avaris.

“I put in at Per-djedken, my heart happy, so that I might let Apopy [who was the Hysksos king also known as Apophis], so that I might let Apopy experience a bad time, that Syrian prince with weak arms, who conceives brave things which never come about for him! I arrived at Yenyet-of- the-southward-journey, and I crossed over to them to greet them. I put the fleet, already equipped, in order, one behind the other, in order that I might take the lead, setting the course with my braves, flying over the river as does a falcon, my flag-ship of gold at their head, something like a divine being at their front. I made the mighty transport boat beach at the edge of the cultivation, with the fleet behind it, as the sparrow-hawk uproots (plants) upon the flats of Avaris!”

It appears then from this inscription that Kamose used transport boats and smaller ships as amphibious vessels to launch an attack on the city of Avaris, fighting from the ships onto land, rather than from ship-to-ship as in a naval battle. The conclusion of the inscription gives the impression that Kamose was successful in his attack, although some scholars have said that Kamose may have inflated the records of his accomplishments. The stela goes on to quote Kamose as boasting: 

“I have not left a plank to the hundreds of ships of fresh cedar which were filled with gold, lapis, silver, turquoise, bronze axes without number, over and above the moringa-oil, incense, fat, honey, willow, box-wood, sticks and all their fine woods - all the fine products of Retenu - I have confiscated all of it! I haven't left a thing to Avaris to her (own) destitution: the Asiatic has perished!” 

The Second Stela of Kamose

The location ‘Retenu’ in that inscription refers to the southern Levant, so it’s obvious that goods from the Levant were still traveling up the Nile even under Hyksos control, but these inscriptions from Kamose give us our best glimpse into the state of maritime trade in the Second Intermediate Period, even if they record the moments that the period was in its last stages. 

When Kamose died, he’d accomplished much of the task of driving the Hyksos north. His successor, Ahmose I, is seen as the first pharaoh of Egypt’s New Kingdom. Also the first king of the 18th Dynasty, Ahmose I spent his reign working to reestablish a centralized government like those that had existed in Egypt’s past. Once the government was again solidified, the earliest pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty focused all of Egypt’s resources on expanding territorial control once again. In the south, they waged a campaign to retake control of Nubia, a campaign that was waged on land, by and large. The northern campaign saw the Hyksos pushed north back to their original home in the Levant.

As Egypt followed on the Hyksos’ heels, the 18th Dynasty pharaohs added more and more northern territory to their kingdoms. By the time Thutmose III took the throne in 1479 BC, he led numerous military campaigns to take control of more territory to Egypt’s north. Thutmose III pushed so far north that Egypt technically controlled territory in southern Syria. However, Egypt had become so extended by reaching that far north that Thutmose’s administration of his territory in the Levant was dependent on his maintaining control of the port cities such as those at Byblos and Ulazza. 

This situation is revealed to us in the text of the Napata Stela, also sometimes called the Gebel Barkal Stela. The stela describes Thutmose III’s northern campaigns against the Hyksos and the Mittani, a group that rose to power in the region of central Mesopotamia and into northern Syria. The stela describes Thutmose “sailing to the northern border of Asia” where he “ordered that many ships be built of cedar from the mountains of God's Land in the neighbourhood of the Mistress of Byblos.” In preparing for his Syrian campaign, the stela tells how “every harbour his majesty came to was supplied with fine bread, various breads, oil, incense, wine, honey, fruit more numerous than anything, beyond the comprehension of his majesty’s army—and that’s no exaggeration!” After describing his victory at the Battle of Megiddo, the stela also describes how Thutmose required tribute of his subjects: “All chiefs of Lebanon built the royal boats in order to sail south in them (and) bring all the precious things of Lebanon to the palace.” 

The same Napata Stela, named after the city of Napata in Nubia to Egypt’s south, tells of Thutmose’s exploits on the southern front, in Nubia where the stela was actually discovered. After describing his victory over the Nubians, it describes how Thutmose also required tribute from his Nubian subjects:

“They pay me (tribute) as one (man), being taxable millions of times in numerous things of the top of the earth, much gold from Wawat, its amount without bounds. One built there for the palace every year Eight-boats and many transporters for the crews, beside the tribute, the Nubians bring ivory and ebony. Precious wood from Kush was brought to me as beams of doum palms and wooden things without number as acacia wood from the Southland. My army made them in Kush, which existed there in millions, besides Eight-boats and many transporters made of doum palms which my Majesty had fetched by force. One built for me in Djahi every year, from genuine cedars of the Lebanon, which were brought to the palace.”

Victory stele of Thutmose III, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Evidence of the tribute being received by Thutmose can be found in the tomb of his vizier, a man named Rekhmire. His Luxor tomb is lavishly decorated and painted depictions of events from his life abound. One depiction shows him making a journey by ship to go receive a decoration from the pharaoh. Perhaps the more historically important image from Rekhmire’s tomb is the depiction of the various people groups who paid tribute to Thutmose III. Among them, the Nubians are clearly identifiable as bringing various African animals that are common to the area then called Nubia. The Syrians are also identifiable by their commonly depicted style in ancient Egyptian imagery. The most interesting group is a group bringing gifts of vases and small statues. The style of dress and hair with which this group is depicted has led many scholars to identify them as natives of Crete, an island that would at that time still have been under the control of the Minoans. Egypt called these people “The People of the Isles in the midst of the Sea,” and the possible connections between Egypt and the Minoans are fascinating theories, but I’m going to leave them until our discussion of the Minoan civilization itself. 

And with that, we’re going to transition from looking at Egypt’s territorial expansion during the New Kingdom, an expansion that relied heavily on the Nile and on the supply routes to the Levantine port cities. Our second and final topic for today involves a woman pharaoh who reigned concurrently with both Thutmose II and III, an Egyptian queen named Hatshepsut. 

Hatshepsut was by far the most successful female pharaoh in Egyptian history and her reign beginning in 1478 BC is seen as peaceful when compared with the reigns of her predecessors. Her reign was a time when Egypt began to reestablish it’s foreign trade connections following the occupation of the Hyksos and the foreign trade hiatus of the Second Intermediate Period. Hatshepsut herself was responsible for a large part of the foreign trade renaissance, and a relief from her temple at Deir el-Bahri gives us some marvelous insight into a voyage that Hatshepsut launched in the ninth year of her reign, so somewhere around 1469 BC.

What’s marvelous about this bas-relief is that it gives us our best information about the land of Punt, since that’s the place where Hatshepsut sent her expedition. Not only is there the information about Punt, but this relief is also important because the intricacy of the relief also gives us a wealth of information about the construction of the ships and even about the type of marine life in the waters which the voyage traversed. The fish in the relief are carved in such detail that modern ichthyologists are able to identify the species of fish that the Egyptian artist intended to depict about 3,500 years ago. 

In it’s entirety, the relief tells a story in several scenes. The first several scenes at the bottom of the relief show the departure of the fleet from Egypt. There appear to be five ships total, three of them still at sail with their square-rigged sails unfurled, while two of them are slightly further ahead and seem to have arrived at Punt; their sails are stowed along the ships’ yards and a smaller boat laden with sacks and large jars is making land after being dispatched from one of the larger ships. The text above the anchored ships described the scene: “Sailing on the sea, and making a good start for God’s Land. Making landfall safely at the terrain of Punt.”

Based on the number rowers aboard one of the ships, 15 to a side for 30 total rowers on each ship, we can estimate that the ships used in Hatshepsut’s voyage to Punt were roughly 23 meters long, or 75 feet. The ships themselves highly resemble the Egyptian ships of previous centuries, ships that we’ve discussed in previous episodes. They each have a hogging hawser to add stability to the hull, while the boom and yard on each ship are curved, possibly to help the sail gain an optimal level of curvature to capture the Red Sea winds while at sail. 

Aside from the depiction of the ships themselves and the marine life they shared the Red Sea with during their voyage, the relief is also important for its depiction of the land of Punt and the goods that Egypt traded for at the far end of their voyage. The scenes in the middle of the relief show Egyptian sailors carrying goods from Punt back to the ships. 

The text describing this scene says that the Egyptians were “loading the ships very heavily with the marvels of the Land of Punt: with all kinds of good herbs of God’s Land and heaps of nodules of myrrh, with trees of fresh myrrh, with ebony and pure ivory.” The list also includes items like gold, wood, incense, animals like baboons and hounds, not to mention the servants that Egypt took back with them from Punt. The scenes depicting the return journey show the ships heavily laden with the goods listed: potted myrrh trees sit on deck, surrounded by full sacks and jars while baboons walk along the hogging truss. In describing the arrival of the fleet at the Karnak Temple at Thebes, the inscription states: “Voyaging and arriving safely, making landfall at Karnak Temple joyfully, by the royal expedition, accompanied by chiefs of this land. They have brought the like of which has not been brought to other kings, from the marvels of the Land of Punt.” 

If you remember your Egyptian and Red Sea geography, you may be wondering how the fleet sailed from the Red Sea over to the Karnak Temple at Thebes, a city that’s located on the Nile. The ‘Canal of the Pharaohs’ that I briefly mentioned last time wasn’t constructed at this point in Egyptian history, so the only feasible possibility is that the ships and the goods they carried were transported across a wadi and back to the Nile. As you’ll remember from our discussion of Egyptian maritime history, this was a common practice dating all the way back to the Old Kingdom, so its a safe assumption that even Hatshepsut’s voyage to Punt did the same thing in the New Kingdom. 

The concluding few scenes of the relief show denizens of the Land of Punt bringing the goods of their homeland before Queen Hatshepsut, bowing down before her and saying “hail to thee, King of Egypt, Lady Ra, shining like the solar disk.” A final interesting tidbit from the Punt voyage relief is that Ramses the Great, a pharaoh who reigned several centuries after Hatshepsut, attempted to remove her name from the relief and put his own in its place, probably in an attempt to claim the glory of the voyage. Despite his best attempts, archaeologists weren’t fooled and we can know for sure that Hatshepsut was the one who was really responsible for the voyage to Punt. If you’re interested in looking at the relief in detail and in seeing a scene-by-scene explanation of exactly what is depicted, the PBS documentary series NOVA has a great breakdown of the relief on their website.

In a project that demonstrates just how advanced ancient Egyptian maritime technology was, in 2009 Cheryl Ward, a maritime archaeologist at Florida State, along with a crew of university students embarked on an 18-day Red Sea voyage aboard a reconstructed Egyptian ship. The reconstruction was largely based on the depiction of ships from the Hatshepsut relief we just discussed, but other information came from fragmentary artifacts discovered at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Mersa Gawasis in addition to the hull measurements of the Dashur boats. The reconstruction was named Min of the Desert, in honor of the Egyptian fertility god depicted on shrines at Mersa Gawasis. The 30-ton ship measured 66 feet long, and the construction techniques are almost exactly like the techniques we’ve seen already in our jaunt through ancient Egyptian maritime history. 

The hull itself was constructed through the use of individual planks fastened by unpegged mortise-and-tenon joints. Linen fiber and beeswax was used as a sealant to waterproof the plank edges of the hull, a technique that isn’t readily evidenced by ancient Egyptian artifacts but is still entirely feasible for them to have used. The square linen sail, the mast and rigging, and the hogging truss are all modeled almost exactly from the depictions of the Hatshepsut Punt ships. The ship also contains two quarter-rudders as are shown in the relief from Hatshepsut’s temple where the rudders are lashed to stanchions to help steer the ship even in a strong wind.

Perhaps the only major difference between the relief and Min of the Desert is the use of rowing oars for propulsion. The reconstructed ship relies mainly on the sail for propulsion, and according to Ms. Ward, even she was surprised by the speed and stability with which the square-rigged sail carried the ship. However, the ship was ultimately outfitted with rowing capabilities, although this would have been used only to maneuver the ship in and out of anchorage positions and not as a main means of propulsion. 

The relief at Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri is generally seen as the best evidence for Egypt’s connection to the land of Punt, and it’s among the most well- known of all Egyptian temple reliefs and tableaus. From Hatshepsut’s voyage forward to the epic clash between the Egyptians and the Sea Peoples, there isn’t a whole lot that’s unique in the way of maritime evidence. Before we wrap up the episode for today, though, I do want to point out one interesting theme that maritime historian Lincoln Paine draws from the Egyptian depictions of Punt.

If you remember our last episode and the supplementary telling of the ‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,’ then you may recall that the serpent on the island with the shipwrecked sailor claimed to be none other than the Prince of Punt. When the sailor attempted to garner the serpent’s favor by promising to lavish him with the riches of Egypt, the serpent laughed at his foolishness, saying that Egypt’s wealth was nothing compared to the wealth of Punt.

Then, in today’s look at Hatshepsut’s voyage to Punt we again saw that even the New Kingdom Egyptians had a high demand for the myrrh and wealth of the Land of Punt, while the natives of Punt were simultaneously depicted as subservient to the awesome Egyptians. Paine points to this theme, Egypt’s desire for eastern wealth while feeling superior to the easterners, as perhaps the first depicted occurrence of a theme that continues to this day. Western nations have continually complained about a wealth of goods coming from the east, cheapening the worth of western produced goods. Modern complaints of trade imbalance come to mind, while medieval and renaissance fascination with the exotic wares of the east also follow this theme. It’s early in the podcast still, and a fair portion of this east/west trade took place on land, but keep an eye out for this theme to crop again in the future. 

Hatshepsut’s voyage to Punt brought us to 1478 BC and from there a few final notable mentions will bring us to a close. The first comes from the tomb of Huy at Qurnet Murai, Thebes. This wall painting is dated to 1360 BC and depicts one ship that is basically the same as the ship depicted in Hatshepsut’s temple. The Huy ship is the same shape, though it lacks the stylized stem and stern. Both ships contain square-rigged sails, quarter-rudders, rowing-oar outfitting, and relatively simple rigging. The main difference with the Huy ships is that their decks contain what seem to be cabin-type shelters, where the ship’s in Hatshepsut’s temple only contained raised portions guarded by railing.

Our second notable mention, mentions really, come from the famed tomb of Tutankhamen. From King Tut’s tomb, Howard Carter pulled 14 different boat models, all of them in pristine condition. Again, while none of these models contain any features that we haven’t already discussed at some point, they make beautiful examples of the way New Kingdom Egyptians decorated their boats and ships. King Tut’s tomb contained small, ceremonial boat models, but one model in particular gives us a full-color glimpse at a ship that is highly similar to the Hatshepsut and Huy ship depictions, even if the model is a bit smaller. Even a boat that we mentioned early on in the podcast, a papyrus reed canoe, was taken from the tomb, showing us that the simplest of boat designs remains in use throughout history.

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And with those last few artifacts from the New Kingdom, our episode today is about out of steam. Although our last item came from 1360 BC, not much changed thereafter until the late Bronze Age collapse began to affect Egypt starting around 1200 BC. From there, the Sea Peoples enter the narrative and the wholesale transition that took place in the whole of the Mediterranean and the ancient world is best left for a series of episodes all to itself. 

Sources

• Bonn-Muller, Eti, Diving into History: Min of the Desert, Archaeology, Vol. 62 (2009).
• Curry, Andrew, Egypt's Ancient Fleet: Lost for Thousands of Years, Discovered in a Desolate Cave, Discovery (6 Sept. 2011).
• Gardiner, Alan H., The Defeat of the Hyksos by Kamōse: The Carnarvon Tablet, No. I, J. Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 3 (Apr.–July 1916), pp. 95–110.
• McGrail, Seán, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (2009).
• Naville, Édouard Henri, The Temple of Deir El Bahari: The north-western end of the upper platform (1894).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Rehak, Paul, Aegean Natives in the Theban Tomb Paintings: The Keftiu Revisited, in Aegaeum 18, pp. 39–50.
• The Kamose Inscriptions.
• The Model Boats of Tutankhamen.
• The Second Stela of Kamose. [Part 1] [Part 2]
• The Viceroy's Boat, Tomb of Huy, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Thutmose III: The Napata Stela.
• Victory stele of Thutmose III, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
• Wachsmann, Shelley, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (2009).
• Ward, Cheryl, Building pharaoh’s ships: Cedar, incense and sailing the Great Green, British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Issue 18 (2012), pp. 217–32.
• Ward, Cheryl, & Chiara Zazzaro, Evidence for Pharaonic Seagoing Ships at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Egypt, Int'l J. of Nautical Archaeology (2009).
• Where is Punt? and The Expedition to Punt, NOVA. [link] [link]
• Wilkinson, Toby, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010).