Ahmose the Soldier

Like little boys all over Egypt, Ahmose had been reared on old stories of mighty battles, villainous foreign invaders and courageous Egyptian heroes. Growing up in the Upper Egyptian town of el-Kab, Ahmose had a special connection to the legends: His father, Baba, a professional army officer, had actually fought in some of these battles and could relate them blow by blow to the wide-eyed child. The villains of these tales were the dreaded Hyksos, a Semitic people whose homeland was across the Sinai in Asia. Their name derives from an Egyptian term meaning roughly “rulers of foreign lands.” In some respects, the Hyksos were as advanced as the Egyptians. And in at least one way—making war—they were far superior.

The Hyksos brought with them new and powerful weapons unknown to the Egyptians. Their spearpoints, arrowheads, and battle-axes were forged from bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that gave a harder, more lethal edge than copper alone. Hyksos archers, moreover, carried composite bows made of laminated strips of wood, horn, and sinew that could fling their bronze-tipped missiles twice as far as wooden bows. Even more intimidating, the Hyksos wielded their weapons from mobile platforms—horse-drawn chariots that darted swiftly in and around enemy soldiers fighting on foot.

With these advantages, it is not surprising that the Hyksos expanded their territory and eventually took over all of Lower Egypt. The Hyksos also cut off Egypt’s source of gold by concluding an alliance with Kush, the Nubian kingdom far up the Nile that had long been considered Egypt’s domain. What a humiliating turn of events this must have been for such a proud people, to be reduced from the pinnacle of the ancient world to a weakened realm only a few miles wide stretching from Thebes south to Aswan.

In all truth, the Hyksos turned out to be relatively benign occupiers—and were eventually accepted as legitimate rulers by many Egyptians. They took pains not to disturb the cultural status quo of Egypt and, in fact, adopted local ways themselves, such as hieroglyphic writing and traditional Egyptian titles in their royal court. Upriver in Thebes, however, resentment continued to grow while foreign intruders, those “vile Asiatics” remained on Egyptian soil.

From their stronghold in Avaris in the Nile Delta, the Hyksos rulers heaped indignities on poor Egypt—or so it was described in the stories told the young Ahmose. He had certainly heard the tale of the greatest insult of all. According to this story, the Hyksos king Apophis decided to taunt the Egyptians in Thebes. He demanded that Seqenere Tao II, the Egyptian prince at Thebes, do away with the royal hippopotamus pool because the noise of the animals disturbed his sleep. Left unsaid was the fact that the hippo pool was hundreds of miles from Apophis’s royal bedchamber.

Although the story was probably untrue, this or some similar outrage proved the last straw for Thebes. The city finally erupted in open revolt. Seqenere became the first of a new breed of Egyptian warrior kings whose courage fueled the nationalistic fires of young Ahmose’s generation. The boy’s father, Baba, fought alongside Seqenere in the first battles of the rebellion. Then, in about 1587 BC, the brave Seqenere was killed in action, his skull shattered by one of the newfangled bronze Hyksos battle-axes.

The slain king’s son, Kamose, took up the fight with patriotic fervor, vowing to his royal ministers, “I will grapple with him and rip open his belly, for my desire is to deliver Egypt and to smite the Asiatics.” True to his word, Kamose attacked down the Nile and destroyed Hyksos power in middle Egypt. It is possible that he was killed in one of these engagements; all that is known for sure is that he reigned for a very short time. His widowed mother, Ahhotepp, kept up pressure on the Hyksos for more than a decade until Kamose’s younger brother was old enough to ascend the throne.

By this time, Ahmose had grown into a young man. He enlisted in the army according to the time honored practice of taking his father’s place. His first assignment as a soldier illustrated the new strength and versatility of the Egyptian army. Ahmose was posted aboard The Wild Bull, a ship rigged with rectangular flaxen sails, and manned by a crew of up to 30 rowers to propel it when the wind failed. Vessels like The Wild Boar patrolled the Nile and transported troops, supplies and weapons. Crewmen had to be able to fight either on water or on land, leaping off their ships when necessary to go into combat as bowmen or spear-carrying infantry. Ahmose and his brothers-in-arms were, in effect, one of the earliest examples of the elite fighting force known today as marines.

To prepare for the coming showdown with the Hyksos, Ahmose and his fellow recruit underwent rigorous training. They practiced advancing under archery fire against specially constructed “enemy fortifications.” They learned how the various components of the army could work together most effectively, with bowmen providing covering fire while assault teams rushed forward with ladders to scale the walls and battering rams to splinter the gates.

By chance, the first king Ahmose served had the same name—a familiar one in those days meaning “the moon is born.” This was Ahmose I, the son of Seqenenre Tao II and Ahhotep and younger brother of Kamose. King Ahmose I was a young adult when he took the field, and his army likewise was coming of age. The ranks now included increasing numbers of career soldiers like Ahmose as well as units of mercenaries like the Medjay, crack Nubian archers whom the Egyptians had recruited from the desert east of the Nile.

Just as important, Egyptian troops now possessed bronze-tipped weapons, composite bows, and even a few chariots—all copied from Hyksos gear captured in battle. Body armor in the form of overlapping scales stitched to linen or leather sleeveless jackets provided the rank and file with some protection over their traditional combat garb of short kilt and breechcloth. They also borrowed from the Hyksos the idea of wearing leather helmets instead of the customary shoulder-length wigs.

About 1560 BC, the climactic campaign against the Hyksos began. Ahmose I and the army pushed northward along the Nile, landing periodically to fight and burn enemy property. They captured Memphis, Egypt’s largest city, and then turned eastward to besiege the Hyksos capital. In his tomb autobiography, Ahmose the common soldier states: “I followed the sovereign on foot when he rode in his chariot. When the town of Avaris was besieged, I fought bravely on foot in His Majesty’s presence.”

The weapons of Ahmose’s day, with their bronze tips and blades, were more lethal than those soldiers had employed previously, but tactics hadn’t changed a great deal since the time of the Old Kingdom. The Egyptians first bombarded the Hyksos army with long-range archery, then the infantry charged in to grapple hand to hand with the foe. Niether side gave nor expected any quarter in this kind of fighting. Soldiers who fell wounded and could not crawl to safety would be dispatched without mercy by the enemy, for wounded prisoners were of no use either as conscripts or slaves.

In close-quarter fighting near Avaris, Ahmose “carried off a hand,” meaning he killed an opponent and then severed his hand to bring before the scribes who compiled the body count. He also leaped into the Nile, capture an enemy soldier, and towed him to shore. For both of these acts he was awarded Gold of Valor—the golden ornaments customarily bestowed for bravery in combat.

The Battle of Avaris was a smashing victory: the Egyptians sacked the city, then chased the surviving Hyksos eastward across the Sinai into Palestine. After a three-year siege, the Hyksos’ last stronghold fell to King Ahmose’s army. “Now when His Majesty had slain the nomads of Asia,” Ahmose’s autobiography reads, “he sailed south to destroy the Nubian Bowmen.”

For most of the journey up the Nile, Ahmose and his fellow crewmen could rest on their oars while the prevailing wind from the north moved them along, even against the current. The difficult part of the passage to Nubia began south of Aswan at the so-called First Cataract—a stretch of swift, un-navigable rapids. The crew had to jump out and, under the grueling desert sun, haul the boats by hand through and around six miles of mu bin, the Egyptian term for “bad water.”

Two hundred miles upstream the river-borne army reached the Second Cataract, site of the great fort at Buhen, built five centuries earlier during the middle Kingdom. They easily recaptured it from it from the Kushite defenders. “His Majesty made a great slaughter among them.” Ahmose recorded enthusiastically. “His Majesty journeyed north, his heart rejoicing in valor and victory. He had conquered southerners, northerners.”

Egypt was fully liberated by 1546 BC, when Ahmose I died at about the age of 35, but the other Ahmose soldiered on to help create an empire. His ship carried King Amenhotep I, son of Ahmose I, into battle against the Kushites south of the Second Cataract. “I was the head of our army: I fought really well,” bragged Ahmose. He took two hands during this fighting and presented them to the king, and was named to the highly honored rank of Warrior of the Ruler.

In one of his final campaigns about 1520 BC, Ahmose again sailed southward behond the Second Cataract. The new pharaoh Tuthmosis I, felt the need to teach the ever-rebellious Kushites another lesson. Ahmose’s bravery in the king’s presence—“in the bad water, in the towing of the ship over the cataract”—bought promotion to crew commander of the ship.

According to Ahmose’s autobiography, King Tuthmosis killed the enemy ruler with his own arrow. Then, as a lesson to anyone who might be tempted to defy Egypt’s new imperial power, Tuthmosis had the corpse tied to his royal ship and sailed home with, as Ahmose’s inscription read, “that wretched Nubian Bowman head downward at the bow.”

Ahmose retired from the army not long afterward. He had soldiered for nearly half a century, and his faithful service to the pharaohs had been well rewarded. Besides receiving Gold of Valor on seven separate occasions, he was also given slaves—nine males and 10 females who had been confiscated from the enemy—and substantial grants of land located near his hometown of el-Kab. In addition, his illustrious career paved the way for his own family’s achievement: A son-in-law and grandson became tutors at the pharoah’s court, and the grandson was also appointed the mayor of el-Kab. Ahmose had his autobiography inscribed in painted relief covering the will of his tomb in the limestone cliffs near el-Kab. It endures as the only surviving personal account by a common soldier from those turbulent days, and stands as a fitting conclusion to the exciting stories of villainy and heroism that he had first heard as a boy.

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