Battle of Kadesh

The Battle of Kadesh was fought in about 1274 BCE beside the Orontes River in western Syria, between the Egyptian army of Pharaoh Ramesses II and the forces of the Hittite king Muwatalli II. It is the earliest battle whose tactics and formations can be reconstructed in some detail, and it was probably the largest chariot battle ever fought. Neither side won outright, and the struggle it belonged to ended years later in one of the oldest surviving peace treaties.

In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, the New Kingdom of Egypt and the Hittites of Anatolia competed for control of the city-states of the Levant. Kadesh, a fortified city near today's border between Syria and Lebanon, had passed into the Hittite orbit. Early in his reign Ramesses II set out to win back Egypt's lost influence in the region. In his fourth year he brought the coastal kingdom of Amurru over to the Egyptian side, and the following spring he marched north towards Kadesh.

Ramesses led four divisions named after the gods Amun, Ra, Ptah and Set, plus a separate force that seems to have approached along the coast. Muwatalli had gathered troops from across his empire and from many allies and vassals. Modern estimates commonly suggest something like 20,000 men on the Egyptian side and perhaps more on the Hittite side, with several thousand chariots in total, but all such figures are uncertain. Egyptian chariots were light and carried two men; Hittite chariots carried three.

According to the Egyptian accounts, two men captured near the city claimed that the Hittite army was still far to the north. Believing this, Ramesses hurried ahead with the Amun division and set up camp near Kadesh. In fact Muwatalli's army was hidden behind the city. Hittite chariots crossed the river, struck the Ra division while it was still on the march, scattered it, and then fell on the Egyptian camp. Ramesses, by his own record, rallied his bodyguard and led repeated charges. The arrival of the separate Egyptian force, and the fact that many Hittite troops had turned to plundering the camp, allowed the Egyptians to recover. On the following day there was further fighting, which appears to have been indecisive.

Ramesses returned to Egypt without taking Kadesh, and the Hittites kept control of the region and even extended their influence southwards. Egyptian temple inscriptions nevertheless presented the battle as a great personal victory for the pharaoh. Historians generally regard it as a draw at best for Egypt, and in strategic terms a Hittite success.

Fighting between the two powers continued for some years. Around 1258 BCE, Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III concluded a formal peace treaty, versions of which survive in both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets from the Hittite capital, Hattusa. The treaty set out mutual non-aggression and support, and was later sealed by a marriage between Ramesses and a Hittite princess. A copy of the agreement hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The battle is unusually well documented from the Egyptian side. Ramesses had his version carved on the walls of several temples, including Abu Simbel, Karnak, Luxor and the Ramesseum, as a long poem and a shorter prose bulletin, with reliefs showing the camp and the chariot fighting. Hittite sources mention the campaign only briefly. Because the Egyptian accounts were royal propaganda, historians treat their details with caution.

Our 1500 BCE map shows the Hittites and the New Kingdom of Egypt as the rival powers of the Near East, two centuries before the battle; by the 1000 BCE map both had passed their height.