Peace (7 page)

Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs further backed pacific uses of Pharaonic authority and power by fusing the temporal, physical conditions of control and influence with eternal, spiritual meanings and purposes. For the first time on record, and far from the last, peace thus became an explicit
religious imperative
where it may have been only an implicit one before. In keeping with this principle, Pharaohs realized early on that rallying the support of their subjects and gods in pursuit of immediate physical and everlasting spiritual peace could be greatly facilitated by representations as far from ephemeral as possible – one reason why, as Egyptologists today hold, the Pyramids were not and could not have been built solely by slaves. “The Great Pyramids are not only impressive monuments to the kings who built them; they are even more imposing as monuments to an age of peace and security.”
²
Although this statement plays up oppressive peace, the construction of the first pyramid at Memphis under the Pharaoh Djoser (
c
. 2668–49) nonetheless marks a sharp turning point in the history of Western peace. From the Pyramid Age onwards, Western religious rulers and activists alike have almost universally tied spiritual peace to the physical world and peace on earth to the spiritual world through more or less lasting symbols of collective beliefs. However, recent research indicates that the history of peace in Ancient Egypt predates the Pharaohs. Predynastic unification by social, economic and political conciliations set precedents Pharaohs sidestepped only at their peril.

Pharaohs' position as religious mediators between spiritual and physical worlds reflected and enhanced their roles as conciliators between what became Upper and Lower Egypt. In this context,
conciliation
can be understood as overcoming apprehension, making compatible and/or settling disagreements by mutually beneficial arrangements. Archaeologists speculate that the peoples of the Nile passed through three distinct conciliatory phases culminating in the unification of Ancient Egypt under the dynastic rule of Pharaohs. During the first phase, complete by 5000 BCE, three separate societies developed along the Nile: one centered at This, the other two at Naqada and Hierakonpolis, respectively. In the second phase, ending a millennium later, rulers of these capitals strengthened and secured their respective dominions. How This gained control of the whole Nile over the course of the third phase remains unknown, but the “annexation of neighboring territories must have involved negotiation and accommodation at the very least,” a supposition backed by an as of yet unexplained dearth of coercive force in the formation of the unified Egyptian state
c
. 3000 BCE.
³
The conciliatory dynamics of predynastic Egypt ultimately led to the unified Pharaonic state, calling into question the assumption that warfare is inevitable in state formation. Whatever forms they took, and only further research can tell, social, political and economic conciliations were so effective in uniting Upper and Lower Egypt, they superseded the use of coercive force past and future potentates frequently found necessary or desirable. The ruling families at This steered Upper and Lower Egypt into a twin state system, and like that of the two worlds, its unified existence depended on peace among its parts.

The divisions Egyptologists ascribe to the Dynastic periods correlate to the
unitive peace
Pharaohs were able to achieve. Early and Old Kingdoms Pharaohs further advanced conciliation in their administrative practices. Titles such as “The Two Powers are at Peace” and evidence that Pharaohs paid foreigners for domestic peacekeeping, presumably to avoid pitting Egyptian against Egyptian, suggest that they tried to limit friction in centralizing power. To concentrate channels of power from the top downwards and from the centre outwards, the capital was established on the border of the two lands. Legitimization thus took on centrifugal tendencies, whereas in Mesopotamia they had been centripetal. Thanks to these efforts, one emphatic historian claims this was a time of “unexampled prosperity for Egypt, a supremely tranquil time of peace.”
⁴
A rhetoric of peace also developed, as both official and lay records of the age are “full of praises of peace and almost pacifist formulations.”
⁵
A didactic work on statecraft, for example, posits: “If you are a leader of peace, listen to the discourse of the petitioner.”
⁶
Similarly, the refrain of a poem in a prominent magistrate's autobiography reads “This army returned in
peace”– not in victory or defeat.
⁷
So while armies no doubt did exist, their primary purpose may have been to keep the peace rather than to break it.

Seven centuries of unitive peace ended when Upper and Lower Egypt split in only one or two generations. Archaeologists surmise that an ecological catastrophe created a hungry, riotous population that remained so for another seven centuries in the First Intermediate Period. If
pacification
is taken to mean the creation or restoration of peace by coercive appeasement and forced submission, the assassination of the first Pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom is a sign that he was perhaps too great a pacificator. By paradoxically waging domestic wars to bring back unitive peace, Amenemhet I achieved his ends but also met his. He promulgated oppressive peace by pacification in
The Teaching of King Amenemhet I to his son Senusret
, who like his successors “reaped the benefit of the peace and prosperity” of previous reigns. That this policy was a constant throughout the period can be surmised in its capital's name, “Seizer of the Two Lands,” and of its only woman and last Pharaoh, “Beauties of Sobek,” a god whose cult was dedicated to pacifying crocodiles.
⁸
She died without an heir and the ensuing scramble for succession started the disarray of the Second Intermediate Period, ending with the Hyksos' successful invasion and foreign rule. Native rulers of Thebes carried out campaigns to liberate Egypt, resulting in a reunified New Kingdom with them as Pharaohs. Cyclic nadirs of divisive decline followed by pinnacles of prosperity repeated in the Third Intermediate Period and Late Kingdom, proving unitive peace was essential to the survival of the Pharaonic state.

However, two developments in Egyptian internal and external affairs require attention at this point. Theban domestic peace policies took on reconciliatory tones before liberation was complete, distinguishable from conciliation in that
reconciliation
has the benefits and drawbacks of established precedents. As mentioned, such precedents included religious, cultural, social, political, economic and administrative conciliations. New and Late Kingdom Pharaohs re-achieved unitive peace by reconciliation, not conciliation. The trouble with attempting internal conciliation with such a considerable reconciliatory toolbox at hand is exemplified in the rapid rise and fall of Atenism, the first known attempt at a universal monotheistic religion. According to an early twentieth-century appraisal of Atenism's first and only prophet, the Pharaoh Akhenaton (
c
. 1352–36 BCE): “When the world reverberated with the noise of war, he preached the first known doctrine of peace. . . He was the first Pharaoh to be a humanitarian.”
⁹
Had this been true, he and Atenism would probably not have been almost completely erased from the official records soon after his death. Historians today claim that Akhenaton brought about the downfall of Atenism himself by working against the grain of Egyptian religious traditions while heightening instead of resolving tensions
between the kingdom's centre and periphery. Along these lines, Akhenaton outlawed local languages and forced the adoption of the contemporary Egyptian one throughout the reunified kingdom. Akhenaton's linguistic policies mirrored his religious ones: in the past, new or renewed gods were henotheistically or syncretically absorbed into extant traditions rather than displacing them outright. The sun god Aten appears in centuries-old texts, and so could have been used to further religious reconciliation. Akhenaton's attempt to impose Aten as the two kingdoms' one and only god was thus at best misguided. At worst, his conciliatory policies de-reconciled his people from their deities and each other, shaking the very foundation of unitive peace between the two worlds as between the two kingdoms.

The second notable development is that, as part of their foreign peace policies infused with lessons from the past, New and Late Kingdom Pharaohs created buffer zones between their territory and those of potential invaders by establishing extra-territorial trading posts, diplomatic outposts, way-stations and even permanent settlements, all of which were required to pay tribute to the Pharaoh. This tributary system was an important economic means of supporting oppressive peace and reconciliation within the kingdoms. But it was also vital in maintaining cross-border control in serving “to pay respect, to display deference, to give an earnest of peaceful intentions, and to placate the distant and more powerful sovereign in the hope that peace will continue to prevail.”
¹⁰
The system's strength was its creation of bonds of loyalty and protection between distant and different peoples; its weakness was that these bonds were themselves weak despite the dependencies they created. Due in part to the system's effectiveness, a relative unimportance of warfare to Pharaohs' foreign policies is discernable in their outdated arms and ritualistically docile tactics compared to better equipped and fiercer foreign contemporaries. But this military asymmetry also explains how first the Libyans then the Nubians conquered Egypt. Their failures in sustaining foreign rule where Pharaohs' tributary systems succeeded show that, then as now, military might alone is not enough to guarantee post-war peace.

The historic actions of one Pharaoh make clear how this peace principle can be and was applied. Ramses the Great (
c
. 1279–13 BCE) is said to have lived to be 96 years old, had some 200 wives and concubines, 96 sons and 60 daughters. His prowess in familial affairs is of direct import to peace. As in past and later times, marriages between rulers and the installation of their children in high posts were key means of preserving the socio-political stability oppressive peace required, especially after successful foreign wars, even at the risk of rivalries that could lead to civil war. The import of actual or symbolic kinship ties on diplomatic relations is clear in a letter sent by Ramses to another ruler: “Know that in
the true condition of
peace and fraternity
in which I now am with the great King of Khatti, I will abide therein for all eternity.”
¹¹
This avowal is verbatim to one made by his wife to a queen she calls her “sister,” in which she describes the “situation of true peace and true fraternity of the great king, the King of Egypt, with the great king, the King of Khatti, his brother.”
¹²
The coordinated rhetoric implies an unprecedented, consciously concerted campaign for peace, which Ramses coupled with first-time war tactics in the earliest major military campaign for which extensive records exist. He was in his twenties when he succeeded his father, whose battlefield exploits he experienced firsthand and emulated. They taught him that quick, successful battles or the appearance thereof could further the cause of post-war peace, a climax of which was the Battle of Kadesh (
c
. 1285 BCE) against Hittites over whom the King of Khatti later ruled.

If the “major problems in war and politics are how to end a battle and how to end a war” then Ramses' solutions in this case were groundbreaking.
¹³
During the battle, he revolutionized military logistics by introducing the quicker ox-drawn cart instead of standard donkey-drawn ones, probably in an attempt to provide faster aid to the injured so as to limit casualties as well as to hasten the battle's end. Although it was indecisive, both sides came to realize that the rise of Assyria demanded a coalition to be deterred, so enemies became allies to offset a common threat. The peace treaty between Ramses and the Hittite King that inaugurated this alliance has been called “the first diplomatic instrument of international high policy that human archives have preserved to us,” negotiated by plenipotentiaries about fourteen years after the battle.
¹⁴
Many conflict-ending and alliance-forming agreements had been reached in the past. What makes this post-war peace treaty the first is its articulation of conciliatory and collaborative intents both to end present hostilities as well as to foster peace in the future:

Present Treaty – Then Khattusil, the great chief of Khatti, has himself made a treaty with the great ruler of Egypt, Usermara-Setepenra, to date from this day to establish a real peace and a real fraternity between us for ever. And he is in fraternity with me and at peace with me, and I, I am in fraternity with him and at peace with him for ever. . .

And the children's children of the great chief of Khatti shall be in fraternity and at peace with the children's children of Rameses-Meriamon, the great ruler of Egypt, being in our position of fraternity and peace. And the land of Egypt with the land of Khatti is at peace and in fraternity, and hostilities shall exist no more between them ever.
¹⁵

Displaying a narrative flexibility considered unpardonable by later writers of peace treaties, the texts are identical except in their attribution of peace
initiatives, which each side claims in their version. One likely reason for the discrepancy is that making both rulers heroes of peace in their peoples' eyes greatly assisted in gathering support for the alliance on either side, strategically instating foreign peace while safeguarding it domestically. “For the first time, to our knowledge, in the world's history men awoke to consciousness of the advantages of universal peace and felt the benefits of a common policy,” which lasted fifty years.
¹⁶