The Battle of Troy

The mound Hissarlik in eastern Turkey was thought to be the site of the Homeric Troy.

It was only when a businessman named Heinrich Schliemann, risking his own money, came up with spectacular discoveries as he dug up the mound in 1870, that scholars began to acknowledge the existence of Troy.

The Battle of Troy is now accepted to had actually taken place in 13th century B.C.

It was then, according to the Greek sources, that gods and men had fought side by side: in such beliefs the Greeks were not alone.

In those days, the Aegean Sea were dotted with Greek settlements, Asia Minor proper was dominated by the Hittites.

The decipherment of the Hittite script and their Indo-European language made it possible to trace their origins to the second millennium B.C., when Aryan tribes began to migrate from the Caucasus area—some southeast to India, others southwest to Asia Minor.

The Hittite kingdom nourished circa 1750 B.C. and began to decline five hundred years later.

The Hittites were harassed by incursions from across the Aegean Sea by the people of Achiyawa.

Many scholars believe that they were the very same people whom Homer called Achioi—the Achaeans, whose attack upon the western tip of Asia Minor he immortalized in the Iliad.

For centuries prior to the war of Troy, the Hittites expanded their kingdom to imperial proportions, claiming to have done so upon the orders of their supreme god TESHUB (“The Stormer”).

His olden title was “Storm God Whose Strength Makes Dead.”

Hittite kings sometimes claimed that the god had actually taken a hand in the battle:

“The mighty Stormgod, my Lord,” [wrote the king Murshilis]. “showed his divine power and shot a thunderbolt” at the enemy, helping to defeat it. Also aiding the Hittites in battle was the goddess ISHTAR, whose epithet was “Lady of the battlefield.”

It was to her “Divine Power” that many a victory was attributed, as she “came down [from the skies] to smile the hostile countries.”

Hittite influence, as many references in the Old Testament indicate, extended south into Canaan; but they were there as settlers, not as conquerors. While they treated Canaan as a neutral zone, laying to it no claim, this was not the attitude of the Egyptians.

Repeatedly the Pharaohs sought to extend their rule northward to Canaan and the Cedar Land (Lebanon); they succeeded in doing so.

circa 1470 B.C.. when they defeated a coalition of Canaanite kings at Megiddo.

The Hittites were expert warriors who perfected the use of the chariot in the ancient Near East.

They went to war only when the gods gave the word, that the enemy was offered a chance to surrender peacefully before hostilities began.

After a war was won, the Hittites were satisfied to receive tribute and take captives: the cities were not sacked; the populace was not massacred.

Thothmes III was the victorious Pharaoh at the battle of Megiddo.

He said: “Now his majesty went north, plundering towns and laying encampments waste.”

Of a vanquished king the Pharaoh wrote: “I desolated his towns, set fire to his encampments, made mounds of them; t h eir resettlement can never take place. All the people I captured. I made prisoners; their countless cattle I carried off, and their goods as well.

I took away every resource of life; I cut down their grain and felled all their groves and all their pleasant trees. I totally destroyed it.” It was all done, the Pharaoh wrote, on the say-so of AMONRA, his god. The vicious nature of Egyptian warfare and the pitiless destructiveness they inflicted upon a vanquished foe were subjects of boastful inscriptions.

The Pharaoh Pepi I commemorated his victory over the Asiatic “sand-dwellers” in a poem which hailed the army which “hacked up the land of the sand-dwellers . . . cut down its fig trees and vines . . . cast fire into all its dwellings. killed its people by many tens of thousands.” The commemorative inscriptions were accompanied by vivid depictions of the battle scenes (Fig. 1).

Adhering to this wanton tradition, the Pharaoh Pi-Ankhy, who sent troops from Upper Egypt to subdue the rebellious Lower Egypt, was enraged by his generals’ suggestion that adversaries who survived the battle be spared.

Vowing “destruction forever,” the Pharaoh announced that he would conic to the captured city “to ruin that which had remained.” For this, he stated, “My father Amon praises me.”

The god Amon, to whose battle orders the Egyptians attributed their viciousness, found his match in the God of Israel.

Prophet Jeremiah says: “Thus sayeth the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel:

‘I will punish Amon, god of Thebes, and those who trust in him, and shall bring retribution upon Egypt and its gods, its Pharaoh and its kings.’ "

This, we learn from the Bible, was an ongoing confrontation; nearly a thousand years earlier, in the days of the Exodus, Yahweh, the God of Israel, smote Egypt with a scries of afflictions intended not only to soften the heart of its ruler but also as “judgments against all the gods of Egypt.”

The miraculous departure of the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land was attributed in the biblical tale of Exodus to the direct intervention of Yahweh in those momentous events:

And they journeyed from Succoth and encamped at Etham, at the edge of the desert. And Yahweh went forth before them, by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light. There then ensued a sea battle of which the Pharaoh preferred to leave no inscriptions; we know of it from the Book of Exodus: And the heart of the Pharaoh and his servants was changed with respect to the people. . . . And the Egyptians pursued after them, and they overtook them encamped by the sea. . . . And Yahweh drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and dried up the waters; and the waters separated. And the Children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon dry ground. . . .

At daybreak, when the Egyptians realized what had happened, the Pharaoh ordered his chariots after the Israelites. But: It came to pass at the time of the morning watch that Yahweh surveyed the camp of the Egyptians from the pillar of fire and cloud; And he stunned the Egyptian camp and loosened the wheels of their chariots, making their driving difficult.

The Egyptians said:

“Let us flee from the Israelites, for Yahweh fighteth for them against Egypt.” But the Egyptian ruler pursuing the Israelites ordered his chariots to press on with the attack. The result was calamitous for the Egyptians: And the waters returned, and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of the Pharaoh that was following them; not one of them remained. . . . And Israel beheld the great power which Yahweh had shown upon the Egyptians.

The biblical language is almost identical to the words of a later Pharaoh, Ramses II, used by him to describe the miraculous appearance of” Amon-Ra at his side during a decisive battle fought with the Hittites in 1286 B.C.

Taking place at the fortress of Kadesh in Lebanon, the battle pitted four divisions of the Pharaoh Ramses II against forces mobilized by the Hittite king Muwatallis from all parts of his empire. It ended with an Egyptian retreat, cutting short Egypt’s northward thrust toward Syria and Mesopotamia.

It also drained Hittite resources and left them weakened and exposed. The Hittite victory might have been more decisive, for they had almost captured the Pharaoh himself. Only partial Hittite inscriptions dealing with the battle have been found; but Ramses, on his return to Egypt, saw fit to describe in detail the miracle of his escape. Fig. 2

His inscriptions on temple walls, accompanied by detailed illustrations (Fig. 2), relate how the Egyptian armies had reached Kadesh and encamped south of it. readying themselves for the battle.

Surprisingly the Hittite enemy did not step forward to do battle.

Ramses then ordered two of his divisions to advance toward the fortress. It was then that the Hittite chariots appeared as if from nowhere, attacking the advancing divisions from behind and causing havoc in the encampments of the two others.

As the Egyptian troops began to flee in panic. Ramses suddenly realized that “His Majesty was all alone with his bodyguard”: and “when the king looked behind him, he saw that he was blocked off by 2,500 chariots”—not his own but of the Hittites.

Abandoned by his officers, charioteers, and infantry, Ramses turned to his god, reminding him that he finds himself in this predicament only because he had followed the god’s orders: And His Majesty said:

“What now, my Father Amon? Has a father forgotten his son? Have I ever done anything without you? Whatever I did or did not do, was it not in accordance with your commands?” Reminding the Egyptian god that the enemy was beholden to other gods, Ramses went on to ask: “What are these Asiatics to you. O Amon? These wretches who know nothing of thee, O God?”

As Ramses went on pleading with his god Amon to save him, for the god’s powers were greater than those of “millions of foot soldiers, of hundreds of thousands of chariot-soldiers,” a miracle happened: the god showed up on the battlefield! Amon heard when I called him.

He held out his hand to me, and I rejoiced. He stood behind me and called out:

“Forward! Forward! Ramses, beloved of Amon, I am with thee!” Following the command of his god, Ramses tore into the enemy troops. Under the influence of the god the Hittites were inexplicably enfeebled: “their hands dropped to their sides, they were unable to shoot their arrows nor raise their spears.” And they called unto one another: “This is no mortal who is among us: this is a mighty god; his deeds are not the deeds of a man; a god is in his limbs.” Thus unopposed, slaying the enemy left and right, Ramses managed to escape.

After the death of Muwatallis, Egypt and the Hittite kingdom signed a peace treaty, and the reigning Pharaoh took a Hittite princess to be his principal wife. The peace was needed because not only the Hittites but also the Egyptians were increasingly coming under attack by “Peoples of the Sea”—invaders from Crete and other Greek islands.

They gained a foothold on the Mediterranean coast of Canaan to become the biblical Philistines; but their attacks on Egypt proper were beaten back by the Pharaoh Ramses III, who commemorated the battle scenes on temple walls (Fig. 3). He attributed his victories to his strict adherence to “the plans of the AllLord, my august divine father, the Lord of the Gods.” It was to his god Amon-Ra, Ramses wrote, that the credit for the victories was due: for it was “Amon-Ra who was after them, destroying them.”

Fig. 3

The bloody trail of man’s war against his fellow men in behalf of the gods now takes us back to Mesopotamia—the Land Between the Rivers (Euphrates and Tigris)—the biblical Land of Shin’ar. There, as is related in Genesis 11, the first-ever cities arose, with buildings made with bricks and towers that scraped the skies. It was there that recorded history began; it was there that prehistory began with the settlements of the Olden Gods.

It is a tale of long ago, which we will soon unfold. But right now let us return to a thousand years before the dramatic times of Ramses II in Egypt. Then, in faraway Mesopotamia, kingship was taken over by an ambitious young man. He was called SharruKin—“Righteous Ruler”: our textbooks call him Sargon the First. He built a new capital city, calling it Agade, and established the kingdom of Akkad. The Akkadian language, written in a wedgelike (cuneiform) script, was the mother tongue of all the Semitic languages, of which Hebrew and Arabic are still in use.

Reigning for the better part of the twenty-fourth century B.C., Sargon attributed his long reign (fifty-four years) to the special status granted him by the Great Gods, who made him “Overseer of Ishtar.

Anointed Priest of ANU. Great Righteous Shepherd of ENLIL.” It was Enlil, Sargon wrote, “who did not let anybody oppose Sargon” and who gave Sargon “the region from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea” (from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf).

It was therefore to “the gate of the House of Enlil” that Sargon brought the captive kings, ropes tied to the dog collars around their necks.

In one of his campaigns across the Zagros mountains, Sargon experienced the same godly feat that the combatants at Troy had witnessed. As he ‘“was moving into the land of Warahshi . . . when he pressed forward in the darkness . . . Ishtar made a light to shine for him.”

Thus was Sargon able to “penetrate the gloom” of darkness as he led his troops through the mountain passes of today’s Luristan.

The Akkadian dynasty begun by Sargon reached its peak under his grandson Naram-Sin (“Whom the god Sin loves”). His conquests, Naram-Sin wrote on his monuments, were possible because his god had armed him with a unique weapon, the “Weapon of the God,” and because the other gods granted him their explicit consent—or even invited him—to enter their regions.

Naram-Sin’s principal thrust was to the northwest, and his conquests included the city-state of Ebla, whose recently discovered archive of clay tablets has caused great scientific interest: “Although since the time of the separation of mankind none of the kings has ever destroyed Annan and Ibla, the god Nergal did open up the path for the mighty Naram-Sin and gave him Annan and Ibla. He also gave him as a present Amanus, the Cedar Mountain, to the Upper Sea.”

Just as Naram-Sin could attribute his successful campaigns to his heeding the commands of his gods, so was his downfall attributed to his going to war against the word of the gods.