Nicky Nielsen tells the story of a battle that supercharged the rise of Egypt’s greatest warrior-pharaoh – at a city that would for centuries be linked with the end of the world
The King of Kadesh knew that he had gambled both his position and his life. Not only had he instigated a revolt against the Egyptian pharaoh, Thutmosis III, but he had also allied with Egypt’s enemy, the kingdom of Mitanni. More perilous still, he had left the safety of his own stronghold in Syria.
In the spring of 1457 BC, the king had led an army south to the fortress city of Megiddo on the outskirts of the Jezreel Valley in what is now northern Israel. And there he formed an alliance with the prince of Megiddo, another disgruntled vassal of the Egyptian empire. Their combined Canaanite army numbered perhaps 20,000 soldiers.
The rebel commanders were confident in victory. Their scouts had informed them that Thutmosis had left Egypt at the head of an army not much larger than their own. And they had a trump card: the city of Megiddo itself. This heavily defended settlement at the foot of Mount Carmel controlled the vital trade route that ran from Egypt along the Mediterranean coast towards the cities of Tyre and Byblos.
The rebels knew that Thutmosis, desperate to put down their uprising before it gathered an unstoppable momentum, would launch an attack on Megiddo. What they didn’t know was where that attack would come from. There were three routes to get to the city, and only two of those were practicable for an army as large as Thutmosis’s. Knowing the terrain, the Canaanite rulers placed strong forces at the head of the two most likely routes, intending to slow down the Egyptian king and degrade his army before he even reached their encampment beneath Megiddo’s imposing battlements.
We do not know where the Canaanite rulers were as they prepared for battle on an April morning in 1457 BC. Perhaps they were inspecting their troops or dining in one of Megiddo’s sumptuous palaces. But whatever they were doing, their plans changed radically at the arrival of one of their scouts, panic clouding his eyes. The scout collapsed and forced out his dreadful message. The Egyptian king had taken the third route, the one no one believed possible. His army was intact, and he was now taking up battle positions only a few miles from Megiddo itself. One of the most significant battles of the late Bronze Age was about to begin.
Groomed for power
Thutmosis III is often referred to as the Napoleon of ancient Egypt – and he certainly did spend much of his life engaged in campaigns of conquest across the near east. He was the son of King Thutmosis II, who died after a short reign. In his place, Thutmosis II’s sister-wife, Hatshepsut, took the throne as regent. She reigned for more than two decades while Thutmosis III came of age.
Far from being the stereotypical wicked stepmother, Hatshepsut seems to have genuinely cared both about her stepson’s upbringing, and his ability to take sole power upon her death. Not only did she consent to Thutmosis serving as her co-regent, she also appointed him to lead the Egyptian military when he reached maturity. The army’s support was essential for any king. By seeing to it that Thutmosis had the loyalty of Egypt’s soldiers, Hatshepsut ensured that his succession to sole kingship upon her death was peaceful and uncontested.
Thutmosis was in his early twenties when his stepmother died, and even though the transfer of power within Egypt was orderly, the ascension of a new ruler often caused tensions on the international stage. During the late Bronze Age, Egypt maintained an intricate system of vassalage across the province of Canaan (modern-day Israel, Palestinian territories and southern Syria). Local rulers, mayors, princes and petty-kings were obliged to pay tribute to the pharaohs under threat of invasion, and serve as a buffer zone between Egypt and those empires who rivalled its military powers.
When a new pharaoh ascended to the throne, those vassals would often become fractious. And so it proved with Thutmosis III. “That wretched enemy of Kadesh has come and has entered into Megiddo,” reported The Annals of Thutmosis III, a series of texts engraved in the Karnak Temple in Luxor. “He is there at this very moment. He has gathered to him the princes of every foreign country which had been loyal to Egypt, as well as those as far as Naharin and Mitanni…”
Up for the fight
If the rebels expected Thutmosis to be hesitant because of his age, then they had misjudged their man. The young pharaoh was neither inexperienced nor timid. He gathered his armies at the vast Egyptian border fortress of Sile on the edge of the western Nile Delta, and, accompanied by chariots and infantry numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men, he set out across the Sinai peninsula towards Megiddo.
The most pressing issue for Thutmosis once his army left Egypt, was how to get to Megiddo without suffering heavy casualties. The pharaoh summoned a council of his generals and asked their opinion. They informed him of the two main roads that led from their position on the coast to Megiddo: “One of the roads – behold, it is to the east of us, so that it comes out at Taanach. The other – behold, it is to the north side of Djefti, and we will come out to the north of Megiddo.” But there was a third route. A short cut led through the Mount Carmel ridge along what today is known as Wadi Ara. Then known as the Aruna Pass, this offered the most direct route to Megiddo. But it was narrow, in some places so narrow that soldiers could only pass through it in single file. That made it a perfect place for ambushes.
Thutmosis’s generals feared that if their enemies anticipated an Egyptian move through the Aruna Pass, they would be able to destroy the entire army by trapping it in the narrow ravines. “Let our victorious lord proceed on the one of them which is satisfactory to his heart,” the generals pleaded with their king. “But do not make us go on that difficult road!”
Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Perhaps it was the recklessness of youth. Or maybe he realised that, if his generals believed the Aruna Pass to be an impossible route, then so would his enemies. Either way, Thutmosis gave the order his officers did not want to hear. The Egyptian army would take the treacherous third option. We can imagine the soldiers passing in silence as they led their horses along the pass in single file. As the rocky path was not suitable for the chariots’ thin wooden wheels, Thutmosis’s troops were forced to dismantle and carry them. Scouts were dispatched to seek out enemy ambushes. Thutmosis’s gamble paid off. There were no enemies waiting in the Aruna Pass.
The rebel commanders had simply not considered that the Egyptian pharaoh would be reckless enough to take this perilous road. They had instead split their forces in three. One section waited by the southern road. Another by the northern road. The third, and largest, contingent positioned itself in front of Megiddo. Frontal attack A tidal wave of panic washed over the rebels as Thutmosis arrived at Megiddo. The Egyptian army was so large that it took seven hours for the force to exit the Aruna Pass and take up positions in the shadow of the city. Thutmosis himself emerged at the head of his troops, resplendent like the deity Horus, in a golden chariot. He then set about taking personal charge of the centre of the Egyptian army, ordering a frontal attack on the Canaanite troops who stood with the walls of Megiddo at their back.
The Annals of Thutmosis III report that the Egyptian charge broke the alliance instantly: “Then [the enemy] saw his majesty prevailing over them, and they fled headlong to Megiddo with faces of fear. They abandoned their horses and their chariots of gold and silver so that someone might draw them up into this town by hoisting on their garments.”
The citizens of Megiddo had wisely shut their gates to prevent the Egyptians from pushing straight through the Canaanite line and into the city. But this meant that the only retreat possible for the rebel leaders was via ropes and lengths of cloth thrown down from the ramparts.
Thutmosis no doubt intended to annihilate the enemy forces in front of the city. But his troops, bolstered by their easy victory, ignored the king’s orders and instead attacked the enemy camp, looting and plundering. Thutmosis temporarily lost control of his soldiers, and this allowed a large part of the enemy army to climb to safety inside the city.
A city under siege
What should have been a quick battle now turned into a protracted siege. Siege warfare was in its infancy during the late Bronze Age, and the Egyptians possessed neither catapults nor trebuchets to batter down the walls of Megiddo. Instead, Thutmosis ordered the rebellious town enclosed. A moat was dug to encircle it, and trees were felled to construct a palisade all the way around the city. Its citizens were trapped within. Starvation, Thutmosis decided, would win the day. It took seven months before Megiddo was ready to surrender. The King of Kadesh slipped back to his Syrian stronghold. But the other leaders of the rebellion came out, crawling towards Thutmosis on their bellies, begging his forgiveness and offering tribute.
Thutmosis had pulled off a remarkable victory – at a moment when the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Defeat at Megiddo might have meant death for the young king at a time when his heir was a newborn. Such an outcome would have resulted in chaos and infighting at the Egyptian court. It might have destabilised the state entirely. Victory, however, put the entire ancient near east on notice that the new Egyptian pharaoh was of an expansionist mindset and did not intend to sit at home in Egypt. With his Canaanite enemies in disarray, Thutmosis was able to launch repeated raids, invasions and conquests across the near east in a series of campaigns that would establish his reputation as the greatest Egyptian warrior-king. The plunder from these – horses, cattle, slaves and tons of gold – enriched Egypt so much that his successors could undertake grand building projects, many of which remain standing to this day.
The significance of the 1457 BC battle of Megiddo, then, cannot be overstated. But it wasn’t the only clash fought in this corner of Canaan. The city was the scene of dozens of battles through the ages, including one in the final months of the First World War, when Allied troops defeated German-Ottoman forces, earning the British general Edmund Allenby the title of Viscount of Megiddo.
Megiddo even entered biblical history. When describing the prophesied end of the world, the Book of Revelation mentions a gathering of the kings of the world at a place that in Hebrew is pronounced har magiddô (‘the mountain of Megiddo’): or, as it is more commonly known: Armageddon. The significance of Thutmosis’s victory, as well as the dozens of other clashes fought for this prized piece of land, led to the belief that the most important battle of all – the one that would end the world – would also take place at Megiddo.
Those trapped inside the city during the seven-month siege of 1457 BC may well have believed that they were being exposed to something akin to Armageddon. Thutmosis III would, no doubt, have seen it as a springboard to greatness.
Nicky Nielsen is a senior lecturer in ancient Egyptology at the University of Manchester
This article first appeared in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine