The Wars in Syria and Palestine of Thutmose III by Donald B. RedfordReview by: Anthony SpalingerJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 124, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2004), pp. 365-366Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132234 .

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Reviews of Books 365

only known from letters, and the sign forms in their letters and graffiti are remarkably similar, pos- sibly because they got so much practice carving on the Theban cliffs!

The paleography itself is well organized and provides the Gardiner sign number in addition to the numbers used in M6ller, Hieratische Paliiographie. The additional pages including inscriptions from Nubia (i.e., Rock Inscriptions of Lower Nubia), Sinai, Wadi Hammamat, and Middle Kingdom Thebes, although very limited in scope, are a useful compilation.

Hopefully, this valuable monograph will be the first of many future publications examining the long neglected paleography of inscriptions left by the ancient Egyptians on the desert cliffs surrounding the lush Nile Valley.

COLLEEN MANASSA NEW HAVEN

The Wars in Syria and Palestine of Thutmose III. By DONALD B. REDFORD. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 16. Leiden: BRILL, 2003. Pp. xvi + 272, plates. $103.

It is always a pleasure to receive a work that is nicely published, excellently written, well argued, informative, and above all original in thought and outlook. This is one of them. The importance of Redford's volume cannot be overstated. After many years of Egyptological research, the author has returned to his earliest phase of scholarship-namely the political history of mid-Dynasty XVIII. In this case, however, his deep understanding of Thutmose III's wars is balanced by a maturity of outlook that could only have been achieved over a lifetime of scholarship.

Redford presents a significant new perspective on the ancient Egyptian war machine, and where he revisits familiar history, for example, Thutmose's Megiddo campaign, he brings up fresh ideas about matters that have hitherto been neglected or overlooked. With attention to detail, he provides both photographs and a helpful facsimile of the main inscription at Karnak. This reviewer, in the midst of writing a study on New Kingdom warfare, immediately appreciated the author's grasp of the logistical nature of warfare, with its problems of planning and timing and the challenge of maintaining large armies. With the exception of Kenneth A. Kitchen's equally important commentary on the battle of Kadesh in his second volume of Ramesside Inscriptions (Oxford, 1996) there has been little investi- gation into the daily activities involved in running Pharaonic campaigns. In all fairness, it can be stated that Kitchen and Redford have simultaneously become interested in crucial questions of military pre- paredness and their implications for the Egyptian empire in Asia, a field that Breasted opened many decades earlier in his studies on the Battles of Megiddo and Kadesh.

Redford's point of view allows the reader to advance step by step with the Pharaoh's army and to consider the possibilities of division size and army personnel. One might quibble with some of Red- ford's mathematical calculations, and his figure of about ten thousand Egyptian troops can be ques- tioned. Yet it remains the case that the writer's knowledge is superb, not just of the official war report (the "Annals") but of the real war.

There will always remain uncertainty as to the date of the battle. Redford, like all previous scholars, has to hypothesize why there is a "missing" day twenty in the war narrative. Whilst accepting Richard A. Parker's analysis of the calendrical implications of the event, but rejecting the famous emendation, Redford has faced up to the difficulty in reconstructing the events surrounding the day before the battle. I might argue that on day twenty, the Egyptian army, now ready at the Qina Brook, waited for the enemy to assemble their chariots. The Egyptians had gone out of their way to arrive through the Aruna Pass, thereby isolating the city and its support troops-the main sector of military opposition-from assistance either to the north or to the south. Yet the enemies met on relatively flat terrain, quite suit- able for the movement of chariots.

When the two armies faced one another, their war vehicles in front and footsoldiers to the rear, it was evident to both commanders that the chariots would have to meet first. (I am not referring to

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366 Journal of the American Oriental Society 124.2 (2004)

surprise attacks, such as occurred at Kadesh under Ramesses II.) In this case it can be argued that the

ensuing chariot melee was at least partly prearranged. I surmise that a show of strength, a combat of charioteers against charioteers, took place with both war leaders fully cognizant of this trial by arms. The famous Karnak War Inscription of Merenptah documents that at least one day elapsed between the arrival of Pharaoh and the battle, although this clash was between his Egyptian chariots and support troops and the Libyan footsoldiers.

I do not claim that this method of fighting is completely parallel to the "duels" between elite mounted troops that were frequent during the High Middle Ages in Europe and in the Near East during the Crusades, and that were not atypical by the eighteenth century A.D., when the guerres en dentelles achieved a developed art of killing people (see Harry Holbert Turney-High, The Military [West Han- over, 1981]). But there is a ludic nature to warfare, which Redford does not explore in his book. If I borrow the term from Johan Huizinga's famous "study of the play element in culture," it is only be- cause the Dutch historian pointed out the delays that would occur when both war parties purposely obeyed a formalized custom in which armies could stand within sight of one another making addi- tional preparations for combat, until a call for honor at a prescribed time and place. There is still an element of ritual in modern warfare (cf. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War [Englewood Cliffs, 1985], 304-5, regarding the French Tunisian "resistance" to the Allied invasion of North Africa).

If one examines the size, mobility, and strength of the chariots of the Late Bronze Age, their fra-

gility and limited usefulness become apparent. They worked best on broad and flat ground; any rocks or hills would have restricted their effectiveness. This is another reason for dating the Megiddo battle to the twenty-first of the first month of harvest (shemu), thereby giving the armies the previous day to

prepare themselves for the chariot encounter. Otherwise, we have to support Faulkner's original emen- dation to eliminate the mysterious "day twenty."

If I have digressed into the problems of chronology and war preparation, it is due to the thought- provoking nature of Redford's work. I found his sections on the Megiddo campaign to be the high- light of the book. While I can quibble with subsidiary points in his presentation, I do not dispute the substance. For example, when Redford addresses the literary aspect of these inscriptions, the analysis tends to be cursory and without the benefit of the work of the modern European school of Egyptology. Hence his claim that Pharaonic encomia have no title has to be rejected (see Spalinger, "New Kingdom Eulogies of Power: A Preliminary Analysis," in Nicole Kloth et al., Es werde niedergelegt als Schrift- stUck [Hamburg, 2003], 415-28). Yet this matter is tangential to Redford's intent. Similarly, the furious debate concerning Egyptian imperialism and its effects upon Palestinian society is better left to cunei- form scholars (Nadav Na'aman in particular) and archaeologists (William Dever). Redford, perhaps since he is an Egyptologist-archaeologist, sides with the latter; but this dispute lies outside the bounds of my review.

I wholeheartedly recommend Redford's study. For me, its concentration upon military affairs has

proved to be inspiring. I am sure that others, whose interests lie elsewhere, will find his historical and

political analyses, especially those concerned with Egyptian imperialism in Dynasty XVIII, of prime importance.

ANTHONY SPALINGER

UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Die datierten und datierbaren Ostraka, Papyri, und Graffiti von Deir el-Medineh. By WOLFGANG HELCK, edited by Adelheid Schlott. Agyptologische Abhandlungen, vol. 63. Wiesbaden: HARRAS- SOWITZ VERLAG, 2002. Pp. 573. 4146.

The rich epigraphic and archaeological material from Deir el-Medina, and the complex, intimate, and even voyeuristic view they often allow into the lives of the royal workmen of New Kingdom Thebes have long captivated both Egyptologists and the Egyptologically interested public. A number

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