The Peace That Outlasted the War

In the thirteenth century BC, the Battle of Kadesh became the stuff of legend before it ever became the stuff of peace. In 1274 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt marched four divisions of troops into Syria, hoping to crush the Hittite presence there and restore Egypt to the dominance it had known under Tuthmosis III. Outdistancing his own army, he was ambushed near the city of Kadesh on the Orontes River by the forces of Hittite king Muwatalli II, who had gathered allies to defend his territory. The Amun division was scattered by a surprise chariot assault, and only the arrival of reinforcements from Amurru saved Ramesses from disaster. Neither side achieved a decisive victory — though Ramesses' scribes, who controlled every inscription carved into Egyptian temple walls, made sure history would remember it as a triumph.

The battle settled nothing. For roughly fifteen more years, Egypt and Hatti remained locked in inconclusive conflict, the latest chapter in tensions that stretched back nearly a century, to when the Hittites had displaced the kingdom of Mitanni as the dominant power in central Syria and absorbed the Egyptian vassal territories of Kadesh and Amurru. Egyptian pharaohs never fully accepted that loss. Ramesses' own father, Seti I, had briefly reclaimed Kadesh in battle, only to relinquish it again in a subsequent treaty — a pattern of gains won and lost that defined the era.

What finally changed the equation wasn't victory but exhaustion, and a shared sense of looming danger. Egypt watched the growing threat of the Sea Peoples on its borders; the Hittites eyed the rising power of Assyria to their east. Neither empire could afford to keep bleeding into an endless Syrian stalemate. So, in the twenty-first year of Ramesses II's reign — 1258 BC — intermediaries negotiated a settlement between the two courts, this time with Ḫattušili III now ruling in Hatti. The two monarchs, remarkably, are believed to have never met face to face.

The result was what we now call the Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty, sometimes loosely called the Treaty of Kadesh even though the city itself is never mentioned in its text. It is also known as the Eternal Treaty or the Silver Treaty, the latter name a clue to its true origin: the surviving inscriptions were copies of original tablets made of silver, since lost, that had been exchanged between the two courts.

The treaty survives today in two independent versions, an extraordinary rarity for the ancient Near East. Ramesses had the Egyptian text engraved in hieroglyphics on the walls of two temples in Thebes — the Ramesseum and the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak — where the scribes even reproduced descriptions of the seals and figures stamped on the Hittite tablet delivered to Egypt. The Hittite version turned up far to the north, in the royal archives of Hattusa, the Hittite capital in what is now central Turkey, inscribed on baked clay tablets.