Extensive treatment of this pivotal figure in the ancient Mediterranean world

In the course of his thirty-two-year reign over ancient Egypt, Thutmose III fought an impressive seventeen campaigns. He fought more battles over a longer period of time and experienced more victories than Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar did. Despite Thutmose III's surprisingly illustrious record, his name does not command the same immediate recognition as these highly visible military leaders. In Thutmose III, Richard Gabriel deftly brings to life the character and ability of ancient Egypt's warrior king and sheds light on Thutmose's key contributions to Egyptian history. Considered the father of the Egyptian navy, Thutmose created the first combat navy in the ancient world and built an enormous shipyard near Memphis to construct troop, horse, and supply transports to support his campaigns in Syria and Iraq. He also reformed the army, establishing a reliable conscript base, creating a professional officer corps, equipping it with modern weapons, and integrating chariotry's combat arm into new tactical doctrines. Politically, he introduced strategic principles of national security that guided Egyptian diplomatic, commercial, and military policies for half a millennium and created the Egyptian empire. Through these crowning achievements, Thutmose set into motion events that shaped and influenced the Levant and Egypt for the next four hundred years. His reign can be regarded as a watershed in the military and imperial history of the entire eastern Mediterranean.

A comprehensive, illuminating and accessible assessment of Egypt's policy in Syria and Palestine (15th century B.C.).

Thutmose III was the king of Egypt between circa 1458 and 1425 BC, after inheriting the throne from his father Thutmose II and his aunt Hatshepsut, however, after Hatshepsut died Thutmose III claimed to have been the king of Egypt throughout Hatshepsut’s reign, meaning his regal years began circa 1479 BC when his father Thutmose II died. This attempt to erase Hatshepsut as a king of Egypt was likely not personal, as he did not attempt to usurp her authority during his life, but more likely an attempt to restore the respect for the kingship that appears to have been lost while Hatshepsut was on the throne. The graffiti of Hatshepsut dressed as the king and having sex with a man found near her mortuary temple clearly shows that she was not respected the way the previous god-like pharaohs had been, and Thutmose III was almost certainly trying to erase what many Egyptians viewed as a distasteful episode of their history. Ironically, her mortuary temple is viewed as one of the greatest architectural monuments of the New Kingdom and served as the basis of all later mortuary temples of the New Kingdom. Thutmose III did not attempt to erase Hatshepsut’s existence from Egyptian history, just her kingship, and she was still spoken of fondly as the ‘queen’ and ‘favorite wife of Thutmose II.’ Her reign seems to have been one of contracting frontiers, as Egypt appears to have lost control of Syria early in her reign, which Thutmose III quickly reversed, launching an invasion of Syria within his first year on the throne. This was the legendary Siege of Megiddo, against the king of Kadesh and his Syrian allies, inscribed in detail in the Annals of Thutmose III at Karnak. The details of the battle inscribed at Karnak were copied from Thutmose III’s scribe Tjaneni’s journal and is a far more detailed account than the subsequent list of battles and plunder taken during Thutmose III’s subsequent invasions of Northern Canaan and the Mitanni Empire in modern Syria, or his campaign against the Nubians. The Capture of Jaffa is another battle reported to have taken place during Thutmose III’s reign, although is generally considered a fictionalized account, as it was found with a copy of The Doomed Prince which is considered ancient Egyptian fiction. How much of the Capture of Jaffa is considered fiction, and how much is historical has been a matter of debate, largely because of the similarities to Homer’s account of the Battle of Troy. The surviving copy of this text was discovered on a papyrus scroll dating back to the Ramesside Period, hundreds of years before Homer wrote the oldest surviving account of the Trojan War. Moreover, the Capture of Jaffa is set centuries before the Trojan War, and while there is a similar story of soldiers being hidden inside a tribute taken into the city, the stories are different overall. Moreover, given Capture of Jaffa appears to have been a popular enough story that it was being copied in Egypt at the time of the Trojan War if the story of the wooden horse actually happened, the Achaeans may have gotten the idea from the Capture of Jaffa.

In Ostraca from the Temple of Millions of Years of Thutmose III, Fredrik Hagen publishes an important new collection of texts illustrating life in an Egyptian temple.

The tombs and mortuary temples of Thebes have proved an enduring topic of interest thanks to a quickly expanding corpus of field materials and a series of conferences devoted to the subject. This volume, the fourth in a series of occasional proceedings from the ongoing Theban Workshop, presents new research on wall decoration in the Theban necropolis. Its thirteen essays, by an international array of leading scholars, attest to the wide and varied scope of the theme.

Five hundred years before Homer immortalized the Trojan Horse, the ancient Egyptians had already composed a tale of soldiers hiding Ali Baba-like in baskets to capture a besieged city. Shortly after the rise to power of the warrior pharaoh Ramesses II, Egyptian authors began to write stories about battles and conquest. However, these stories were not set in the present, but in the past: they were the world's first works of historical fiction. These literary recreations of past events, which preserve fascinating mixtures of fact and fiction, provide unparalleled information about topics as diverse as ancient Egyptian historiography, religion, and notions of humor and wit. Imagining the Past is the first volume to provide complete translations and commentary for the historical fiction composed during Egypt's New Kingdom. The four works include The Quarrel of Apepi and Seqenenre, The Capture of Joppa, Thutmose III in Asia, The Libyan Battle Story. An introduction explores Egyptian conceptions of the past, the universe of historical and literary texts in New Kingdom Egypt, and the definition of a new genre of Egyptian literature. Extensive commentary and new translations appear within each chapter, and a concluding analysis summarizes the audience and function of historical fiction as well as theology and historiography within the tales. Despite the fragmentary nature of the papyrus copies, the thorough research into the literary, political, and social context of each tale allows a modern reader to explore this forgotten literary subfield and appreciate the stories as works of historical fiction.

Tel Maresha is located in the foothills of Israel's Judaean Mountains. It was established in the Iron Age II (circa 700 BCE) and is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Josh 15:44; I Chron. 2:42). But it was mainly a Hellenistic-period town - a major Idumean political and administrative center. One of the unique and fascinating aspects of Maresha is its subterranean city - hundreds of underground galleries and chambers filled to the gills with artifacts. This volume is a report of the excavations of one of these rich subterranean complexes - SC 169 - which contained a full corpus of Hellenistic pottery forms - both local and exotic altars, figurines, amulets, seals and seal impressions, hundreds of inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic, coins, jewelry and much more. These finds tell the story of an affluent cosmopolitan society comprised of Idumeans, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Jews, who lived together in a vibrant urban setting until the city was destroyed, probably by the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom in 104 BCE.