The Walls That Recorded The End Of A World

The carvings on the walls of Medinet Habu are still there.

At the temple complex on the west bank of the Nile, near what was once Thebes, the Pharaoh Ramesses III commissioned the most ambitious victory monument of his reign — an extended pictorial narrative of the battles he fought, carved and painted in the high relief style that ancient Egyptians used to make their history permanent.

The carvings are damaged now, the paint long gone from most surfaces, the faces of figures occasionally chipped away by iconoclasts of various periods.

But the essential story survives.

It is a story of catastrophe, or rather of catastrophe averted — of an Egypt that came to the edge of destruction and, in Ramesses III’s telling, was pulled back by the king’s personal courage and divine favor.

On one wall, the naval battle of the Nile Delta.

Egyptian galleys packed with archers engage strange ships, crewed by warriors in feathered headdresses that the Egyptians found alien enough to record in detail.

Men fall into the water.

Soldiers fight on the decks of ships that are shown lashed together or capsizing.

The sea itself is depicted as crowded with bodies.

On another wall, the land battle in the region the Egyptians called Canaan.

More warriors in feathered headdresses, shown in organized formations with wagons and ox-carts — an entire people on the move, with women and children in the carts, clearly not just a raiding party but a migration.

Egyptian soldiers engage them.

The outcome, as Ramesses wished it recorded, was an Egyptian victory.

The hieroglyphic texts accompanying these images give us names.

The Peleset.

The Tjeker.