Hige sceal þe heardra heorte þe cenre mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað

One of the many confusing things about the battle of Kadesh is what the two contestants were doing. Its difficult to determine this because so many of the facts are in doubt, and most analyses seem to be starting with the texts. I have been thinking about this from a wargamer’s point of view though (and assuming that both Rameses and Muwatallis were reasonably competent), and these are my initial thoughts.

Rameses is fairly easy I think. He was advancing up to try and retake Kadesh from the Hittites, as a traditionally Egyptian vassal. He had an army of 4 (or possibly 5) corps, each a combined arms formation and each travelling separately to make most efficient use of bronze age logistics. Most of the army was moving up the central valley system, but at least one corps appears to have taken the coast road with orders to advance up the Eleutheros valley to Kadesh. So far, this is a demonstration of good strategic generalship. Rameses then makes two mistakes. One is a fundamental failure of generalship – he appears to not be using scouts. The other is too much self-belief. When he captures two Bedouin who tell him that the Hittite army is miles to the north at Tunip because Muwatallis is scared of him, he falls for it hook, line and sinker. With commendable zeal he decides to take advantage of the situation and try to reach and take Kadesh before the Hittites move south. He advances rapidly with the Amun division and pitches camp to the north west of Kadesh, maintaining both his lines of communication but also giving himself advance warning of any Hittite advance. If the Hittites had been at Tunip it would have been a masterstroke of seizing the initiative.

Unfortunately for Rameses, the Hittites were not at Tunip and the whole thing was a trap set by Muwatallis as far as we can tell. The Hittites were already at Kadesh. And here the Hittites take the initiative and we need to start trying to understand what Muwatallis’ plan was so that we can understand what his strategy is.

First, the strategy. Muwatallis starts the campaign with a key advantage. He already holds Kadesh and assuming that Kadesh is the key objective, all he needs to do is avoid anything happening and he has won this year. However if all he does is avoid a battle and endure a siege then he will have surrendered the initiative and Rameses will be back next year and the year after. So he needs to have a plan to defeat Rameses. But given the rough equivalence of the two armies, the last thing he wants is a straight-up pitched battle where he has everything to lose and nothing to win. Normally you only fight if you seriously outnumber the enemy or if you are forced to. No-one bets on a 50:50.

So Muwatallis must have a plan to eliminate Rameses’ army without risking an even battle. And if he thinks that Kadesh will be the objective there seems to be one obvious strategy, which is to lure Rameses into a siege of Kadesh and then hit his army while it is deployed in siege lines facing Kadesh. That way it won’t be concentrated or formed up. But he needs to time this just right so the Egyptians have had time to invest Kadesh but not time to build any kind of defences to protect their siege works from external attack (defences to protect from sallies from the defenders will always come first). So this means that he must have his army near to Kadesh to spring the trap quickly.

So, lets examine the initial deployment. Muwatallis must know that Rameses is young, and he obviously knows something of his personality to have set the bait he did. But for the trap to work, he can’t assume that Rameses will do no scouting at all. So the Hittite camp must have been reasonably well concealed from the probably Egyptian line of march and scouting – merely being on the other side of Kadesh and hidden by the mound seems a little superficial. So lets assume that the Hittite camp was actually a fair distance beyond Kadesh, possibly hidden by a rise in the ground. Given that and the proximity of Kadesh, it is plausible that Muwatallis and the other kings and notables, rather than camping in the field, would have imposed themselves on the hospitality of the king of Kadesh instead. So when Rameses arrives on day 9, we have Muwatallis in Kadesh and the bulk of his army possibly a couple of hours walk (and it is walking then) away.

So a sequence of events like this could then have played out:

On the afternoon of Day 9, Rameses arrives with Amun and camps on the west side of Kadesh. Muwatallis observes this from Kadesh and sends out some foot scouts in the afternoon/evening. 2 are captured by Rameses who learns the awful truth that Muwatallis is already here and rather than leaping forward to seize Kadesh, he is on his own with only 5,00o men and a Hittite army 3 or 4 times larger on his doorstep.

That evening Rameses sends his vizir south to rouse the corps of P’Re and get them to his aid as soon as possible. Again, its probably going to take a good few hours to find P’Re by which time they will have camped for the night. Even with the urgings of the vizir, breaking camp and forming up for march in the middle of the night will be a long and exhausting affair and the corps will be in no condition to fight the next day. So almost certainly the corps commander will decide to get a night’s sleep, break camp as normal in the morning and then rush to make up time by marching as fast as possible the next morning. Tactically sound decision given the information he has, but in the event potentially disastrous.

Muwatallis now has a dilemma. The original plan was to wait for Rameses to invest Kadesh and then attack his siege lines. But now he has been given an even better opportunity. Rameses appears to have sent a single corps of the Egyptian army forward on its own. This is a chance to attack that at an advantage of 3 or 4 to 1, which is the odds any commander would take. But possibly he needs more information. Maybe this is a counter-trap of Rameses? Surely he can’t have been so rash as to send a single corps up unsupported. We can assume that he has other scouts who are not captured, but maybe the information he gets from his scouts is not enough. He might have Rameses where he wants him, but he might not. How many Egyptian troops are in the camp? How well prepared are they? Is Rameses there, or is it a vanguard and he is with the main body? In order to answer some of these questions, he sends a message to the camp, ordering his elite Hittite chariotry to perform a reconnaissance in force the next morning. I suspect that their orders are to sweep round the Egyptian camp on the plain from south to north, driving in any foraging parties and seeing what reaction they get from the Egyptians (and if there are any other Egyptian camps on the plain). I still go with the theory that this is a scouting force because if it were a fully developed attack then there would have been supporting infantry (above and beyond chariot runners). I feel that Bronze Age armies were combined arms armies where the infantry and the chariotry had complementary roles and needed each other (as the Hittites would find out later in the day).

Next morning (Day 10) the two forces set out on their different missions. P’Re is desperate to make up lost time (and avoid the wrath of Pharoah) so don’t bother with scouts as the march up a track parallel to the forest. The Hittite scouting force (and I go here with the sources that claim that this was probably a lot smaller than the 2,500 claimed by Rameses) moves south west from the camp and crosses the Orontes and then its tributary, covered by the woods, and somehow not spotting the dust raised by 5,000 rapidly moving Egyptians. As they come out of the wood, they see the line of the Egyptian column along the road ahead of them. At this point they have been spotted. If they turn and retreat they will be caught in the wood and against the river as they try and ford again and slaughtered. They make the instant decision to trust to surprise and momentum and break through the thin Egyptian column and onto their open plain beyond where they can use their mobility. They charge forward and smash through the line, scattering the centre of P’Re. Total confusion reigns for the Egyptians. It is easy to see how the rest of P’Re could easily imagine that an entire Hittite army had just caught them. The tail of the column retires back to their camp of the previous night. The centre flees across the plain. The van accelerates towards the camp of Amun to warn Rameses that the Hittites have started the battle with an audacious ambush, rather than a chance encounter that has actually just occurred.

The Hittite column sweeps northwards across the plain as ordered. I imagine that having swept through P’Re so easily they are feeling very confident. Ahead they see the camp they are supposed to be scouting (or testing the defences of). Whether they are over-confident and assume that all the Egyptians are a push-over, or whether they are in on Muwatallis’ plan and decide to expedite its execution, or whether the think the camp is ill-defended, or whether they are tempted by Pharoah’s treasure is immaterial – they sweep in to attack the camp. Initially they are successful but gradually the Egyptians regroup and they lose their momentum. At this point their lack of supporting infantry becomes a major issue.

In Kadesh, this is the first that Muwatallis realises that the plan has come apart. He can see his elite chariots becoming embroiled in a battle without supporting infantry. He knows that chariotry alone cannot prevail against a combined-arms army. He sends messages to his camp to order the full army to come forth for a battle, but he knows that it will take hours for them to arrive. Rameses at this point stresses that it is him alone who defeats the entire Hittite army, but it is almost certainly the superior staying power of the Egyptian infantry against the exhausted Hittite chariotry.

Meanwhile, Muwatallis can see that the tide is turning against his chariots. The only force he has to hand in Kadesh is his retinue and those of the kings who are staying there with him. Quickly he orders them to form a relief force and rescue the Hittite chariots. Together, he correctly estimates that these two forces should be enough against a single Egyptian corps, even though they are still lacking in infantry (and he can’t risk leaving Kadesh completely undefended).

His scratch force rides forth and enters the fray. At this point, fate intervenes and the Ne’arin, the Amurru Canaanites (or possibly Egyptian corps that had taken the coast road) appears on the scene. This is something neither Rameses or Muwatallis could have forseen, since if local they have been raised here and if Egyptian they must have split from the main host days earlier, but they are enough to prevail over the Hittite forces, who are forced to flee to the safety of Kadesh, losing large numbers in attempting to cross the river. At this point the Hittite army appears from their camp. They are too late though. They arrive at the river, as seen in the Egyptian reliefs, but any attempt to advance across will be suicidal without chariot support and the Hittite chariot forces are in no shape to resume offensive action. At the same time, Rameses’ forces are also disorganised and exhausted. It would be equally suicidal for him to attempt a crossing in the face of a mass of fresh enemy infantry. Both sides withdraw, lick their wounds and regroup. Muwatallis still holds the key strategic asset of Kadesh.

At each stage, everyone in this narrative has made sensible and reasonable decisions using the information they had at the time, and the result is the confused mess of a battle that we see in the accounts, with the most bizarre aspect, the total lack of impact of the Hittite infantry, explained.

Some distances from the Osprey (the best source we have at the moment 🙂

From the tree line to the line of march of P’Re is 0.5 miles, which is about 800 metres or 1040 paces or 13 barkers. If the chariot flank guards are 240 paces from the column and 80 paces wide, the tree line is 720 paces from the flank guards.

The whole column is 2 miles long, including baggage. This is 3200 metres or 4160 paces or 52 barkers. Given that there are 26 elements in the line of march (see below, minus 3 chariot elements on each side as flank guards), that means that if they are evenly spaced there should be 2 barkers from the front of one element to the front of the next element. To be generous we will put the SG in the middle to front of the column, so he can command as much as possible but not be killed by the Hittite attack.

The P’Re corps is a single command, with 5000 infantry and 500 chariots:

1 Sub General – Reg Cv(S)

9 Chariots – Reg Cv(S)

8 Close Fighters – Reg Bd(F)

8 Bowmen – Reg Bw(O)

2 Libyans – Irr Ps(I)

2 Nubians – Irr Ps(O)

2 Baggage Train – Reg Bge(I)

For a total of 42 ME (Disheartens on 10.5, breaks on 14).

In the actual battle it looks like it is disheartened but doesn’t actually break as the chariots from it continue to fight with Amun and the remnants rally during the night.

The Amun corps is also a single command, but we will give it more baggage than normal to reflect the royal princes and all the royal accessories. So it will have the same as P’Re but 8 Reg Bge(O) and 2 Reg Bd(O) as the Sherden Royal Guard. Thus its ME will be 50 (disheartens on 12.5, breaks on 16.6).

We could regard the baggage in the Amun camp as the army baggage but the Osprey seems adamant that P’Re also had baggage and it would make sense for each corps to have its own baggage as they were advancing and camping separately (the Osprey makes a good point that in mainly pastoral country in the bronze age 20,000 men would find it very hard to forage whereas 4 groups of 5,000 would find it much easier).

Update from last night after the game. The attack on the marching column (stretching over the first 5 feet of the table) worked very well with the Egyptians on the road so they could all march. The Hittites need to hit in the middle of the column though, so that not more than three Egyptian chariots escape for free to the north. The road also needs to bend to the north-east (towards Kadesh) for the last 3-4 feet of the board.

The camp also worked well with each side 7 barkers wide – 3 TF then a 1 base gap for the gate then 3 TF. Total of 24 TF for the outer wall. The inner zone was 3 barkers wide – TF then gap then TF on the east and west sides, 3 TF on the north and south. Total of 8 TF for the inner wall.

Next SoA Battle Day

Egyptian palisades

First cut of the camp.

Kadesh – what was Muwatallis up to?

Kadesh Stats

Stiff neck…

Second game

Centre command disheartened

First game

Army packed