Battle of Megiddo (1457 BC): Thutmose III's Great Victory

The Battle of Megiddo was fought around 1457 BC between the Egyptian army of Thutmose III and a coalition of Canaanite and Syrian rulers led by the king of Kadesh, near the city of Megiddo in northern Canaan. After a daring march through a narrow mountain pass, Thutmose routed the coalition and then besieged Megiddo for about seven months until it surrendered. It is the first battle in history described in enough detail for historians to reconstruct how it was fought.

Background

In the 16th century BC the kings of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty had driven out the Hyksos and pushed Egyptian influence into Canaan and Syria. During the long co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, however, Egypt fought few major wars in the north, and the powerful kingdom of Mitanni, centred in northern Syria, gained influence over the local city-states.

When Hatshepsut died, around 1458 BC, many of these city-states rebelled. The king of Kadesh, a city on the Orontes River in Syria, gathered an alliance of rulers and their armies at Megiddo. The city controlled the main route between Egypt and Mesopotamia, where the coastal road crossed the Carmel ridge into the Jezreel Valley, so whoever held it controlled the region’s trade and communications.

Megiddo itself was an old and wealthy city built on a mound, or tell, formed by the remains of many earlier settlements. It had strong walls, a palace and temples, and overlooked the fertile fields of the Jezreel Valley, which could feed a large army.

The march north

The size of the armies is not recorded. Modern estimates for the Egyptian force usually range from about 10,000 to 20,000 men, including chariotry and infantry, and the coalition was probably of similar size. Both sides relied on the two-horse chariot carrying a driver and an archer, the decisive weapon of the Late Bronze Age.

Thutmose III, now ruling alone, moved quickly. According to his annals, he left the border fortress of Tjaru (Sile) on the eastern edge of the Nile Delta and reached Gaza about ten days later, on the anniversary of his coronation. From there the army marched north to Yehem, south of the Carmel ridge.

At Yehem the king held a council of war. Three routes led to Megiddo. Two were wider roads that went around the ridge to the north and south, reaching the plain near Djefti and Taanach. The third ran straight through the narrow pass of Aruna, where, as the officers pointed out, the army would have to march in single file, horse behind horse, and the leading troops could be attacked before the rear arrived.

The Aruna pass

The annals record that the officers urged the king to take one of the safer roads. Thutmose refused, declaring that he would go by Aruna, and that any officer who wished could follow the other roads. He then led the army through the pass himself, at the head of his troops.

The decision paid off. The coalition had expected the Egyptians on one of the easier routes and had placed troops to block them near Taanach and to the north. The Egyptian army came out of the pass unopposed and camped beside the brook of Qina, south of Megiddo, in the evening. Thutmose waited for the rear of the column to arrive before giving battle.

The battle and the siege

The next morning Thutmose drew up his army in three wings, with himself in the centre in a chariot of gold and electrum. The coalition forces, caught facing the wrong way and outmanoeuvred, broke and fled towards the city. The gates of Megiddo had already been closed, and the defenders hauled fleeing soldiers, including the kings of Kadesh and Megiddo, up over the walls by their clothes.

The annals frankly criticise the Egyptian troops for what came next. Instead of storming the city at once, they stopped to plunder the enemy camp. The chance of an immediate capture was lost, and the king had to lay siege to Megiddo. His army surrounded the city with a moat and a wooden palisade and waited.

The siege lasted about seven months. Finally the rulers inside surrendered, coming out to swear loyalty to the pharaoh. The king of Kadesh, however, escaped, and Kadesh itself would hold out against Egypt for many years.

Spoils and numbers

The annals list the booty taken at Megiddo, as copied from the army’s records. The figures are given by the Egyptians themselves and may be exaggerated or incomplete, but they are unusually precise for the ancient world.

The list also records armour, bows, cattle, sheep and goats, and the harvest of the surrounding fields, which the army gathered to feed itself. The modest number of prisoners suggests that most of the coalition’s men escaped into the city or fled.

How we know about it

The main source is the record of the campaign in Thutmose III’s annals, carved on the walls around the sanctuary of Amun at Karnak. The text says it was based on a daily journal kept on a leather roll by the scribe Tjaneni and stored in the temple. Shorter accounts appear on stelae from Gebel Barkal in Nubia and Armant in Egypt.

Like all royal inscriptions, the annals were written to glorify the king, and the council of war in particular may be shaped to show his courage. Still, the route, places and logistics fit the geography of the region well, and historians such as Harold Nelson and Donald Redford have used them to reconstruct the campaign in detail.

Consequences

The fall of Megiddo gave Egypt control of Canaan for the rest of the Late Bronze Age. Thutmose installed loyal rulers, took their sons to Egypt as hostages and future vassals, and led further campaigns almost every year, culminating in his crossing of the Euphrates in his 33rd year. Kadesh remained a centre of resistance, and two centuries later Ramesses II would fight the Hittites there in the Battle of Kadesh.

Megiddo’s strategic position kept it a battleground. Its name, as Har Megiddo, became Armageddon in the Book of Revelation, and in 1918 the British general Edmund Allenby fought the Battle of Megiddo against Ottoman forces in the same valley, taking his title from it.

Timeline

• c. 1458 BC: Hatshepsut dies; Thutmose III rules alone and Canaanite rulers gather at Megiddo.
• c. 1457 BC, spring: Thutmose leaves Tjaru and reaches Gaza about ten days later.
• c. 1457 BC, spring: At Yehem the king chooses the route through the Aruna pass.
• c. 1457 BC, spring: The Egyptians defeat the coalition outside Megiddo.
• c. 1457 BC, late in the year: Megiddo surrenders after a siege of about seven months.
• c. 1446 BC: Thutmose crosses the Euphrates on his eighth campaign.
• 1913: Harold Nelson publishes a detailed study of the battle.

Why it matters

The Battle of Megiddo is the earliest battle for which a detailed, near-contemporary account survives, giving a rare view of Bronze Age strategy, logistics and siege warfare. It launched Thutmose III’s career as a conqueror and established the Egyptian empire in the Levant that would shape the region’s politics for the next two centuries.