Page 323 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

270 The Argosies
[137O-13O° b.c.]
family and spent much of his time in the deltalands. He was
ambitious, too, to use the efficient army which his father and
Horemheb had built up, and to confirm in the eyes of his people
his divine right to the throne by regaining the empire to the
northeast which had been lost under Akhenaten fifty years be­

fore. After a punitive campaign against marauding raiders from
Libya in the west, he crossed the frontier into Palestine.
It was a young men’s expedition. The Egyptians of the ex­
queen’s generation, who had seen revolution and civil war and

religious persecution in their youth, had no enthusiasm for a
venture which at best must temporarily disrupt business and at
worst could lead to an exhausting war with the powers in the
north. But the young men and the professional soldiers were
eager to try out in action the new system of independent bri­

gades, each bearing the name of one of the gods and each
equipped and supplied to operate alone. And the mechanized
divisions with their squadrons of heavy chariots were believed to
be a match for anything the northerners could produce, even for

the iron-armed regiments of the Hittites.
In the end, though, no pitched battle was fought. The
independent tribes of Palestine offered no resistance and the
army marched along the coastal plain of Canaan into southern

Lebanon. There, at the end of long and as yet unestablished
fines of communication, they met the outpost troops of the
Hittite provinces of north Syria, and indecisive skirmishes con­
vinced Seti that further advance would be expensive and in­

conclusive. It would take time to reorganize the reconquered
province of Palestine. He concluded a peace with the emissaries
from Aleppo, acting for King Mursilis II of the Hittites, and
established the frontier between the two powers just north of

Beirut.
The young soldiers grew to middle age in the following ten
years of peace and minor skirmishes along and behind the new
frontier. But it was no longer a peace of exhaustion with war;

it was rather a period of avowed preparation. From the Hittite
country came reports of the successful campaigns of Mursi is
against his insurgent frontier provinces to the west, north, an