The Wars in Syria and Palestine of Thutmose III.

• Author: Spalinger, Anthony
• Position: Book Review

The Wars in Syria and Palestine of Thutmose III. By DONALD B. REDFORD. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 16. Leiden: BRILL, 2003. Pp. xvi + 272, plates. $103.

It is always a pleasure to receive a work that is nicely published, excellently written, well argued, informative, and above all original in thought and outlook. This is one of them. The importance of Redford's volume cannot be overstated. After many years of Egyptological research, the author has returned to his earliest phase of scholarship--namely the political history of mid-Dynasty XVIII. In this case, however, his deep understanding of Thutmose III's wars is balanced by a maturity of outlook that could only have been achieved over a lifetime of scholarship.

Redford presents a significant new perspective on the ancient Egyptian war machine, and where he revisits familiar history, for example, Thutmose's Megiddo campaign, he brings up fresh ideas about matters that have hitherto been neglected or overlooked. With attention to detail, he provides both photographs and a helpful facsimile of the main inscription at Karnak. This reviewer, in the midst of writing a study on New Kingdom warfare, immediately appreciated the author's grasp of the logistical nature of warfare, with its problems of planning and timing and the challenge of maintaining large armies. With the exception of Kenneth A. Kitchen's equally important commentary on the battle of Kadesh in his second volume of Ramesside Inscriptions (Oxford, 1996) there has been little investigation into the daily activities involved in running Pharaonic campaigns. In all fairness, it can be stated that Kitchen and Redford have simultaneously become interested in crucial questions of military preparedness and their implications for the Egyptian empire in Asia, a field that Breasted opened many decades earlier in his studies on the Battles of Megiddo and Kadesh.

Redford's point of view allows the reader to advance step by step with the Pharaoh's army and to consider the possibilities of division size and army personnel. One might quibble with some of Redford's mathematical calculations, and his figure of about ten thousand Egyptian troops can be questioned. Yet it remains the case that the writer's knowledge is superb, not just of the official war report (the "Annals") but of the real war.

There will always remain uncertainty as to the date of the battle. Redford, like all previous scholars, has to hypothesize why there...