Latest / Ramses the Great: Egypt's Most Powerful Pharaoh — Fexingo History / Ramses the Great's Hittite Peace Treaty: The World's First
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Ramses the warrior — Kadesh, Dapur, the Sea Peoples — but today I want to look at something he did that was arguably more lasting than any battle: he made peace. Luna: Peace? With the Hittites, I assume? Lucas: Exactly. After the big showdown at Kadesh around 1274 BCE, neither side really won. Ramses claimed victory, but the Hittites under Muwatalli II held the field. Both empires were drained — Egypt had spent decades campaigning in Syria, and the Hittites were dealing with Assyrian pressure to the east. Lucas: So for about fifteen years after Kadesh, there were skirmishes, but no major war. Then Muwatalli died, and his brother Hattusili III eventually took the throne after a civil war. Hattusili needed a stable southern border, and Ramses — well, Ramses wanted his Syrian buffer zone secured. Luna: So both sides had something to gain. Lucas: Right. What's remarkable is the diplomacy that followed. We have actual letters — clay tablets in Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca of the time — exchanged between Ramses and Hattusili. They negotiated for years, haggling over terms, sometimes getting testy. Lucas: And then in 1259 BCE, they signed a treaty. It was inscribed on silver tablets — one for each side — and copies were carved into the temple walls at Karnak and the Ramesseum in hieroglyphs, and on clay tablets in Hattusa in cuneiform. Luna: Wait — we have both versions? That's incredible. Lucas: We do. And they match pretty closely, which is rare for ancient treaties. The Egyptian version is about forty lines of hieroglyphs, and the Hittite cuneiform version is longer but essentially the same. It's a mutual non-aggression pact, with extradition clauses — if a fugitive fled from one empire to the other, they had to be sent back. There's also a mutual defense clause: if either Egypt or Hatti was attacked by a third party, the other would come to their aid. Luna: That's basically a military alliance. Lucas: Exactly. And it was reinforced by a marriage: Hattusili's daughter, Maathorneferure — which means 'she who sees Horus, the visible splendor of the sun' — was sent to Egypt to become Ramses's queen. It sealed the deal. Lucas: Now, the treaty is often called the first in history, but there are older ones — the Sumerians had treaties. Still, this is the earliest one we have from both sides, and it's remarkably sophisticated. It even includes a list of gods from both pantheons as witnesses — a thousand gods from Hatti and a thousand from Egypt, all called upon to enforce it. Luna: Did it actually hold? Lucas: It did, for the rest of Ramses's reign and beyond. The peace lasted about a century, until both empires weakened and new powers arose. Hattusili and Ramses even continued writing friendly letters afterward — we have one where Ramses asks Hattusili to send him a physician to help his sister conceive a child. So there was genuine cooperation. Luna: That's a far cry from the propaganda we saw in the scarab episode. Lucas: Absolutely. Ramses's official version always painted Kadesh as a triumph, but behind the scenes, he was a pragmatist. The treaty was carved onto his temple walls not as a boast of victory, but as a record of a diplomatic achievement — and maybe as a reminder to the gods that he had kept Ma'at, the cosmic order, by securing peace. Lucas: Today, a copy of the treaty actually hangs in the United Nations headquarters in New York, as a symbol of early international diplomacy. It's a remarkable legacy for a pharaoh we usually think of as a warrior. Luna: It really reframes how we see him. Lucas: It does. And speaking of that — you know, a couple of dollars a month from listeners is genuinely what keeps these conversations going. If you've gotten something out of the show, especially these deep dives into figures like Ramses, consider throwing a couple of bucks at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It makes a real difference. Luna: Yeah, it's a small thing that adds up. Lucas: So, back to the treaty — one thing I love is the human detail. The silver tablet itself hasn't survived, but from the temple copies we can see that the treaty opens with a grand preamble, then lists the terms, then invokes the gods. It's almost modern in structure. Luna: And it really worked. No major wars between Egypt and Hatti for a century. Lucas: Right. And that peace allowed both empires to focus on internal projects. For Ramses, it meant he could build like crazy — the Ramesseum, the additions to Karnak, the temples at Abu Simbel. Without the Hittite threat, he could pour resources into monuments that still stand today. Luna: So maybe his greatest achievement wasn't a battle at all. Lucas: Maybe not. The Treaty of Kadesh shows a side of Ramses we don't often see: the diplomat, the realist, the man who knew when to stop fighting and start building. And in the end, that treaty outlasted his empire.