Original subtitles

May 19, 1 458 BC.

A rebel warlord challenges the might of Egypt.

The two greatest armies the ancient world has ever seen are ready to fight.

The fate of Egypt lies in the hands of its young Pharaoh,

who has never before seen battle.

lf the rebels win, Egyptian civilisation will crumble.

This is a true story.

The chronicle of this epic struggle

was carved into the stone walls of the Temple of Karnak

over 3,500 years ago.

lt records how a pampered prince was transformed by war

and turned his kingdom into an empire.

He became Egypt's greatest warrior Pharaoh,

Tuthmosis lll.

For a generation,

Egypt's three million people have lived in peace and prosperity.

Most are farmers and fishermen

living along the fertile banks of the river Nile.

Ahmose was a peasant farmer whose family worked this land together.

Their life follows the changing seasons.

Egyptians marry young.

Ahmose

Ahmose's wife is just 16.

They expect that one day their children will take over from them and work the fields.

But Ahmose's life is about to change.

The sacred ibis are an omen of danger.

200 miles away, in the capital, Thebes,

Queen Hatshepsut, a female Pharaoh, is dead.

While the country mourns, Egypt's enemies are gathering.

The prince of Kadesh, an embittered Syrian warlord,

is whipping up revolt among the tribes of the North.

For decades they have struggled under the yoke of Egypt

and her imperial ambitions.

With 150 mutinous princes behind him,

Kadesh plans to invade Egypt and crush the power of the Pharaohs.

Egypt is vulnerable.

What she needs now is a leader of unswerving courage

and tested military skill.

But the new Pharaoh is Tuthmosis lll.

For 20 years this princeling has been kept from power by his stepmother,

Queen Hatshepsut.

He has been pampered and indulged, untroubled by the affairs of state.

But now he is a king with a nation to lead.

To the Egyptians, he is a living god,

his body a sacred object.

But to his enemies, he's simply a young king

with no experience of battle

and a feeble hold on power.

Tuthmosis comes from a long line of warriors.

A century and a half ago, the founders of his dynasty

expelled the ancestors of the Prince of Kadesh from Northern Egypt.

Syrians and Egyptians have struggled for supremacy ever since.

But none of Tuthmosis's ancestors ever faced

a military challenge as great as the one that confronts him now.

Three and a half thousand years later, this is modern Luxor

and the ruins of Tuthmosis's Temple of Karnak.

ln a narrow passageway, on a wall few visitors will ever notice,

there's a long inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs,

carved on the orders of Tuthmosis himself.

lt tells the story of his war against the Syrians,

which begins in the winter of 1 458 BC.

Just weeks after taking the throne,

Tuthmosis and his entourage move from Thebes to the fortress of Tjaru,

500 miles north.

Tjaru is on the Syrian border.

lt's Egypt's largest garrison and the gateway to the Middle East.

The young Tuthmosis locks himself away with his generals.

Djehuty and Yamunedj are hardened soldiers,

sceptical of the young Pharaoh's ability to lead.

They have just a few weeks to devise a strategy to defend Egypt's borders.

Recording every word of their deliberations is a fourth man,

not a soldier but a scribe named Tjeneni.

He's been called the world's first war correspondent

and it's his words in ancient Egyptian

that are carved into the temple wall at Karnak.

The Prince of Kadesh and his allies have gathered at Megiddo,

near present-day Jerusalem.

Megiddo is now the nerve centre of the revolt.

Kadesh has persuaded the northern warlords

to provide him with every fighting man they have.

Under his command is the largest Syrian army ever assembled.

He's determined that this time Egypt will fall.

Megiddo?

The intelligence is worse than Tuthmosis expects, far worse.

Megiddo is just 150 miles from Egypt's borders

and Tuthmosis is heavily outnumbered.

He needs more men.

Conscription is nothing new in Egypt.

For centuries, peasants have been taken from the land

to build canals, temples and pyramids.

But Ahmose is destined for something different -

the Army.

Ahmose knows he may never see his wife and home again.

The eye of the hawk god Horus

is a magic charm that wards off danger.

Every Egyptian is now touched by the threat to the kingdom.

Ahmose

Ahmose is just one of thousands of young men

herded north to possible death in the struggle against the Syrians.

ln February 1 458 BC

Ahmose and his fellow conscripts reach the fortress of Tjaru.

The Pharaoh is mustering every fighting man in the kingdom

to throw against the Syrian rebels who plan to invade Egypt.

Ahmose is a peasant farmer who has never left his village before.

He's going to be made part of the most sophisticated army

the world has ever seen.

Quartermasters marshal food, weapons and clothing supplies.

Every day an army of 10,000 men

consumes 1 4 tons of grain and 95,000 litres of water.

The wealth of Egypt pours into the war effort.

What makes the Egyptian army so formidable is these men,

an elite corps of professional soldiers,

Nubians from the south in what is today Sudan.

Nakht joined the Pharaoh's army three years ago,

along with five men from his village.

His ambition is to rise through the ranks

and he is likely to succeed.

Nubians are admired by the Egyptians

for their courage, strength and skills in combat.

For men like Nakht, the coming war is an opportunity.

There's booty to be had and glory to be won.

Other Nubians have become generals and risen to the top of Egyptian society.

The most Ahmose can hope for is to get back to his home alive.

Raw recruits must be made part of the military machine.

This is the job of Egypt's officer class.

Yamunedj and Djehuty are two of the Pharaoh's most trusted generals.

They come from very different backgrounds.

Djehuty is an aristocrat. Yamunedj rose through the ranks.

Officers will be equipped with the latest military technology.

lvory-tipped arrows, bows made of imported birch or elm,

bound with glue made from fish bladders.

As well as the most radical innovation of all - the chariot,

a lightweight war machine that brings speed and surprise to the battlefield.

The lower ranks will use more basic weaponry -

axes, knives and spears.

Nakht is putting the new recruits through their paces.

Wrestling is the Egyptians' favourite sport

and in the army, is a useful test of manhood.

Ahmose has made the grade

and the Pharaoh's army is in fighting spirit.

By April, the prince of Kadesh

is preparing to move the coalition's 10,000 men

from Megiddo towards the Egyptian border.

Tuthmosis, the inexperienced leader, has grown in confidence.

He won't wait for the Syrians to invade.

He won't fight a defensive war.

He will invade Syria

and crush the rebels at Megiddo.

The army will march tomorrow.

This momentous decision is recorded by Tjeneni in his chronicle,

inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Karnak.

But to reach Megiddo,

the army faces a gruelling march of 200 miles

across the deserts of Sinai and Gaza.

Tjeneni, the scribe, is part of the campaign.

He's here to record the Pharaoh's exploits

and guarantee Tuthmosis a place in history.

Tjeneni is not interested in the hardships of foot soldiers.

such as Ahmose and Nakht.

But this thousand-year-old papyrus, discovered in a tomb in Luxor,

tells us what life was like

for the ordinary soldier on campaign in Syria.

At first, the army makes rapid progress.

ln the first ten days, it covers 150 miles.

Then the heat takes its toll.

The pace slows

from 15 miles a day to five.

Three weeks later, the troops have crossed the Gaza Strip and the hills of Canaan.

They're camped deep inside Syrian territory

at Yaham, in present-day lsrael.

The soldiers are exhausted and their thoughts turn towards home.

Ahmose, like every Egyptian,

is terrified of dying outside his native land.

lf he's buried in foreign soil, without his family to tend his grave,

he'll have no chance of reaching the afterlife.

lf he dies here, his spirit will be cast into oblivion

and he'll face a second death.

And perhaps Tuthmosis, despite his status as a god,

is troubled by the very same thought.

He's just 30 miles from Megiddo and the rebel army

and now he must make a decision.

The choice he makes will dictate his future and the fate of Egypt.

The young Pharaoh faces the most important decision of his campaign.

Tjeneni records the discussion with his generals.

For the first time in his account,

we hear Tuthmosis's own words

as he spoke them 3,500 years ago.

Surprise is the key.

Reach Megiddo quickly, catch the Syrians unawares

and they could crush the rebellion in a single strike.

From their camp at Yaham there are three routes to Megiddo.

Through Yokneam, north of mount Carmel.

South, through Taanakh, approaching Megiddo from the southeast.

These are the safest routes but also the longest.

There is a third approach, the Aruna Pass,

a narrow gorge that snakes through the mountains.

lt's the most direct and the most dangerous.

For hours on end, the army would be exposed to ambush.

They'll take the Aruna pass.

The generals think the young Pharaoh is wrong.

Tjeneni records their words.

But has Tuthmosis signed the army's death warrant?

On 1 4 May Tuthmosis leads his army into the Aruna pass.

10,000 men must march in single file

through the narrow gorge, utterly exposed.

For 12 hours they're open to attack from above.

But the Syrian ambush never comes.

Kadesh has been outwitted.

He expected to ambush the Egyptians on the southern route to Megiddo.

Now his troops are in the wrong place.

All he can do is scramble back to Megiddo.

Six hours later,

Tuthmosis is within sight of the Syrian stronghold.

Tomorrow, for the first time,

Tuthmosis will lead his men into battle.

Here, at Karnak,

is Tjeneni's eyewitness account of the final minutes before the battle of Megiddo.

lt's 15 May 1 458 BC.

Tuthmosis anoints his peasant soldiers with sacred perfume

to bring down the gods' blessings on them in battle.

The real test has come.

Tjeneni describes the Egyptian positions.

Kadesh, too, is ready.

Egyptians and Syrians face each other at last.

As Syrian bodies drop around him,

Kadesh's dreams of conquest evaporate.

All Kadesh can do is save his own skin.

The Egyptians have victory within their grasp

but they let it slip through their fingers.

lnstead of attacking the city,

they loot the bodies of their Syrian enemies.

lt's the common soldier's chance to enrich himself

but it's a military disaster.

Tjeneni's account condemns the foot soldiers for their greed.

The Egyptians measure their success by collecting severed hands.

But this is not yet a victory.

Has the greed of the foot soldiers been the Egyptians' undoing?

The Pharaoh's generals are in disgrace.

lt was their job to take Megiddo.

lnstead, they stood by while their own soldiers plundered.

Tuthmosis will now have to starve the Syrians into submission.

No-one knows how many Egyptians fell at the battle of Megiddo.

The Egyptian military documents keep quiet on the subject of their own casualties.

What we do know is how Egyptian surgeons treated the wounded.

This papyrus is the world's oldest medical textbook.

lt gives detailed descriptions of treatments for battle injuries.

Raw meat, with its natural blood-clotting agents,

is used on flesh wounds.

Burns are treated with a mixture

of gum, ram's hair and the milk of a breast-feeding woman.

But despite the doctors' best efforts,

most of the wounded in this field hospital will die from infection within days.

Another ancient text sums up the fate of many Egyptian soldiers.

Ahmose.

For seven months Tuthmosis holds Megiddo under siege.

Finally, in December 1 458 BC,

a symbol of surrender.

These are the children of the Syrian warlords

offered to Tuthmosis in a gesture of submission.

The Syrian revolt is over.

The children will be taken to Egypt as hostages

and killed if their families rebel again.

Some are destined to become puppet rulers within Tuthmosis's new Egyptian empire.

Tuthmosis returns to his capital, Thebes, in triumph.

No-one doubts his strength now.

The final words of Tjeneni's chronicle are those of the defeated enemy,

the Prince of Kadesh.

Over the next 20 years,

the Pharaoh Tuthmosis lll fought and won another 1 7 campaigns.

At the time of his death and mummification in 1 425 BC,

he had imposed Egyptian rule across an empire

that extended, he claimed, ''as far as the circuit of the sun''.

Tjeneni's eyewitness account of the Battle of Megiddo

set a standard of military heroism for every Pharaoh who followed.

As Tuthmosis intended,

he is still remembered today as Egypt's greatest warrior Pharaoh.

PAL English