Captives, Abu Simbel

Captives taken in war were depicted in many ways in ancient Egypt: on royal footstools, on the soles of royal sandals, on thrones, statues, and figurines, on floor tiles, and on monumental architecture. In the case of royal furniture, footwear, and flooring, the symbolism was clear: the pharaoh sat or walked upon the prisoners, crushing them, and by association, crushed the countries from which they were taken. Statues and figurines of prisoners of war were often captioned with magical texts (the so-called Execration Texts) that were meant to cause death to the countries and enemies they represented, and these also acclaimed the pharaoh’s political dominance in the region.

Temples such as Medinet Habu, the funerary temple of Rameses III at Thebes, depict battles and their aftermath on the walls, and these monuments provide details not only of wars led by the pharaoh, but also of the entire range of the processes of war, from the preparation of troops, to the battles, to the capture and return to Egypt of booty and its subsequent distribution into Egyptian society. Booty included noncombatant men, women, and children, as well as prisoners of war. Since the captured combatants are rarely distinguished in the records from captured noncombatants, it is difficult to distinguish between the treatment of the two groups.

Egyptian sources record large numbers of prisoners of war in various campaigns. One of Amenhotep II’s campaigns recorded over 100,000 captives; Thutmose III’s Megiddo booty lists (as such records are known in Egyptological literature) note 340 living prisoners, 43 officers, 84 children, 1,796 male and female slaves including children (these were presumably already slaves), and 103 pardoned persons who had surrendered; Merenptah’s troops captured more than 9,000 people in the war against the Libyans; and the temple estates in the reign of Rameses II had nearly 5,000 workers “of his majesty’s capturing.” One campaign of Amenhotep II took so many captives that he ordered a palisade to be built in order to contain them until he could deal with them, an unusual occurrence. While some of these numbers were probably inflated for propaganda purposes, it is clear that ancient Egyptian wars produced many prisoners.

When battle was over, victorious Egyptian soldiers systematically checked the battlefield for the dead, the dying, and the living. Enemy soldiers who had fled the battle site were rounded up and brought back. The dead were counted, the dying were executed, and the prisoners, including those who had surrendered, were processed. Not only combatants were captured; whole families, and sometimes whole towns, were captured and treated as booty, along with their livestock and other possessions.

The prisoners of war were presented to the pharaoh, sometimes in large groups and sometimes individually, by the soldiers who had captured them. Prisoners automatically belonged to the pharaoh, who had the power of life and death over them, as over all other war booty, and they were disposed of in several different ways. In some cases, prisoners were returned as slaves to their captors as a reward. In other cases, the prisoners were allowed to plead for their lives and were given their freedom after taking an oath of loyalty to the pharaoh. These men thus became vassals of the Egyptian administration and were returned to their homes after being disarmed.

Several temple walls display scenes of prisoners of war being executed, and others show that captured high officials or royalty were ceremonially executed and their bodies paraded throughout both the conquered country and Egypt as illustrations of the pharaoh’s power. Other royal captives were returned to Egypt as laborers or as hostages to guarantee the good behavior of the vassals. Defeated soldiers were sometimes allowed to join the Egyptian army after swearing loyalty to the Egyptian pharaoh. One such group was the Sardinians, who were captured by the troops of Rameses II and then fought the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh (c. 1295 B.C.E.) as part of the Egyptian army.

Those prisoners whom the pharaoh decided to keep as workers were branded and then transported to Egypt, either by forced march or by boat. That the forced marches caused hardships for the captives, especially the women and children, is made clear in the Papyrus Deir el-Medina from the Twentieth Dynasty: “The captives going to Egypt are handed over to His Majesty. The foreign woman faints because of the marching. She is placed on the soldier’s shoulder. His haversack is cast aside; others take it—he is saddled with the captive.”

In Egyptian temple scenes, prisoners of war are typically depicted bound with their elbows touching behind their backs or above their heads, positions that would be impossible unless their shoulders were dislocated. Since this would cause the prisoners to be injured and unable to work, this is probably an exaggeration; the bonds were probably not tight enough for the elbows to actually meet. Statues of prisoners show them tied at the elbow, with the arms as far back as they could go, but without the elbows actually touching. Other methods of restriction included a type of wooden handcuff, attached to the captive’s hands and neck, by which the captive was often linked to others. The prisoners were bound during transport to ensure they did not escape. These methods of containment are described in the Harris Papyrus I (77.4–6): “I have brought back in great numbers those that my sword has spared, with their hands tied behind their backs before my horses, and their wives and children in tens of thousands, and their livestock in hundreds of thousands. I have imprisoned their leaders in fortresses bearing my name, and I have added to them chief archers and tribal chiefs, branded and enslaved, tattooed with my name, and their wives and children have been treated in the same way.”

On arrival in Egypt, prisoners of war were presented by the pharaoh to the gods of Egypt, who were believed to have brought victory to the Egyptian forces. Here the chiefs of the prisoners were expected to plead for their lives and to pledge allegiance to the pharaoh in public. They were then allocated to their new lives in captivity: to quarries as miners, to temple estates as field laborers or animal herders, to the army as slave soldiers. Women joined the pharaoh’s harem or worked as weavers, clothing makers, or house servants, and presumably their children went with them. Large groups were often kept together in settlements of their own, but with food and supplies provided by the pharaoh in return for their labor. Full repatriation as we know it did not occur; most prisoners of war who survived became members of Egyptian society. Some of them even rose to positions quite high in the Egyptian administration.

The influx of large numbers of prisoners of war and other war captives over the many years of ancient Egyptian military activity ultimately influenced Egyptian language and culture, even though the prisoners were forced to learn and speak Egyptian. They brought to Egypt foreign gods, and foreign words, customs, and values, thereby enriching the culture of their adopted homes.