Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [68]
The text begins with the king meeting with his council and holding forth with great passion upon the ignominy of his position:
What use is this strength of mine, when one prince is in Avaris and another in Cush, so that I sit here associated with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his slice of this Egypt and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis!
In texts like these the council members are depicted as timid souls so that their caution may cause the king’s impetuous bravery to shine more strongly. Kamose’s council tried to soothe the king by pointing out that their part of the country was peaceful and prosperous. Why start trouble?
Naturally this excellent advice falls on deaf ears, and Kamose goes forth to battle. When the first text breaks off, the war is going well; Kamose’s advance has been unopposed. Something is missing between the end of one stela and the beginning of the second, for when the sequel starts, Kamose is already approaching the enemy capital, the heavily fortified city of Avaris in the Delta. The Hyksos king had prudently shut himself up in the fortress, and none of Kamose’s taunts and insults could induce him to come out and fight. He was the same Apophis who had sent Sekenenre the Brave that outrageous message about the hippopotami, and he may have suspected that Kamose’s antagonism had a personal as well as a patriotic cause. Kamose devastated the fields and villages around the capital and got so close to the enemy palace that he was able to see the women of the harem looking down from the roof at him and his army. He sent more threatening messages to Apophis via these ladies, but nothing, it seemed, could shame the Hyksos king into taking action. Before long, Kamose found out why.
One day Egyptian soldiers captured a messenger heading south from the besieged city. The dispatch he carried was an urgent appeal for aid to the prince of Cush, or Nubia. The terms of the letter made it clear that the Asiatic and the Nubian were in cahoots; Apophis volunteered to keep Kamose busy until the Cushite army could arrive, whereupon the allies would crush Kamose and divide Egypt between them. The Hyksos king may thus be the first diplomat in history to use an ancient device—how ancient we did not know until this text was deciphered—for he says that Kamose is planning to attack Cush too: “Help me now, or you’ll be next.”
Kamose arranged that the ingenious appeal would never reach Cush, but it doesn’t seem that he was too worried about the Cushite kingdom, perhaps because he had made sure his southern boundary was safe before he took on the Hyksos. Still, he was not in sufficient strength to attack so formidable a fortress as Avaris; he went back to Thebes, where he was met by cheering crowds. He had won the battle, but it was not given to him to win the war. We do not know what cut the courageous prince of Thebes off in his prime; a Hyksos weapon, in some later and unrecorded battle, or one of the diseases to which the ancients were prey? We can be pretty sure that if Kamose had lived he would have taken another crack at Avaris. It was left to his successor, possibly his younger brother, Ahmose, to complete the work he had begun, though a period of at least ten years ensued before Ahmose led his armies northward. He may have been a mere child when Kamose died, his mother serving as regent until he reached his majority.
The later campaigns are recorded by two soldiers who fought under King Ahmose in the concluding years of the War of