“It’s essentially an ax with extra power behind it.” “This is a weapon that’s purely Egyptian,” says Elliott. But during the New Kingdom, they improved on the deadly design with the addition of a curved blade embedded into a solid wooden head. ![]() Starting as early as 6,000 B.C., Egyptians armed themselves with simple maces made of a wooden handle topped with a heavy stone head. The standard war mace is a bludgeoning club that’s one of the oldest weapons on earth. Mace-AxĪrcheologists have recovered evidence of a distinctive Egyptian weapon referred to as a mace ax. Painted relief from the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Light infantry on parade carrying standards, battle axes and palm fronds. During a siege of a Canaanite city, half the army of Ramses III used their axes to dig beneath the city’s mud walls while the rest leveled the trees in the surrounding countryside. The battle axe also doubled as a multi-faceted tool suitable for all manner of wartime demands. In earlier periods of Egyptian history, when the enemy didn’t wear armor, the blades of battle axes were semi-circular or crescent-shaped, designed to deliver deep, slashing cuts to unprotected flesh.ĭuring the New Kingdom, however, in which Egypt faced Hittite and Syrian armies wearing protective leather jerkins across their chests, the axe blades grew increasingly narrow and straight-edged, “ideally suited to punch through armor,” says Elliot. In close combat, it could hack at an enemy’s shield or dispatch an injured foe with a crushing blow. The Egyptian battle axe was a secondary weapon tucked into a warrior’s waistband or hung from his shoulder. They fitted their javelins with diamond-shaped metal blades and made them easier to aim and throw with a well-balanced and reinforced wooden grip. Eliott says that Egyptians didn’t treat the javelin as a disposable ordinance like an arrow. At close range, they would use the javelin to thrust at the enemy behind their shields, but they could also launch the armor-piercing javelin at attacking chariots or lines of infantry. New Kingdom soldiers would carry a quiver of javelins over their shoulder like arrows. It also functioned in close combat as a short spear about a meter long (3.3 feet). The Egyptian javelin was more than a hand-launched missile. The Egyptians’ shields were utilitarian-three wooden planks bound with glue and animal hides-but they transformed into a formidable defense when the infantry closed ranks in a phalanx formation. The Syrians showed them how to forge simple bronze speartips with a hollow socket that fit tightly over a wooden shaft. “You could outfit hundreds of recruits with them, perfect for the warfare of the period.”īefore the Hyksos invasion, Egyptian speartips were wooden and prone to splintering on contact. “At a time when metal was so precious, all you needed was a small bit of bronze at the tip,” says Paul Elliott, a historian and reenactor who wrote Warfare in New Kingdom Egypt. The length of the spear allowed Egyptian fighters to joust at their enemy behind the relative safety of their shields, and the bronze tip was hard and sharp enough to pierce through an enemy infantry’s leather armor. Armed with a wooden shield ( ikem) in their left hand and a bronze-tipped spear ( dja) in their right, the Egyptian spearmen would advance on the enemy in tightly packed formations. The core of the Egyptian army, like most ancient armies, was its spearmen. These are the nine key weapons that powered the Egyptian army at the height of its power.ĭepiction of soldiers carrying spears and shields on the expedition to the Land of Punt, from the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, c.1503-1482 BC, New Kingdom. When Ahmose I liberated and reunited Egypt, he became the first pharaoh of the New Kingdom, a golden age in which Egypt used its upgraded weaponry and efficient bureaucracy to expand the empire and grow rich from foreign tributes. with vastly superior weapons like speedy chariots and powerful composite bows.ĭuring the century of foreign humiliation known as the Second Intermediate Period, the Egyptians studied their enemy closely and built up an arsenal of deadly new weapons based on the Syrian designs. Then came the Hyksos, an invading army from Syria that conquered Egypt around 1650 B.C. For much of its early history, Egypt relied on simple stone maces, wooden-tipped spears, axes and bows and arrows to fight off neighboring Nubian and Libyan tribesmen. 1070 B.C.), but it did so using borrowed weapons technology. ![]() The Egyptian military became one of the ancient world’s greatest fighting forces during the New Kingdom period (1550 B.C.
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