until sixteen years later that peace was finally established between the two rival powers.
The act of personal prowess upon which the heroic poem of Pentaur was built may have covered what had really been a check to the Egyptian arms. At all events, it is significant that no attempt was made to capture Kadesh, and that even the poet acknowledges how ready the Egyptian soldiers were to come to terms with their enemies. Equally significant is the fact that the war against the Hittites still went on; in the eighth year of the Pharaoh's reign Palestine was overrun and certain cities captured, including Dapur or Tabor 'in the land of the Amorites,' while other campaigns were directed against Ashkelon, in the south, and the city of Tunep or Tennib, in the north. When a lasting treaty of peace was at last concluded in the twenty-first year of Ramses, its conditions show that 'the great king of the Hittites' treated on equal terms with the great king of Egypt, and that even Ramses himself, whom later legend magnified into the Sesostris of the Greeks, was fain to acknowledge the power of his Hittite adversaries. The treaty was sealed by the marriage of the Pharaoh with the daughter of the Hittite king.
The treaty, of which we possess the Egyptian text in full, was a very remarkable one, not only because it is the first treaty of the kind of which we know, but also on account of its contents. It ran as follows[1]:—
'In the year twenty-one, in the month Tybi, on the 21st day of the month, in the reign of King Ramessu Miamun, the dispenser of life eternally and for ever, the worshipper of the divinities Amon-Ra (of Thebes),
- ↑ This translation is the one given by Brugsch in the second edition of the English translation of his History of Egypt.
