I assert that the archetypal image of ancient god kings smiting their enemies, which can be found in scenes from Egypt through to the fertile-crescent and Anatolia, are time honoured recordings of battles in the heavens and have little if anything to do with events here on earth (see gks7). And, although I’ve suspected for some time that some Egyptologists do actually question the authenticity of Egypt’s countless battles it difficult to get anything in writing. However, a colleague of mine (jno) has brought the following ‘extracts’ to my attention. As can clearly be seen, some experts do actually take the stance that a number of Egyptian battles, “DID NOT TAKE PLACE !”

“The visual depiction of Egypt’s enemies and their role became so prevalent that it is difficult to distinguish in the archaeological and textual sources between purely ritualistic and rhetorical references to foreigners and genuine historical records. Repeatedly, we find examples of battles, and king’s smiting enemies that in fact, did not take place, but were mere copies of earlier scenes.”

“The reliefs in the Old Kingdom mortuary temples of Sahure at Abusir and Pepi II at Saqqara , as well as the Late Period temple of Taharqa at Kawa, include stock scenes of a Libyan chief being smitten by the pharaoh, while the victim’s wife and children beg for mercy. However, the personal names for the Libyans in all three scenes are repetitions and therefore suggest that these reliefs did not actually record historical events, but were rather an elaborate icon of Kingship.”

Source http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/enemies.htm

I was also recently pleased to learn that (lecture CD’s on ancient battles) eminent military historian, lecturer and journalist John Keegan OBE favors a ritualistic warless Egypt model right up until the New Kingdom era. See gks7 (scroll down).

My question remains, did these ‘sacred’ ancient battles take place or not? If so, why weren’t the many hundreds of thousands of fallen Egyptian soldiers (or the slain enemy soldiers) memorialised? The criteria seems to based on the quantity of literal sources, inasmuch, the more accounts we have of a particular battle, then this somehow deems it to have taken place. This is very poor logic, almost ‘cherry picking’ as to what did or didn’t occur. Ancient battles should be verified by good old fashioned irrefutable archaeological evidence, they are not.

Most ‘alternative’ writers such as myself can be easily dismissed by simply turning the subject round to hard evidence, and yet here I am, turning the tables and asking scholars for hard evidence!

I will of course add the above ‘supporting evidence’ to my ‘The nonexistent battles of the Pharaohs’.