The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

On the following day, Aziru called me to his tent and in terrible words accused me and frightened me, but agreed thereafter to make peace, and in Pharaoh’s name I made peace with him and with all the cities of Syria, and Egypt was to retain Gaza, the routing of the voluntary forces was to be left to Aziru, and Pharaoh reserved the right to buy the freedom of Egyptian prisoners and slaves. On these conditions, we drew up on clay tablets a treaty of eternal friendship between Egypt and Syria, and we confirmed it in the names of the thousand gods of Egypt and the thousand gods of Syria and also in the name of Aten. Aziru cursed in a hideous manner and called all gods to help him as he rolled his seal upon the clay, and I also tore my clothes and wept bitterly as I pressed my Egyptian seal on it, but at the end we were both pleased, and Aziru gave me many presents, and I also promised to send many to him and to his wife and to his son by the first ships to sail from Egypt to Syrian cities under the terms of peace.

So, we were in agreement when we parted, and Aziru even embraced me and called me his friend, and I lifted up his handsome boy and praised his valour and touched his rosy cheeks with my mouth. Yet both Aziru and I knew that the treaty we had made in perpetuity was not worth the clay it was written on for he made peace because he was forced to make peace, and Egypt made peace because Pharaoh Akhenaten so wanted. Our peace hung in the air, a prey to every wind, since all depended on which way the Hittites would turn from Mitanni, and much depended also on Babylon’s fortitude and on the Cretan warships that protected the maritime trade.

At any rate, Aziru began to repatriate his forces and furnished me with an escort to Gaza, issuing at the same time an order to the troops there to raise the profitless siege of Gaza. Yet I came near to death before I ever reached Gaza, and I was in greater danger than at any moment during my journey. When we drew near to the gates of Gaza and my escort waved palm branches and shouted that peace had been made, the Egyptian defenders began to let fly their arrows at us and cast

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their spears, and their catapults thundered throwing large rocks upon us, and I thought my last hour had come. Aziru’s soldier who was unarmed held his shield before me, receiving an arrow in his throat and fell bleeding while his comrades fled — but terror paralysed my legs, and I crouched beneath the shield like a tortoise and weeped and cried out in a most pitiful voice. When because of the shield the Egyptians could not get at me with their arrows, they poured down boiling pitch from huge jars, and the pitch ran seething and hissing along the ground toward me. By good fortune, I was protected by some large stones so that I received only slight burns on my hands and knees which indeed would not have needed these burns.

At this spectacle, Aziru’s men laughed so heartily that they fell down and then lay writhing on the ground with laughter, and maybe it was an amusing sight but I did not laugh. At last, their commander ordered the horns to sound, and perhaps my miserable cries softened the Egyptian hearts, so that they consented to let me into the city. They would open no gates for me but lowered a basket at the end of a reed rope, into which I must creep with my clay tablets and my palm branch — and so they hauled me up the wall. I was trembling from fear so bad that the basket started swinging, for the wall was very high, and I thought it was too high — and Aziru’s soldiers laughed at me even harder so that their laughter was behind me like the sea rumbling against rocks during a storm.

I sharply rebuked the garrison commander for this, but he was a stern and obstinate man and said he had met with so much treachery and deceit amongst the Syrians that he did not intend to open the gates of the city without an explicit order from Horemheb. He would not believe that peace had been signed, although I showed him all my clay tablets and spoke to him in the name of Pharaoh for he was a simple and stubborn fellow, and were it not for his simplicity and stubbornness Egypt would assuredly have lost Gaza long before, so I had no right to reproach him too severely. Seeing the skins of captured Syrians drying on the wall, I regarded it best to stay silent and not to upset him and did not reproach him more than that — though my dignity had greatly diminished when they had pulled me in a basket from a reed rope to the wall.

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