Thutmose III
Any time you obliterate enough balls to become known as "the Napoleon of Ancient Egypt," you know you're doing something right, but, in the case of this week's badass, that title doesn't really do him justice. You see, Napoleon lost a couple battles. Thutmose the Third didn't. And also, you know, Thutmose lived like 3,300 years before Napoleon, so honestly the way shit should be phrased is that Napoleon was the "Thutmose the Third of Post-Revolution France".
I guess that doesn't really have the same ring to it, but you get the idea.
I am boarding an airplane to Cairo early tomorrow morning, so I've spent the past few weeks catching up on my ancient Egyptian history so that I can properly appreciate all the badass shit I'm about to see, and it only seems appropriate to talk about the most hardcore face-smashing hardass in the history of the Nile Delta. Thutmose III was born around 1479 BCE (depending on how you choose to measure time in Ancient Egypt, but that's a whole thing I really don't want to get into right now), which is a really really goddamn long time ago if you really think about it. He was still considered part of the New Kingdom, despite being really fucking old, and he was part of the 18th Dynasty, which was the same dynasty as Ramses II and King Tut. He lived about 200 years before Ramses, 150 before King Tut, and 1,400 before Cleopatra, if any of that puts the insane longevity of the Pharaohs into perspective at all.
Thutmose's dad was also a Thutmose (Pharaoh Thutmose the Second), and his mom was Thutmose the Second's second-favorite wife. Thutmose II's first-favorite wife, however, was his half-sister Hatshepsut, a woman so badass that I have a whole thing about her in the first Badass book and will probably do a writeup about her on this site at some point. Thutmose Deuce named his son as the heir to the Egyptian throne pretty much immediately up on the kid's birth, but then 2 Thutmose 2 Furious up and died like an idiot while Thutmose 3 was still a little baby, and Hatshepsut was basically like, "Yeah, fuck that shit," and just decided she was going to be Pharaoh instead. She ruled as a King for the next 20+ years, was super prosperous, had a ton of success, was an amazing and competent leader, and had a bunch of statues of herself built where she's holding the rod and scepter and wearing the beard of a Pharaoh. She's one of only like three women to ever have the title, which is pretty badass, but this article's not about her so that's enough of that.
While Hatshepsut was running shit in Ancient Egypt, Thutmose did the smart thing and didn't really try to fuck with her. Instead, he left for the military, where he was raised in barracks, trained with soldiers, commanded armies, and studied hand-to-hand combat, horsemanship, archery, and the fine ancient art of surfing on chariots while 360 no-scoping motherfuckers with a composite bow. He participated in public sharpshooting competitions, was apparently unbeatable at wrestling and marksmanship, fought in military campaigns in Nubia and Palestine, and also spent lots of time reading, listening to music, and appreciating art, craftsmanship, and culture.
Hatshepsut died in 1458 BCE, leaving Thutmose to take the throne at the age of 21. He went to war with everyone in the world pretty much immediately.
Thutmose's name means, “Eternal are the Manifestations of Ra, son of Thoth”, a fact that makes me really glad I never tried to learn the Ancient Egyptian language.
The first asshole who needed to have his spine kicked out through their ear canal was the King of a place called Megiddo. Megiddo was a city that had been part of the Egyptian empire, but when the leader of the city heard that Hatshepsut was dead and there was some 20 year old punk dipshit on the throne he immediately declared himself King and said that his town didn't have to pay tribute to the Egyptians anymore.
Naturally, Thutmose had to go raze their lands and annihilate their armies. So that’s what he did.
Megiddo has the interesting distinction of being probably the first recorded military engagement in history. Certainly battle existed since the first time a caveman clubbed his idiot cousin across the skull with a half-chewed dinosaur bone and plenty of motherfuckers were killing each other for a millennia or two before this battle, but Megiddo was the first time someone bothered to write down what happened, and then that text somehow miraculously survived to a point where we can now read it on the internet when we're not too busy jerking off or being mad about politics. Megiddo is also cool because the field outside the city is called Har Megiddo, and that's where we get the name Armageddon, meaning that the first and last battles in recorded history could potentially go down at the same coordinates (unless of course Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck forget to nuke that asteroid or whatever).
Anyway, here's the story of how the First Battle went down. Basically, the city of Megiddo was on the far side of a mountain range, and there were only really three ways through – you could loop around to the north through an older, less-used but more poorly-maintained road, or you could go south through a large highway kind of road, or you could take this super-narrow pass through the mountains that was so tight you could only get like two or three guys shoulder-to-shoulder through it.
Thutmose's advisors all told him to go North or South.
Thutmose said they were all a bunch of lame-ass cowards. Not only was he going Mountain Pass, but he was going to personally lead the way at the head of the army.
Amazingly, this worked, because the King of Megiddo took one look at that pass and was like, "yeah, nobody's dumb enough to try and lead and army through that shit." He positioned his guys to the North and the South, so when Thutmose III Tokyo Drifted his chariot through the pass outside Armageddon at the head of a huge army of Egyptians, he completely caught the King of Megiddo by surprise and split his armies in half. In the ensuing attacks, Thutmose crushed the King of Megiddo with a series of bold attacks. He spared the city from complete annihilation, but returned home with a caravan of prisoners, horses, gold, weapons, twenty-two thousand sheep for some reason, and the King of Megiddo's personal chariot, and royal armor.
It would be the first of 17 successful military campaigns carried out by Pharaoh Thutmose the Third.
Thutmose routinely fought with a bow from chariot, even though he was the dang Pharaoh and everything.
After taking down the King of Megiddo, Thutmose went to war in Syria against the Phoenicians, who were also rebelling against Egyptian rule. He marched out there and defeated them handily with a bunch of badass bleeding-edge military tech like horses, composite bows, chariots, and battle axes, a bunch of shit that is still awesome to this day but super omega blew everyone's minds 3500 years ago when a lot of the world was still trying to club each other with rocks or whatever. Thutmose defeated the Phoenicians and went home, but they rebelled again, so this time he went back, crushed them again, then harvested all of their food and stored it on board Egyptian ships harbored in friendly ports and said he was only going to give out food to people if they stopped fucking with him. Then, after basically ransoming subservience with food by bankrupting the civilization's entire economy, he went home and carved badass shit like this on the sides of obelisks:
In case you can't see it, this is an image of a twenty-foot-tall Thutmose grabbing like a dozen guys by their hair and demanding their subservience.
Ok, so after stomping Meggido and the Phoenicians, Thutmose took Babylon, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Levant, and even the Minoans on the Greek Isles. His next big adversary though was the Mitanni, a kingdom in the area of Northern Syria / Southern Turkey. These guys had been part of the crew that instigated the King of Meggido's revolt, and if Thutmose was going to put an end to this rebellion shit he was going to need to take out the King of Mitanni. Mitanni started all kinds of shit and declared war on Thutmose, so once again the Pharaoh packed up his shit and marched out for the Middle East. This time, his army carried a bunch of boats with them – regular wooden pontoon boats, dragged across the fucking Middle Eastern desert by donkeys and shit – and nobody really knew what the hell the plan was until he got to the edge of the mighty Euphrates River, threw in the boats, ferried his entire army across the river, and attacked the Mitanni from the absolute last direction they were expecting it. He crushed the King of Mitanni, captured Aleppo, the royal treasury, and like thirty of the King's wives, and then celebrated by hunting fucking elephants and lions from horseback with a bow and arrow, which is basically just like one step removed from fistfighting them.
Even at the age of 50, Thutmose III was still leading Egypt's armies, this time in the Sudan against the Nubians. The Nubians were a super badass warrior culture, but Thutmose defeated them, pushed his armies as far South as the fifth cataract of the Nile (whatever that means), and then basically captured every gold mine he could get his hands on and forced his defeated enemies to dig up all the cash for him.
Thutmose III fought seventeen military campaigns over the course of twenty years, and claimed credit for capturing 350 cities in the process. But then, after the Nubia war, he basically just retired and spent the last twelve years of his life collecting tribute, living in a golden palace, and building badass shit across Egypt. He built 50 temples, had painters paint them floor-to-ceiling (this had never been done before in Egypt), and his artisans advanced glass-working to the point where people started making the first glass drinking vessels. Presumably the Pharaoh Thutmose III was the first guy to drink out of a glass, which is kind of a crazy thought. He also commissioned a huge mural where artists drew every kind of plant and animal Thutmose encountered across all his adventures – crazy shit like giraffes, elephants, bears, and chickens (they didn't have chickens in ancient Egypt at this point). It's all chiseled on a wall in the temple of Karnak that you can still see today, and he had it commissioned next to sculptures of himself fist-bumping the Gods and karate-chopping Apophis the Serpent God of Chaos. He built a bunch of obelisks that were so cool that a bunch of Europeans stole them – one was in the Hippodrome in Constantinople, one is on the banks of the Thames in London, and one is in the middle of Central Park in New York (that one's called "Cleopatra's Needle," but Thutmose built it 1400 years before Cleopatra lived).
Thutmose the Third died in 1426 BC, having ruled alone for thirty years. He was buried in the Valley of the Kings, halfway up the side of a mountain face – the masons built a big staircase to get up there and dig the tomb, then they sealed the tomb and smashed the steps to help hide the tomb and keep out grave robbers. It didn't work, but it was a cool idea.
