Battle of the Delta: Egypt’s Only Naval Battle, 1175 BC (EVA0258)

The Battle of the Delta: won with bows, not with rams

An Egyptian ship seen from the bow, hull red, a gilded lion’s head at the stem, oars out — and look up: the sail is furled tight against the yard. This ship is fighting under oars, deliberately. Archers shoot from a decorated wooden castle amidships and from a fighting top at the masthead. Off the stern, men in crested helmets. In the water below, men are drowning.

Nobody in this picture is ramming anybody

The ram had not been invented yet. A sea fight in 1175 BC was an archery duel that ended in boarding, and the Egyptians won it by doing the archery better: massed bowmen on the ships and more of them lining the riverbank. Their tactic was to let the raiders come into the mouths of the Nile, where there was no room to manoeuvre, and then shoot into them from three sides.

The furled sail is the whole tactical argument

Under sail a ship goes where the wind allows. Under oars it goes where the captain wants, which is what you need when the enemy is a hundred metres away and closing. In the Egyptian reliefs the attackers’ ships are shown with sails set and no oars in the water — caught, in other words, still travelling rather than fighting.

The archers are standing in a box

That wooden structure amidships is a shooting platform, and so is the basket at the masthead. It is the same idea as the war chariot in EVA0059: the weapon is the bow, and everything else exists to carry it and keep it steady. A crew that can shoot from height into an open deck has an advantage that no amount of courage on the other side corrects.

What actually killed most of them

The water. Men in scale armour who go over the side do not come back up, and the painting is honest about it: hands above the surface, a body face-down, one man holding a rope, another clinging to a plank. Grappling hooks were used to capsize the enemy vessels on purpose — the object was not to sink a ship so much as to tip its crew into the river.

We know all this because Ramesses III had it carved

The reliefs at Medinet Habu are the only depiction of a naval battle in Egyptian art, and nearly everything we know about how these ships were built and fought comes from that one wall. It is worth remembering what kind of source that is: a victory monument. The same problem, in a sharper form, is in EVA0065.