Hunting and Warfare

During the fourth millennium bce Upper Egyptian iconography reveals an equation of warfare and hunting. A canid predator (more rarely a feline) may follow groups of animals (or a single object of prey) and represent human agency; a depiction of the animal object of human ritual hunting, beset by canids, may balance an image of the zoomorphic royal domination of a human enemy, the latter also receiving the label of an addax, a symbol of sacrifice.¹ Scenes of complex rituals incorporating hunting and sacrifice from the end of the Naqada II period (in both Egypt and Nubia, c.

Ritualised hunting and capture of certain desert game by elite members of Predynastic society, and the return of those animals for proper sacrifice in a Nilotic setting, with depiction of those activities on both the desert rock surfaces and on the bodies of some of the participants, enacted a process of Niloticisation of the desert.^[350] The activities of hunting and sacrifice, many focusing on annual festivals, imposed ritual order on the natural world, symbolically expanding the ordered cosmos. The earliest Egyptian depictions of human conflict insert subjugated foes into the role of sacrificial animal, providing the template for much of the imagery, iconography and later literature of pharaonic warfare. As late as the New Kingdom, major military campaigns could coincide with hunting expeditions. At the dawn of the New Kingdom an association of a hunting expedition with military activity appears to be in place, a grouping repeated throughout the first half of the Eighteenth Dynasty.^[351] So Thutmosis I (c. 1504-1492 bce) in northern Syria fought a battle with human enemies from Mitanni (northern Mesopotamia) and hunted elephants in Niye; Thutmosis III (c. 1479-1425 bce) on northern campaign repeated the hunting of elephants in Niye, and added as an aside to a campaign in Nubia the hunt of rhinoceros.