The ordeal was a terrible one for the Khâti; but when the first moment of defeat was over, they again took courage and resumed the campaign. This single effort had not exhausted their resources, and they rapidly filled up the gaps which had been made in their ranks. The plains of Naharaim and the mountains of Cilicia supplied them with fresh chariots and foot-soldiers in the place of those they had lost, and bands of mercenaries were furnished from the table-lands of Asia Minor, so that when Ramses II. reappeared in Syria, he found himself confronted by a completely fresh army. Khâtusaru, having profited by experience, did not again attempt a general engagement, but contented himself with disputing step by step the upper valleys of the Litany and Orontes. Meantime his emissaries spread themselves over Phoenicia and Kharû, sowing the seeds of rebellion, often only too successfully. In the kings VIIIth year there was a general rising in Galilee, and its towns--Galaput in the hill-country of Bît-Aniti, Merorn, Shalama, Dapur, and Anamaîm*--had to be reduced one after another.
* Episodes from this war are represented at Karnak. The list of the towns taken, now much mutilated, comprised twenty- four names, which proves the importance of the revolt.
Dapur was the hardest to carry. It crowned the top of a rocky eminence, and was protected by a double wall, which followed the irregularities of the hillside. It formed a rallying-point for a large force, which had to be overcome in the open country before the investment of the town could be attempted. The siege was at last brought to a conclusion, after a series of skirmishes, and the town taken by scaling, four Egyptian princes having been employed in conducting the attack. In the Pharaohs IXth year a revolt broke out on the Egyptian frontier, in the Shephelah, and the king placed himself at the head of his troops to crush it. Ascalon, in which the peasantry and their families had found, as they hoped, a safe refuge, opened its gates to the Pharaoh, and its fall brought about the submission of several neighbouring places. This, it appears, was the first time since the beginning of the conquests in Syria that the inhabitants of these regions attempted to take up arms, and we may well ask what could have induced them thus to renounce their ancient loyalty. Their defection reduced Egypt for the moment almost to her natural frontiers. Peace had scarcely been resumed when war again broke out with fresh violence in Coele-Syria, and one year it reached even to Naharaim, and raged around Tunipa as in the days of Thûtmosis III. Pharaoh assembled his foot-soldiers and chariots, and he commanded his foot-soldiers and his chariots to attack the perverse Khâti who were in the neighbourhood of Tunipa, and he put on his armour and mounted his chariot, and he waged battle against the town of the perverse Khâti at the head of his foot-soldiers and his chariots, covered with his armour; the fortress, however, did not yield till the second attack. Ramses carried his arms still further afield, and with such results, that, to judge merely from the triumphal lists engraved on the walls of the temple of Karnak, the inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates, those in Carchemish, Mitanni, Singar, Assyria, and Mannus found themselves once more at the mercy of the Egyptian battalions. These victories, however brilliant, were not decisive; if after any one of them the princes of Assyria and Singar may have sent presents to the Pharaoh, the Hittites, on the other hand, did not consider themselves beaten, and it was only after fifteen campaigns that they were at length sufficiently subdued to propose a treaty. At last, in the Egyptian kings XXIst year, on the 21st of the month Tybi, when the Pharaoh, then residing in his good town of Anakhîtû, was returning from the temple where he had been offering prayers to his father Amon-Eâ, to Harmakhis of Heliopolis, to Phtah, and to Sûtkhû the valiant son of Nûît, Eamses, one of the messengers who filled the office of lieutenant for the king in Asia, arrived at the palace and presented to him Tartisubu, who was authorised to make peace with Egypt in the name of Khâtusaru.* Tartisubu carried in his hand a tablet of silver, on which his master had prescribed the conditions which appeared to him just and equitable. A short preamble recalling the alliances made between the ancestors of both parties, was followed by a declaration of friendship, and a reciprocal obligation to avoid in future all grounds of hostility.