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His olden title was "Storm God Whose Strength Makes Dead." and Hittite kings sometimes claimed that the god had actually taken a hand in the battle: "The mighty Stormgod, my Lord," [wrote the king Murshilis]. "showed his divine power and shot a_thunder- bolt" at the enemy, helping to defeat it. Also aiding the Hittites in battle was the goddess ISHTAR, whose epithet was "Lady of the battlefield." It was to her "Divine Power" that many a victory was attributed, as she "came down [from the skies] to smile the hostile countries." Hittite influence, as many references in the Old Testament indi- cate, extended south into Canaan; but they were there as settlers, not as conquerors. While they treated Canaan as a neutral zone, laying to it no claim, this was not the attitude of the Egyptians. Re- peatedly the Pharaohs sought to extend their rule northward to Ca- naan and the Cedar Land (Lebanon); they succeeded in doing so. circa 1470 B.C.. when they defeated a coalition of Canaanite kings at Megiddo. The Old Testament, and inscriptions left by the Hittites' foes, pictured the Hittites as expert warriors who perfected the use of the chariot in the ancient Near East. But the Hittites' own inscriptions suggest that they went to war only when the gods gave the word, that the enemy was offered a chance to surrender peacefully before hostilities began, and that once a war was won, the Hittites were satisfied to receive tribute and take captives: the cities were not sacked; the populace was not massacred. But Thothmes III. the Pharaoh who was victorious at the battle of Megiddo. was proud to say in his inscriptions: "Now his maj- esty went north, plundering towns and laying encampments waste." Of a vanquished king the Pharaoh wrote: "I desolated his towns, set fire to his encampments, made mounds of them; their resettlement can never take place. All the people I captured. I made prisoners; their countless cattle I carried off, and their goods as well. I took away every resource of life; I cut down their grain and felled all their groves and all their pleasant trees. I totally destroyed it." It was all done, the Pharaoh wrote, on the say-so of AMON- RA, his god. The vicious nature of Egyptian warfare and the pitiless destruc- tiveness they inflicted upon a vanquished foe were subjects of boastful inscriptions. The Pharaoh Pepi I, for example, commemo- rated his victory over the Asiatic "sand-dwellers" in a poem which hailed the army which "hacked up the land of the sand-dwellers . . cut down its fig trees and vines. . . cast fire into all its dwell- The Wars of Man