- The Impact of Thutmose III on the Levant and Egypt
- Comparing Thutmose III and Alexander the Great
- The Role of Military Foundations: Philip vs Thutmose
- Thutmose’s Military Reforms | A Legacy of Innovation
- Thutmose's Pioneering Strategy in the Eastern Levant
- The Enduring Legacy of Thutmose III’s Army vs. the Decline of Alexander’s Military
- Alexander’s Pursuit of Glory vs. Philip’s Strategic Vision
- Thutmose III’s Strategic Vision | National Security Over Personal Glory
- Thutmose III’s Comprehensive Reign vs. Alexander’s Tactical Brilliance
- Alexander's Conquests | Victories Against a Decaying Persian Empire
- Thutmose III: A Greater Conqueror Than Alexander?
- Alexander's Hellenistic Legacy | A Double-Edged Sword
- Thutmose III | Egypt's Forgotten Conqueror
The Impact of Thutmose III on the Levant and Egypt
Thutmose III set in motion a series of events that shaped and influenced the Levant and Egypt for the next five hundred years. His reign marked a watershed moment in the military and imperial history of the eastern Mediterranean. In the context of historical significance, “Thutmose III vs Alexander the Great” is a comparison often made to highlight their lasting impacts on their respective regions.
Comparing Thutmose III and Alexander the Great
Thutmose III is often compared to Alexander the Great, whose achievements served as a turning point for Greece a thousand years later. However, in numerous instances, Thutmose’s legacy surpasses that of Alexander. The “Thutmose III vs Alexander the Great” comparison reveals that while both rulers shaped their empires, Thutmose’s independent reforms were pivotal to his success.
The Role of Military Foundations: Philip vs Thutmose
Alexander benefited from the military foundation laid by his father, Philip of Macedon. Philip’s genius was evident in his decision to abandon traditional Greek infantry tactics and replace them with a cavalry-focused strategy. In “Thutmose III vs Alexander the Great,” it’s important to recognize that unlike Alexander, who inherited a well-established military, Thutmose had to build his forces from the ground up.
Thutmose’s Military Reforms | A Legacy of Innovation
Thutmose III, on the other hand, inherited a rudimentary military establishment that was inadequate for his imperial ambitions. Unlike Alexander, Thutmose III had to create his own model army. In this “Thutmose III vs Alexander the Great” discussion, it is evident that Thutmose introduced revolutionary reforms in logistics, conscription, weapons, chariotry, and the creation of a naval arm capable of supporting distant operations.
Thutmose’s Pioneering Strategy in the Eastern Levant
Thutmose III’s military innovations were crucial in allowing Egypt to conquer and administer the eastern Levant. Without these reforms, Egypt’s expansion and control over the region would have been impossible. In comparing “Thutmose III vs Alexander the Great,” Thutmose emerges as a more independent architect of military strategy, having built his empire’s military power without inherited advantages.
The Enduring Legacy of Thutmose III’s Army vs. the Decline of Alexander’s Military
The army that Thutmose brought into being lasted almost four centuries without major changes, remaining a reliable instrument of force projection in the hands of his immediate successors throughout the rest of the eighteenth Dynasty and during most of the Nineteenth.
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After Alexander’s death, however, his army proved largely ineffective in the hands of his successors, whose meager reforms included the use of lesser-quality infantry and the introduction of the elephant. Alexander’s successors seem not to have continued his one tactical innovation, the use of catapults as covering artillery.
Alexander’s Pursuit of Glory vs. Philip’s Strategic Vision
on the one hand, the strategic vision that made Alexander’s victories possible was not Alexander’s creation. It was Philip’s. It was Philip who conceived the idea of an attack on Persia and forged the new military instrument to attempt it.
Both men, however, were not motivated by any calculations of national security or national economic interest, something that would have required a genuine sense of Greek nationhood that transcended city-state, clan, and regional rivalries and did not yet exist.
Instead, Alexander was motivated by the traditional Greek ideal of military glory, with the conquest of Persia being merely the arena in which personal glory and fame might well be sought. The very nature of the Greek city-states, with their small populations, paucity of wealth and resources, and part-time militia armies, made it almost impossible for long-term strategic goals to be achieved by Greek arms.
Thutmose III’s Strategic Vision | National Security Over Personal Glory
Thutmose III, on the other hand, created a new strategic vision for Egypt based solidly in calculations of national self-interest. unlike Greece, Egypt already possessed a sense of national identity.
Achieving Thutmose III’s long-term strategic goals made it possible for his heirs to keep Egypt safe for generations. Thutmose III was certainly aware of the millennia-old Egyptian ideal of the warrior king who protected Egypt from its enemies and triumphed gloriously on the battlefield.
But the search for glory in Egyptian terms had to be sought in the protection of the nation and its security interests and not in the performance of a king seeking glory (arete) for himself alone.
Thutmose III’s Comprehensive Reign vs. Alexander’s Tactical Brilliance
In twelve years Alexander demonstrated his brilliance as a tactician while fighting four major battles (Granicus, Issus, Arbela, and the hydaspes River), four short sieges (Miletus, Halicarnassus, Tyre, and Gaza), and a number of running bloody battles and sieges with tribal armies in what is now Afghanistan and India.
All the other potential adversaries—the city-states of the Phoenician coast, Egypt, and key satrapies of the Persian empire—surrendered to Alexander without a fight.
Thutmose III, by contrast, took part in twenty campaigns in two distant theaters of operations—Canaan-Syria and Nubia—and ruled for thirty-two years.
Alexander neither governed the empire that he brought into being nor concerned himself with public works, improvements in the army, creating a new naval force, foreign policy, diplomacy, and rebellions. Thutmose III had to attend to all these things as well as oversee the governance of an empire that stretched from Asia to Nubia.
Alexander’s Conquests | Victories Against a Decaying Persian Empire
Alexander’s victories were achieved against mostly second-rate armies and third-rate generals. Persia itself was rotten to the core well before Alexander attacked it. Indeed, the political assessment that Persia was corrupt prompted Philip to conclude that only a slight push was needed to make the empire collapse.
The Persian army that faced Alexander, though very large, was ill led, ill equipped, incapable of maneuver or controlled retreat, and had officers who were selected more for their political reliability than for their military competence.
When Alexander struck, the Persian army collapsed just as Philip had predicted. only in India did Alexander confront competent professional armies, and with the exception of his battle with King Porus at the Hydaspes River, Alexander refused to engage them.
Thutmose III: A Greater Conqueror Than Alexander?
The Canaanite armies that Thutmose faced in Canaan-Syria were professional armies, led by competent commanders who were members of a professional military aristocracy, and were equipped with the most modern military equipment of the day: the sickle-sword, body armor, composite bow, penetrating ax, and chariots.
Most of Thutmose’s adversaries in that theater of operations also had the advantages of interior lines along which to logistically support their field forces and of strongly fortified cities upon which to fall back and from which to carry on the war even when defeated on the battlefield.
Only in Nubia did the Egyptians face adversaries who were weaker than they were. Egypt’s ability to prevent Nubia from obtaining adequate supplies of tin to manufacture bronze reduced its armies to using bows, arrows, and spears.
If the greatness of a field commander is judged by the ability of the enemy he faces—both the opposing commander and the armies he commands—then compared to Alexander, Thutmose must rank as the greater field commander for his success in defeating stronger adversaries.
Alexander’s Hellenistic Legacy | A Double-Edged Sword
Alexander’s victories permitted Greek rule to be imposed on what was the Persian empire and resulted in Greek cultural and military influences replacing the Persian in most of the Levant.
This change ushered in the Hellenistic Age, a period in which eastern influences in all areas flooded into the West at a level not seen before, and permitted the diffusion of new ideas and technologies throughout the Mediterranean basin.
But Alexander’s empire existed in name only, for upon his death it was divided among his successors into three competing imperial states that frequently warred against one another. once this internecine warfare commenced, Alexander’s imperium came to an end in a practical sense.
Thutmose III | Egypt’s Forgotten Conqueror
Within a generation, the Ptolemies of Egypt, Alexander’s successors, had become thoroughly Egyptianized to the point of calling themselves pharaohs. even the traditional Greek gods were expressed in Egyptian terms.
By the battle of Raphia (217 BCE), Egyptian troops outnumbered Greeks in the Ptolemies’ armies. The rulers of mainland Greece witnessed the beginning of their empire’s end at the hands of Rome after the battle of Cynoscephalae (197 BCE) and suffered the coup de grâce at the battle of Pydna thirty years later.
The Syrian branch of Alexander’s empire fell to the Romans at the battle of magnesia in 190 BCE. By the time of Carthage’s destruction in 147 BCE, for all practical purposes the empire of Alexander’s successors had ceased to exist. By contrast, the empire Thutmose III created in Canaan, Syria, and Nubia remained the dominant cultural and military force in the Levant for more than five hundred years.
Seen in context, then, Thutmose III was at least Alexander’s equal as a military commander and a force of history, and in many respects this Egyptian warrior king was even greater than the Macedonian.
