From Kadesh to Troy: The Oldest War Stories

Every culture that has fought a war has also told stories about it. The oldest of those stories that survive did not come from soldiers writing home or historians checking facts. They came from kings who wanted their victories remembered, from scribes who copied old poems as school exercises, and from singers who carried long tales in their heads for generations. Reading them today tells us a good deal about ancient wars, and even more about why people tell war stories at all.

Before writing: war stories as performance

For most of human history, war stories were spoken or sung, not written. A story survived only if someone found it worth repeating. That simple fact shaped what got remembered. Tales that were exciting, moving, or useful to a community lasted. Dull details, like supply problems or the names of ordinary soldiers, usually did not.

We cannot hear those early performances, but we can see their fingerprints in the texts that were eventually written down. Repeated phrases, stock scenes, and set speeches are signs of stories built to be performed and remembered. Later in this article we will look at how scholars learned to recognize those signs. First, it helps to look at three very different early ways of recording war: a royal monument, a body of clay-tablet poetry, and an epic that began as song.

Kadesh: a pharaoh tells his own story

The Battle of Kadesh was fought beside the Orontes River in Syria, around 1275 BCE according to Britannica, between the Egyptian army of Ramesses II and the Hittites led by Muwatalli. It is often described as one of the largest chariot battles of the ancient world. Hittite agents posing as deserters misled Ramesses about where the enemy army was, and the Hittite chariots struck the Egyptian vanguard hard. Ramesses managed to rally his forces, and after a day of heavy fighting there was no outright victor.

That is not the story Ramesses told. He had his own version of the battle carved and painted on the walls of temples across Egypt. Egyptologist John A. Wilson, writing for the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, counted copies at Luxor, Karnak, the Ramesseum (the king's memorial temple at Thebes), Abu Simbel, and Abydos. Luxor alone held three copies of one version and two of another.

Two versions, one message

Scholars usually describe two main Kadesh texts. One is a long, elevated account known as the Poem. The other is a shorter prose account, often called the Bulletin or the Record, which sits beside large carved scenes of the camp and the fighting. Wilson warned that the Poem's main purpose was to glorify the king, and he judged only its opening lines to be reliable as history. The prose account is plainer, but it still tells the story from the king's point of view.

In these inscriptions Ramesses appears almost alone, holding off the enemy while his own troops falter. Britannica calls the Egyptian version biased and the real outcome inconclusive. Roughly fifteen years later, the two powers returned to the matter and agreed to a nonaggression pact, which Britannica describes as the first known example of its kind in history.

Gilgamesh: friendship, a siege, and grief

The Gilgamesh stories come from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Gilgamesh was remembered as a king of the city of Uruk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that no contemporary information about him is known, so we cannot say for certain whether he lived.

According to Britannica, the earliest surviving Gilgamesh texts are five short poems in the Sumerian language, preserved on tablets written in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Later, a Babylonian scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni recorded what became the classic version of the tale. The fullest text of the epic survives on twelve incomplete tablets in the Akkadian language, found in the 19th century in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.

A war story inside the legend

One of the older Sumerian poems, known today as Gilgamesh and Aga, is a true war story. In the translation published by the University of Oxford's Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, envoys from Aga, king of Kish, demand that Uruk submit. Gilgamesh asks the city's elders for advice, and they counsel submission. He then asks the young fighting men, who urge resistance. He sides with them. Aga besieges the city, Gilgamesh appears on the walls, Uruk's men drive off the attackers, and Aga is captured. Then, in a quiet ending, Gilgamesh reminds Aga of a past kindness and sets him free.

Even this short poem shows features that appear again and again in later war literature: a council debating whether to fight, a leader under pressure, and a moment of mercy that the storyteller clearly thought mattered.

The cost of loss

The longer epic is less about battle than about what comes after. Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu set out to face Humbaba, the guardian of a distant cedar forest. Later the gods decree that Enkidu must die. Britannica notes that Gilgamesh's lament for his friend and Enkidu's funeral fill the eighth tablet. The king's grief sends him on a search for a way to escape death, and the poem ends with him returning to Uruk still mortal.

Many readers who have lost a comrade find that part of the story surprisingly familiar. More than three thousand years ago, someone thought the most important thing to say about a warrior's life was how much his friend's death hurt.

The Iliad: a war remembered in song

The Iliad is an epic poem in 24 books, traditionally attributed to the Greek poet Homer. Britannica describes it as the tragic story of the wrath of Achilles and says the Homeric epics likely date to the 8th century BCE and grew out of a long oral tradition. The poem does not tell the whole Trojan War. It focuses on a quarrel between Achilles and the Greek commander Agamemnon, the deaths it leads to, and its aftermath.

The opening lines announce that this will be a story about the human cost of anger, not simply a tale of glory:

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades…

Homer, Iliad, Book I, translated by Samuel Butler (1898), Project Gutenberg

The poem ends not with the fall of Troy but with a funeral. After Achilles kills the Trojan prince Hector, Hector's father Priam comes to Achilles to ask for his son's body. The final book closes with the Trojans mourning and burying Hector. For a poem so full of fighting, it is striking that its last word is about how a community grieves.

How scholars learned the Iliad began as song

Readers had long noticed that Homer repeats himself. Ships are "swift," the sea is "wine-dark," and heroes carry the same descriptive tags every time they appear. A young American scholar named Milman Parry (1902–1935) argued that these phrases were tools of oral composition. According to Harvard Magazine, Parry showed that the stock phrases fit neatly into the rhythm of Greek epic verse, giving a singer ready-made building blocks for composing aloud.

To test the idea, Parry traveled to the Balkans in the 1930s and recorded living singers who performed long heroic songs without writing. His assistant, Albert Lord, helped run the recording equipment. Parry died in 1935, but Lord carried the work forward. His book The Singer of Tales, first published in 1960, drew on fieldwork among epic singers in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia and applied its findings to the Iliad and Odyssey, among other works. The recordings are preserved today in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard.

Parry and Lord also noticed that singers changed their songs a little each time they performed them, while still believing they were telling the same story. That insight matters well beyond ancient Greece. Anyone who has listened to a veteran tell the same story over many years has seen something similar. Our article on memory and the war memoir looks at why retold accounts shift over time.

What the oldest war stories teach us

These three traditions are very different, but together they show the main reasons people have always told war stories:

• To claim credit. The Kadesh inscriptions were made to show a king as a hero. Official accounts in every age carry some of this purpose.
• To remember the lost. The Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad both give their deepest attention to grief, funerals, and the people left behind.
• To pass on values. Councils of war, acts of mercy, and the dangers of pride appear in these stories because the storytellers thought listeners needed to hear them.
• To keep a community's memory alive. Oral singers, temple carvers, and scribes all worked to make sure a story outlived the people in it.

None of these early sources is history in the modern sense. There are no footnotes, no lists of witnesses, and little interest in checking one account against another. That change came later, with a Greek general who decided to write down a war as accurately as he could. You can read his story in Thucydides and the birth of war history.

The impulse behind the oldest war stories has not changed, though. People who live through war still want the experience understood and the dead remembered. Today that work is often done with a recorder and a set of good questions instead of a lyre or a chisel. If you would like to preserve a veteran's story in your own family, our practical guide to recording a veteran's story is a good place to begin.