Tjaneni

Tjaneni went on campaign with Thutmose III and wrote down what happened, which is why the first battle in recorded history is a battle we can follow. He was an army scribe in the fifteenth century BC, and his job was the record: the order of march, the disposition of troops, the count of prisoners and cattle and captured chariots. At Megiddo in about 1457 BC the Egyptian army faced a coalition of Canaanite princes. Thutmose took the narrow Aruna pass against the advice of his officers, emerged in front of the enemy, and won the field - and then lost the immediate advantage because his troops stopped to plunder the abandoned camp while the defeated were hauled over the city walls by knotted clothing. The siege that followed took seven months. All of that detail comes from Tjaneni. His account was copied onto the walls of the temple at Karnak, in the Hall of Annals, where it survives as the earliest battle narrative with a recoverable tactical sequence. The annals run well past Megiddo. They cover seventeen campaigns over twenty years, with tribute lists, the names of towns taken and the quantities carried home, and they are the reason the reign of Thutmose III can be reconstructed year by year where most Egyptian reigns cannot. He is credited in the inscription itself, which is unusual: the record says it was written on a leather roll kept in the temple, and names the man who kept it. Nothing else about him is known, including when he was born or died. This record carries no dates for that reason rather than by oversight - the whole of the evidence is the campaign and the wall it was carved on.

• Nationality: Egyptian
• Roles: scholar