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The world's oldest peace treaty hangs at the UN
💡 The oldest peace treaty we can fully read survives from both sides at once, letting us see how two ancient enemies each spun the same deal as a win.
Around 1259 BCE, after years of fighting over the city of Kadesh (in modern Syria), the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III signed a formal peace agreement. It is the earliest surviving peace treaty whose full text we can still read — and remarkably, we have it from both sides: an Egyptian version carved in hieroglyphs on temple walls, and a Hittite version pressed into clay tablets in cuneiform.
Having both copies is what makes it a historian's treasure. The two texts largely agree — they promise an end to war, a defensive alliance, and even the return of political refugees — but each kingdom framed itself as the gracious equal, not the loser. Tellingly, the battle that started it all had ended in a bloody draw, yet both rulers had earlier claimed victory back home.
Because the treaty reads like a model of balanced diplomacy between equals, a replica of it is displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York as a symbol of international peacemaking. A deal struck by two Bronze Age empires still speaks to how enemies turn stalemate into a workable peace.