"Magic picks and shovels? This part talks about some of the Hittites being stopped by a trench around the Egyptian camp, and if they just dug it when they set camp for the night that's pretty quick, right?"

"I don't know that it's especially quick, conventional armies have to dig latrines."

"I think you just have everyone dig a bit and you get a trench. Though maybe many of the armies I've heard about were secretly using magic, now that I think about it. And the Egyptians had had, like, continuity of rule for a long time, right, so maybe they'd been gradually accumulating magic stuff, if they took acceptably good care of it - I think weapons just like doing lots of fighting, and it sounds like they were sure doing that - I feel like we can definitely at least hypothesize weapons, and armor, and horse-armor, and stuff for making camp -" She adds it all to the list.

"I think Malak's right about the Hittite chariots. There's not a lot about their construction or anything, but in the initial charge they attack from across the river, and then during the Egyptian counterattack they don't all have their chariots and a bunch of them drown trying to swim it, so it must have been quite deep. It also says that the Egyptian chariots are lighter and faster, easily overtaking the Hittite ones - could be that the two sides have their chariots enchanted differently, the Hittites primarily for handling difficult terrain and the Egyptians for moving as quickly as possible."

"- also that's some evidence the soldiers were armored, if they drowned in the river."

"Yeah, some? Does anybody have any idea how common it was for people to know how to swim back then? - I guess it probably depended."

"They might just not have known how to swim but armor probably wouldn't help."

"I guess armor is probably useful anyway. - I think we should also think about what artifice Rameses II may have had on his person, this account has him claiming that he was totally alone when the Hittites ambushed and that he found himself in a fight for his life, but he then managed to gather his personal guard and some of the routed Egyptian soldiers, and attacked the enemy as they had stopped to loot the camp. It says he called on the god Amun - that'll have been some kind of incantation - but I imagine that magical weapons or other resources would have helped him, too."

"I'll put shield holders on the list of things for someone to look up whether they'd been invented yet -uh, enchanted clothes, probably the pharaoh's fancy pharaoh rod was magic - I'm thinking of a real thing, right, I've definitely seen depictions of pharaohs where they had a fancy pharaoh rod -"

"I've seen fancy pharaoh rods, yeah. I don't know if he'd have been wearing armor when ambushed if it was totally out of nowhere, unless it was additionally enchanted to not suck to wear all the time?"

"There's an illustration at the end of him fighting, taken from a temple he later had erected - it's a bit hard to tell what sort of weapon he has, but it looks more like a rod than like a sword. I don't think he's wearing armor, though. There's some kind of cowl thing, though, I don't know what that's called."

"Stuff about the pharaoh's personal magic items is probably attested elsewhere, that might be a good lookup for extra credit."

"I'm not sure how accurate the illustration is supposed to be, but it doesn't look like the Pharoah is steering the chariot at all – so that could be stylized, or it might be some kind of self-steering artifice."

Also, weren't they supposed to impress Bella by sharing all their ideas from earlier and pretending they'd thought of them on the fly? Julian distinctly remembers this being discussed. "Also, we haven't talked about artillery at all. They're trying to sack a city somewhere in here, they could have had all kinds of enchanted catapults and battering rams and such." 

"Oh, good one - if the city has walls -"

"The city probably has walls. - is he holding an arrow. You'd almost certainly not enchant an arrow but if he was surprised it might have been what he had on hand."

" - huh, you're right, that actually doesn't look like a rod. Darn. Okay, our open questions for more research are - did the city the Egyptians were attacking have walls - what animals drew chariots, or could they have been magically driverless - what stuff are the pharaohs mentioned to have personally possessed - had shieldholders been invented yet - had barding been invented yet. How about we each look up one of those, and then come back and share our citations, and then we can each write an essay that references five external sources for background research which should be an easy good grade."

"Sounds good to me. Anybody gonna fight me over shieldholders?"

Annisa really appreciates how Bella phrases her requests so it wouldn't be incredibly awkward to argue them!!! It seems like a good skill for an enclaver to have. "I want 'when was barding invented', because it similarly doesn't sound like it'll require reading Egyptian at all."

"I'll take the walls. This school seems to want me to learn about macro-scale wards anyway." 

"I guess that means I've got chariots."

"Great. We can compare notes - at lunch tomorrow?"

"Sure, and then we can all do the essay over work period?"

"Works for me. Maybe once we're busier we'll want to rotate who's doing all the work but we haven't gotten anything else to do yet, might as well get ahead to start."

"Pharaoh's personal possessions, hopefully involving citing primary sources in Egyptian. I'll have it for everyone tomorrow."