Ramesses II

Ramesses was born around 1303 BCE into a family that had only recently claimed the throne of Egypt. His grandfather, Ramesses I, was a military officer of non-royal birth whom the childless pharaoh Horemheb selected as successor, founding the Nineteenth Dynasty ^[1]. The old soldier reigned briefly, and power passed to his son Seti I, a capable commander who set about restoring Egyptian authority in Canaan and Syria after the disruptions of the Amarna period.

The young prince grew up in the Nile Delta, in the region around Avaris where his family had roots, and his education was shaped from the start by his father's campaigns. Seti I took the boy on military expeditions while he was still very young, and inscriptions later claimed that Ramesses accompanied the army before he was ten years old ^[1]. Whatever the precise truth of such statements, which served royal propaganda as much as record keeping, the prince clearly received serious training in warfare, administration, and religious duty.

By his mid teens Ramesses held the title of prince regent. Seti I gave him a household of his own, real responsibilities in state affairs, and a role in building projects, including work at the temple of Abydos ^[2]. This deliberate grooming meant that when Seti died, around 1279 BCE, the transition was smooth. Ramesses came to the throne as a man in his early twenties who had already fought in battle, managed officials, and learned how monuments could carry a king's name across centuries.

The new pharaoh moved quickly to stamp his identity on Egypt. Within his first years he began transforming his family's Delta homeland into a full royal capital, Pi-Ramesses, a sprawling city of palaces, temples, military barracks, and workshops near modern Qantir ^[3]. Placing the seat of government in the eastern Delta was practical as well as sentimental: it put the king close to the routes into Canaan and Syria, where Egypt's most dangerous rival, the Hittite Empire of Anatolia, was pressing southward.

Early military action established his reputation. In his second regnal year Egyptian forces defeated seaborne raiders known as the Sherden, some of whom Ramesses then recruited into his own army as elite troops ^[1]. A campaign in his fourth year pushed north along the Levantine coast and secured the province of Amurru, whose ruler switched allegiance from the Hittites to Egypt. That defection guaranteed a Hittite response and set the stage for the confrontation that would dominate the first decades of the reign.

Ramesses also inherited an enormous religious and architectural program. He completed his father's temple at Abydos, continued work on the great hypostyle hall at Karnak, and began his own mortuary temple at Thebes, the Ramesseum ^[2]. Egyptian kingship demanded visible piety, and the young ruler understood better than most that stone outlasts armies. Any serious Ramesses II biography has to reckon with the sheer scale of this output, which continued without pause for more than six decades.

In the fifth year of his reign, around 1274 BCE, Ramesses marched a large army north toward Kadesh, a strategically placed city on the Orontes River in modern Syria. The Hittite king Muwatalli II was waiting with a substantial force of his own, including thousands of chariots drawn from allied states ^[4]. Misled by captured spies who claimed the Hittites were far away, Ramesses pushed ahead with only one of his four divisions and camped near the city. The Hittite chariotry then smashed into the following division and drove straight at the royal camp.

Egyptian accounts describe the king personally rallying his guard and fighting his way out of the encirclement until reinforcements arrived. The battle ended without a clear victor: Ramesses extricated his army but failed to take Kadesh, and the city remained in the Hittite sphere ^[4]. At home, however, the king presented the engagement as a triumph of personal valor. Versions of the Kadesh narrative, in both poetic and pictorial form, were carved on temple walls at Karnak, Luxor, Abydos, the Ramesseum, and Abu Simbel, making it the most extensively recorded battle of the ancient Near East ^[5].

Fighting along the frontier continued for years, but neither empire could destroy the other, and both faced new threats, including a rising Assyria. In his twenty first regnal year, about 1259 BCE, Ramesses concluded a formal peace with the Hittite king Hattusili III. Copies survive in Egyptian hieroglyphs on temple walls and in Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets found at the Hittite capital of Hattusa, which is why scholars often describe it as the earliest surviving written peace treaty between major powers ^[6]. The agreement held. Thirteen years later Ramesses married a Hittite princess, and diplomatic correspondence flowed between the two courts for the rest of his reign.

No pharaoh built more, or claimed more, than Ramesses II. His most famous project stands at Abu Simbel in Nubia, where workers cut two temples directly into a sandstone cliff above the Nile. The Great Temple is fronted by four seated colossi of the king, each about 20 meters high, and its inner sanctuary was aligned so that on two days each year the rising sun penetrates the mountain to illuminate the statues within ^[3]. A smaller temple nearby honors his chief wife Nefertari alongside the goddess Hathor, a rare instance of a queen shown at the same scale as her husband on a temple facade.

In Thebes he finished the vast hypostyle hall at Karnak, a forest of 134 giant columns begun under his father, and added a pylon and colossal statues to Luxor Temple ^[2]. On the west bank he raised the Ramesseum, his memorial temple, whose fallen colossus later inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias, a name derived from Usermaatre, the king's throne name ^[1]. Across Egypt and Nubia he founded new temples, enlarged old ones, and ordered his cartouches carved so deeply that later kings could not easily erase them.

He was also an energetic recycler. Ramesses usurped statues and monuments of earlier rulers, recutting their inscriptions with his own names, which long complicated the work of Egyptologists trying to date objects ^[2]. The habit was less vandalism than strategy. By attaching his name to as much stone as possible, he made himself unavoidable, and the tactic worked: among Ramesses II facts that surprise modern visitors, few Egyptian archaeological sites of any size lack some trace of him.

Ramesses maintained one of the largest royal families ever recorded in Egypt. He is credited with roughly one hundred children by his various wives and concubines, and lists of his sons and daughters were carved on temple walls almost as monuments in themselves ^[1]. His first and most celebrated consort was Nefertari, whom he married before taking the throne. Her tomb in the Valley of the Queens, decorated with some of the finest painting to survive from ancient Egypt, and her temple at Abu Simbel testify to her standing ^[3].

After Nefertari's death, around the twenty fifth year of the reign, the queen Isetnofret and later several royal daughters held the position of great royal wife, as did the Hittite princess Maathorneferure following the diplomatic marriage of about 1246 BCE ^[6]. Such marriages sealed the peace with Hatti and displayed Egypt's international reach.

The king outlived many of his heirs. His fourth son, Khaemwaset, served as high priest of Ptah at Memphis and became famous for restoring pyramids and temples that were already a thousand years old, work that has earned him the modern nickname of the first Egyptologist ^[2]. Khaemwaset died before his father, as did at least eleven other elder sons. The eventual successor, Merneptah, was the thirteenth son, already an old man when he finally became pharaoh.

Few rulers of the ancient world governed as long as Ramesses II. He celebrated the Sed festival, the traditional jubilee of renewal normally held after thirty years on the throne, and then repeated it again and again, marking thirteen or fourteen jubilees in all ^[1]. By the later decades of the reign most of his subjects had known no other king, and Egypt enjoyed a stretch of prosperity and external peace secured by the Hittite treaty.

His body tells the story of his old age. Examination of the mummy, including a celebrated study in Paris in 1976 and 1977, revealed severe dental disease, arthritis, and hardening of the arteries, and indicated that the elderly king walked with a hunched back ^[7]. Analysis of hair samples suggested he had been a redhead in youth. He was probably about ninety when he died in 1213 BCE at Pi-Ramesses, in the sixty seventh year of his reign ^[1].

Ramesses was buried in tomb KV7 in the Valley of the Kings, but his rest was short by Egyptian standards. Tomb robbery became so rampant in the following centuries that priests moved his mummy more than once, finally hiding it with dozens of other royal bodies in a cache at Deir el-Bahari, where it lay undisturbed until its discovery in 1881 ^[7].

Later Egyptians remembered him simply as the great ancestor. Nine subsequent pharaohs took the name Ramesses in his honor, and Egyptologists call the era he dominated the Ramesside period ^[2]. Classical writers preserved garbled memories of a mighty king Sesostris or Ozymandias whose deeds blended those of Ramesses with earlier rulers, evidence of how thoroughly his fame outgrew the facts.

Modern history has treated him just as dramatically. When the construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened to drown Abu Simbel beneath Lake Nasser, UNESCO coordinated an international rescue between 1964 and 1968 in which engineers sawed both temples into more than a thousand blocks and reassembled them on higher ground, an operation that helped inspire the World Heritage Convention ^[3]. In 1976 his mummy traveled to Paris for conservation and study, reportedly issued an Egyptian passport listing his occupation as king (deceased), and was received with honors normally reserved for heads of state ^[7]. In 2006 archaeologists moved his 83 ton colossus from Ramses Square in Cairo to protect it from pollution; it now greets visitors at the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza ^[8].

Among Ramesses II achievements, historians usually rank the Hittite peace treaty, the sixty six year reign, and the unmatched building program above his battlefield record, since Kadesh was at best a draw. Yet the king's real genius may have been for permanence itself. Debate continues over questions the ancient sources cannot settle, including the popular but unproven identification of Ramesses as the pharaoh of the biblical Exodus ^[1]. What is beyond dispute is the outcome he engineered: more than three thousand years after his death, his name, face, and monuments remain the standard image of pharaonic Egypt.