The reign of Ramesses II

The story

The king who had himself carved into the mountain

If you travel up the Nile to the far south of Egypt, almost at the border with Sudan, you find a wall of reddish sandstone facing the great Lake Nasser. In the middle of the wall sit four stone giants, about twenty metres tall: they are four statues of the same man, the pharaoh Ramesses II, carved in the living rock more than three thousand two hundred years ago. Behind them, in the mountain, a temple goes in for more than sixty metres. It is called Abu Simbel, and it was built for a very clear message, aimed at anyone arriving from the south: this country belongs to a powerful king.

The temple is carefully aligned: twice a year, around 22 February and 22 October, the morning sun's rays go all the way down the corridor and light up the statues of the gods in the sanctuary at the back. The one of the god Ptah, lord of darkness, stays in shadow. Tradition links these dates to the king's birthday and coronation, but there is no direct proof.

The pharaoh of records

Ramesses II, called by his subjects and then by everyone “the Great”, reigned for sixty-six years and two months, from about 1279 to 1213 BC. He came to the throne still young and died at around ninety: an exceptional age for antiquity. When he died, almost no Egyptian had a memory of another king. He had many wives, among them his favourite, Nefertari, to whom he dedicated a small temple beside his own, at Abu Simbel, and a very large number of children, sons and daughters, according to estimates between 88 and 103. For many years he outlived his heirs: the thirteenth son, Merneptah, followed him on the throne when he was already about sixty.

He was also a great builder. He had a new capital built in the Nile delta, Pi-Ramesses, finished the great hall at Karnak, built the Ramesseum, his mortuary temple at Thebes, and added his name to a great many monuments, sometimes erasing those of his predecessors. The English poet Shelley, in 1818, was inspired by a great statue of Ramesses II, which had arrived at the British Museum, to write the poem “Ozymandias”: the name is the Greek form of Usermaatra, the king's throne name.

The Battle of Kadesh

In the fifth year of his reign, around 1274 BC, Ramesses II led the army into Syria to take back territories disputed with the Hittites, the great power of Anatolia. The battle was fought near the city of Kadesh, on the river Orontes. The Hittite king, Muwatalli II, sent Ramesses two false deserters, who told him the enemy army was still far away. It was a trap: the Hittite chariots suddenly attacked an Egyptian division on the march and overwhelmed it. Ramesses, according to the Egyptian account, found himself almost alone and managed to turn the tide of the battle with courage and with the arrival of reinforcements.

The Battle of Kadesh is one of the best documented in antiquity, because Ramesses had it told and portrayed in enormous reliefs on several temples, including Abu Simbel. But those images are propaganda: they show the pharaoh as an absolute victor. In reality, historians think the battle ended without a true winner, and that the Hittites kept Kadesh. One of the best pieces of evidence: after the battle, Syria remained in Hittite hands.

The oldest peace we know

The war with the Hittites lasted about fifteen more years. Then, around 1259 BC, in the twenty-first year of his reign, Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III decided to make peace. The treaty that resulted is the oldest peace agreement of which we have the text. It exists in two versions: the Egyptian one, in hieroglyphs, carved on the walls of Karnak and the Ramesseum, and the Hittite one, written in Akkadian on clay tablets found in the archives of the Hittite capital, Hattusa, in Turkey.

The treaty says there will be “brotherhood and peace for ever” between the two kingdoms, that neither will attack the other, that they will help each other if an enemy attacks one of them, and that they will hand over fugitives. Each swears before the gods of the two countries, with curses for whoever does not keep the pact. A few years later, Ramesses married a Hittite princess, Hattusili's daughter, to strengthen the alliance. A copy of the treaty is displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York, as a symbol of the search for peace.

Saved from the waters

In 1960 Egypt began to build the great Aswan Dam, which would create an enormous lake and drown Nubia, with its temples. UNESCO issued an appeal to the world and a group of countries, forty-eight in all, contributed to a colossal rescue operation. Between 1964 and 1968 the temple of Abu Simbel was cut into over a thousand blocks, moved higher up, 65 metres above the original level and more than 200 metres from the shore, and rebuilt with a precision of a few millimetres. The operation cost about 42 million dollars. Today the temples stand on an artificial hill, and everything looks as before.

The king's mummy

The mummy of Ramesses II was found in 1881 in a hiding place at Deir el-Bahari, where the priests had put it to keep it safe from thieves. Today it is kept in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization at Fustat, in Cairo. Analyses show a tall man, with reddish hair (perhaps dyed with henna), a hooked nose, teeth badly ruined by abscesses and joints deformed by arthritis. He was old and ill, as was normal after so long a life.