Ramesses II

• 1. The Great God

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  Ramesses II ruled Egypt for sixty-six years, the longest recorded reign of any pharaoh. He fought no fewer than fifteen military campaigns, and the source records every one of them as a victory, with a single exception. That exception, the Battle of Kadesh, ended in a stalemate. He came to the throne at age twenty-five, and by the time he died he was about ninety years old. Successor pharaohs called him the Great God and prayed to share his longevity and glory. Greek writers gave him another name entirely: Ozymandias, drawn from the first part of his regnal name, Usermaatre Setepenre. So who was the man behind a reign that outlasted nearly everyone he ruled? How did a child who was not born a prince become the most celebrated pharaoh of the New Kingdom? And why, three thousand years later, do scholars still argue over whether his face belongs to the story of the Exodus?

• 2. An Accidental Dynasty

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  Ramesses II was not born a prince. His grandfather, Ramesses I, served as a vizier and military officer under the pharaoh Horemheb, who had no clear heir of his own. Horemheb appointed the soldier-administrator as his successor, and at that moment the future Ramesses II was only about eleven years old. When Ramesses I died, his son Seti I became king. Seti named his own son, the young Ramesses, prince regent at about the age of fourteen. The boy was being groomed for a throne his family had held for only a single generation. That haste left fingerprints on his name. The name of Seti I means "follower of Set," the deity who slew Osiris, and Seti's own father had served as High Priest of Set. The family carried Set into its very titles, an unusual loyalty for a line that would rule the New Kingdom at its height.

• 3. The Reckoning Of Years

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  His accession is recorded as III Shemu, day 27, which most Egyptologists place on the 31st of May 1279 BC. From there the count is unusually precise for the ancient world. The historian Josephus, drawing on Manetho's lost work through his book Contra Apionem, assigned Ramesses a reign of sixty-six years and two months. Papyrus Gurob fragment L confirms it: Year 67 of Ramesses is immediately followed by Year 1 of his son Merneptah, meaning the old king died about two months into his sixty-seventh regnal year. The Egyptians remembered his passing with a feast. At Deir el-Medina, scribes observed a free feast day called the "Sailing" of UsimaRe-Setepenre, marked on II Akhet day 6. The Egyptologist Robert J. Demarée notes that such "Sailings" commemorated the passing of deified royals; the Sailing of Seti I fell on III Shemu 24. Cross-referenced with A. J. Peden's window and the work of Jürgen von Beckerath, that date yields the 13th of August 1213 BC. Ramesses had reigned sixty-six years and seventy-four days. The next pharaoh to inherit was a son, because Ramesses had already outlived so many of his children.

• 4. War By Land And Sea

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  In his second year, Ramesses faced the Sherden sea pirates, who attacked cargo ships along Egypt's Mediterranean coast. He did not chase them. He posted troops and ships at strategic points, lured the raiders toward their expected prey, then ambushed and captured them in a single action. A stele from Tanis describes the pirates arriving "in their war-ships from the midst of the sea, and none were able to stand before them." Soon after, those same Sherden appear among the pharaoh's own bodyguard, recognizable by their horned helmets, round shields, and great Naue II swords. The Sherden may have come from Ionia, from southwest Anatolia, or from the island of Sardinia. The army behind these campaigns was enormous, estimated at some one hundred thousand men. Ramesses also pushed south past the first cataract of the Nile into Nubia, a colony by then for two hundred years. At Beit el-Wali, a temple wall shows him charging into battle in a war chariot, his young sons Amun-her-khepeshef and Khaemwaset following behind in chariots of their own. Another wall claims he fought one of those battles without help from his soldiers. Westward, the Egyptians were active along a three hundred kilometre stretch of Mediterranean coast, as far as Zawyet Umm El Rakham, where a fortress was built on what its own texts call Libyan land.

• 5. The Hittite Years

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  By his fifth regnal year, Ramesses arrived at Kadesh on the 1st of May 1274 BC, after marching through Canaan for exactly a month. He wanted the city to expand Egypt's frontier into Syria and to match his father Seti I's triumphant entry a decade earlier. Instead his troops walked into a Hittite ambush. The chariotry of Muwatalli II smashed through his second division and reached his camp before reinforcements let the Egyptians counterattack and rout the enemy, who swam the Orontes River to safety. Ramesses claimed a great victory, and in the battle itself that was technically true. Across the wider campaign, the Hittites came out ahead; the Egyptians retreated, and Hittite forces briefly occupied territory near Damascus. The fighting dragged on for years. In his seventh year he split his army, sending his son Amun-her-khepeshef to chase Shasu tribes toward the Dead Sea while he attacked Jerusalem and Jericho, the two forces reuniting to recover the land around Damascus. In his eighth and ninth years he reached Dapur, far past Kadesh, in territory no Egyptian soldier had seen since Thutmose III almost one hundred and twenty years earlier. At Dapur he later claimed he fought without putting on his corslet until two hours into the battle. Six of his young sons, still wearing their side locks, joined that conquest. The standoff finally broke in Year 21. Ramesses concluded the Treaty of Kadesh with Ḫattušili III, recorded both in Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Hittite cuneiform. The two versions differ on one point: the Hittite text says the Egyptians sued for peace, while the Egyptian text says the reverse. Its eighteen articles called for peace, and the Egyptians received the agreement as a silver plaque carved later into the temple at Karnak. After it, no further Egyptian campaigns in Canaan are recorded.

• 6. Covering The Land With Buildings

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  In the third year of his reign, Ramesses began what the source calls the most ambitious building project after the pyramids, raised almost fifteen hundred years earlier. He built from the Delta to Nubia, one description holding that he covered the land with buildings as no monarch before him had. His method was deliberate. Earlier pharaohs carved shallow reliefs that successors could easily erase, so Ramesses insisted his own carvings be cut deep into the stone, harder to alter and more striking under the Egyptian sun, an echo of his bond with the sun deity Ra. His cartouches appear even on buildings he never constructed. His new capital, Pi-Ramesses, rose in the eastern Delta on a site that had once been Seti I's summer palace. Its full name meant "Domain of Ramesses, Great in Victory," and it held vast temples, a residential palace, and its own zoo. For a time in the early twentieth century the site was confused with Tanis, until scholars recognized the real Pi-Ramesses lay about thirty kilometres south, near modern Qantir, where the colossal feet of a statue are almost all that remain above ground. In western Thebes he raised the Ramesseum, his mortuary temple, which the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus marveled at. Its enthroned syenite statue stood seventeen metres high and weighed more than a thousand tonnes. In 1255 BC he and his queen Nefertari traveled into Nubia to inaugurate Abu Simbel, a temple later described as ego cast into stone.

• 7. The Body Of A King

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  By the end, aged about ninety, Ramesses suffered from severe dental problems, arthritis, hardening of the arteries, and heart disease. A significant hole was later found in his jaw, where an abscess may have grown serious enough to kill him. His arthritis is thought to have bent him into a hunched walk for his final decades. His tomb, KV7 in the Valley of the Kings, did not hold him for long. Because of looting, priests moved his body, re-wrapped it, and shifted it again, all of it recorded in hieroglyphics on the linen of his coffin. His mummy was discovered in 1881 inside a plain reused wooden coffin. Gaston Maspero, who first unwrapped it, described straight locks about five centimetres long, white at death and possibly auburn in life, on a face that gives a fair idea of the living king. The hair told a story of its own. Forensic work in 1976 by Pierre-Fernand Ceccaldi found the hair was naturally red, and Maurice Bucaille confirmed it was not dyed by embalming. In ancient Egypt, red hair was associated with Set, which tied neatly back to a family whose names already honored that deity. That same year the mummy traveled to Paris for treatment after a French doctor found it decaying. It was met at Paris-Le Bourget Airport with full military honours and taken to the Musée de l'Homme. The widely repeated claim that it received a passport is incorrect, though the French word passeport was used for its documentation. After irradiation against fungi and insects, it returned to Egypt in 1977. In April 2021 it moved again, this time in a public procession called the Pharaohs' Golden Parade, joining seventeen other kings and four queens at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.

• 8. The Pharaoh Who Was Not There

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  "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Diodorus Siculus recorded that boast on the base of one of his statues, and Percy Bysshe Shelley paraphrased it in the poem "Ozymandias." The afterlife of Ramesses runs through fiction as much as stone. He shapes Adrian Veidt's alter-ego in the graphic novel Watchmen, anchors Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, and stars in Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned. Yul Brynner played him in The Ten Commandments in 1956, and Ralph Fiennes voiced him in The Prince of Egypt in 1998, each version casting him as the pharaoh of the Exodus. Yet that casting is exactly what scholars dispute. Mostafa Waziry, then secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in 2023 that no archaeological or historical evidence points to Ramesses, or any Egyptian king, as the pharaoh of the Exodus, noting the Hyksos held power at the relevant time. The historian Lester L. Grabbe put it bluntly: this was one of the strongest pharaohs, with a firm grip on the whole region well into Syria, who "did not drown in the Red Sea." The man who carved his name so deep that no successor could erase it ended up famous for a role the record says he never played. His legacy outlived even his own dynasty, and nine more pharaohs took the name Ramesses in his honour.