Ramses II

Egyptian pharaoh (r. 1279–1213 b.c.e.)

• Born: c. 1300 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Probably the Eastern Delta of Egypt
• Died: 1213 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Probably Pi-Ramesse (Qantir), Egypt

Renowned for his statesmanship, military leadership, administrative abilities, and building activity, Ramses set a standard by which subsequent rulers of Egypt measured themselves.

Early Life

Born of Egypt’s great god Amen (personified by King Seti I) and Queen Tuya, Ramses (RAM-zeez) was designated “while yet in the egg” as Egypt’s future king: Such is Ramses II’s account of his own birth. The period into which he was born, that of the New Kingdom, was a time when Egypt was attempting to maintain control of an extensive empire that ranged from the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in the Sudan to the provinces of North Syria.

Some fifty years prior to his birth, during the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt had undergone a period of turmoil. Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV, r. 1377–1360 b.c.e.), reacting against the ever-growing power of the Amen priesthood, had abandoned the traditional religion and proclaimed the sun god, represented as the sun disk Aton, as sole god of the country. He worshiped the Aton at the virgin site of Amarna. He died without heirs; after his demise, a series of relatively ineffectual kings, including Tutankhamen (r. 1361–1352 b.c.e.), ruled for brief periods as the Amen priesthood set about reestablishing religious domination and refurbishing Amen’s temples.

Meanwhile, using this period of uncertainty in Egypt to best advantage, vassal states in Syria held back their tribute and fomented revolt. When Tutankhamen died without living heirs, a military man of nonroyal birth, Ay, assumed the throne. He was followed only four years later by another, the general Horemheb, who also ruled only a short period before his death, but not before designating another man with a military background, his vizier Pa-Ramessu, as his heir. Pa-Ramessu (Ramses I, first king of the Nineteenth Dynasty) had what rulers since Akhenaton had lacked: viable male descendants. Thus, when Ramses I died after only a two-year rule, his son, Seti I (r. 1294–1279 b.c.e.), assumed the throne. Immediately, Seti began an active program of military campaigns in Canaan, Syria, and Libya. During many of these excursions, his son, the young Ramses II, was at his side, learning the art of warfare.

Seti I instructed his son in civil and religious affairs as well, and Prince Ramses accompanied his father or acted as his deputy on state occasions and at religious festivals. As prince-regent, Ramses received the rights of Egyptian kingship, including his titulary (five royal names attributing to him divine power and linking him with Egypt’s divine past) and a harem.

When his father died, after a rule of between fifteen and twenty years, Ramses II oversaw Seti’s burial in the Valley of the Kings and assumed the throne. At that time, he was probably in his mid-twenties. Many children had already been born to him and his numerous wives.

Life’s Work

With great ceremony, on the twenty-seventh day of the third month of summer, 1279 b.c.e., Ramses II acceded to the throne of Egypt. Following an age-old tradition, the great gods of Egypt, in the persons of their high priests, placed the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt (Nile Valley and Delta) on his head and presented him with other symbols of rulership: the divine cobra (uraeus) to protect him and smite his enemies, and the crook and flail. At the sacred city of Heliopolis, his name was inscribed on the leaves of the sacred ished tree, and birds flew in all directions to proclaim his names to all Egypt. With this ceremony concluded, the divine order (or balance) in the universe, a concept known as Ma’at, was once again in place. It would be Ramses’s duty, as it had been of every king before him, to maintain Ma’at, thereby guaranteeing peace and prosperity for all.

Ramses II set out with determination to ensure the preservation of Ma’at. He was a shrewd politician from the start; one of his first acts as king was to journey south to Thebes to act as high priest in the city’s most important religious event, the Opet Festival. Amid great and joyous celebration, Amen’s cult image was carried from his home at Karnak to the Luxor temple. There, through a reenactment of his divine conception and birth, the ceremonies of Opet Festival assured the divinity of Ramses’s kingship and promoted his association with the god Amen, whose cult image was recharged with divine energy during its stay at Luxor.

Afterward, Ramses II headed north to Abydos, restored that city’s holy sites, and promoted a member of the Abydos priesthood to the position of high priest of Amen at Thebes, the highest and most powerful religious office in the land. In this way, he kept Amen’s priesthood under his control and averted the power struggles that had beset earlier kings.

From Abydos, Ramses continued his northerly journey to the eastern Nile Delta. There, in his ancestral homeland near Avaris, he established a new capital, naming it Pi-Ramesse (the house of Ramses). Scribes extolled its magnificence, likening the brilliant blue glaze of its tile-covered walls to turquoise and lapis lazuli.

Not only at Pi-Ramesse but also at Memphis, Egypt’s administrative capital, at Thebes, the country's religious capital, and at numerous other sites throughout Egypt and Nubia, Ramses II built extensively and lavishly. Indeed, few ancient Egyptian cities were untouched by his architects and artisans. Monuments that Ramses II did not build he often claimed for his own by substituting his name for those of his predecessors. Colossal statues of the king erected outside temples were considered to function as intermediaries between the villagers and the great gods inside. They also reminded every passerby of Ramses’s power.

The territorial problems and general unrest that had compelled Seti I to travel to the Levant continued during Ramses II’s rule. When the growing Hittite empire annexed the strategically important city of Kadesh in northern Syria, an area formerly under Egyptian sovereignty, Ramses rose to the challenge.

In April of the fifth year of Ramses’s reign, he led an army of about twenty thousand men to meet about twice as many enemy soldiers. As the Egyptian army neared Kadesh, two Hittites posing as spies allowed themselves to be captured. The main Hittite army, they assured the Egyptians, was still far to the north. Thinking that he had nothing yet to fear, Ramses marched ahead, accompanied by only his personal guard. Two more captured Hittites, this time true spies, revealed, on vigorous beating, that the Hittites were encamped just on the other side of Kadesh, a few miles away. Suddenly, the enemy attacked the Egyptian line, sending surprised soldiers fleeing in confusion and fright.

With valor and courage, Ramses succeeded virtually single-handedly in holding the Hittite attackers at bay. Relief came at a critical moment in the form of the king’s advance guard arriving from the north. Gradually, the rest of Ramses’s army regrouped and joined battle. The day ended with no clear victor. The second day also ended in a stalemate, and both sides disengaged.

Ramses headed home in triumph, having, after all, saved his army (and himself) from great disaster. Although during the next fifteen years Ramses returned frequently to the Levantine battlefield, no battle made as great an impact as the Battle of Kadesh. For decades following, on temple walls throughout the land, the king’s artists told the story of this battle in prose, poetry, and illustration, with each telling more elaborate than the one before. What the chroniclers neglected to mention each time was the battle’s outcome: The disputed city, Kadesh, remained a Hittite possession.

Sixteen years after the Battle of Kadesh had made Ramses a great military leader, at least in his own eyes, it cast him into the role of statesman as well. A new generation of leadership in the Hittite Empire, the lack of military resolution with Egypt, and the rising power of Assyria made the prospect of continued warfare with Egypt unattractive to the Hittites. Accordingly, a peace treaty was proposed (by the Hittites according to Ramses and by Ramses according to the Hittites). Its terms are as timely today as they were in 1258 b.c.e.: mutual nonaggression, mutual defense, mutual extradition of fugitives, and rightful succession of heirs. A thousand gods of Egypt and a thousand gods of Hatti were said to have witnessed this treaty, which survives today in both the Egyptian and Hittite versions.

Former enemies became fast friends following the treaty’s execution, as king wrote to king and queen to queen. In Year 34, the Hittite king even sent his daughter to Ramses. Chronicles of Ramses’s reign indicate his pleasure on his first sight of her, accompanied by her dowry of gold, silver, copper, slaves, horses, cattle, goats, and sheep.

Matnefrure, as Ramses II named his Hittite bride, joined a harem that was already quite large. In the course of his long rule, the king had at least eight great royal wives and numerous lesser wives. To Nefertari (c. 1307–c. 1265 b.c.e.), who must have been his favorite wife, he dedicated a temple at Abu Simbel, and on her untimely death he buried her in a tomb whose wall paintings are the finest in the Valley of the Tombs of the Queens. Ramses II fathered at least ninety children (some fifty sons and forty daughters), who were often represented in birth-order procession on temple walls or sculpted knee-height beside images of their father.

In 1213 b.c.e., nearly ninety years old and after more than sixty-six years of rule over the most powerful country in the world, King Ramses II died. His carefully mummified body was laid to rest in a splendidly carved tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and he was succeeded on the throne of Egypt by his thirteenth son, Merenptah (r. c. 1213–1203 b.c.e.).

Significance

Military leader, statesman, builder, family man, and possibly pharaoh of the biblical Exodus, Ramses II left a legacy that history never forgot. He distinguished himself in battle in the early years of his reign, and during the remainder of his lengthy rule—the second longest in Egyptian history—he maintained an interlude of peace in an increasingly tumultuous world. Egypt under his leadership was a cosmopolitan empire. Foreigners were free to come to Egypt to trade or settle; others were taken as prisoners of war and joined Egypt’s labor force. It was an era of religious permissiveness, and foreign gods were worshiped beside traditional Egyptian deities. The cultural climate of Ramses’s Egypt is similar to the one described in the Bible just prior to the Exodus (an event for which no archaeological record has been found).

The monuments Ramses II built to Egypt’s gods (and to himself) are larger and more numerous than those of any other Egyptian king. Nine kings named themselves after him and patterned their lives after his. During his own lifetime, he promoted himself as a god, and he was worshiped as such for the next thousand years.

Greek and Roman tourists marveled at his monuments and immortalized them in their writings, just as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley did hundreds of years later in his 1818 poem “Ozymandias.” (The name Ozymandias is the Greek rendering of User-Ma’at-Ra, throne name of Ramses II.) When the greatest of all Ramses’s monuments, Abu Simbel, was threatened by the rising waters of the Aswān High Dam in the 1960s, ninety countries around the world contributed funds and expertise to save it. In this way, they too paid homage to Ramses, as do millions of tourists who travel thousands of miles to visit his monuments.

Although his tomb was plundered and his body desecrated, Ramses II has gained the immortality he sought. His monuments and his actions bear testimony to his importance and justify the appellation Ramses the Great.

Additionally, his remains, upon their archeological discovery in the nineteenth century, were carefully preserved and put on display for the public for decades at Cairo's Egyptian Museum. In the 1970s, his mummy was even flown to France to specially treat an infection that had been causing greater deterioration. When the decision was made to relocate Ramses's mummy, along with those of twenty-one other figures held at the museum, to the newer National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in April 2021, a grand procession was held and highly publicized in Cairo to honor the transport. At the same time, as many had long believed that there was a curse associated with Egyptian mummies, some hypothesized that there may have been a link between the movement and recent disastrous events in the country, such as a train crash and a lengthy blocking of the Suez Canal.

Kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty

1295–1294

• Ramses I

1294–1279

• Seti I

1279–1213

• Ramses II

c. 1213–1203

• Merenptah

1203–1200?

• Amenmessu

1200–1194

• Seti II

1194–1188

• Saptah

1188–1186

• Queen Tausret

Note: Dynastic research is ongoing; data are approximate.

Bibliography

Bierbrier, Morris. The Tomb Builders of the Pharaohs. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984. A delightfully written description of the community of workmen who built the tombs of the New Kingdom kings, including that of Ramses II. An intimate picture of their day-to-day lives. Includes a description of how they built the tombs.

Healy, Mark. The Warrior Pharaoh: Ramses II and the Battle of Qadesh. Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 2000. A military history detailing the battle, its causes, and its consequences. Discusses Ramses’ military tactics and the equipment used by the armies; describes the location of the battle and other matters of interest to military historians.

Hussein, Wael. "Egypt Mummies Pass through Cairo in Ancient Rulers' Parade." BBC News, 3 Apr. 2021, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56508475. Accessed 5 May 2021.

James, T. G. H. Ramses II. New York: Sterling, 2002. A lavishly illustrated biography that accompanies a major traveling exhibit from the British Museum.

Menu, Bernardette. Ramesses II: Greatest of the Pharaohs. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. A concise, well-balanced history of Ramses and his reign. Includes useful information such as lists of Ramses’ known advisors, spouses, and children.

Murnane, William. The Road to Kadesh. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Oriental Institute, 1990. Background for the understanding of Egypt’s far-flung empire. Consideration of Egypt’s relations with Syria and the Hittites through the reign of Ramses’ father, Seti I, and detailed analyses of Seti’s military campaigns.

Tyldesley, Joyce A. Ramesses: Egypt’s Greatest Pharaoh. New York: Penguin, 2001. An approachable, well-written biography of Ramses and his time.

Weeks, Kent. The Lost Tomb. New York: William Morrow, 1998. In 1995, an expedition led by Weeks discovered the enormous tomb complex of Ramses II’s fifty sons, possibly the most important find in modern Egyptology. This book is more of an archaeological memoir than a site study, but it offers an inside look at the archaeological site and provides Weeks an opportunity to explain why this tomb is so important.

Weeks, Kent, ed. The Valley of the Kings. New York: Sterling, 2001. Essays by experts interpret the archaeological evidence from the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens for the nonspecialist reader. Includes many illustrations, as well as plans, diagrams, and bibliography.