Chapter XV: Rameses the Great

The central figure of Egyptian history has always been, probably always will be, Rameses II. He holds this place partly by right, partly by accident. He was born to greatness; he achieved greatness; and he had borrowed greatness thrust upon him. It was his singular destiny not only to be made a posthumous usurper of glory, but to be forgotten by his own name and remembered in a variety of aliases. As Sesoosis, as Osymandias, as Sesostris, he became credited in course of time with all the deeds of all the heroes of the new empire, beginning with Thothmes III, who preceded him by three hundred years, and ending with Sheshonk, the captor of Jerusalem, who lived four centuries after him. Modern science, however, has repaired this injustice; and, while disclosing the long-lost names of a brilliant succession of sovereigns, has enabled us to ascribe to each the honors which are his due. We know now that some of these were greater conquerors than Rameses II. We suspect that some were better rulers. Yet the popular hero keeps his ground. What he has lost by interpretation on the one hand, he has gained by interpretation on the other; and the _beau sabreur_ of the “Third Sallier Papyrus” remains to this day the representative Pharaoh of a line of monarchs whose history covers a space of fifty centuries, and whose frontiers reached at one time from Mesopotamia to the ends of the Soudan.

The interest that one takes in Rameses II begins at Memphis and goes on increasing all the way up the river. It is a purely living, a purely personal interest; such as one feels in Athens for Pericles, or in Florence for Lorenzo the Magnificent. Other Pharaohs but languidly affect the imagination. Thothmes and Amenhotep are to us as Darius or Artaxerxes--shadows that come and go in the distance. But with the second Rameses we are on terms of respectful intimacy. We seem to know the man--to feel his presence--to hear his name in the air. His features are as familiar to us as those of Henry VIII or Louis XIV. His cartouches meet us at every turn. Even to those who do not read the hieroglyphic character, those well-known signs convey by sheer force of association the name and style of Rameses, beloved of Amen.

This being so, the traveler is ill-equipped who goes through Egypt without something more than a mere guide-book knowledge of Rameses II. He is, as it were, content to read the argument and miss the poem. In the desolation of Memphis, in the shattered splendor of Thebes, he sees only the ordinary pathos of ordinary ruins. As for Abou Simbel, the most stupendous historical record ever transmitted from the past to the present, it tells him a but half-intelligible story. Holding to the merest thread of explanation, he wanders from hall to hall, lacking altogether that potent charm of foregone association which no Murray can furnish. Your average Frenchman, straying helplessly through Westminster Abbey under the conduct of the verger, has about as vague a conception of the historical import of the things he sees.

What is true of the traveler is equally true of those who take the Nile vicariously “in connection with Mudie.” If they are to understand any description of Abou Simbel, they must first know something about Rameses II. Let us then, while the Philæ lies moored in the shadow of the rock of Abshek,[74] review, as summarily as may be, the leading facts of this important reign; such facts, that is to say, as are recorded in inscriptions, papyri, and other contemporary monuments.

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Rameses II[75] was the son of Seti I, the second Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty and of a certain Princess Tuaa, described on the monuments as “royal wife, royal mother, and heiress and sharer of the throne.” She is supposed to have been of the ancient royal line of the preceding dynasty, and so to have had, perhaps, a better right than her husband to the double crown of Egypt. Through her, at all events, Rameses II seems to have been in some sense born a king[76] equal in rank, if not in power, with his father; his rights, moreover, were fully recognized by Seti, who accorded him royal and divine honors from the hour of his birth, or, in the language of the Egyptian historians, while he was “yet in the egg.” The great dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Osiris at Abydos,[77] relates how his father took the royal child in his arms, when he was yet little more than an infant, showed him to the people as their king, and caused him to be invested by the great officers of the palace with the double crown of the two lands. The same inscription states that he was a general from his birth, and that as a nursling he “commanded the body-guard and the brigade of chariot-fighters”; but these titles must, of course, have been purely honorary. At twelve years of age he was formally associated with his father upon the throne, and by the gradual retirement of Seti I from the cares of active government the co-royalty of Rameses became, in the course of the next ten or fifteen years, an undivided responsibility. He was probably about thirty when his father died; and it is from this time that the years of his reign are dated. In other words, Rameses II, in his official records, counts only from the period of his sole reign, and the year of the death of Seti is the “year one” of the monumental inscriptions of his son and successor. In the second, fourth, and fifth years of his monarchy, he personally conducted campaigns in Syria, more than one of the victories then achieved being commemorated on the rock-cut tablets of Nahr-el-Kelb, near Beyrût; and that he was by this time recognized as a mighty warrior is shown by the stela of Dakkeh, which dates from the “third year,” and celebrates him as terrible in battle--“the bull powerful against Ethiopia, the griffin furious against the negroes, whose grip has put the mountaineers to flight.” The events of the campaign of his “fifth year” (undertaken in order to reduce to obedience the revolted tribes of Syria and Mesopotamia) are immortalized in the poem of Pentaur.[78] It was on this occasion that he fought his famous single-handed fight against overwhelming odds, in the sight of both armies under the walls of Kadesh. Three years later he carried fire and sword into the land of Canaan, and in his eleventh year, according to inscriptions yet extant upon the ruined pylons of the Ramesseum at Thebes, he took, among other strong places on sea and shore, the fortresses of Ascalon and Jerusalem.

The next important record transports us to the twenty-first year of his reign. Ten years have now gone by since the fall of Jerusalem, during which time a fluctuating frontier warfare has probably been carried on, to the exhaustion of both armies. Khetasira, Prince of Kheta,[79] sues for peace. An elaborate treaty is thereupon framed, whereby the said prince and “Rameses, chief of rulers, who fixes his frontiers where he pleases,” pledge themselves to a strict offensive and defensive alliance, and to the maintenance of good-will and brotherhood forever. This treaty, we are told, was engraved for the Khetan prince “upon a tablet of silver adorned with the likeness of the figure of Sutekh, the great ruler of Heaven”; while for Rameses Mer-Amen it was graven on a wall adjoining the great hall at Karnak,[80] where it remains to this day.

According to the last clause of this curious document, the contracting parties enter also into an agreement to deliver up to each other the political fugitives of both countries; providing at the same time for the personal safety of the offenders. “Whosoever shall be so delivered up,” says the treaty, “himself, his wives, his children, let him not be smitten to death; moreover, let him not suffer in his eyes, in his mouth, in his feet; moreover, let not any crime be set up against him.”[81] This is the earliest instance of an extradition treaty upon record; and it is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of the clemency with which international law was at that time administered.

Finally the convention between the sovereigns is placed under the joint protection of the gods of both countries: “Sutekh of Kheta, Amen of Egypt and all the thousand gods; the gods, male and female; the gods of the hills, of the rivers, of the great sea, of the winds and the clouds, of the land of Kheta and of the land of Egypt.”

The peace now concluded would seem to have remained unbroken throughout the rest of the long reign of Rameses II. We hear, at all events, of no more wars; and we find the king married presently to a Khetan princess, who, in deference to the gods of her adopted country, takes the official name of Ma-at-iri-neferu-Ra, or “Contemplating the beauties of Ra.” The names of two other queens--Nefer-t-ari and Ast-nefert--are also found upon the monuments.

These three were probably the only legitimate wives of Rameses II, though he must also have been the lord of an extensive hareem. His family, at all events, as recorded upon the walls of the Temple at Wady Sabooah, amounted to no less than one hundred and seventy children, of whom one hundred and eleven were princes. This may have been a small family for a great king three thousand years ago. It was but the other day, comparatively speaking, that Lepsius saw and talked with old Hasan, Kashef of Derr--the same petty ruler who gave so much trouble to Belzoni, Burckhardt, and other early travelers--and he, like a patriarch of old, had in his day been the husband of sixty-four wives and the father of something like two hundred children.

For forty-six years after the making of the Khetan treaty, Rameses the Great lived at peace with his neighbors and tributaries. The evening of his life was long and splendid. It became his passion and his pride to found new cities, to raise dikes, to dig canals, to build fortresses, to multiply statues, obelisks, and inscriptions, and to erect the most gorgeous and costly temples in which man ever worshiped. To the monuments founded by his predecessors he made additions so magnificent that they dwarfed the designs they were intended to complete. He caused artesian wells to be pierced in the stony bed of the desert. He carried on the canal begun by his father and opened a water-way between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.[82] No enterprise was too difficult, no project too vast, for his ambition. “As a child,” says the stela of Dakkeh, “he superintended the public works and his hands laid their foundations.” As a man, he became the supreme builder. Of his gigantic structures, only certain colossal fragments have survived the ravages of time; yet those fragments are the wonder of the world.

To estimate the cost at which these things were done is now impossible. Every temple, every palace, represented a hecatomb of human lives. Slaves from Ethiopia, captives taken in war, Syrian immigrants settled in the delta, were alike pressed into the service of the state. We know how the Hebrews suffered, and to what extremity of despair they were reduced by the tasks imposed upon them. Yet even the Hebrews were less cruelly used than some who were kidnaped beyond the frontiers. Torn from their homes, without hope of return, driven in herds to the mines, the quarries, and the brick-fields, these hapless victims were so dealt with that not even the chances of desertion were open to them. The negroes from the south were systematically drafted to the north; the Asiatic captives were transported to Ethiopia. Those who labored underground were goaded on without rest or respite, till they fell down in the mines and died.

That Rameses II was the Pharaoh of the captivity,[83] and that Meneptah, his son and successor, was the Pharaoh of the exodus,[84] are now among the accepted presumptions of Egyptological science. The Bible and the monuments confirm each other upon these points, while both are again corroborated by the results of recent geographical and philological research. The “treasure-cities Pithom and Raamses” which the Israelites built for Pharaoh with bricks of their own making, are the Pa-Tum and Pa-Rameses, of the inscriptions, and both have recently been identified by M. Naville, in the course of his excavations conducted in 1883 and 1886 for the Egypt Exploration Fund.

The discovery of Pithom, the ancient biblical “treasure-city” of the first chapter of Exodus, has probably attracted more public attention and been more widely discussed by European savants than any archæological event since the discovery of Nineveh. It was in February, 1883, that M. Naville opened the well-known mound of Tel-el-Maskhutah, on the south bank of the new sweet-water canal in the Wady Tûmilât, and there discovered the foundations and other remains of a fortified city of the kind known in Egyptian as a _bekhen_, or store-fort. This _bekhen_, which was surrounded by a wall thirty feet in thickness, proved to be about twelve acres in extent. In one corner of the inclosure were found the ruins of a temple built by Rameses II. The rest of the area consisted of a labyrinth of subterraneous rectangular cellars, or store-chambers, constructed of sun-dried bricks of large size and divided by walls varying from eight to ten feet in thickness. In the ruins of the temple were discovered several statues more or less broken, a colossal hawk inscribed with the royal ovals of Rameses II, and other works of art dating from the reigns of Osorkon II, Nectanebo and Ptolemy Philadelphus. The hieroglyphic legends engraved upon the statues established the true value of the discovery by giving both the name of the city and the name of the district in which the city was situated; the first being Pa-Tum (Pithom), the “Abode of Tum,” and the second being Thuku-t (Succoth); so identifying “Pa-Tum, in the district of Thuku-t,” with Pithom, the treasure-city built by the forced labor of the Hebrews and Succoth, the region in which they made their first halt on going forth from the land of bondage. Even the bricks with which the great wall and the walls of the store-chambers are built bear eloquent testimony to the toil of the suffering colonists and confirm in its minutest details the record of their oppression; some being duly kneaded with straw; others, when the straw was no longer forthcoming, being mixed with the leafage of a reed common to the marsh lands of the delta; and the remainder, when even this substitute ran short, being literally “bricks without straw,” molded of mere clay crudely dried in the sun. The researches of M. Naville further showed that the temple to Tum, founded by Rameses II, was restored, or rebuilt, by Osorkon II, of the twenty-second dynasty; while at a still higher level were discovered the remains of a Roman fortress. That Pithom was still an important place in the time of the Ptolemies is proved by a large and historically important tablet found by M. Naville in one of the store-chambers, where it had been thrown in with other sculptures and rubbish of various kinds. This tablet records repairs done to the canal, an expedition to Ethiopia and the foundation of the city of Arsinoë. Not less important from a geographical point of view was the finding of a Roman milestone which identifies Pithom with Hero (Heroöpolis), where, according to the Septuagint, Joseph went forth to meet Jacob. This milestone gives nine Roman miles as the distance from Heroöpolis to Clysma. A very curious manuscript lately discovered by Sig. Gamurrini in the library of Arezzo, shows that even so late as the fourth century of the Christian era this ancient walled inclosure--the camp, or “Ero Castra,” of the Roman period, the “Pithom” of the Bible--was still known to pious pilgrims as “the Pithom built by the children of Israel;” that the adjoining town, external to the camp, at that time established within the old Pithom boundaries, was known as “Heroöpolis;” and that the town of Rameses was distant from Pithom about twenty Roman miles.[85]

As regards Pa-Rameses, the other “treasure-city” of Exodus, it is conjecturally, but not positively, identified by M. Naville with the mound of Saft-el-Henneh, the scene of his explorations in 1886. That Saft-el-Henneh was identical with “Kes,” or Goshen, the capital town of the “Land of Goshen,” has been unequivocally demonstrated by the discoverer; and that it was also known in the time of Rameses II as “Pa-Rameses” is shown to be highly probable.[86] There are remains of a temple built of black basalt, with pillars, fragments of statues and the like, all inscribed with the cartouches of Rameses II; and the distance from Pithom is just twenty Roman miles.

It was from Pa-Rameses that Rameses II set out with his army to attack the confederate princes of Asia Minor then lying in ambush near Kadesh;[87] and it was hither that he returned in triumph after the great victory. A contemporary letter written by one Panbesa, a scribe, narrates in glowing terms the beauty and abundance of the royal city, and tells how the damsels stood at their doors in holiday apparel, with nosegays in their hands and sweet oil upon their locks, “on the day of the arrival of the war-god of the world.” This letter is in the British Museum.[88]

Other letters written during the reign of Rameses II have by some been supposed to make direct mention of the Israelites.

“I have obeyed the orders of my master,” writes the scribe Kauiser to his superior Bak-en-Ptah, “being bidden to serve out the rations to the soldiers, and also to the Aperiu [Hebrews?], who quarry stone for the palace of King Rameses Mer-Amen.” A similar document written by a scribe named Keniamon and couched in almost the same words shows these Aperiu on another occasion to have been quarrying for a building on the southern side of Memphis; in which case Turra would be the scene of their labors.

These invaluable letters, written on papyrus in the hieratic character, are in good preservation. They were found in the ruins of Memphis and now form part of the treasures of the Museum of Leyden.[89] They bring home to us with startling nearness the events and actors of the Bible narrative. We see the toilers at their task and the overseers reporting them to the directors of public works. They extract from the quarry those huge blocks which are our wonder to this day. Harnessed to rude sledges, they drag them to the river side and embark them for transport to the opposite bank.[90] Some are so large and so heavy that it takes a month to get them down from the mountain to the landing-place.[91] Other laborers are elsewhere making bricks, digging canals, helping to build the great wall which reached from Pelusium to Heliopolis, and strengthening the defenses not only of Pithom and Rameses but of all the cities and forts between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Their lot is hard; but not harder than the lot of other workmen. They are well fed. They intermarry. They increase and multiply. The season of their great oppression is not yet come. They make bricks, it is true, and those who are so employed must supply a certain number daily;[92] but the straw is not yet withheld, and the task, though perhaps excessive, is not impossible. For we are here on the reign of Rameses II, and the time when Meneptah shall succeed him is yet far distant. It is not till the king dies that the children of Israel sigh, “by reason of the bondage.”

There are in the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, some much older papyri than these two letters of the Leyden collection--some as old, indeed, as the time of Joseph, but none, perhaps, of such peculiar interest. In these, the scribes Kauiser and Keniamon seem still to live and speak. What would we not give for a few more of their letters! These men knew Memphis in its glory and had looked upon the face of Rameses the Great. They might even have seen Moses in his youth while yet he lived under the protection of his adopted mother, a prince among princes. Kauiser and Keniamon lived, and died, and were mummied between three and four thousand years ago; yet these frail fragments of papyrus have survived the wreck of ages, and the quaint writing with which they are covered is as intelligible to ourselves as to the functionaries to whom it was addressed. The Egyptians were eminently business-like, and kept accurate entries of the keep and labor of their workmen and captives. From the earliest epoch of which the monuments furnish record, we find an elaborate bureaucratic system in full operation throughout the country. Even in the time of the pyramid-builders, there are ministers of public works; inspectors of lands, lakes, and quarries; secretaries, clerks, and overseers innumerable.[93] From all these, we may be sure, were required strict accounts of their expenditure, as well as reports of the work done under their supervision. Specimens of Egyptian book-keeping are by no means rare. The Louvre is rich in memoranda of the kind; some relating to the date-tax; others to the transport and taxation of corn, the payment of wages, the sale and purchase of land for burial, and the like. If any definite and quite unmistakable news of the Hebrews should ever reach us from Egyptian sources it will almost certainly be through the medium of documents such as these.

An unusually long reign, the last forty-six years of which would seem to have been spent in peace and outward prosperity, enabled Rameses II to indulge his ruling passion without interruption. To draw up anything like an exhaustive catalogue of his known architectural works would be equivalent to writing an itinerary of Egypt and Ethiopia under the nineteenth dynasty. His designs were as vast as his means appear to have been unlimited. From the delta to Gebel Barkal, he filled the land with monuments dedicated to his own glory and the worship of the gods. Upon Thebes, Abydos, and Tanis he lavished structures of surpassing magnificence. In Nubia, at the places now known as Gerf Hossayn, Wady Sabooyah, Derr, and Abou Simbel, he was the author of temples and the founder of cities. These cities, which would probably be better described as provincial towns, have disappeared; and but for the mention of them in various inscriptions we should not even know that they had existed. Who shall say how many more have vanished, leaving neither trace nor record? A dozen cities of Rameses[94] may yet lie buried under some of these nameless mounds which follow each other in such quick succession along the banks of the Nile in Middle and Lower Egypt. Only yesterday, as it were, the remains of what would seem to have been a magnificent structure decorated in a style absolutely unique, were accidentally discovered under the mounds of Tel-el-Yahoodeh,[95] about twelve miles to the northeast of Cairo. There are probably fifty such mounds, none of which have been opened, in the delta alone; and it is no exaggeration to say that there must be some hundreds between the Mediterranean and the first cataract.

An inscription found of late years at Abydos shows that Rameses II reigned over his great kingdom for the space of sixty-seven years. “It is thou,” says Ramses IV, addressing himself to Osiris, “it is thou who wilt rejoice me with such length of reign as Ramses II, the great god, in his sixty-seven years. It is thou who wilt give me the long duration of this great reign.”[96]

If only we knew at what age Ramses II succeeded to the throne, we should, by help of this inscription, know also the age at which he died. No such record has, however, transpired, but a careful comparison of the length of time occupied by the various events of his reign, and above all the evidence of ago afforded by the mummy of this great Pharaoh, discovered in 1886, show that he must have been very nearly, if not quite, a centenarian.

“Thou madest designs while yet in the age of infancy,” says the stela of Dakkeh. “Thou wert a boy wearing the sidelock, and no monument was erected and no order was given without thee. Thou wert a youth aged ten years, and all the public works were in thy hands, laying their foundations.” These lines, translated literally, cannot, however, be said to prove much. They certainly contain nothing to show that this youth of ten was, at the time alluded to, sole king and ruler of Egypt. That he was titular king, in the hereditary sense, from his birth[97] and during the lifetime of his father, is now quite certain. That he should, as a boy, have designed public buildings and superintended their construction is extremely probable. The office was one which might well have been discharged by a crown prince who delighted in architecture and made it his peculiar study. It was, in fact, a very noble office--an office which from the earliest days of the ancient empire had constantly been confided to princes of the royal blood;[98] but it carried with it no evidence of sovereignty. The presumption, therefore, would be that the stela of Dakkeh (dating as it does from the third year of the sole reign of Rameses II) alludes to a time long since past, when the king as a boy held office under his father.

The same inscription, as we have already seen, makes reference to the victorious campaign in the south. Rameses is addressed as “the bull powerful against Ethiopia; the griffin furious against the negroes;” and that the events hereby alluded to must have taken place during the first three years of his sole reign is proved by the date of the tablet. The great dedicatory inscription of Abydos shows, in fact, that Rameses II was prosecuting a campaign in Ethiopia at the time when he received intelligence of the death of his father and that he came down the Nile, northward, in order, probably, to be crowned at Thebes.[99]

Now the famous sculptures of the commemorative chapel at Bayt-el-Welly relate expressly to the events of this expedition; and as they are executed in that refined and delicate style which especially characterizes the bas-relief work of Gourmah, of Adydos, of all those buildings which were either erected by Seti I or begun by Seti and finished during the early years of Rameses II, I venture to think we may regard them as contemporary, or very nearly contemporary, with the scenes they represent. In any case, it is reasonable to conclude that the artists employed on the work would know something about the events and persons delineated and that they would be guilty of no glaring inaccuracies.

All doubt as to whether the dates refer to the associated reigns of Seti and Rameses, or to the sole reign of the latter, vanish, however, when in these same sculptures[100] we find the conqueror accompanied by his son, Prince Amenherkhopeshef, who is of an age not only to bear his part in the field, but afterward to conduct an important ceremony of state on the occasion of the submission and tribute offering of the Ethiopian commander. Such is the unmistakable evidence of the bas-reliefs at Bayt-el-Welly, as those who cannot go to Bayt-el-Welly may see and judge for themselves by means of the admirable casts of these great tableaux which line the walls of the second Egyptian room at the British Museum. To explain away Prince Amenherkhopeshef would be difficult. We are accustomed to a certain amount of courtly exaggeration on the part of those who record with pen or pencil the great deeds of the Pharaohs. We expect to see the king always young, always beautiful, always victorious. It seems only right and natural that he should be never less than twenty and sometimes more than sixty feet in height. But that any flatterer should go so far as to credit a lad of thirteen with a son at least as old as himself is surely quite incredible.

Lastly, there is the evidence of the Bible.

Joseph being dead and the Israelites established in Egypt, there comes to the throne a Pharaoh who takes alarm at the increase of this alien race and who seeks to check their too rapid multiplication. He not only oppresses the foreigners, but ordains that every male infant born to them in their bondage shall be cast into the river. This Pharaoh is now universally believed to be Rameses II. Then comes the old, sweet, familiar Bible story that we know so well. Moses is born, cast adrift in the ark of bulrushes and rescued by the king’s daughter. He becomes to her “as a son.” Although no dates are given, it is clear that the new Pharaoh has not been long upon the throne when these events happen. It is equally clear that he is no mere youth. He is old in the uses of state-craft; and he is the father of a princess of whom it is difficult to suppose that she was herself an infant.

On the whole, then, we can but conclude that Rameses II, though born a king, was not merely grown to manhood, but wedded, and the father of children already past the period of infancy, before he succeeded to the sole exercise of sovereign power. This is, at all events, the view taken by Professor Maspero, who expressly says, in the latest edition of his “Histoire Ancienne,” “that Rameses II, when he received news of the death of his father, was then in the prime of life and surrounded by a large family, some of whom were of an age to fight under his command.”[101]

Brugsch places the birth of Moses in the sixth year of the reign of Rameses II.[102] This may very well be. The fourscore years that elapsed between that time and the time of the exodus correspond with sufficient exactness to the chronological data furnished by the monuments. Moses would thus see out the sixty-one remaining years of the king’s long life, and release the Israelites from bondage toward the close of the reign of Menepthah,[103] who sat for about twenty years on the throne of his fathers. The correspondence of dates this time leaves nothing to be desired.

The Sesostris of Diodorus Siculus went blind and died by his own hand; which act, says the historian, as it conformed to the glory of his life, was greatly admired by his people. We are here evidently in the region of pure fable. Suicide was by no means an Egyptian, but a classical, virtue. Just as the Greeks hated age, the Egyptians reverenced it; and it may be doubted whether a people who seem always to have passionately desired length of days would have seen anything to admire in a willful shortening of that most precious gift of the gods. With the one exception of Cleopatra--the death of Nitocris the rosy-cheeked being also of Greek,[104] and therefore questionable, origin--no Egyptian sovereign is known to have committed suicide; and even Cleopatra, who was half Greek by birth, must have been influenced to the act by Greek and Roman example. Dismissing, then, altogether this legend of his blindness and self-slaughter, it must be admitted that of the death of Rameses II we know nothing certain.

Such are, very briefly, the leading facts of the history of this famous Pharaoh. Exhaustively treated, they would expand into a volume. Even then, however, one would ask, and ask in vain, what manner of man he was. Every attempt to evolve his personal character from these scanty data is in fact a mere exercise of fancy.[105] That he was personally valiant may be gathered with due reservation, from the poem of Pentaur; and that he was not unmerciful is shown in the extradition clause of the Khetan treaty. His pride was evidently boundless. Every temple which he erected was a monument to his own glory; every colossus was a trophy; every inscription a pæan of self-praise. At Abou Simbel, at Derr, at Gerf Hossayn, he seated his own image in the sanctuary among the images of the gods.[106] There are even instances in which he is depicted under the twofold aspect of royalty and divinity--Rameses the Pharaoh burning incense before Rameses the Deity.

For the rest, it is safe to conclude that he was neither better nor worse than the general run of oriental despots--that he was ruthless in war, prodigal in peace, rapacious of booty and unsparing in the exercise of almost boundless power. Such pride and such despotism were, however, in strict accordance with immemorial precedent and with the temper of the age in which he lived. The Egyptians would seem beyond all doubt to have believed that their king was always in some sense divine. They wrote hymns[107] and offered up prayers to him, and regarded him as the living representative of deity. His princes and ministers habitually addressed him in the language of worship. Even his wives, who ought to have known better, are represented in the performance of acts of religious adoration before him. What wonder, then, if the man so deified believed himself a god?