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.
[Illustration: CARTOUCHES OF RAMESES THE GREAT.]
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.
* * * * *
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?