Ramses II

Ramses II (c. -1303 to -1213) was also known as Ramesses II, Ramses the Great or, as the Greeks called him, Ozymandias. He ruled Egypt from about -1279 to -1213. In our time he is the best known pharaoh after King Tut, who died some 20 years before Ramses was born.

Ramses is best known for:

• Being the (probable) pharaoh of the Book of Exodus in the Bible.
• Building more temples, obelisks and statues (of himself) than any other pharaoh – even if you do not count the stuff he put his name on built by other pharaohs.
• The Battle of Kadesh (May -1274) with the Hittite Empire, the biggest chariot battle ever.
• Being the pharaoh of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” (+1818), famous for the ironic lines: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
• Pi-Ramses, his new capital, becomes the largest city in the world in the -1100s. Probably what the Jews worked on.

Nefertari playing senet.

Main wives:

1. Nefertari – his favourite (not to be confused with Nefertiti, King Tut’s stepmother)
2. Isetnofret – mother of Merneptah, the next pharaoh (ruled -1213 to -1203)
3. Bintanath – daughter
4. Meryetamun – daughter
5. Nebettawy
6. Henutmire – sister
7. Maathorneferure – Hittite princess
8. ??? – Hittite princess

He also had a harem.

Empire: In his time the Egyptian Empire held sway over Nubia, Palestine and parts of Libya, Phoenicia and Syria. Nubia was the most important: it had gold, making Egypt the richest country in the world.

Ramses II at the Battle of Kadesh.

Battle of Kadesh: Kadesh was a huge fort in Syria that stood between the Egyptian and Hittite Empires. Ramses set out with four army divisions to take it. Along the way he met two Bedouins who told him the Hittite army was at Aleppo, 220 km north of Kadesh. Ramses rushed to get to Kadesh first, taking the Amun division, leaving the Re, Ptah and Seth divisions strung out behind him.

He arrived and set up camp. Suddenly men from the Re division were running for their lives through the camp. Most of the Amun division fled with them: right behind was the Hittite army! The Bedouins had lied: they were Hittite spies.

Ramses, with a fourth of his army wiped out, half of it hours away and much of the rest in flight, faced the Hittite army almost alone. He prayed to Amun and tried to hold them off. The Nearen from the nearby land of Amurru came up on the Hittites from behind. Together they held the field till the sun was setting and the golden standards of the Ptah division were seen glinting in the distance.

It is the first battle we have a description of. Many of Ramses’s temples tell of it. Schoolboys were made to write about it. Ramses boasted of it as a great victory – but from the Hittite account we can tell it was most likely a draw.

Famous buildings: Contrary to Shelley, much of what Ramses built still stands over 3,000 years later, stuff like the temples at Abu Simbel, the Ramesseum, and the tomb of his favourite, Nefertari, in the Valley of the Queens.

Temples at Abu Simbel in what was then Nubia, now in Egypt near the Sudan border.

Ramesseum near Thebes (now Luxor, Egypt).

Tomb of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens, near Thebes (now Luxor, Egypt).

– Abagond, +2017.

Update (2023): Made sure this posts uses the dating of “The Princeton Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” (2008) by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson.

Sources: mainly “Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs” (2007) by Barbara Mertz; “Chronicles of the Pharaohs” (1994) by Peter A. Clayton; “General History of Africa II” (1990, abrdiged) by UNESCO. 

See also:

• Ancient Egypt
  • according to Chancellor Williams
• King Tut
• Amun
• Shelley – has the whole poem “Ozymandias”
• Jews
• The largest cities in history
• Nubia

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