Ramesses II

Ramesses II was born around 1303 BCE, the son of Seti I and Queen Tuya. The family came from a military background in the eastern Nile Delta: his grandfather Ramesses I had been a general and vizier and had received the throne from the pharaoh Horemheb, who had no heir. The 19th Dynasty was therefore young and still had to prove its legitimacy.

Seti I had his son act as crown prince from an early age. Inscriptions at Abydos and Karnak show Ramesses beside his father at rituals and on campaigns. According to a later inscription at Abydos, he already had his own household as a boy. Such texts also served to justify his succession after the fact and are therefore not impartial.

After his accession around 1279 BCE, Ramesses turned to the northern frontier, where Egypt and the Hittite empire competed for influence in Syria. Around 1274 BCE he marched with four army divisions to Kadesh on the Orontes. The Egyptian army was surprised by Hittite chariots; Ramesses managed to regroup his troops, but the city remained in Hittite hands.

After years of further campaigns he concluded a treaty with Hattusili III around 1259 BCE, with provisions for mutual assistance and the extradition of fugitives. The Hittite copy was found at Hattusa, and the Egyptian text is inscribed in temples. Around 1245 BCE Ramesses married a Hittite princess, which confirmed the peace.

Ramesses built on a vast scale: the residence city of Pi-Ramesses in the Delta, the rock temples of Abu Simbel, his mortuary temple the Ramesseum at Thebes, and extensions to the temples of Karnak, Luxor and Abydos. He also had statues and inscriptions of earlier kings re-carved with his name, so his name appears even more often than his own building projects explain.

The Late Bronze Age was a period of great empires, such as Egypt, the Hittite empire, Assyria and Babylonia, which corresponded with one another, traded and formed marriage alliances. The Amarna letters from the previous century show that Akkadian was the language of diplomacy. Vassal states in the Levant manoeuvred between the great powers.

In Egypt the pharaoh was both head of state and religious mediator between gods and people. After Akhenaten's religious reforms and the turmoil that followed, the pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty emphasised the restoration of the cults of Amun, Ra and Ptah. Monuments and temple reliefs served as political messages for a largely illiterate public.

Under Ramesses II, Egypt enjoyed a long period of relative internal stability and prosperity. The building projects required much work from craftsmen and labourers, such as the inhabitants of the village of Deir el-Medina near Thebes. Their papyri and ostraca give an exceptional picture of wages, disputes, religion and everyday life in this period.

The treaty with the Hittites stabilised relations in the Levant for decades. The official Egyptian accounts of Kadesh present the battle as a personal victory of the pharaoh; Hittite sources and modern historians judge the outcome as indecisive or even a strategic advantage for the Hittites. The example shows how royal propaganda worked.

Ramesses II died around 1213 BCE at a great age, probably around ninety, and was buried in tomb KV7 in the Valley of the Kings. He had dozens of children; his thirteenth son Merenptah succeeded him because many older sons had already died. After tomb robbery the mummy was reburied in antiquity and found again in 1881 in the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari.

Greek authors knew him as Ozymandias, a corruption of his throne name Usermaatre. The relocation of the Abu Simbel temples in the 1960s, to save them from the reservoir of the Aswan High Dam, made his monuments known worldwide. Since 2021 his mummy has been in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.

In popular culture he is often seen as the pharaoh of the biblical story of the Exodus. That identification cannot be demonstrated historically: Egyptian sources mention no exodus, and the biblical text does not name the pharaoh. Historians therefore treat the story separately from the known history of his reign.