A variety of reasons had led Egyptologists to the belief that in the Pharaoh of the Oppression we were probably to see Ramses ii. Ramses ii., the Sesostris and Osymandyas of Greek story, was the third king of the nineteenth dynasty, and one of the most striking figures of Egyptian history. His long reign of sixty-seven years was the evening of Egyptian greatness. With his death the age of Egyptian conquests passed away, and the period of decay set in. Like Louis xiv. of France, the grand monarque of ancient Egypt exhausted in his wars the resources and fighting population of his country.
But it was as a builder rather than as a conqueror [pg 048] that Ramses ii. was famous. Go where we will in Egypt or Nubia, we find traces of his architectural activity. There is hardly a place where he has not left his name. His whole reign must have been occupied with the construction of cities and temples, or the restoration and enlargement of previously existing ones, and, in spite of its length, it is difficult to understand how so vast an amount of work could have been accomplished in the time. Much of the work, however, is poor and scamped; it bears, in fact, marks of the feverish haste with which it was carried through. Much of it, on the other hand, is grandiose and striking in its colossal proportions and boldness of design. The shattered granite colossus at the Ramesseum, once nearly sixty feet in height, the fragment of a standing figure of granite found by Professor Flinders Petrie at Sân, which must originally have been over a hundred feet high, the great hall of columns at Karnak, the temple of Abu-Simbel in Nubia, are all so many witnesses of vast conceptions successfully realised. Abu-Simbel, indeed, where a mountain has been hollowed into a temple, and a cliff carved into the likeness of four sitting figures, each with an unrivalled expression of divine calm upon its countenance, justly claims to be one of the wonders of the world.
Apart from the colossal proportions of so many of [pg 049] them, the buildings of Ramses ii. are distinguished by another trait. They were erected to the glory of the Pharaoh rather than of the gods. It is the name and titles of Ramses that everywhere force themselves upon our notice, and often constitute the chief decoration of the monument. He must have been vainglorious above all other kings of Egypt, filled with the pride of his own power and the determination that his name should never be forgotten upon the earth.
It is not strange, therefore, that Ramses ii. should be the most prominent figure in ancient Egyptian history. His name and the shattered relics of his architectural triumphs force themselves upon the attention of the traveller wherever he goes. His long reign, moreover, was a period of great literary activity, and a considerable portion of the literary papyri which have survived to us was written during his lifetime. He was, furthermore, the last of the conquering Pharaohs; the last of the Theban monarchs whose rule was obeyed from the mountains of Lebanon and the plateau of the Haurân to the southern frontiers of Ethiopia. With his death the empire, which had been founded by the military skill and energy of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, began to pass away. His son and successor, Meneptah, had to struggle for bare existence against an invasion of barbarian hordes, and the sceptre dropped from [pg 050] the feeble hands of Seti ii., who next followed, into those of rival kings. The nineteenth dynasty ended in the midst of civil war and foreign attack: for a while Egypt submitted to the rule of a Syrian stranger, and when Setnekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty, restored once more the native line of kings, he found a ruined and impoverished country, scarcely able to protect itself from hostile assault.
But the age of the twentieth dynasty was still distant when Jacob and his sons journeyed into Egypt, or even when his descendants, under the leadership of Moses, succeeded in escaping from the land of their slavery. Before that age arrived more than one revolution was destined to pass over the valley of the Nile, which had momentous consequences for the foreign settlers in Goshen. The Hyksos were driven back into Asia, and a united Egypt once more obeyed the rule of a native Pharaoh.
But the centre of power had been shifted from the north to the south. Memphis and Zoan had to make way for Thebes, and it is probable that the monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty, under whom Egypt recovered its independence, had Nubian blood in their veins. A new life was breathed into the ancient kingdom of Menes, and for the first time in its history Egypt became a great military power. The war was transferred from the Delta to Asia itself; [pg 051] Canaan and Syria were conquered, and an Egyptian empire established, which extended as far as the Euphrates. With this empire in Asia, however, came Asiatic influences, ideas, and beliefs. The Pharaohs intermarried with the royal families of Asia, and little by little their court became semi-Asiatic. Then followed reaction and counter-revolution. A new king arose—the founder of the nineteenth dynasty—“who knew not Joseph,” representing the national antagonism to the Asiatic foreigner and his religious faith. For a while the Asiatic was proscribed; and the expulsion of the stranger and his religion, which Arabi endeavoured to effect in our time, was successfully effected in the troublous days which saw the fall of the eighteenth dynasty. In this war against the hated Asiatic the Israelites were involved; their children were destroyed lest they should multiply, and they themselves were degraded into public slaves. We have now to trace the events which led to such a result, and to show how the political history of Egypt was the ultimate cause of the Israelitish Exodus.
Chapter II. The Age Of Moses.
On the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and Assiout, the traveller from Cairo to Assouan passes a line of mounds which are known by the name of Tel el-Amarna. Tel is the name given to the artificial mounds which cover the remains of ancient cities, while el-Amarna denotes the Bedouin tribe of Beni-Amran whose descendants inhabit the district in which the line of mounds is found. Between the mounds and the Nile is a fertile strip of bank, green with corn in the winter and spring, and shaded with groves of lofty palms. On the other side of them is a tawny desert plain, shut in by an amphitheatre of hills. The limestone cliffs of the latter are broken in three places, where ravines lead through them to the Arabian plateau beyond. The central ravine is short and rugged; that to the north, however, though its lofty walls of rock seem at times almost to meet, eventually carries the explorer by a slow ascent into the heart of the Arabian [pg 053] desert. About three miles from its mouth, and in a side-valley, the tomb has lately been discovered of the founder of the city, of which the mounds of Tel el-Amarna are now the sole representatives. The tomb is worthy of the monarch for whom it was intended. In the distant solitude of the desert gorge, it is cut deep into the solid rock. Steps first convey the visitor downwards to the huge door of the sepulchre. Within is a broad sloping passage, to the right of which are the sculptured chambers in which the body of one of the Pharaoh's daughters once rested, while at the end of it is a vast columned hall, within which the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh himself was placed.