A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

They went and stood at the feet of the colossi, and on the threshold of that vast portal beyond which was darkness. The great statues towered above their heads. The river glittered like steel in the far distance. There was a keen silence in the air; and toward the east the Southern Cross was rising. To the strangers who stood talking there with bated breath, the time, the place, even the sound of their own voices, seemed unreal. They felt as if the whole scene must fade with the moonlight, and vanish before morning.

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.

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.