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?