Cleopatra's Needle / A History of the London Obelisk, with an Exposition of the Hieroglyphics

by Berwick-upon-Tweed Vicar of St. Mary's James King

Thothmes III. was the man who overran Palestine with his armies two hundred years before the birth of Moses, and has left us a diary of his adventures; for, like Cæsar, he was author as well as soldier. It seems strange that though the body mouldered to dust, the flowers with which it had been wreathed were so wonderfully preserved, that even their colour could be distinguished; yet a flower is the very type of ephemeral beauty, that passeth away and is gone almost as soon as born. A wasp which had been attracted by the floral treasures, and had entered the coffin at the moment of closing, was found dried up, but still perfect, having lasted better than the king whose emblem of sovereignty it had once been; now it was there to mock the embalmer’s skill, and to add point to the sermon on the vanity of human pride and power preached to us by the contents of that coffin. Inexorable is the decree, “Unto dust thou shalt return.”

Following the same line of meditation, it is difficult to avoid a thought of the futility of human devices to achieve immortality. These Egyptian monarchs, the veriest type of earthly grandeur and pride, whose rule was almost limitless, whose magnificent tombs seem built to outlast the hills, could find no better method of ensuring that their names should be had in remembrance than the embalmment of their frail bodies. These remain, but in what a condition, and how degraded are the uses to which they are put. The spoil of an ignorant and thieving population, the pet curiosity of some wealthy tourist, who buys a royal mummy as he would buy the Sphinx, if it were moveable; “to what base uses art thou come,” O body, so tenderly nurtured, so carefully preserved!

Rameses II. died about thirteen centuries before the Christian era. It is certain that this illustrious monarch was originally buried in the stately tomb of the magnificent subterranean sepulchre by royal order hewn out of the limestone cliffs in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. In the same valley his grandfather and father were laid to rest; so that these three mighty kings “all lay in glory, each in his own house.” This burial-place of the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth and XIXth dynasties is in a deep gorge behind the western hills of the Theban plain. “The valley is the very ideal of desolation. Bare rocks, without a particle of vegetation, overhanging and enclosing in a still narrower and narrower embrace a valley as rocky and bare as themselves—no human habitation visible—the stir of the city wholly excluded. Such is, such always must have been, the awful aspect of the resting-place of the Theban kings. The sepulchres of this valley are of extraordinary grandeur. You enter a sculptured portal in the face of these wild cliffs, and find yourself in a long and lofty gallery, opening or narrowing, as the case may be, into successive halls and chambers, all of which are covered with white stucco, and this white stucco, brilliant with colours, fresh as they were thousands of years ago. The sepulchres are in fact gorgeous palaces, hewn out of the rock, and painted with all the decorations that could have been seen in palaces.”

One of the most gorgeous of these sepulchral palaces was that prepared in this valley by Rameses II., and after the burial of the king the portals were walled up, and the mummified body laid to rest in the vaulted hall till the morn of the Resurrection. From a hieratic inscription found on the mummy-case of Rameses, it appears that official Inspectors of Tombs visited this royal tomb in the sixth year of Her-Hor, the founder of the priestly line of kings; so that for at least two centuries the mummy of Rameses the Great lay undisturbed in the original tomb prepared for its reception. From several papyri still extant, it appears that the neighbourhood of Thebes at this period, and for many years previously, was in a state of social insecurity. Lawlessness, rapine and tomb-breaking, filled the whole district with alarm. The “Abbott Papyrus” states that royal sepulchres were broken open, cleared of mummies, jewels, and all their contents. In the “Amherst Papyrus,” a lawless tomb-breaker, in relating how he broke into a royal sepulchre, makes the following confession:—“The tomb was surrounded by masonry, and covered in by roofing-stones. We demolished it, and found the king and queen reposing therein. We found the august king with his divine axe beside him, and his amulets and ornaments of gold about his neck. His head was covered with gold, and his august person was entirely covered with gold. His coffins were overlaid with gold and silver, within and without, and incrusted with all kinds of precious stones. We took the gold which we found upon the sacred person of this god, as also his amulets, and the ornaments which were about his neck and the coffins in which he reposed. And having likewise found his royal wife, we took all that we found upon her in the same manner; and we set fire to their mummy cases, and we seized upon their furniture, their vases of gold, silver, and bronze, and we divided them amongst ourselves.”

Such being the dreadful state of insecurity during the latter period of the XXth dynasty, and throughout the whole of the Her-Hor dynasty, we are not surprised to find that the mummy of Rameses II., and that of his grandfather, Rameses I., were removed for the sake of greater security from their own separate catacombs into the tomb of his father Seti I. In the sixteenth year of Her-Hor, that is, ten years after the official inspection mentioned above, a commission of priests visited the three royal mummies in the tomb of Seti. On an entry found on the mummy case of Seti and Rameses II., the priests certify that the bodies are in an uninjured condition; but they deemed it expedient, on grounds of safety, to transfer the three mummies to the tomb of Ansera, a queen of the XVIIth dynasty. For ten years at least Rameses’ body reposed in this abode; but in the tenth year of Pinotem was removed into “the eternal house of Amen-hotep.” A fourth inscription on the breast bandages of Rameses relates how that after resting for six years the body was again carried back to the tomb of his father in “the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings,” a valley now called “Bab-el-Molook.”

How long the body remained in this resting-place, and how many transfers it was subsequently subjected to, there exists no evidence to show; but after being exposed to many vicissitudes, the mummy of Rameses, together with those of his royal relatives, and many of his illustrious predecessors, was brought in as a refugee into the family vault of the Her-Hor dynasty. In this subterranean hiding-place, buried deep in the heart of the Theban Hills, Rameses the Great, surrounded by a goodly company of thirty royal mummies, lay undisturbed and unseen by mortal eye for three thousand years, until, a few years ago, the lawless tomb-breakers of Thebes burrowed into this sepulchral chamber.

The mummy-case containing Rameses’ mummy is not the original one, for it belongs to the style of the XXIst dynasty, and was probably made at the time of the official inspection of his tomb in the sixth year of Her-Hor’s reign. It is made of unpainted sycamore wood, and the lid is of the shape known as Osirian, that is, the deceased is represented in the well-known attitude of Osiris, with arms crossed, and hands grasping a crook and flail. The eyes are inserted in enamel, while the eyebrows, eyelashes, and beard are painted black. Upon the breast are the familiar cartouches of Rameses II., namely, Ra-user-Ma-sotep-en-Ra, his prenomen; and Ra-me-su-Meri-amen, his nomen.

The mummy itself is in good condition, and measures six feet; but as in the process of mummification the larger bones were probably drawn closer together in their sockets, it seems self-evident that Rameses was a man of commanding appearance. It is thus satisfactory to learn that the mighty Sesostris was a hero of great physical stature, that this conqueror of Palestine was in height equal to a grenadier.

The outer shrouds of the body are made of rose-coloured linen, and bound together by very strong bands. Within the outer shrouds, the mummy is swathed in its original bandages; and Professor Maspero has expressed his intention of removing these inner bandages on some convenient opportunity, in the presence of scholars and medical witnesses.

It has been urged that since Rameses XII., of the XXth dynasty, had a prenomen similar though not identical with the divine cartouche of Rameses II., the mummy in question may be that of Rameses XII. We have, however, shown that the mummies of Rameses I., Seti I., and Rameses II., were exposed to the same vicissitudes, buried, transferred, and reburied again and again in the same vaults. When, therefore, we find in the sepulchre at Deir-el-Bahari, in juxta-position, the mummy-case of Rameses I., the mummy-case and acknowledged mummy of Seti I., and on the mummy-case and shroud the well-known cartouches of Rameses II., the three standing in the relation of grandfather, father, and son, it seems that the evidence is overwhelming in favour of the mummy in question being that of Rameses the Great.