Wonder Stories of Travel

by Eliot McCormick; E. E. Brown; Ernest Ingersoll; David Ker

YOU have all heard of Rameses the Great, whose noble presence looms up from the black night of ages, majestic, gracious, clear cut, and real almost as the monarchs of to-day.

Rameses mei Amoun, as his people delighted to call him, meaning Rameses beloved of Ammon, the great god of Egypt, was born more than three thousand years ago, in Thebes, the capital of the kingdom. His father was a pharaoh, Seti I., and his mother was the queen Livea. Old Greek historians tell marvellous stories concerning his birth. They claim that one of the gods announced to Seti in a dream that the tiny babe should become the sovereign of the whole earth. It is clear that the ambition of the father prompted him to do all in his power to secure the fulfilment of this prophecy.

With a royal liberality, he ordered that all of the male children of the realm born on the same day with the crown prince should be brought to the palace. Here nurses were provided, and they were reared with and educated like the young prince in all respects. The king believed that a company of fellow students and playmates from childhood would be bound to him in manhood by the ties of affection, the best and strongest of all. They were “skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians,” and also trained to feats of bodily skill, strength and endurance. Thus they grew up a brave company of hardy young warriors, well fitted to obey and to command.

The stone pictures of Rameses on the monuments show that he was regarded as a king even in infancy, and received the homage of the people in his cradle. There are sculptures of him as a mere infant, with the finger to the mouth, and yet wearing the “pshent,” or double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Others are in child’s dress and with the braided sidelock of hair, but having the Uræus, or Asp, the symbol of royalty, above his head. These may be seen at the museum of the Louvre in Paris.

The inscriptions give us an address of his subjects to him after he had succeeded to the throne: “When you were yet a very little child, wearing the braided hair, no monument was made without you. You commanded armies when you were ten years old.”

Seti, his father, died when he was but fifteen years old, and after the customary seventy days of mourning for the king had passed and his splendid tomb was sacredly sealed, Rameses II. became the boy king of the mighty land of the Nile.

The first public acts of his reign show a knowledge of human nature beyond his years. He appointed his young companions the generals of his armies; he distributed among them lands and large gifts, and by every means sought to strengthen the bands of their loyalty to himself. For the people at large he forgave all fines and penalties, and opened the doors of all the crowded prisons. In this way he secured the loving faithfulness of his subjects at home, and of the great armies he was to lead in long victorious marches through an enemy’s country. Does it not read like a romance, that some of his boldest expeditions and bravest conquests were accomplished while he was still under twenty years of age? Is he not a veritable boy king? Herodotus tells us that after Ethiopia and all the nations of Asia were subdued, he passed into Europe and conquered a few wild tribes of barbarians. After each victory he erected stelæ, or tablets, inscribed with his name and that of his country. Herodotus saw three of these tablets, and they have been found by travellers in our day. Two of them are in Palestine. Each is the figure colossal of a warrior, carved on a solid wall of rock, standing with spear in one hand and bow in the other. On the breast is the inscription, “It is I who have conquered this country by the strength of my arm.” All of his victories are also recorded on the stone walls of temples, with marvellous detail. The painted sculpture shows the wealth of tribute he exacted: gold, ivory, ebony, and timber for building his ships of war, the droves of dusky captives running before his royal chariot, and the gods bestowing honors and blessing on their well-beloved son. No monarch of earth has left a more imperishable record on the pages of history than Rameses the Great. He was the Sesostris of the Greeks, their greatest hero. He was the pharaoh whose reign was the golden age of power and splendor in Egypt. He was one of the long line who so cruelly oppressed the Israelites. Many of the magnificent monuments of his reign were builded entirely by subjugated peoples who were prisoners of war. This fact is carefully noted on tablets, and among them the “bricks without straw” of the captive Hebrews are largely represented. He is said to be the father of the princess who found the Jewish infant in his frail cradle of reeds. If this be true it was at his imperial court that Moses became “skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians.” The splendid achievements of his reign attest their wonderful knowledge of the arts and sciences.

On a stelæ, or tablet, deciphered jointly by distinguished English and French orientalists, is a detailed account of the boring of an artesian well by the special decree of Rameses. An embassage, consisting of the chief dignitaries of a distant province, arrived at the court and begged an audience with the king. They petitioned for a spring to supply water to the slaves and animals employed in bringing gold from a far region over a parched desert road, and who they said were dying of thirst on the long journey. His majesty graciously had compassion on these his humble subjects, and in obedience to his royal mandate, water rose to the height of twenty feet on the road to Okan. The exact height was decreed by his own lips, and the dry and thirsty land was refreshed. The great canal from the Nile to the Red Sea—one of the triumphant successes of our own century—was first accomplished by the engineers of Rameses mei Amoun. The great temple palaces of Luxor and Karnak, the wonderful rock-hewn temples at Aboo Simbel and the Rameseum—or Memnonium, as it has been wrongly called—are among the stupendous monuments of his reign, the latter being his splendid tomb. Its walls are covered with painted sculptures telling the wonders of his life. Chief among these is an episode in one of his battles with the Khetas, a powerful enemy, which commemorates the great personal bravery of the king. It is a favorite subject of the sculptures of his time. It is twice given in the Rameseum and appears again three times in the principal temples that perpetuate the glories of his long reign of sixty-eight years.