* The fact of the marriage is known to us by the decree of
Phtah Totûnen at Abu Simbel in the XXXVth year of the king’s
reign. The account of it in the text is taken from the stele
at Abu Simbel. The last lines are so mutilated that I have
been obliged to paraphrase them. The stele of the Princess
of Bakhtan has preserved the romantic version of this
marriage, such as was current about the Saite period. The
King of the Khâti must have taken advantage of the
expedition which the Pharaoh made into Asia to send him
presents by an embassy, at the head of which he placed his
eldest daughter: the princess found favour with Ramses, who
married her.
Ramses, unwilling to relegate a princess of such noble birth to the companionship of his ordinary concubines, granted her the title of queen, as if she were of solar blood, and with the cartouche gave her the new name of Ûirimaûnofîrurî—“She who sees the beauties of the Sun.” She figures henceforth in the ceremonies and on the monuments in the place usually occupied by women of Egyptian race only, and these unusual honours may have compensated, in the eyes of the young princess, for the disproportion in age between herself and a veteran more than sixty years old. The friendly relations between the two courts became so intimate that the Pharaoh invited his father-in-law to visit him in his own country. “The great Prince of Khâti informed the Prince of Qodi: ‘Prepare thyself that we may go down into Egypt. The word of the king has gone forth, let us obey Sesostris. He gives the breath of life to those who love him; hence all the earth loves him, and Khâti forms but one with him.’” They were received with pomp at Ramses-Anakhîtû, and perhaps at Thebes. It was with a mixture of joy and astonishment that Egypt beheld her bitterest foe become her most faithful ally, “and the men of Qimît having but one heart with the chiefs of the Khâti, a thing which had not happened since the ages of Pa.”
The half-century following the conclusion of this alliance was a period of world-wide prosperity. Syria was once more able to breathe freely, her commerce being under the combined protection of the two powers who shared her territory. Not only caravans, but isolated travellers, were able to pass through the country from north to south without incurring any risks beyond those occasioned by an untrustworthy guide or a few highwaymen. It became in time a common task in the schools of Thebes to describe the typical Syrian tour of some soldier or functionary, and we still possess one of these imaginative stories in which the scribe takes his hero from Qodshû across the Lebanon to Byblos, Berytus, Tyre, and Sidon, “the fish” of which latter place “are more numerous than the grains of sand;” he then makes him cross Galilee and the forest of oaks to Jaffa, climb the mountains of the Dead Sea, and following the maritime route by Raphia, reach Pelusium. The Egyptian galleys thronged the Phoenician ports, while those of Phoenicia visited Egypt. The latter drew so little water that they had no difficulty in coming up the Nile, and the paintings in one of the tombs represent them at the moment of their reaching Thebes. The hull of these vessels was similar to that of the Nile boats, but the bow and stern were terminated by structures which rose at right angles, and respectively gave support to a sort of small platform. Upon this the pilot maintained his position by one of those wondrous feats of equilibrium of which the Orientals were masters.
Drawn by Boudier, from the photograph published by Daressy.
An open rail ran round the sides of the vessel, so as to prevent goods stowed upon the deck from falling into the sea when the vessel lurched. Voyages to Pûanît were undertaken more frequently in quest of incense and precious metals. The working of the mines of Akiti had been the source of considerable outlay at the beginning of the reign. The measures taken by Seti to render the approaches to them practicable at all seasons had not produced the desired results; as far back as the IIIrd year of Ramses the overseers of the south had been forced to acknowledge that the managers of the convoys could no longer use any of the cisterns which had been hewn and built at such great expense. “Half of them die of thirst, together with their asses, for they have no means of carrying a sufficient number of skins of water to last during the journey there and back.” The friends and officers whose advice had been called in, did not doubt for a moment that the king would be willing to complete the work which his father had merely initiated. “If thou sayest to the water, ‘Come upon the mountain,’ the heavenly waters will spring out at the word of thy mouth, for thou art Râ incarnate, Khopri visibly created, thou art the living image of thy father Tûmû, the Heliopolitan.”—“If thou thyself sayest to thy father the Nile, father of the gods,” added the Viceroy of Ethiopia, “‘Raise the water up to the mountain,’ he will do all that thou hast said, for so it has been with all thy projects which have been accomplished in our presence, of which the like has never been heard, even in the songs of the poets.” The cisterns and wells were thereupon put into such a condition that the transport of gold was rendered easy for years to come. The war with the Khâti had not suspended building and other works of public utility; and now, owing to the establishment of peace, the sovereign was able to devote himself entirely to them. He deepened the canal at Zalû; he repaired the walls and the fortified places which protected the frontier on the side of the Sinaitic Peninsula, and he built or enlarged the strongholds along the Nile at those points most frequently threatened by the incursions of nomad tribes. Ramses was the royal builder par excellence, and we may say without fear of contradiction that, from the second cataract to the mouths of the Nile, there is scarcely an edifice on whose ruins we do not find his name. In Nubia, where the desert approaches close to the Nile, he confined himself to cutting in the solid rock the monuments which, for want of space, he could not build in the open. The idea of the cave-temple must have occurred very early to the Egyptians; they were accustomed to house their dead in the mountain-side, why then should they not house their gods in the same manner? The oldest forms of speos, those near to Beni-Hasan, at Deîr el-Baharî, at Bl-Kab, and at Gebel Silsileh, however, do not date further back than the time of the XVIIIth dynasty. All the forms of architectural plan observed in isolated temples were utilised by Ramses and applied to rock-cut buildings with more or less modification, according to the nature of the stratum in which he had to work. Where space permitted, a part only of the temple was cut in the rock, and the approaches to it were built in the open air with blocks brought to the spot, so that the completed speos became only in part a grotto—a hemi-speos of varied construction. It was in this manner that the architects of Ramses arranged the court and pylon at Beît-Wally, the hypostyle hall, rectangular court and pylon at Gerf-Hosseîn, and the avenue of sphinxes at Wady es-Sebuah, where the entrance to the avenue was guarded by two statues overlooking the river. The pylon at Gerf-Hosseîn has been demolished, and merely a few traces of the foundations appear here and there above the soil, but a portion of the portico which surrounded the court is still standing, together with its massive architraves and statues, which stand with their backs against the pillars.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger.