Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph brought back by
Bénédite.
Before this it had been little more than a deserted ruin: he cleared out the débris, brought a population to the place; rebuilt the temple, enlarging it by aisles which extended its area threefold; and here he enthroned, along with the local divinities, a triad, in which Amonrâ and Sûtkhû sat side by side with his own deified “double.” The ruined walls, the overturned stelæ, the obelisks recumbent in the dust, and the statues of his usurped predecessors, all bear his name. His colossal figure of statuary sandstone, in a sitting attitude like that at the Eamesseum, projected from the chief court, and seemed to look down upon the confused ruin of his works.*
* The fragments of the colossus were employed in the Græco-
Roman period as building material, and used in the masonry
of a boundary wall.
We do not know how many wives he had in his harem, but one of the lists of his children which has come down to us enumerates, although mutilated at the end, one hundred and eleven sons, while of his daughters we know of fifty-five.*
* The list of Abydos enumerates thirty-three of his sons and
thirty-two of his daughters, that of Wady-Sebua one hundred
and eleven of his sons and fifty-one of his daughters; both
lists are mutilated. The remaining lists for the most part
record only some of the children living at the time they
were drawn up, at Derr, at the Eamesseum, and at Abu Simbel.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a sketch by Mariette.
The majority of these were the offspring of mere concubines or foreign princesses, and possessed but a secondary rank in comparison with himself; but by his union with his sisters Nofrîtari Marîtmût and Isîtnofrît, he had at least half a dozen sons and daughters who might aspire to the throne. Death robbed him of several of these before an opportunity was open to them to succeed him, and among them Amenhikhopshûf, Amenhiunamif, and Ramses, who had distinguished themselves in the campaign against the Khâti; and some of his daughters—Bitanîti, Marîtamon, Nibîttaûi—by becoming his wives lost their right to the throne. About the XXXth year of his reign, when he was close upon sixty, he began to think of an associate, and his choice rested on the eldest surviving son of his queen Isîtnofrît, who was called Khâmoîsît. This prince was born before the succession of his father, and had exhibited distinguished bravery under the walls of Qodshu and at Ascalon. When he was still very young he had been invested with the office of high priest of the Memphite Phtah, and thus had secured to him the revenues of the possessions of the god, which were the largest in all Egypt after those of the Theban Anion. He had a great reputation for his knowledge of abstruse theological questions and of the science of magic—a later age attributing to him the composition of several books on magic giving directions for the invocation of spirits belonging to this world and the world beyond. He became the hero also of fantastic romances, in which it was related of him how, in consequence of his having stolen from the mummy of an old wizard the books of Thot, he became the victim of possession by a sort of lascivious and sanguinary ghoul. Ramses relieved himself of the cares of state by handing over to Khâmoîsîfc the government of the country, without, however, conferring upon him the titles and insignia of royalty. The chief concern of Khâmoîsît was to secure the scrupulous observance of the divine laws. He celebrated at Silsilis the festivals of the inundation; he presided at the commemoration of his father’s apotheosis, and at the funeral rites of the Apis who died in the XXXth year of the king’s reign. Before his time each sacred bull had its separate tomb in a quarter of the Memphite Necropolis known to the Greeks as the Serapeion. The tomb was a small cone-roofed building erected on a square base, and containing only one chamber. Khâmoîsît substituted for this a rock-tomb similar to those used by ordinary individuals. He had a tunnel cut in the solid rock to a depth of about a hundred yards, and on either side of this a chamber was prepared for each Apis on its death, the masons closing up the wall after the installation of the mummy. His regency had lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, when, the burden of government becoming too much for him, he was succeeded in the LVth year of Ramses by his younger brother Mînephtah, who was like himself a son of Isîtnofrît.* Mînephtah acted, during the first twelve years of his rule, for his father, who, having now almost attained the age of a hundred, passed peacefully away at Thebes in the LXVIII year of his reign, full of days and sated with glory.** He became the subject of legend almost before he had closed his eyes upon the world.