* Mînephtah was in the order of birth the thirteenth son of
Ramses II.
** A passage on a stele of Ramses IV. formally attributes to
him a reign of sixty-seven years. I procured at Koptos a
stele of his year LXVI.
He had obtained brilliant successes during his life, and the scenes describing them were depicted in scores of places. Popular fancy believed everything which he had related of himself, and added to this all that it knew of other kings, thus making him the Pharaoh of Pharaohs—the embodiment of all preceding monarchs. Legend preferred to recall him by the name Sesûsû, Sesûstûrî—a designation which had been applied to him by his contemporaries, and he thus became better known to moderns as Sesostris than by his proper name Ramses Mîamûn.*
* This designation, which is met with at Medinet-Habu and in
the Anmtasi Papyrus I., was shown by E. de Rougé to refer to
Ramses II.; the various readings Sesû, Sesûsû, Sesûstûrî,
explain the different forms Sesosis, Sesoosis, Sesostris.
Wiedemann saw in this name the mention of a king of the
XVIIIth dynasty not yet classified.
According to tradition, he was at first sent to Ethiopia with a fleet of four hundred ships, by which he succeeded in conquering the coasts of the Red Sea as far as the Indus. In later times several stelæ in the cinnamon country were ascribed to him. He is credited after this with having led into the east a great army, with which he conquered Syria, Media, Persia, Bactriana, and India as far as the ocean; and with having on his return journey through the deserts of Scythia reached the Don [Tanais], where, on the shore of the Masotic Sea, he left a number of his soldiers, whose descendants afterwards peopled Colchis. It was even alleged that he had ventured into Europe, but that the lack of provisions and the inclemency of the climate had prevented him from advancing further than Thrace.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a statue in the
British Museum.
He returned to Egypt after an absence of nine years, and after having set up on his homeward journey statues and stelæ everywhere in commemoration of his victories. Herodotus asserts that he himself had seen several of these monuments in his travels in Syria and Ionia. Some of these are of genuine Egyptian manufacture, and are to be attributed to our Ramses; they are to be found near Tyre, and on the banks of the Nahr el-Kelb, where they mark the frontier to which his empire extended in this direction. Others have but little resemblance to Egyptian monuments, and were really the work of the Asiatic peoples among whom they were found. The two figures referred to long ago by Herodotus, which have been discovered near Ninfi between Sardis and Smyrna, are instances of the latter.
