Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a photograph.
The shoes of the figures are turned up at the toe, and the head-dress has more resemblance to the high hats of the people of Asia Minor than to the double crown of Egypt, while the lower garment is striped horizontally in place of vertically. The inscription, moreover, is in an Asiatic form of writing, and has nothing Egyptian about it. Ramses II. in his youth was the handsomest man of his time. He was tall and straight; his figure was well moulded—the shoulders broad, the arms full and vigorous, the legs muscular; the face was oval, with a firm and smiling mouth, a thin aquiline nose, and large open eyes.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph taken from the mummy
itself, by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
There may be seen below the cartouche the lines of the official report of inspection written during the XXIst dynasty. Old age and death did not succeed in marring the face sufficiently to disfigure it. The coffin containing his body is not the same as that in which his children placed him on the day of his obsequies; it is another substituted for it by one of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance to the face of the victorious Pharaoh. The mummy is thin, much shrunken, and light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the figure is still tall and of perfect proportions.*
* Even after the coalescence of the vertebrae and the shrinkage produced by mummification, the body of Ramses II. still measures over 5 feet 8 inches.