"If possessing the largest statue ever known in ancient or modern times makes one happy, Rameses ought to have been as jolly as he was great. But perhaps he did not enjoy himself much, after all, as he seems to have been a cruel tyrant, who oppressed his people, and compelled his prisoners of war to build the temples that remain to mark his greatness. The inscriptions around this and other temples show him to have been full of cruelty: he sacrificed prisoners with his own hand, or caused them to be put to death in his presence; and there is one picture wherein he is putting out the eyes of several captives, who are held by cords passed through their nostrils. On the whole, though we should have liked to look upon Rameses in his great temple, we are not at all sorry that he belonged to an age long past. If he was a good man for his time, it was certainly not a good time to live in.
"We have wished ever so much that we could read the inscriptions on the walls of the temple; but, after all, we need not feel so badly that we cannot do so, because many learned men have made translations for us. The pictures tell us a great deal, even without the hieroglyphics; they make it certain that the King was the most important personage at the time he lived, and if we believed what they represent, we should conclude that he did all the fighting, and his army only stood and looked on. One picture shows him sending a shower of arrows among the enemy and putting them to flight; and in another he is pulling down the walls of a fort, as though it was nothing but a toy house built of corn-cobs.
THE PHALANX OF THE SHETA.
"There is a picture which is called 'The Phalanx of the Sheta,' which we could not make much of till it was explained to us, and then we saw there was a good deal in it. We enclose a drawing of it, so that you can see how the Egyptians represented things on a plain surface without perspective.
"The phalanx is represented as a reserve corps close by a fortified town, which is surrounded by double ditches for protection against an enemy. On each side of the town there is a bridge over the ditches, and there are men in the towers of the fort, as if they were expecting to be attacked. The soldiers in the phalanx are armed with short swords or knives, and with spears. Doctor Bronson says the swords have a very close resemblance to the famous bowie-knife of the South-western States of North America, and it is possible that the inventor of that weapon got his idea from the ancient Egyptians. Only the front and rear ranks have weapons, and what the men in the middle are holding out their hands for we cannot guess.
