“Pay attention to what I tell you, So that you can be king over the earth, So that you can be the ruler of countries …
Be callous towards all subordinates!
People are wary of those who keep them at bay.
Don't go near them when you're alone
Don't rely on your brother
Don't know a friend
And may you not have confidants -
It doesn't make any sense.
When you sleep, take precautions yourself.
For there are no friends
On an evil day."
(Teaching of Pharaoh Amenemhat I, circa 1991-1962 BC, to his son Senusret)
Great rulers. After Akhenaten, who never became great in the opinion of the Egyptians, but quite the opposite - was cursed forever and ever, the first truly great pharaoh was Ramses II of the XIX dynasty, who ruled around 1279-1213 BC. NS. According to the account, he was the third pharaoh of the XIX dynasty, the son of Pharaoh Seti I and his wife Tuya. And this time, the time of the reign of Ramses II the Great, became the era of the hitherto unprecedented heyday of Ancient Egypt. Ramses himself lived for 92 years, ruled for 67 years, and became famous for not being afraid to oppose the Hittites who were at the peak of his power and personally fought with them in the Battle of Kadesh - one of the most impressive battles of the Ancient World, where war chariots participated and even … trained lions. Received the honorary title A-nakhtu - "Winner". Moreover, he was a winner in many ways.
Last time we talked about the fact that a truly great ruler must take care of the continuity of power and leave behind a worthy heir. So he succeeded here too. In any case, on the wall of the temple of Seti I in Abydos, images and even the names of 119 children of Ramses II, including 59 sons and 60 daughters, have been preserved. Moreover, this list is incomplete. There are other data: 111 sons and 67 daughters. That is, he had someone to choose a successor from and who to tie the bonds of dynastic marriage to the benefit of the country.
Lucky historians and with the fact that a lot of monuments associated with his name have survived to our time. There are documents dating from each year of his reign, although by their nature they are very heterogeneous: there are temples and huge statues with inscriptions, and there are honey pots from Deir el-Medina, on which the name of Ramses is also written.
Ramses II came to power on the 27th day of the third month of the shemu season (the month of Drought), when he was about twenty years old. And … his reign began with the fact that he had to pacify the uprisings in Canaan and Nubia. For some reason, the local population or its leaders considered that the change of the tsarist power in Egypt was a convenient moment in order to “put aside” from it, and that the young pharaoh for some reason would not be able (or would not be able to) punish them for this separatism.
He managed, however, and only in one of the sparsely populated areas he killed seven thousand people, which was accurately calculated by their … severed hands! But while the pharaoh pacified the Nubians, for some reason the Libyans rebelled (however, during the time of the pharaohs, they only did what they rebelled periodically), but … Ramses immediately returned from the south and also punished them, as we know from the preserved image of his triumph over their western neighbors.
In the second year of Ramses' reign, the "peoples of the sea" - the Sherdans - invaded his country. But they were also some kind of "stupid". They sailed on ships and settled in the Nile delta, where they were killed by the Egyptians at night in a dream. But not all! The captive male sherdans were included in the Egyptian army. And they served Pharaoh honestly. In any case, there are images of them, in which they are fighting in the front ranks of Ramses' army in Syria and Palestine.
But the most, perhaps, the main achievement of the third year of the reign of Ramses was a seemingly not very significant fact at first glance: at the gold mines in Wadi Aki, water was finally found underground, which was previously brought there in jugs. Now the water shortage was over, and gold production increased several times!
Now he had something to pay for the loyalty of the mercenaries, and the army of Ramses exceeded 20 thousand people - the number for that time was simply enormous. And then the first campaign to Palestine took place, and after it the second, in which his 20-thousandth army took part in four corps named after the gods: Amun, Ra, Pta and Set. In the battle of Kadesh, Ramses had to face the Hittite army, which, according to Egyptian sources, had 3,500 chariots (each of which had three warriors!) And another 17,000 infantrymen. True, there were not so many Hittite warriors in it, but almost all Anatolian and Syrian allies with their troops were present in abundance: the kings of Artsava, Lucca, Kizzuvatna, Aravanna, Euphrates Syria, Karkemish, Halaba, Ugarit, Nukhashsh, Kadesh, and in addition the nomads from the desert. It is clear that it was very difficult for the Hittite king Muwatalli to command all this "camp" and, apparently, that is why he did not manage to defeat the army of Ramses, although he was able to inflict serious losses on it.
We can say that this historic battle ended in a draw. However, it is important that Ramesses II himself considered him a victory and ordered the story about him to be knocked out in the form of reliefs on the walls of many temple complexes he built in Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, Ramesseum and in the cave temple in Abu Simbel.
After the victory at Kadesh, Ramses considered the capture of the fortress Dapur located in the "country of Hatti", an event that also found reflection on the walls of the Ramesseum, his second great act after the victory at Kadesh. Moreover, if his predecessor Thutmose III two centuries earlier preferred to starve out enemy cities, and often failing to achieve the goal, completely recklessly devastated the fields and gardens surrounding them, Ramses II learned to take large and small fortresses by storm. Again, a list of cities captured by him in Asia can be read on the wall of the Ramesseum, although many of them have not yet been identified by name.
However, despite all the victories won, the "world power" created under Thutmose III was never fully restored: a number of lands previously subordinate to Egypt were still not able to be recaptured from the Hittites. The war between the Egyptian and Hittite kingdoms as a whole went on with varying success, and for many years!
And only after the death of the implacable enemy of the Egyptians, King Muwatalli, in the tenth year of the reign of Ramses II, a clear improvement in relations took place between Egypt and the Hittite state. But eleven more years passed before a peace treaty was signed in the capital of the Egyptian kingdom, Per-Ramses, again immortalized on the walls of the temples at Karnak and Ramesseum. Interestingly, the parties agreed to help each other by force of arms in the event of attacks by a third party or uprisings of their subjects, and also by all means hand over the defectors.
In fact, it was the first peace treaty in the history of our civilization, which has survived from that time to the present day.
Relations with the Hittite state were also strengthened by the diplomatic marriage of Ramses II with the daughter of King Hattusili III, whose new Egyptian name Maathornefrura (“Seeing the Beauty of the Sun”) clearly hinted that she could now contemplate the Pharaoh. And what is most important: she not only replenished the royal harem, but became the “great” wife of the great Pharaoh.
It is interesting that the second daughter of the Hittite king also became the wife of Ramses, about the 42nd year of his reign, that is, he became related to the Hittite royal house even by double bonds.
As a result, peace reigned between Egypt and Asia for more than half a century, and people began to actively trade. And the exchange of cultural achievements began. After all, before that, the Egyptians, having plundered the cities of Syria and Palestine, always went back. Now, many of them began to remain in the Syrian-Palestinian cities, which increased the interpenetration of cultures in this region, and this is very important for strengthening the status of any great power and, accordingly, the status of its ruler.
It has been said: if you want to reign, build public buildings to give the people money. And someone who, but Ramses consistently followed this commandment. First, the war with the Hittites forced Ramses to move his capital to the site of the former capital of the Hyksos conquerors, Avaris, where the new city of Per-Ramses was built (or Pi-Ria-masse-sa-Mai-Aman, "House of Ramses, beloved by Amon"). It is clear that a huge temple was immediately built, in front of which was installed a monolithic colossus of Ramses made of granite, more than 27 m high and weighing 900 tons.
Then Ramses also built temples in Memphis, Heliopolis, and in Abydos, where he finished the magnificent temple of his father, and even built his own memorial temple nearby. The Ramesseum was built in Thebes - a huge temple surrounded by a brick wall, in front of which there was another statue of him: lower than in Per-Ramesses, but weighing 1000 tons. Ramses expanded the Luxor temple, and it was he who also completed the colossal Hypostyle Hall in the Karnak Temple, the greatest building in terms of its dimensions, both of antiquity and of the new world. Its area is 5000 sq. m. On both sides of the middle aisle there stood (still stands!) 12 columns with a height of 21 m, and together with tops (architraves) and beams-crossbeams - 24 m. On each such column it was possible to easily accommodate 100 people - that's how great it is. In addition, there were 126 more columns, standing in seven rows on each side of the middle aisle, which were “only” 13 m high.
Well, in Nubia, the Nubians out of fear, in a sheer cliff in Abu Simbel, a stunning cave temple was carved out, the entrance to which was decorated with four 20-meter statues of Ramses II. It's funny that the great pharaoh did not reckon with his predecessors at all and used their buildings as quarries. So, he destroyed the pyramid of Senusret II in El-Lahun, and in the Delta he dismantled the buildings of the Middle Kingdom into stones. He even tore down the granite chapel of Thutmose III, and used its stones in the construction of the Luxor Temple.
After the death of Ramses, the priests had to bury him as many as five times, and all because of the damned grave robbers. His mummy, one might say, wandered through foreign tombs, where the priests carried it, until it found final rest in the cache of Pharaoh Herihor in Deir el-Bahri.
But even there she was found in 1881 and sent to the Cairo Museum. And for a long time she lay there, but almost in our time it was noticed that she began to collapse under the influence of some harmful fungi. Therefore, in 1976 she was sent on a military plane to France, where she was again mothballed in the Paris Ethnological Museum.
At the same time, it turned out that Ramses was quite tall (1.7 m), had fair skin and typologically belonged to the African Berbers. And here's what's interesting: there were many pharaohs in the history of Egypt who, let's say, left quite important traces in it - the unifiers of the country, the builders of the pyramids, the conquerors … There were many of them, but only one Rameses II became Great!
