Ramesses II became pharaoh in 1279 BCE at around 25 years old, and he did not die until 1213 BCE.
That is 66 years on the throne, one of the longest reigns in recorded history.
By the time he died, he was approximately ninety years old, moving through a world in which most Egyptians did not survive past their forties.
Arthritis had twisted his spine. His teeth were so badly worn and infected that historians believe the resulting abscesses caused him near-constant pain in his final years.
He ruled anyway.
The scale of what he built in those sixty-six years is staggering. The temples at Abu Simbel, carved directly into a Nubian cliff face, with four colossal seated statues of Ramesses himself standing sixty-six feet tall at the entrance.
The Ramesseum, his vast mortuary temple at Thebes. The city of Pi-Ramesses, constructed from scratch as his new capital in the eastern Nile Delta.
He conducted no fewer than 15 military campaigns, negotiated the world’s first known peace treaty with the Hittites after the inconclusive Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, and fathered somewhere between 100 and 160 children across his many wives and royal concubines.
That last fact is where the dynasty nearly consumed itself. Ramesses had designated heirs in succession, each one promoted as the crown prince, each one dying before the old man did.
His firstborn son Amun-her-khepeshef held the title for twenty-five years and died. His son Ramesses the younger held it for the next twenty-five years and died.
His fourth son Khaemweset, the most intellectually gifted of his children and a man who spent decades carefully preserving older monuments and texts, earning him the modern title of history’s first Egyptologist, held the crown prince position for five years and died.
Twelve designated heirs in total, gone before the throne became vacant.
The man who finally inherited was Merneptah, the thirteenth son, born of the queen Isetnofret. He had been named crown prince only in Ramesses’s 55th regnal year, meaning he spent the last twelve years of his father’s reign serving as regent, already managing the kingdom’s affairs for a pharaoh too old and broken to run it himself.
When Ramesses finally died, Merneptah was likely somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties, an elderly man ascending a throne that had been waiting for him longer than most Egyptians had been alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment