One of the most treasured possessions of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is an ancient siltstone slab, about two feet high, carved with expert precision on both sides with scenes depicting the exploits of King Narmer, the first pharaoh to rule over the Two Lands of Egypt. On one side, Narmer is portrayed as the triumphant king of Upper Egypt, wearing its ‘White Crown’, standing over a kneeling prisoner, grasping him by the hair and threatening to strike him with a mace. Looking on with approval is the falcon god Horus, the patron deity of the Egyptian monarchy, holding a tether attached to six papyrus plants, the symbol of Lower Egypt. On the other side, Narmer is shown wearing the ‘Red Crown’ of Lower Egypt, inspecting two rows of decapitated corpses whose genitals have been cut off. The purpose of the Narmer Palette, as it is known by Egyptologists, was to signify the power and force that lay behind pharaonic rule.
The greatest challenge facing Narmer and his successors in the First Dynasty was to consolidate their control over diverse peoples, numbering about one million, scattered across a state that now stretched from the southern frontier at the Nile’s First Cataract to the shores of the Mediterranean. One of their early decisions was to construct a new capital at Memphis, a strategic location on the west bank of the Nile at the junction between Upper and Lower Egypt, enabling them to keep an equal grip over the Two Lands. Lying a few miles south of modern Cairo, Memphis remained a focal point of Egypt for most of its dynastic history. To guard the southern frontier, First Dynasty pharaohs built a fortress at another strategic location – an island on the Nile at the First Cataract known as Abu or Elephantine, named for its role in the ivory trade.
The pharaonic system established during the First Dynasty eventually encompassed every aspect of life in Egypt. A state bureaucracy was set up to bring the entire country under royal control. Upper Egypt was divided into twenty-two provinces and Lower Egypt into twenty provinces, each administered by provincial governors answerable to the king. A network of officials ensured that taxes on trade and agricultural produce were paid to support the Crown and its grand projects. Peasant farmers were required to hand over a proportion of their crops or serve in lieu as conscripts on royal projects, quarrying stone or digging canals. Whole swathes of land were appropriated as royal property. Royal workshops turned out a wide range of products such as stone vases, leather, linen and basketry, providing further revenues for the treasury. Royal power became absolute.
All this was sanctified by ceremonies, rituals and royal writs proclaiming the reigning pharaoh to be a living god, the earthly incarnation of the supreme celestial deity, Horus. The pharaoh’s seal – serekhs inscribed on trade goods to mark royal ownership or carved in stone on royal monuments – showed Horus standing on top of a rectangular panel within which the pharaoh’s ‘Horus name’ was written. According to inscriptions on a piece of basalt stela known as the Palermo Stone, King Narmer’s successor, Aha, conducted a biennial tour of inspection in Egypt, imposing his presence on local communities, delivering legal judgements and ensuring that taxes were collected, in an event called the ‘Following of Horus’. The notion of divine kingship became deeply embedded in Egyptian consciousness. As manifestations of the divine, the pharaohs were seen as the guarantors of stability and prosperity, in this life as well as the next.
Much of the wealth that First Dynasty pharaohs and their entourages enjoyed was directed towards building increasingly elaborate tombs and funerary enclosures, designed to provide them with every comfort for the afterlife. The trend continued during the Second Dynasty when stone as well as mud bricks were used for the first time. The funerary buildings for the last of the Second Dynasty kings, Khasekhemy, were constructed on a monumental scale. The perimeter walls, made of mud-brick, were more than sixteen feet thick and nearly sixty feet high. The tomb consisted of fifty-eight rooms with a central burial chamber made of quarried limestone. Khasekhemy’s funerary possessions included huge quantities of copper tools and vessels, pottery vessels filled with grain and fruit, and a fleet of boats to help him navigate into the afterlife. The quest for eternity became an abiding preoccupation. Egypt’s pharaohs expected to continue to reign after death, traversing the heavens in the company of gods.
During the Third Dynasty, further leaps were made in tomb design. At a site on the edge of the desert escarpment at Saqqara, overlooking the capital city of Memphis, an Egyptian nobleman named Imhotep supervised the construction of a pyramid of six steps to house the tomb of Netjerikhet (Djoser), a pharaoh who reigned in the twenty-seventh century BCE. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was the first monument in the world to be built entirely of stone. Rising to a height of 204 feet, it was the tallest building of its time. And its construction marked the beginning of the Pyramid Age.
Compared to all previous structures, the logistical undertaking at Saqqara was immense. Pyramid building required a highly organised supply system involving quarries, mines, shipyards, storehouses, workshops and a labour force of thousands. The pyramid itself consisted of 600,000 tons of limestone blocks. Its main burial chamber was made up of ten blocks of granite, each weighing twelve and a half tons, which had been transported by river barge from quarries at Aswan. But the construction went further. The pyramid was set within a forty-acre complex of buildings enclosed by a mile-long rectangle of perimeter walls built of fine white stone. It is estimated that the quantity of copper chisels needed to cut such a vast assembly of stone blocks would have amounted to seventy tons’ worth, delivered to workshops from newly opened copper mines in the eastern desert.
The peak of pyramid building came a century later during the Fourth Dynasty – about 4,500 years ago. Shortly after ascending to the throne, King Khufu ordered the construction of a burial place grander than any of the tombs built for his predecessors. The site he chose was the Giza plateau, further downstream from Saqqara. Over a period of twenty years, a labour force numbering tens of thousands – stonemasons, toolmakers, craftsmen, quarry workers and haulage crews, many of them peasant conscripts – worked relentlessly to complete the monument before the pharaoh’s death. The scale of the endeavour was extraordinary. By the time Khufu’s Great Pyramid was complete, it consisted of 2.3 million blocks of stone, each weighing on average more than a ton, reaching a height of 480 feet; the slopes of the outer surface were covered by a layer of polished white casing stone that glittered in the sun. The entire edifice was engineered with remarkable precision. The base, extending over more than thirteen acres, was a near-perfect square closely aligned to the four cardinal points of the compass, with a precise orientation to true north. In later ages, the Great Pyramid was regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It remained the tallest building in the world for the next thirty-eight centuries.
Khufu’s son, Khafra, added his own pyramid complex at Giza. It reached a similar height but included a striking additional feature: alongside the causeway leading to his pyramid, facing eastwards towards the rising sun, stood a huge guardian statue of a recumbent lion with a king’s head that later became known as the Great Sphinx. Measuring 200 feet long and rising to a height of 65 feet above the desert floor, it served as a dramatic symbol of royal power.
Khafra’s successor, Menkaura, built a third pyramid at Giza, but it was on a much smaller scale. Egypt’s pharaohs could no longer sustain the economic drain of funding such colossal monuments.
Instead of concentrating on size, pharaohs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties transformed the inner chambers of their pyramids with elaborate decorations and a series of other innovations. The walls of King Unas’s burial chamber, constructed in the twenty-fourth century BCE, were covered in columns of carved hieroglyphs, painted in blue. The inscriptions – an assorted compendium of prayers and spells – constitute the world’s oldest collection of religious writings. They were intended to assist Unas on his journey to the afterlife and ensure that he would dwell in ‘lightland for all eternity’. Some texts recorded testimony from oral traditions dating back to the earliest Egyptian dynasties; others dealt with more contemporary beliefs. Further texts were added to the tombs of nine subsequent kings and queens.
Among the inscriptions, two gods figured prominently. One was Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis, a religious centre that lay to the north-east of Memphis on the east bank of the Nile (now a Cairo suburb). The cult of Ra had been growing in importance since the Third Dynasty. Fourth Dynasty pharaohs incorporated the name into their own titles, using the epithet ‘son of Ra’. Fifth Dynasty pharaohs built a series of temples dedicated to Ra, with inscriptions emphasising the sun-god’s role as the ultimate giver of life and the moving force of nature, with which they claimed to be associated. Under royal patronage, the cult of Ra rapidly became the most powerful in the land.
The other prominent god recorded in the Pyramid Texts was Osiris, king of the land of the dead – the underworld. Originally a local deity in the eastern Delta, associated with agriculture and annually recurring events in nature such as the Nile floods, Osiris evolved into a potent symbol of the renewal of life after death with which Fifth Dynasty pharaohs sought to identify themselves. In the Pyramid Texts, King Unas is referred to as Osiris Unas.
The Sixth Dynasty was followed by a succession of weak kings who proved unable to hold Egypt together. In place of royal control, provincial officials amassed ever more authority, leading to the collapse of central government and the end of what historians would subsequently call the Old Kingdom, an era renowned for its pyramid-building. One thousand years after its foundation, Egypt fragmented along regional lines, suffering more than a century of civil war. Compounding the chaos was a prolonged period of low Nile floods. Famine spread from one village to the next. In an autobiographical text inscribed on the pillars of his rock tomb, Ankhtifi, a local ruler, wrote: ‘The whole country has become like locusts going upstream and downstream [in search of food].’
During the Middle Kingdom, an era beginning in the twenty-first century BCE and lasting 400 years, pharaohs ruled over a united Egypt once more, re-establishing economic prosperity and fostering a renaissance in literature, art and architecture. Using irrigation, thousands of new acres were put under cultivation. Trade expeditions were sent to the Levant and to Punt, an African land towards the southern end of the Red Sea.
The founder of the Middle Kingdom, Mentuhotep II, was a dynastic ruler from Thebes in Upper Egypt who emerged as the victor in the civil war and went on to stamp his authority over the whole country. Thebes had previously been no more than a small provincial town on the east bank of the Nile, but now became the new national capital. Selecting a location for his burial ground, Mentuhotep chose a site at Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, where a colossal tomb was carved for him out of steep cliffs rising above the river valley. To demonstrate his national power, Mentuhotep commissioned a series of temples and cult buildings across Egypt proclaiming him to be a ‘living god, foremost of kings’.
The pharaohs’ preoccupation with eternal life eventually spread to other sections of the Egyptian population. No longer was the pharaoh regarded as having the sole right to an afterlife in the company of gods. Senior officials began inscribing on the sides of their wooden coffins passages and illustrations adapted from the Pyramid Texts and other sacred texts providing a set of instructions on how to safely reach the afterlife (heaven) and on how to avoid the many dangers and demons that lurked along the way (hell). Coffin Texts, as they were later known, also offered advice on such matters as how to ‘assemble a man’s family in the realm of the dead’.
Other ideas that gained currency included the notion that all people – and not just kings – possessed the ba, a spiritual force said to represent the essence of an individual’s unique characteristics, that was able to survive death. The population also came to believe that they could gain direct access to deities rather than via the king or priests. In a further break with tradition, individuals began to take part in the rites of Osiris, receiving blessings that had once been restricted to kings. Osiris became a universal god, symbolising the triumph of good over evil and the promise of immortality for all Egyptians. With royal encouragement, the cult of Osiris reached new heights and was celebrated at festivals and ceremonies, displacing a host of other deities and beliefs.
Once their control of Egypt was fully restored, the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom sought opportunities to extend their power and wealth in the region, notably in Wawat (Lower Nubia), the lands of the Nile Valley lying south of the First Cataract. As a major source of gold and copper, Nubia had long excited the attention of Egypt’s rulers. Expeditions had been sent there since the Sixth Dynasty. An account of a journey by the explorer Harkuf describes his caravan returning ‘with three hundred donkeys laden with incense, ebony, precious oil, grain, panther skins, elephant tusks, throw sticks: all good tribute’.
When Wawat leaders became increasingly assertive during the twentieth century BCE, Amenemhat I, a Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh, ordered a campaign to crush them. Returning from Wawat, a triumphant vizier boasted: ‘I sailed upstream in victory, killing the Nubian upon his land, and I sailed downstream, uprooting crops and cutting down the remaining trees. I put the houses to the torch, as is done to a rebel against the king.’ To enforce their hegemony over Lower Nubia, pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty constructed a chain of massive forts stretching from the First Cataract all the way to the southern end of the Second Cataract where a new southern frontier for Egypt was established.
Yet the fate of the Middle Kingdom, just like the Old Kingdom before it, was to succumb to a prolonged succession crisis. Over a period of about one hundred years, some seventy rulers came and went, one weak king after another, some surviving for no more than a few months. Egypt’s plight was compounded once again by a period of low Nile floods, precipitating famine and disease and leaving the state weakened and vulnerable to foreign invaders. In the south, the forts in Lower Nubia had to be abandoned, opening the way for Nubians from the rival kingdom of Kush, south of Wawat, to take possession. In the north, an influx of migrants from the Levant encroached into the Delta region, setting up their own settlements.
Then in the seventeenth century BCE, an army of Hyksos from the Levant crossed northern Sinai into the Delta, gained control of the whole of Lower Egypt and captured the ancient capital of Memphis. A technologically advanced people, the Hyksos possessed a range of superior weapons. These included spearpoints, arrowheads and battle-axes forged from bronze; composite bows made of laminated strips of wood, horn and sinew that doubled the range their archers could achieve; and horse-drawn chariots able to outmanoeuvre infantry units. Hyksos rulers remained in power for more than a century, leaving Egypt’s line of pharaohs confined to a rump state based on Thebes.
Chafing at foreign occupation, a new breed of warrior kings mastered the new military technology and led better-trained and better-equipped troops on a war of liberation. After thirty years of sporadic campaigns, an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Amhose I, finally succeeded in driving out the Hyksos and regaining control over Lower Nubia and its gold mines. His triumph marked the beginning of another glittering era of pharaonic civilisation that historians would later call the New Kingdom.
Egypt during the New Kingdom era became an imperial power. Its pharaohs embarked on military campaigns, forged diplomatic alliances and established commercial networks to build an empire that stretched for two thousand miles from the Euphrates in Syria to new boundaries on the Upper Nile in Nubia. Underpinning the empire was a professional army. Hitherto, Egypt’s rulers had relied upon conscript armies, raised from the general population on an ad hoc basis and bolstered by foreign mercenaries. The new standing army consisted of specialised units using advanced equipment adapted from Hyksos models, including an elite chariot corps; marines trained to fight on land and water; archers equipped with composite bows; and infantry regiments provided with body armour and drilled in battle techniques.
An early target was the kingdom of Kush in Upper Nubia. In 1492 BCE, Thutmose I launched a devastating campaign of conquest against Kush, destroying its capital Kerma, a town near the Third Cataract, and advancing up river beyond the Fourth Cataract to Kurgus which he declared to be Egypt’s new southern frontier. On his way home, Thutmose ordered the corpse of the ruler of Kush to be strung up on the prow of his flagship, with his head hanging down, as a mark of his victory. Henceforth, Kush was ruled as a colony by Egyptian officials and required to send regular shipments of gold, ivory, cattle and slaves.
Thutmose’s next foray was a brief expedition to the Levant to seek out the potential for glory and wealth. It was a region of city states and towns grown wealthy from trade. After reaching the banks of the Euphrates and leaving a commemorative inscription there, Thutmose returned to Egypt. His exploratory mission was followed up by his grandson, Thutmose III, who in 1458 led an army of 10,000 men into the Levant determined to enforce Egyptian hegemony there and gain control of its trade routes. It was the first of his sixteen campaigns which over two decades gave Egypt dominance over a vast stretch of Canaan and Syria. Vassal states and towns were allowed to retain their own administrative arrangements and their own indigenous rulers as long as they swore oaths of allegiance and delivered annual tribute. But Egyptian garrisons were also stationed at ports along the coast.
The booty acquired during Thutmose’s wars of conquest in the Levant provided a huge boost to Egypt’s treasury. The list of items seized after the fall of Megiddo (biblical Armageddon), for example, included 2,000 horses, nearly a thousand chariots, and 25,000 sheep, cattle and goats. Army scribes also recorded a total of 2,500 captives and 340 prisoners of war. Huge quantities of gold, silver, copper, timber, grain, wine and aromatic oils were shipped back to Egypt.
As well as military expeditions, trade missions were sent far afield. One of the most ambitious was organised in 1463 BCE during the reign of Hatshepsut, daughter of Thutmose I. According to a series of carved reliefs on the walls of her memorial temple in western Thebes, five ships were loaded on to a caravan of oxcarts at Thebes and taken along a desert road to the Red Sea port of Mersa Gawasis. The fleet then sailed southwards for 600 miles, reaching the coast of Punt after a six-week voyage. The rulers there expressed amazement at the Egyptians’ arrival, asking their commander: ‘How have you reached here, to this land which no one knows about?’
From the coast, the expedition trekked inland, to central Punt, noting how local inhabitants lived in beehive-shaped huts mounted on stilts and reachable by ladders. The fleet returned with the most impressive cargo of African goods ever seen in Egypt: gold, ebony, ivory, leopard skins, frankincense, myrrh and resin gum. A vast caravan of donkeys was needed to transport it all to Thebes. Hatshepsut was particularly pleased to receive thirty-one living incense trees, complete with roots and the soil in which they had been grown carried in baskets, and had them planted in the garden in front of her memorial temple.
The empire brought an era of great prosperity to Thebes. Successive pharaohs commissioned building programmes of royal palaces, temples and tombs and presided over festivals and ceremonies to demonstrate their power and eternal authority, acclaimed as divine beings in their own right. The patron deity of Thebes, Amun, the Hidden One, was merged with the great sun-god Ra and transformed into a supreme state god known as Amun-Ra, on whom pharaohs lavished royal largesse. Amun-Ra’s temple at Ipetsut (modern Karnak) became a national shrine, extended year by year into a sprawling complex of chapels and obelisks, of workshops and storehouses, attended by a host of priests and artisans. A second temple dedicated to Amun-Ra was built three miles south of Ipetsut at Luxor at the south end of Thebes during the reign of Amenhotep III.
On the western bank of the Nile Valley opposite Thebes, pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty commissioned a new range of royal funerary monuments. Thutmose I was the first to decide that his tomb should be cut deep into the rock-face of cliffs in a remote valley in the desert escarpment, far from the public gaze, in the hope of avoiding the threat of tomb robbers. His architect, Ineni, recorded: ‘I supervised the cutting out of the cliff tomb of his majesty, in secret. No one saw and no one heard.’ Thutmose’s successors followed suit, establishing a royal necropolis that later became known as the Valley of the Kings.
The public’s gaze was directed instead to a series of royal temple complexes sited prominently on the floor of the valley opposite Thebes. Hatshepsut, the most powerful woman to rule over ancient Egypt, built one of the most spectacular monuments of all there: a temple set against the backdrop of steep cliffs approached by a causeway flanked by more than a hundred sphinxes of Hatshepsut and a giant staircase of colonnaded terraces.
The temple was dedicated to ‘my father Amun’ and inscribed on its walls was the story of how Amun had fathered her and granted her the right to rule as pharaoh. Amenhotep III’s vast temple complex, covering nearly a hundred acres, was guarded by a pair of statues of the king, standing more than sixty feet tall, visible for miles around.
In preparing for an afterlife, pharaohs ensured that their burial chambers were packed with a huge variety of treasures. In the following centuries, most of the sites were looted. But some idea of the wealth that they stashed away came when the royal tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered intact in 1922. A boy-king who ruled for ten years until his death in 1322 BCE, Tutankhamun was accompanied into the afterworld with a fabulous array of gilded beds, chariots, model boats, fine linen, ornate furniture, caskets, headrests, jewellery, food boxes, game boards, measuring rods and several hundred figurines known as shawabtis, doll-size replicas of servants and craftsmen, ready to do his bidding. His inner coffin was made of solid gold; and resting on the head of his linen-wrapped body was Tutankhamun’s golden funerary mask – a work of consummate skill that has come to symbolise the opulence and mystery of ancient Egypt.
The ruling elite – high priests, army officers, mayors and government administrators – shared in much of the wealth. The priesthood in particular gained increasing economic power. As the worship of Amun-Ra spread across the nation, the cult acquired vast assets, including granaries, breweries, bakeries and control of as much as one-tenth of Egypt’s agricultural land. Elite families lived in splendour in villas on immense estates and delighted in throwing lavish banquets attended by musicians, dancers and singers. They also enjoyed the benefit of literacy and liked to spend their time reciting stories and poems written on sheets of papyrus. At lower levels of the bureaucracy, an army of scribes was kept busy compiling records and performing clerical tasks.
A notable feature of Egyptian society was the status accorded to women. A few women, such as Hatshepsut, ruled as pharaohs. Several queens served with their husbands as partners in power, wielding extraordinary influence. But in every walk of life, women possessed rights and privileges not seen elsewhere in the world at the time. Women were employed in a variety of occupations. They owned and controlled property, and were entitled to write their own wills.
Whatever their rank or status, all Egyptians remained preoccupied with the afterlife. During the New Kingdom, the collection of spells and prayers that had appeared in the Pyramid Texts and then the Coffin Texts was expanded into a new version that was known at the time as the ‘Book of Going Forth by Day’ but in the nineteenth century BCE acquired the modern name of the ‘Book of the Dead’. It was usually written on a papyrus scroll but the contents varied from one to the next according to the choices a person made in deciding what texts might be needed or useful on the journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife.
The journey was said to be full of hazards. Once the spirit of the dead person left its body, it was required to pass through a series of gates, caverns and mounds guarded by grotesque supernatural creatures ready to pounce. Only by knowing the correct procedures and appropriate speeches could the spirit achieve safe passage. Having survived the terrors of the underworld, the dead person then faced judgement before an imposing council of gods in a ritual known as the ‘Weighing of the Heart’. Reciting a text known as the ‘Negative Confession’, the defendant sought to deny committing a range of sins: ‘I have not robbed the poor’; ‘I have not maligned a servant’; ‘I have not mistreated cattle’; ‘I have not taken milk from the mouths of children’. The defendant’s heart was weighed on a pair of scales set before the image of Maat, the goddess of truth. If the scales balanced, then the defendant was allowed to pass into the afterlife. If the heart was out of balance, then a fearsome monster known as Ammit, the Devourer of the Dead, would eat it, annihilating all chances of an afterlife. This concept of a final day of judgement ending with the hope of a glorious resurrection was taken up by later religious traditions, notably Christianity.
As well as being furnished with the appropriate funerary texts, Egyptians paid great attention to preserving the bodies of the deceased. Wealthy individuals employed embalmers to ensure they were mummified in accordance with sacred texts, wrapped in the finest linen and adorned with jewelled amulets. Their coffins were decorated with personal inscriptions and decorative carvings; and their grave goods included furniture and paintings. The poor too aspired to purchase a coffin for the afterlife and set aside a few possessions to take with them.
A radical break with Egypt’s religious traditions occurred during the reign of Amenhotep IV, an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh of vaulting ambition who sought to establish his own cult and to undermine the powerful priesthood of Amun. Amenhotep based his cult on a solar deity called Aten, the visible orb of the sun, and changed his own name to Akhenaten, meaning the spirit of Aten, claiming to be the god’s son and demanding total obedience. He gave unusual prominence to his wife and queen Nefertiti, a name meaning ‘the beautiful woman has come’, well known from the portrait bust of her by the sculptor Thutmose which has become one of the most revered works of art from this era. In temple reliefs, the royal couple were invariably shown in the presence of the solar disc of Aten, caressed by life-enhancing rays of light ending in human hands – a divine trio on whom the destiny of the state depended.
The cult of Amun, however, remained deeply embedded in Thebes, and after five frustrating years there, Akhenaten resolved to abandon the city altogether and to set up a new capital 240 miles north of Thebes to enable his own cult to flourish unopposed. Built from scratch, the city of Akhetaten eventually occupied nearly eighty square miles on the east bank of the Nile and included royal palaces, temples to Aten and residential quarters.
Not content with distancing himself from rival cults, Akhenaten now banned the worship of other deities and decreed that Aten was not only the supreme god but the sole god. Determined to impose a strict monotheism on Egypt, he ordered the destruction and disfigurement of temples and monuments that glorified rulers and gods from previous eras and set out to efface their memories. The cult of Amun became a principal target.
Despite his efforts, Akhenaten’s revolutionary cult never took root. Upon his death, in the seventeenth year of his reign, his successors repudiated his beliefs and set Egypt back on the path of tradition. With similar zeal, they then embarked on a campaign to erase all traces of his rule. Akhenaten’s treasured capital soon became a city of ruins. It lay undiscovered for some 3,500 years.
At the start of the Nineteenth Dynasty in the thirteenth century BCE, Egypt remained an imperial power backed by a formidable army and proficient administration. Its empire was held together by a combination of military might and diplomatic manoeuvre. Its pharaohs were still regarded as god-like kings on whom the welfare of the population depended. They continued to demonstrate their power and authority by commissioning huge building programmes. During the reign of Ramesses II, the construction of palaces, temples and statues reached unprecedented levels.
Born into a military family from the eastern Delta region, Ramesses II ruled Egypt for sixty-seven years from 1279 to 1213 BCE, fathered more than fifty sons and as many daughters, and bequeathed to Egypt some of its most spectacular monuments. His works included a new dynastic capital in his ancestral Delta homeland, unrivalled in its architectural grandeur, and temples and statues of himself that ran the length and breadth of the country.
In Lower Nubia, just north of the Second Cataract, he conscripted thousands of Nubian workers to build a temple carved out of the sheer rock face of a sacred mountain towering above the Nile (modern Abu Simbel). The entrance was guarded by four seated statues of Ramesses II measuring more than seventy feet high. Behind the façade was a pillared hall with eight colossal standing statues of the pharaoh in the guise of Osiris; and in the inner sanctuary stood statues of four principal gods, the protectors of Egypt and its empire in Nubia and the Levant, one of whom was Ramesses II himself. The inner sanctuary was designed so that twice a year, on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the rays of the rising sun flooded through the entrance to the temple, illuminating the statues.
At Thebes, his mortuary temple was constructed on a similarly grand scale. It included a sixty-two-foot-high granite statue weighing about 1,000 tons that was subsequently felled during an earthquake. In the first century BCE, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, describing the original appearance of the colossus, recorded that on its base was an inscription referring to the throne name of Ramesses II, Usermaatra, a name that he transliterated into Greek as Ozymandias. The inscription read:
I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. If anyone would seek to know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.
The reign of Ramesses II marked a peak in Egypt’s fortunes. Never again did Egypt’s pharaohs attain such prestige and authority. His successors were beset by palace plots and internecine rivalry. The economy, burdened by military expenditure and the cost of grand projects, began to falter. A period of low Nile floods made matters worse. Egypt’s borders were threatened by incursions from Libya and attacks by marauding armies of Sea Peoples from the eastern Mediterranean. Garrisons stationed in the Levant had to be recalled to maintain national security, leading to the collapse of Egypt’s empire there. Thebes was afflicted by an outbreak of strikes, civil unrest and tomb robberies. The royal necropolis was plundered; all but a handful of royal tombs were stripped of their treasures. Even the mummies of the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom were wrenched apart and stripped of their precious amulets. A military faction took control in Thebes, precipitating civil war. Troops sent by Ramesses XI from his Delta homeland to regain control there eventually set up their own regime in Thebes, defying his authority. When Ramesses XI died in 1069 BCE the New Kingdom era came to an end amid chaos and disorder, with Egypt divided into two halves and vulnerable to invasion by foreign predators.
Inspired by the legend of Ozymandias and his monuments of self-aggrandisement, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley composed a sonnet in 1817 about the inevitable decline and decay of empires that tyrants built, however mighty they may have been seen in their own time:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.