Ramses II

Egypts Founding Father!

 
 Ramses II Usermaatre Setepenre, son of King Sethi I, was one of the longest reigning pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. He reigned 67 years (roughly from 1290-1224 BC), in the he was beginning co regent with his father.  He was said to have lived for more than 80 years this must have made him seem even more than godly for the average life expectancy was nearly half that.
    During his life he made quite a reputation as a builder and a warrior, but also as a ladies man. He had 5 or 6 main wives, foremost of all being Nefertari, but he is also known to have had more than 100 children with all of his wives!
    It seems that in Ancient Egypt people seemed to have made fun of this fact, since the contemporary and famous Turin Papyrus features erotic scenes involving a pharaoh --probably Ramses II--and several women.
   Ramses II is, however, best known for all the buildings he had constructed in his name across the country. Especially the monumental temples of Karnak (near Luxor) and Abu Simbel (in the south of the country in so-called Nubia), and his mortuary temple The Ramesseum (on the West Bank near Luxor) give evidence of his love for grandeur.
    In all of his monuments he had his name cartouche and texts engraved so deep that no successor would be able to remove it.
  Ramses' energetic building activities more or less, led to a degrading period of Egyptian art as far as the engraving of texts and images on temple walls was concerned.  He demanded the monuments to be erected with greater speed than usual, the result was that carefully engraved texts and images with many beautiful details were now made more superficially, a practice which was unfortunately continued by his successors.
    Most famous of his military engagements is the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites (from Western Asia), with whom the Egyptians had been struggling for many years. He seems to have escaped with nothing but pure luck, as his main force --the pharaoh himself commanding-- was ambushed by the Hittites, and was only saved just in time by reinforcements while retreating. Both sides claimed the victory in this battle, but it seems more likely to have ended in a status quo. Ramses II recorded 'his' victory on several monuments, showing him slaying the Hittites in person.
    The problems between Egyptians and Hittites were finally settled though, several years later, when Ramses married a Hittite princess.
    After he died, Ramses was buried in the famous royal necropolis of the Valley of the Kings, located in the hills on the west bank of the Nile opposite the modern town of Luxor.
    However, the mummy of Ramses II was not found on location in his tomb, but was discovered in 1881 among many other royal mummies in the so-called Royal Cache in Deir el-Bahri on the Theban west-bank. According to a hieroglyphic text found on the mummy it was removed from the actual royal tomb for safety reasons by Egyptian priests in the 10th year of the reign of king Pinodjem (around 1070 B.C.) after robbers violated the burial.
    Though the text stated it was placed together with the body of his father, Seti, in the tomb of Amenhotep I, it was apparently later moved again to its final resting place in the royal cache. The mummy is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.