Ramesses the Great: A Draw at Kadesh, the Oldest Peace Treaty and the Temples of Abu Simbel

Ramesses II is called "Ramesses the Great" because he ruled Egypt for about 66 years, from 1279 to 1213 BC, led at least 15 military campaigns, signed the oldest peace treaty that survives in writing and filled Egypt and Nubia with colossal temples, which is why he is often regarded as the most celebrated and powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom. He was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and his reign was the longest recorded of any pharaoh, with the possible exception of Pepi II a thousand years earlier. But the greatness was also carefully built: Ramesses was a master of publicity, and some of his most famous "victories" look different when you read the other side's records.

A prince from a new family

Ramesses II was not born a prince. His grandfather, Ramesses I, was a vizier and army officer whom the pharaoh Horemheb chose as his successor, when the future Ramesses II was about eleven years old. After Ramesses I died, his son Seti I became king and named his own son, Ramesses, prince regent at around the age of fourteen. So the young man grew up watching his father rule, and he took the throne at about 25.

In the early part of his reign he concentrated on building cities, temples and monuments. He moved the capital from Thebes in the Nile valley to a new city in the eastern Delta, Pi-Ramesses, whose full name meant "Domain of Ramesses, Great in Victory". His exact reasons are uncertain, but the new capital was closer to Egypt's territories in Canaan and Syria and became the base for his campaigns there. Egyptian sources say its workshops could turn out about 1,000 weapons a week and some 250 chariots in two weeks.

Kadesh: the battle he called a victory

The most famous event of his reign came in his fifth year. Ramesses marched into Syria against the Hittite Empire, then ruled by Muwatalli II, hoping to push Egypt's frontier north and to repeat his father's triumphant entry into the city of Kadesh. He arrived there on 1 May 1274 BC and walked into a Hittite ambush: the enemy's chariots smashed through one of his divisions and attacked his camp.

When other Egyptian divisions arrived, Ramesses counterattacked and drove the Hittites back across the Orontes River. He held the battlefield, but he could not sustain a long siege and went home. Back in Egypt he presented Kadesh as a great personal triumph, and scenes of the Hittites fleeing were carved on the walls of his temples. Historians are more cautious: the battle itself was technically his, but Egypt retreated afterwards and the Hittites briefly occupied Egyptian lands around Damascus, so the campaign as a whole is usually seen as a Hittite success or a stalemate. Even so, Egypt's Kadesh inscriptions are counted as the best-documented description of any battle in ancient history.

The oldest surviving peace treaty

The rivalry did not end at Kadesh. Years later a new crisis broke out when Hattusili III seized the Hittite throne and his deposed nephew fled to Egypt; when Hattusili demanded him back, Ramesses claimed not to know where he was, and the two empires came close to war again. Instead, in the 21st year of his reign, around 1259 BC, Ramesses and Hattusili agreed a peace treaty.

This treaty, sometimes called the Eternal Treaty, is the oldest known surviving peace treaty, and the only one from the ancient Near East whose versions from both sides have survived. The Egyptian version was carved in hieroglyphs on temple walls at Karnak and the Ramesseum, while the Hittite version was found on clay tablets in their capital, Hattusa, in today's Turkey. The two texts are mostly identical, with one human detail: the Hittite version says the Egyptians asked for peace, and the Egyptian version says the opposite. A copy of the treaty is now displayed at the headquarters of the United Nations. After it, no more Egyptian campaigns in Canaan are recorded, and the northern border seems to have stayed quiet for the rest of his reign.

Abu Simbel: a king carved into a mountain

His most famous monument lies far to the south in Nubia, a region Egypt controlled and valued as a source of gold. Around 1255 BC, Ramesses and his queen Nefertari travelled there to inaugurate a new temple at Abu Simbel. It is actually a pair of temples cut directly into the mountainside, with huge seated figures of Ramesses on the front and smaller figures of Nefertari and their children at his feet; inside, sculptures celebrate his role at Kadesh.

The temples have had a second life in modern times. Sand had almost buried them when a Swiss traveller, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, came across them in 1813. Then, in the 1960s, the reservoir of the new Aswan Dam threatened to flood them. As part of an international campaign to save the monuments of Nubia, the whole complex was moved to higher ground in 1968. Engineers cut the temples into large blocks, lift them up and reassemble them, and Egypt and dozens of UNESCO member states shared the cost. Today Abu Simbel is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Nubian Monuments.

A long life and a famous mummy

Ramesses celebrated thirteen or fourteen Sed festivals, the jubilees that renewed a king's power, which is more than any other pharaoh. He was one of the few pharaohs worshipped as a god in his own lifetime. He died around 1213 BC, probably aged 90 or 91, suffering from bad teeth, arthritis and hardened arteries. He was buried in the Valley of the Kings, but priests later moved his body to a hidden royal cache, where archaeologists found it in 1881; the mummy is now displayed at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.

Ozymandias and the legacy

Later pharaohs prayed to enjoy his long life and glory and called him the "Great God". Greek writers knew him as Ozymandias, and the historian Diodorus Siculus quoted an inscription on one of his statues that boasted, "King of Kings am I, Osymandias". The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley turned that boast into his poem "Ozymandias", about a broken statue in the desert, and in doing so made Ramesses a symbol of how even the greatest power fades. It is a nice irony: the king who worked so hard to be remembered is remembered partly as a lesson in pride.

Learn with Ramesses II: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to claim victory	to say you won, even if it is unclear	Both sides claimed victory.
a stalemate	a situation where nobody can win	The talks ended in a stalemate.
to bury the hatchet	to make peace after a quarrel	The two kings buried the hatchet.
larger than life	very impressive, more than normal	He was a larger-than-life ruler.
to stand the test of time	to last for a very long time	Abu Simbel has stood the test of time.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a disagreement that ended well, using "a stalemate" and "bury the hatchet".