Ramesses II the Great

Ramesses II (d. c. 1213 BC) ruled Egypt for about sixty-six years, and the sheer duration, fertility, and self-advertisement of the reign made him the measure against which later pharaohs were judged. Son of Seti I, he was associated with the throne as prince regent before acceding around 1279 BC, in his early twenties, with military experience already behind him.

The defining military event came in his fifth year at Kadesh on the Orontes, where his army, marching in separated divisions, was ambushed by the Hittite king Muwatalli II. Egyptian accounts, inscribed and illustrated across his temples, present the king's personal stand as a heroic victory; the strategic result was at best a draw, and Kadesh stayed Hittite. Years of inconclusive campaigning followed until, in about 1259 BC, Ramesses concluded a formal treaty with Hattusili III — the earliest surviving written peace treaty between great powers, preserved in both Egyptian and Hittite versions. The peace was later sealed by his marriage to a Hittite princess, and a copy of the treaty now hangs at the United Nations.

As a builder he exceeded every predecessor. He completed his father's projects, added to Karnak and Luxor, raised the Ramesseum as his memorial temple, and founded a new Delta capital, Pi-Ramesses, near his family's home district. At Abu Simbel in Nubia he cut two temples from the cliff, the greater fronted by four colossal seated figures of himself, the smaller dedicated to Hathor and to his Great Royal Wife Nefertari — the whole complex relocated above the rising waters of Lake Nasser in the 1960s. Usurpation and recutting of earlier monuments stretched his name across the country.

His family was proportionate to the reign: alongside Nefertari and the queen Isetnofret he acknowledged some hundred children. He outlived his eldest sons, and the succession fell to the thirteenth, Merenptah, already elderly. Ramesses died around 1213 BC, aged about ninety. His mummy, found in the Deir el-Bahri cache, was flown to Paris for conservation in 1976; later Egyptians remembered him simply as Sese, and the name Ramesses became almost synonymous with kingship itself.