Dan Snow's History Hit - Rameses The Great

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Was Rameses really that great or just an excellent self-promoter? Well, as Dan learns in this episode, a little bit of both. He reigned for 66 years and marked a golden era of prosperity, architectural triumphs, and military might. He also made sure to put his face on almost everything he built, and the things others had built before him. Even in death, he was revered above other Pharaohs who'd come before him. Dan is joined by Dr Campbell Price from the Manchester Museum, curator of Egypt and Sudan to explore the intricacies of his rule, his contributions to Egypt's grandeur, and how his legacy continues to captivate the world thousands of years later.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Anisha Deva.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. He's one of the most famous rulers in history, certainly one of the most long-lived rulers in history. He was born about 1300 BC, when the New Kingdom was at its zenith. His reign lasted nearly 70 years, and he lived to the age of about 90. He was referred to by subsequent generations of Egyptians as the Great Ancestor. He fought many military campaigns. He built vast temples across Egypt

and rebranded ones that had already been built by his predecessors. He was, of course, Ramesses II. The man, the legend, often celebrated as one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Join me on the podcast, talk all about him. I've got the equally brilliant Dr. Campbell Price. He's the head of Egyptgypt and sudan at the manchester museum which just had its triumphant reopening

and has welcomed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people through its doors particularly to look at its remarkable egyptian collections we're going to talk about ramesses we'll talk about the slightly uncertain grip that his dynasty had on the throne of egypt we're going to talk about his wives, his children, and whether he did, in fact, turn back an entire enemy army by himself. It's Ramesses II, folks. Enjoy. Dr. Campbell Price, good to have you back on the show. Hi, Dan Snow. Nice to be back.

It's nice to be in a little studio with you. This is fun. So Ramesses the Great, let's play the silly pub game first. Is he the greatest of the Egyptian pharaohs? And how do we define that? Yeah, how do you define it? I mean, as you know, Dan, I'm a big fan of Queen Hatshepsut, female pharaoh. I think she did lots that maybe Ramesses II benefited from. But he's only number two out of 11 kings called Ramesses,

and he's definitely the greatest of those. Okay, there you go. Well, good answer. Interesting point, though, about Hatshepsut, because she's in the 18th dynasty. So where are we? 1300 BC? Yeah, yeah, the late 1200s BC. So you're talking 250 years after Hatshepsut. Okay, but she and her stepson and others have left a really powerful legacy. Yes, basically they've pushed the sphere of influence. I won't say the Egyptian empire because that's an anachronism to talk about an empire for pharaonic Egypt. But they have established that set of international relations that Ramesses can use to push his own agenda. So this is all New Kingdom Egypt. And we should just clarify because we're saying,

oh, it's a few hundred years. The British Empire lasted about 250 years, right? So the New Kingdom is a remarkable period of stability. No doubt you'll tell me there were moments and revolutions and the old sacking here and there, but you're talking about hundreds of years of pretty continuous stable pharaonic rule of the Nile Valley the area around it I mean that's a huge achievement right yeah yeah I mean relatively stable by the ancient Egyptians own accounts okay the official accounts but you're right I mean the new kingdom starts maybe 1550 and ends about 1050. So you're talking about 500 years of pretty ambitious statecraft. There's no state on earth at the moment which has enjoyed a continuous kind of constitutional existence for 500 years at the moment, for example, in our world. I think it's fair to say. Yes, that's fair to say, yeah.

So the new kingdom is pretty astonishing. He's coming in, what, three, four hundred years into that story, is he? So the new kingdom is pretty astonishing. He's coming in, what, 300, 400 years into that story, is he? Yeah, the late 1200s BCE. So already the ancient Egyptian state, if we want to call it that, is well over almost 2,000 years old. Going all the way back to the beginning.

That's crazy. Yeah. And his dad, was he inherited or? Yes. So his granddad, Ramses I, is a non-royal person. He has the role of pharaoh thrust upon him by a military colleague called Horemheb. Who was Tutankhamen's general? Yes, exactly.

Because things get a bit loose. Tutankhamen, I, Horemheb, they're casting about for pharaohs who are outside the royal family. And that's a fairly restricted amount of time. So for Ramses the boy, he would have a memory of the amarna period this real upheaval of tootin cammon's father wow doing weird things he wouldn't have lived through it

but people would have talked people would have talked about it i'm sure yeah okay and then there's a couple of quite quick pharaohs ramesses comes new dynasty but a reasonable continuation it's not a sort of upheaval no i, I think that as far as, you know, the sources allow us to say, it seems quite smooth. So you have Ramses I, who doesn't last long, a couple of years. Seti I, well, we're not quite sure exactly how long.

Has he got an amazing tomb in the Valian case? He does have. Seti I is the crazy Seti tomb. Beautiful, big, beautifully decorated. I think of all the kings we know of from the New Kingdom, Seti I probably has the best taste. And it's funny because his son, Ramses II, pretty quickly sheds that taste

and does things a bit more slapdash. So Ramses is one of these kings who has grown up in a successful, powerful, enduring political system. He doesn't feel he's looking over his shoulder. He's not worried about the dynasty. He's born to it. He's born to the purple. He's born to the purple in a sense, yes, because his grandfather had that role. But maybe Ramesses II was alive in a time before his grandfather had been appointed. It's interesting, those kings, Seti I in particular, are at pains to stress that they are legitimate, acceptable inheritors of this great pharaonic

history. So it's no coincidence that our two, in fact our three, most significant kings lists come from the time of Seti I and Ramses II. Hey everyone, these are the list of kings stretching back to ancient times. And here I am worshipping them. And there's a wonderful fun fact, Dan, in the temple of Seti I at Abydos, this beautiful, beautiful temple in the north of southern Egypt. You have this corridor completely decorated, you know, six, seven metres long with royal names. And it shows Seti I and his son, the crown prince, Ramesses, worshipping

the names as if reading the names out. And the location of the corridor is between the abattoir of the temple and the centre of the cult activity. So all the beef dinners that had to be brought to the statues of the gods had to pass by the names of the ancestors so it's almost like guaranteeing they will be given a supply of offerings and that is a lovely little insight into the way ancient egyptian architecture and art works but it says something about this was the way seti the first and ramses the second chose to decorate their mansions of millions of years they wanted to pay full you know homage to the great kings of the past. And place themselves within that list.

Yes, exactly. They're part of the list. Interesting. Ramesses, we have him down, don't we, as a classic great man of history, really. Quite violent, quite building. What do we know about him? Much less than we would like to.

He tells us a lot about one particular military endeavor, the Battle of Kadesh. I listened to an In Our Time about Kadesh the other day. And I came away thinking, we don't know if it's a battle. We don't know who won. We don't know who lost. We don't know if it happened. I'm like, ah, it's one of those ones, isn't it? It's tricky. Yeah. You even get the same with Hatshepsut. She sends this expedition off to Punt. But we know there are earlier kings who have records on the temple walls of expeditions to Punt. So to what extent is that a historical reality?

And to what extent is it just something to please the gods? So it could be fake news in that sense. The account Ramesses gives of himself standing alone essentially in the battlefield because his other soldiers have deserted him is in some ways, for a god-king, quite human. And so it's plausible.

It seems like a plausible story. I'm also not sure that boasting about how all of your own men abandoned you and ran away is quite the flex you think it is. No, you could be shitting yourself on the foot there. You're just a bad leader. Yeah. Where is Kadesh? The Levant.

So Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, okay, Syria. And so there's military expeditions going on. Is Egypt under threat of these expeditions against sort of existential enemies, or are they raiding expeds? Is he just grandising his own? There's some sense, perhaps, in which the great kind of victories of Thutmose III, for example, Hatshepsut's step-nephew, have the kind of frontiers have receded with time so Akhenaten doesn't seem so interested in although he still has keeps up pretty strong diplomatic correspondence

with different neighbors so there's a sense in which the I hate to call it the empire but the sphere of Egyptian influence has shrunk and so Ramses has to re-establish it I don't think it's a direct threat to Egypt itself it's Egypt's vassal states that are threatened. So Egypt has to make a bit of a noise to reassert its importance. What about wives? I mean, he rules for a long time, right? 66 years, which is very long in the ancient world.

It's long any time, frankly. And he has many, many wives or many productive partners or how do you call them? Many productive partners. It depends how you count them, but he has around 100 children, about 50 princes and 50 princesses. And in some ways, it's sad he outlives at least 12 of his sons. So he's only succeeded by his 13th son, a guy called Merimpta,

who comes to the throne pretty old, maybe in his 60s or even 70s. And it's a little bit of a Charles III situation where you have to make your mark on history after a long-lived parent. And I think Ramesses III was being worshipped already as a god, as a full-blown god. And if you reach your 90s in the ancient world and you see your children, your wives, your grandchildren dying around you, that's not very pleasant. And maybe, to some extent, you know, the court, such as it was the people who surrounded him in the palace, maybe thought, gosh, this guy's never going to die.

Maybe he is really a god. Oh, interesting. It gets called Ramesses Panetia, Ramesses the god. We say that about everyone, but maybe this guy really is a god. Really? Louis XIV buried his son, grandson, great-grandson, and similarly difficult for his successors. And amongst those wives, Nefertari,

everywhere you go in Egypt, you see her name. What's going on there? I think this largely arises from the confusion with the name Nefertiti, who was the wife, of course, of Akhenaten. So Nefertari is the lady who Ramesses builds a temple, a kind of his and hers temple, set up at Abu Simbel. So right in the south of Egypt, south of Aswan.

Oh, I've never been there. I'd love to go. That is worth a visit. Just on the shores of Lake Nasser. So you have the big, famous, looks like an Iron Maiden album cover, frontage of Ramesses in the rocks, four statues of him. But he is being worshipped there as a god himself. It's like a divine avatar of himself he bases his kind of pr program a little bit on amanhotep the third so he uses him as a role

model for sure but then he takes along nefertari as the wife goddess and this is something that seems to again hark back to amanhotep the and Queen T, the grandparents of Tutankhamen, you do get the sense that he's genuinely in love with Nefertari and the other women are maybe he's less fond of. Because he marries, of course, diplomatic brides from foreign kings. And it's said, of course, no daughter of a king of Egypt

will marry a foreign prince. But as part of a peace treaty, the pharaoh will marry any foreign princess so you can bring them in but you can't export and so building wise abu simbel famous ramassium ramassium his mansion of millions of years well because his spirit will live there yeah being worshipped there and that's true of most kings of the new kingdom to be fair ramesses was just following in a tradition and it's funny that a later king rameses the third builds an almost total carbon copy of the ramesseum which itself is not well preserved but we know of the decoration scheme

because of the later king making such a close copy i mean even the later king names his children after the names of the children of rameses the second you listen to dan snow's history don't go anywhere There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were

by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. so rameses ii we're not the only ones fascinated with him i mean he was yeah his legacy was hugely powerful in the years following his death yeah so later kings named themselves after him he's worshipped as a god there's a whole priesthood operating into the ptolemaic period so a? So a thousand years after his death. That's pretty impressive. Which is pretty impressive. No, it's not a million.

Not a million. But he's on the way. It's on the way. In modern times, you know, his reception, whether it's, you know, Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments or Shelley, Percy Shelley writing Ozymandias, that is based on a colossal sculpture of Ramses II. And it's interesting, King of Kings is actually a divine title of Ramses II.

Heka in Hekaou, ruler of rulers. So it's a funny historical echo of the greatness of Ramses. What else do we know about him? He himself, we've got his body. Oh yes, we do, don't we? So we have the mummified body. And it's interesting it was found in a cache of lots of royal personalities kings queens high officials and amongst that

group the best coffin is reserved for all the coffins are reused but ramses ii really has the nicest so even when they've taken his body out of his tomb for safekeeping yeah it was in another tomb in the valley of kings wasn't it it was moved around it was like musical chairs as the wheels are falling off some stage later the valley is what presumably threatened yeah they're moving some of the best people they're trying to hide people like ramesses so even within the cache even within that kind of rescue mission they're like obviously give ramesses second the nicest tomb yes he gets the nicest coffin and it's interesting that the stripping of the gold is not just a fear of robbers. It's the state itself funding current mercy expeditions.

Sorry, you had a good point. So it's not necessarily bandits from outside. It's the state melting down the value. Or we're doing this, you know, out of this great sense of piety for great kings of the past. We're also just pocketing all the gold that we've found in the process of doing the rewrapping. But Ramesses II as a personality, of course, is closely associated with Bible story about the Exodus.

Often thought that he was the pharaoh of the Exodus. Is there any truth? It's difficult to say, to be honest. Some will say it's Ramesses II still. Do we know about the historicity of Jewish people in Egypt at the time? There are attestations, of course, of Jewish settlements in Egypt. people in Egypt at the time. There are attestations, of course, of Jewish settlements in Egypt, and there are other historical echoes with groups like the Hyksos, who we know were expelled from Egypt. So there may be a folk memory there that does relate to the Exodus narrative. But I think

Ramses II, in a way, gets a bad press because he seems to be artistically a bit slapdash. You know, the jury's out on the Battle of Kadesh and he's painted as a bit of a tyrant. We don't know that. We don't know either way. And there's no evidence that he mistreated a group of Jews who then... Not definitively, no. But I don't know really honestly what that evidence would look like

in the archaeological record. The word Israel appears for the first time in the reign of his son. So, you know, the concept of groups with biblical names is happening around that time. I should say my favorite thing about Ramses II is not him himself. He has a son, his fourth son, who in the list of the great sons in the temples, when they're shown, all the sons are shown with kind of military apparel. And the fourth son is shown with a big bunch of flowers. And this is a guy called Kayamwasset. And he is often called the first Egyptian Egyptologist because he goes around excavating and restoring the pyramids.

So he does it ostensibly in the name of his dad. So he puts the name of Ramesses II on the casing stones of pyramids, which remember originally were blank so you can imagine a situation reyna rameses ii and rameses put his name on everything every available space every old statue gets updated with his facial style and his name so you could imagine wandering along maybe going hunting in the desert and seeing this massive expansive stone and thinking that's an area i could be putting my own name on. Isn't that funny?

Lost opportunity here. The kings of the past, yeah, lost the opportunity to aggrandize themselves. So there's a sense of Prince Kamuasset going around, researching the past, labeling the pyramids. And then he himself is something of a culture hero by the Ptolemaic period. He features in one of the first ever ghost stories. Well, one of the best ghost stories we have from ancient Egypt of a reanimated mummy. So the whole story of the mummy and the

Hollywood story filtered through kind of gothic horror comes from the character of this scholar prince who goes in search of this lost knowledge in a tomb and the spirits of the dead come and haunt him. And so by the new kingdom, you've got 2,000 years now stretching back to the pyramids being built. Yes. Slightly less, but they'd already been looted. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

They've been got into. Right. Is the landscape littered with, I mean, this is a stupid question because of course it's littered with ancient Egyptian buildings like the British landscape is now littered with British buildings, but temples, Abu Simbel, the various mansions of a million years, I mean, just littering the banks of the

Niles in certain places. Yeah. So again, Ramses gets a little bit of a bad reputation for recycling on such a big scale. Now, bearing in mind he's got 66 years and he definitely exploits quarries for extracting new building material, there is something very deeply meaningful about putting the name of the current king on the statue of an ancient king. Because no kings look like the faces of the statues. They're timeless, generic images of godliness. So Ramesses adding his name onto the sculpture of one of his predecessors is a way of just kind of tapping into that ancient sense of kingship. And although we might be quite dismissive of it, wham bam, thank you Ram, just wants to put his name everywhere. I think he's more sensitive

than that. And it's interesting, the Great Sphinx, so the Great Sphinx is over a thousand years old by the time Ramesses comes along. That is something something like and i hate to draw a spurious comparison it's sort of like a westminster abbey it's the place you go i'm not saying the ancient egyptians performed coronations as we might understand them but it's a place you go to have the sense of history confer and confirm your kingship so between the pause of the Sphinx, Ramesses II, very early on when he takes the throne, sets up this little room of him worshipping the Sphinx. And it's almost like the Sphinx or the god incarnate of the Sphinx says to every new king, right, you are okay, you can be the pharaoh of Egypt. You're talking about that makes me think

why we all have heard of Ramesses II because he had decades and decades put his name on everything so if egyptologists in the 19th century every time you look anywhere you see ramesses cartouche yeah usur matra seti penra ramesses the second boom there's those little symbols and i guess it took people a while to then initially in the 19th century they must thought ramesses literally did build everything yes okay yeah yeah yeah and i think there was it was only when egyptology maybe became a little more critical that they realized some of those names are later kings copying the name of rameses ii and then yes rameses ii himself putting his name on older structures and sculptures he is important instantly after his death as somebody to aspire to and emulate. Do the Romans know about Ramesses? Do

medieval kings in Europe? Do the Arabs? In popular accounts that were collected by, you know, the time of Herodotus or Manetho. So Manetho is this great Egyptian priest historian who kind of legitimizes the early Ptolemies. So he's trying to collect Egyptian history. But like I said, you can go to an Egyptian temple and as long as you can read hieroglyphs, there are lists of kings. So Manetho being able to read hieroglyphs would of course have known who Ramesses II was. So there's one thing, there's the documentary evidence that's passed down and of course that can be corrupted. And then there's the folk tales that talk about this great king who did battles up and down the land. And those endured. Those endured, yeah, for sure. And, you know, Champollion, the French decipherer

who cracked the code using the Rosetta Stone that established this kind of Western idea of control of Egyptology, that sense of being able to read the name of Ramesses II, you know, you get that feeling of him just going around and for the first time in so long reading the name again and again and again and again and again. And so for him, he must have thought,

gosh, this Ramesses Oussermatra Setepenra must have been really quite the big cheese. Grand fromage. Speaking of grand fromage, Ramesses would be absolutely livid now if he'd been knocked into second place of most famous fairies by the teenage wonder boy. Well, yes. Because the tomb found 100 years ago, right? Yes. Tutankhamen second place of most famous fairies by the teenage wonder boy. Well, yes. Because the tomb found 100 years ago, right? Yes. Tutankhamun is now the most famous.

Yes, that's the more household name, sure. Tutankhamun's tomb is relatively small. And I've often wondered, it seems in the case of Tutankhamun, which is really the only intact tomb we have from the New Kingdom, that any clothing that touched his body was sacred and was kept so his underwear was kept so you wonder were there rooms 65 years yeah in the tomb of rameses ii that was just his wardrobe well and it's big enough right it's pretty big sadly very badly damaged not nearly as well preserved as his father's say to the first there seems a sense maybe of superstition about okay we don't want to finish

the tomb because if it's finished the king will die and we'll have to use it so it kind of constantly gets expanded so it's sizable and yet unfinished it's a strange because for someone that rules for that long like you thought you get your tomb sorted i suspect his son starts working on the son's tomb as rameses gets on in. I think that's what's happening, really. Campbell Price, thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Everyone should go to the Manchester Museum.

It's a phenomenon. Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you want more Egypt, we're running episodes all week on the feed. We've had the pyramids of Giza. We've talked about the origins of this mighty civilization. And coming up this week,

we still have the mysterious golden mummies of Greek Egypt. And for our paying subscribers, we're going to be doing some more deep dives. you