The Ancients - Ramesses the Great

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

One of the greatest Pharaohs from Ancient Egypt, Ramesses II is renowned for commissioning some of the most iconic architecture and art from ancient Egypt. But not only was he a great builder and commissioner, he's responsible for the first recorded peace treaty in history, the first recorded diplomatic marriage in history, and a number of monumental victories. So who was Ramesses II - and why is his legacy so enduring?In today's episode, Tristan is joined by Dr Peter Brand from University of Toronto, to dive into the long reign of Egypt's greatest Pharaoh. Looking at his childhood, marriages, and legacy - what do we actually know about Ramesses the Great, and what made him so extraordinary?The Ancients has been nominated in the History category at the Signal Awards! Help us win Gold by casting your vote here!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, we're talking about one of the most iconic, the greatest, the ultimate Egyptian

pharaoh from history. We're talking all about Ramesses II, the third ruler of the 19th dynasty. He is renowned for some of the most iconic architecture and art that endures from ancient Egypt, whether it's the great temples at Abu Simbel or the monuments, many of the monuments that exist at Karnak temples in Luxor. There are many other achievements as well. This climactic clash with the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh. Was it an Egyptian victory? Was it a Hittite victory? Was it a stalemate? Well, there was some debate around that as you're going to hear in today's episode. He is also responsible or partly responsible for the oldest recorded peace treaty in history, the first recorded diplomatic marriage in history and so much more. There is so much that is recorded about Ramses II from

surviving inscriptions and so on. Not all of it can be taken as being completely accurate. There is definitely quite a bit of propaganda there. However, his story, his legacy is huge. Naturally, for such a titanic figure of ancient history, we can't cover everything about him in one episode. So today, we're more focusing in on the early years of Ramses II, Today, we're more focusing in on the early years of Ramses II, his rise culminating with his great battle against the Hittites at Kadesh. And to talk through all of this, well, I was delighted to chat to a couple of months back,

Dr. Peter Brand from the University of Toronto. Now, Peter, he has just written this massive, beautiful book all about Ramsesesses II and if you want to know anything about this pharaoh get this book it's beautifully illustrated it covers so much and for me it was so informative so I really do encourage you to get Peter's book Ramesses II Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh once you've listened to the episode today. This was great fun. It's about time that we covered this ultimate pharaoh of ancient Egypt. So without further ado, here's Peter. Peter, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. You're very welcome. And for a topic like this, of all the Egyptian pharaohs, this man,

he always seems to be right at the top of the most recognizable names, Ramesses. And Ramesses II, Peter, this is a pharaoh, and he comes complete with so many superlatives, doesn't he? Well, yes. And of course, he's very often known as Ramesses the Great, probably the only pharaoh that we refer to as the great. And of course, you might be wondering why then I didn't entitle the book, Ramesses, Egypt's greatest pharaoh. And the short answer is, of course, is that title was already taken. But to justify the title Egypt's ultimate pharaoh, I think the reason is that in many ways, he was the ultimate pharaoh, because he was the ultimate example of what a pharaoh was supposed to be in so many different ways. He was the ultimate builder. He was, in many ways, the

ultimate warrior. He was the ultimate family man. I mean, this was a pharaoh that had, at the very least, a dozen wives and probably more. With at least a hundred children, he was the ultimate family man. He was the author of one of the earliest known peace treaties between two great kingdoms almost in human history. So, in all these different ways, and also living for such a long time and ruling for about 67 years, which places him among the longest reigning monarchs in human history. I mean, for instance, Queen Elizabeth, who just died last year, only outstripped him by a few years. So in many ways, he was the ultimate pharaoh. He is the ultimate pharaoh, and there's so much that happens during his reign. We won't be able

to cover it all today, but we're going to take a good stab at it over the next 40 minutes or so peter you highlighted there you know that great wealth of information that we have for this ultimate pharaoh but when you are looking at ramses and other scholars too how do you go about approaching the information that has survived about him when so much of it seems to have been stylized and maybe not exactly the whole truth? Well, that's one of the main themes of the book. On the one hand, we do have a wealth of information. On the other hand, it is surprising that despite how much we know about this king, we also have to confront the fact that many of the sources are fragmentary. But one of the key themes that I deal to confront the fact that many of the sources are fragmentary.

But one of the key themes that I deal with is the fact that all these ancient sources, particularly the ones, these royal inscriptions, are heavily ideological. They present us with what I call the ideological filter, that all the information that comes down to us in these royal inscriptions, this monumental art, both the statuary but also the relief carvings, these beautiful pictorial scenes on the wall carvings on the Egyptian temple walls that represent things like the Battle of Kadesh, they present us with a kind of ideological filter through which all the information that comes down to us passes through. So we have to take into account this ideology, which expresses the Egyptian worldview. So for instance, when we're reading his account of the Battle of Cades and seeing

these images, they're coming down to us presenting the Egyptian worldview. And so we have to understand that Ramses is presenting us with his own spin on these events. And their purpose is not necessarily to inform us about what happened during his reign, what happened at the Battle of Kadesh, but to express the Egyptian worldview and to express the ph Pharaoh's point of view. And so we have to understand what that point of view was and understand why he's telling it to us and why he is telling it to us in this particular way. As a way of trying to make sense of this and to be forewarned that we can't necessarily take everything he tells us at face value.

And this isn't to say that necessarily the Pharaoh is trying to deceive us or that he's trying to lie to us, but we can't just naively take everything that he is telling us at face value, but really to understand where he's coming from, understand what his motivations are, and then try to make sense of both his worldview, and then also trying to essentially read between the lines and try to get a better understanding what might have happened, but also to understand what made the Egyptians tick, what their thought processes were, and also what their worldview was, because their own mindset, their own worldview is an interesting subject for study in and of itself. It isn't just sort of an obstacle to understand what really

happened. That's certainly something that I'd love us to explore as this episode goes on, particularly when we get around Kadesh and the portrayal of that battle and its importance to Ramses. But let's start with the background. So before Ramses rises to power, before he is pharaoh, set the scene for us, Peter. When in Egypt's long and prestigious ancient history are we talking about the early stages of Ramses' life? Ramses is the third king of a brand new royal family, a new dynasty of pharaohs known as the 19th dynasty. And really, when Ramses became pharaoh, his immediate predecessors, his father Seti I and his grandfather Ramses I, they had only ruled about a dozen years. Before them, the glorious 18th dynasty had just died out. In fact, just about a generation before

the famous King Tutankhamen had been the last pharaoh who had succeeded his father on the throne. pharaoh who had succeeded his father on the throne. And when young King Tutankhamun had died at about the age of 19 or 20, there had been a very unusual succession of three kings in a row who came to the throne by appointment who did not have royal blood in their veins, who did not have royal blood in their veins, a courtier named I, and then a general of the army named Horemheb, and finally, Ramesses' grandfather, Ramesses I. Each one of them had been appointed to the throne because I and Horemheb had died without an heir. And finally, when Ramses I came to the throne, he had a son and a grandson to succeed him. Ramses I, of course, gave way to his son, Asedi I, the father of Ramses II. So, Ramses I was the first king since Tutankhamun who could say that he succeeded his father on the throne. And when Ramses II came to the throne, 10 years after his father said he the first had come to the throne,

he was the first king since Tutankhamun who could say my father and grandfather had ruled before me. And this was a huge deal. But still, this was a brand new dynasty, scarcely 12 years on the throne. And they were still liable to be viewed as kind of like upstarts. It was still could be remembered that they were not long in the palace, as it were. And so they still had something to prove. There were still memories of a time when this kind of political upheaval had been going on. And abroad, Egypt had experienced upheaval too. During the time of the end of the 18th dynasty, Egypt's empire was a bit shaky, especially in Syria, where Egypt had come into conflict with another great empire called the

Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey. And the two empires had classed over Syria. And in particular, this border territories, a kingdom called Amru and a famous city state called Kadesh, the famous city-state called Kadesh, had been lost to the Egyptian empire by the Hittites, and the Egyptians desperately wanted these two territories back. And this long-festering border war over these two territories ensued that would last for about 60 years, with the Egyptians in particular desperately wishing to recover the city-state of Kadesh. And of course, this would culminate in one of the most famous episodes of Ramses II's long reign, the Battle of Kadesh in the fifth year of his reign. And even 20 years after Ramses came to the throne,

eventually he would make peace with the Hittites. And so all these things were going on as young Ramses finally came to the throne and a lot of water was under the bridges, as it were. But all these things had been going on in the background in the recent decades when young Ramses came to the throne at about the age of 20. Do we know what Ramses was doing during his father's reign? Seti's roughly 10 years on the throne, as you say, maybe it was between, well, when Ramses is a teenager. Do we have any evidence

that shows if he was playing an important, a prominent role that Seti was lining him up as his heir as he's trying to solidify this new family on the throne as the pharaonic line, the new pharaonic line. As far as we can tell, Ramses was perhaps among the best prepared princes in Egyptian history to fulfill his role as king. During Seti's reign, he carefully groomed Ramses as crown prince to one day succeed him. We know this through a number of inscriptions that were created both during Seti's reign and also early in Ramses' own reign, where Ramses recounts his role as crown prince during his father's reign. And these tell us that Setia appointed his crown prince to a number of high positions and that he carefully prepared Ramses in the important kinds of roles that a future pharaoh would have to fulfill. Among these would include his role as

an administrator of large building projects. So for instance, in the ninth year of Seti's reign, you know, one or two years before Seti died, Seti commissioned a number of large colossal statues and large obelisks from the granite quarries at Aswan, and he scenes that show Seti with Prince Ramses conducting the rituals side by side, father and son. We also have at the Temple of Karnak in the great Hypostel Hall that Seti built, some of the war scenes that show Seti fighting in Libya and in Western Asia. in Libya and in Western Asia, we see Ramses falling after his father in battle. And we have a number of retrospective inscriptions from the time of Ramses, where he recounts his role as crown prince and how his father had groomed him as a demonstrator and even claims that his father had appointed him as a commander of the army at the tender age of 10. And even as a future pharaoh who would have a large family, because of course the pharaohs were polygamous, we are told that he is given his own starter family

that consists of numerous wives and that Setti selected wives for the prince from throughout the land, I suspect from the daughters of the high court officials, and told him to get busy and that even before the end of Setti's reign that a number of children had been born to the crown prince so that even at the beginning of his reign, he already had a number of children, including the four eldest princes, already at the first year of his own reign. Well, let's go on a quick tangent with that, Peter. I mean, do we know, therefore, anything about Ramses's mother? His mother was a woman named Tuya. And it's rather one of the ironies of this period is that the

queen mother, Tuya, who was the great royal wife, the senior wife of the pharaoh Seti I, we almost know nothing of her during the reign of her husband, even though she was obviously very prominent. Almost everything we know of her is from the period when she was the queen mom during the reign of her son. She lived at least into about the 21st year of her son's reign because she participated in the congratulatory round of letters after Ramesses signed his peace treaty with the Hittites in year 21. And she played a very important ideological and presumably a kind of highly influential political role in her son's reign. There's no doubt, of course, that Ramses doted on his dear mummy, but her ideological role was critical. Among her

titles was that of the god's mother, because of course the pharaoh was to some extent a divine. Ideologically, she was the central figure in an official royal myth that was common among the New Kingdom Egyptian pharaohs, that of the divine birth of the king. It was believed that every pharaoh was the product of a mystical union between the previous queen, the wife of the previous pharaoh, and none other than the god Amun-Re himself, the principal god father, the previous king, that his queen was visited one night by the god Amun, who disguised himself as the reigning king, her husband, and who then came into her bedchamber and seduced the queen, so that every king, the future king, was both the product of a union between the king and the queen, but also a product of the union of the queen with the god Amun. And so, he had both an earthly and a heavenly father. And Ramses took

this one step further because his mother Tuya was also called Mut Tuya, which means mother Tuya. But Mut is also the name of the goddess Mut, who is the wife of Amun. So now he had double parents. Not only was Seti and Queen Tuya his earthly parents, but not just was Amun his heavenly father, but the goddess Mut was now his heavenly mother. And both these things could be true at the same time. He could have both these earthly parents, Seti and Tuya, but these earthly parents could also both be his heavenly parents, Amun and Mut. And his mother, Tuya, had this unique role of being a woman who had quite literally known a god, but she also had been transformed into a living incarnation of this goddess as Mut Tuya.

And so she had this very significant role to play. With only the exception of the great royal wife Nefertari, Tuya then has the most influential and prominent status as the senior royal woman during the first 20-odd years of her son's reign. And even after her death, Ramses continues to dedicate monuments to her during the later years of his reign. Well, come on then, let's explore these early years of Ramses's reign now. If we go right to the beginning, so Seti has died, and now Ramesses II, roughly 19 or 20 years old, he is the new pharaoh. What does he do once he's ascended the throne? What

are some of the first things that we see from, let's say, the earliest years of his reign? There's sort of a dual track, and if we focus on, if you will, domestic policy, sort of a dual track, and if we focus on, if you will, domestic policy before we get to his foreign policy. On the one hand, he is very keen to honor the memory of both his father, Seti I, especially, and to some extent his grandfather, Ramses I, what we call filial piety, honoring the memory of his recently deceased father as a way of bolstering his legitimacy. He continues work on some of the unfinished monuments. Seti I was an ambitious builder, but his great monuments were unfinished. The Karnak-Hypistel Hall and the cult temples Seti was building at the city of Abydos

and in the western side of Thebes, his cult temple at Gorna. And so, Ramses continues to build these monuments. And for instance, at Gorna Temple, Ramses continues to add relief decoration. And in one part of Gorna Temple that was dedicated to the cult of his grandfather, Ramses II, dedicates images that shows him worshiping the gods alongside with his deified father and grandfather. He also adds more reliefs in another part of the temple that shows him and also images of his father, Seti I, as if Seti was still alive. And in fact, some of these images had led some scholars to believe, in fact, that Ramses and Seti had briefly ruled jointly as if that Seti was still alive.

Although my research shows that, in fact, there was not a period of joint rule that, in fact, these inscriptions had been created after Seti had, fact died. The same kind of thing was going on at another temple to the north at the holy city of Abydos. But Ramses was also interested in creating new monuments. So for instance, south of Karnak Temple on the east bank of ancient Thebes or modern Luxor, the temple of Luxor, Ramses built this huge new addition, the great pylon gateway and courtyard, along with some giant statues and obelisks. And in fact, these are some of the same obelisks and colossal statues that probably that Seti had commissioned in the ninth year of his reign that Ramses had overseen the quarry work but they had not emerged

from the quarry before Seti had died well they were now completed by Ramses as king and of course inscribed by Ramses and of course one of these obelisks was the one that ended up in the Place de la Concorde in Paris and other building projects were taken in hand, and so this was a major objective of Ramses to put his stamp on the monuments throughout Egypt. There were other monuments that must have been going up in northern Egypt, including Memphis at his new showcase capital of Pyramaces. The northern monuments, because of preservation, have not survived nearly as well as the ones in southern Egypt. You know, Heliopolis, Memphis, Pyramides, they have not survived as well. But all across Egypt, it became a giant building site, as the pharaoh, who was,

of course, one of the greatest builders of all Egyptian history, perhaps of all time, raised great monuments to his glory. And, of course, in Nubia as well, work would have begun on a series of new temples, including the earliest works of one of the most important and grand monuments of his reign, the famous temples at Abu Simbel, although work on them would not come to fruition for almost two decades as well. having been to both i've never done abu simbel but it's definitely on my bucket list but having visited both luxor temple and karnak and walking through a place like the hyper style hall and you see the cartouches of ramses all around it's such a great microcosm, isn't it? A symbol of Ramses' dedication, his desire to either build from scratch or complete monumental architecture begun by his predecessors

right from the beginning of his reign. And I think before looking at the military side of Ramses, looking at that focus, that desire to create monuments like that is absolutely astonishing. Yes, there's no question that he was among the most ambitious of pharaohs. Some would argue that, again, this somehow masked a kind of insecurity or megalomania. And I'm not here to psychoanalyze the pharaoh. But again, there's no question that Ramses went big, as it were. Of course, displaying your name was something that all pharaohs aspired to. The passion for building was, again, another hallmark of pharaonic civilization and another kind of passion that Egyptian rulers had.

civilization and another kind of passion that Egyptian rulers had. But the scale of Ramesses' ambitions outstripped almost every other pharaoh, although this was one of the ways that Ramesses emulated one of his great predecessors and one of the pharaohs Ramesses looked to as a model. In fact, to some extent, this was another one of the pharaohs that his father, Seti I, also modeled himself upon. And that, in fact, Ramses was also trying to live up to the example that his father, Seti I, who, of course, had begun some of these projects, like the Great Hypostyle Hall, that both of them were trying to model themselves on one of the great builders of the 18th dynasty, the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who was another one of these grand builder pharaohs. So I think if you look at the Haibistahl Hall, and this is where I do my field work,

building this huge monument, and it really is spectacular. It covers roughly an acre of land with 134 giant sandstone columns that represent essentially a giant papyrus marsh. The central columns that reach heights of about 13 meters or about 70 feet tall, these massive sandstone columns that represent papyrus stalks with massive capitals that represent open papyrus blossoms. There are 12 of them in the central aisle and then on either side you have an additional, I think it's something like 122 more, that represent closed bud papyrus columns that are only about 42 feet tall or, you know, about 10 meters. They support a massive roof with a network of giant architraves that would have been covered with ceiling slabs that have now all fallen down, unfortunately, and enclosed by these large walls.

And this giant space, which was probably one of the largest, if not one of the largest, enclosed spaces in the ancient world. Every square inch of this building is completely covered with hieroglyphic texts and elaborately carved scenes, and all picked out in beautiful colors against a brilliant whitewashed background. Today, it's mostly very drab, but a recent cleaning work by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has revealed some startling and brilliant colors that have been still preserved below a lot of the grime and dust that accumulated over the centuries, where some of the paint has survived,

and it's given us a real glimpse into the glorious ancient color. And even then, it's still a fraction of what the original monument looked like in its heyday. But it really does show us just how spectacular these ancient monuments were. But with all these inscriptions and everywhere you look, you see the names of the ancient pharaohs. It does give us essentially a kind of multimedia and spectacular vision of how the pharaohs advertised their glory through these kind of giant building projects. We could talk about the Hyperstyle Hall for hours. It is so incredible. And as you say, with that colour and everything. But let's turn our attention to the military side of Ramesses. Peter, when does Ramesses start looking outside of Egypt? And when does he start turning his

attention to military matters? There may have been some kind of minor military skirmishes very early in his reign, but his first official military expedition, what the Egyptians called the first campaign of victory, happens in the fourth year of his reign. And in some ways, this is surprising because his father, Seti I, led his first military campaign in the very first year of his reign. And even this first expedition in year four was really a kind of military tour of inspection, as far as we can tell. There may have been fighting. It went through southern Canaan, across northern Sinai, into southern Canaan. And as far as we can tell, it mainly got as far north as Lebanon, perhaps into coastal Syria. But of course, it was overshadowed by the second campaign of victory in

year five, a year later. And this was the big one, the famous one, because it's better known as the Kadesh campaign. And this was, of course, the famous Battle of Kadesh. This was the one that everybody remembers. It was, of course, recorded in great detail, whereas the details of the first campaign are only known from a few battered inscriptions that are not complete. We don't know much about them. Whereas the details of the Kadesh campaign, of course, are recorded in glorious details with numerous inscriptions, two great epic textual compositions, and very elaborate pictorial records that are spread on multiple temples across Egypt and Nubia in a sort of a media blitz and very elaborate, very detailed records that have come down to us. And of course, this was one of the centerpieces of my book. And perhaps the most

fun part to write, actually, was the account of the Battle of Kadesh, because it's full of such glorious details. This was, as it were, a grudge match. Everybody talks about the Battle of Kadesh, but it really, it was just one of several battles of Kadesh. It was certainly the last Battle of Kadesh that the Egyptians fought, but it was not the first or the only battles of Kadesh. As early as the reign of Akhenaten and again under Tutankhamun, the Egyptians had been fighting to regain the battle of Kadesh. Of course, if you go all the way back into the 18th dynasty, pharaohs like Thutmose III and Amenhotep II had originally captured Kadesh and added it to the Egyptian empire. When the Hittites had taken over Kadesh and Tutankhamun had attempted to

capture Kadesh but had failed. I've recently seen an inscription at Karnak built into a later wall that I think shows that the pharaoh Horemheb may have captured Kadesh where Akhenaten and Tutankhamun had failed. We know that Seti I had managed to capture Kadesh because it's recorded in the battle scene at Karnak, and also there was a battered victory stela that was unearthed in the ruins of ancient Kadesh that showed that, in fact, Seti had captured the place, although he wasn't able to hold on to it because it was close to the Hittite Empire. And as soon as the pharaoh's armies left, the Hittite envoys would have come by and said to the Kadesh king, who's your daddy? And of course, the Kadesh locals would have said, of course, the Hittites were the boss. And so it necessitated a

few years later that young Ramses would have basically made one last attempt. And in the end, even if he had managed to capture the place, ultimately it was a futile exercise to try to once again capture the place. But of course, in the end, Ramses would come out short, despite his best efforts to recapture Kadesh. Well, go on, PC. You said this was one of your favourite parts of the book to write and research because you have those incredible sources. Is it right? Is it the poem and the bulletin? Are those the name of those two great detailed sources? Well, this is what we call them more poetic, more in a verse. This is often called the literary or the poetic record, so we call it the poem.

The Egyptians actually called it essentially the victory text, as sort of a hymn of victory. We call it the poem, but the Egyptians called it the victory text. And it's sort of a hymn of victory to glorify the king. And it is in a poetic verse, and it sings of the victory of the king over the king of the Hittites and all of his allies at the Battle of Kadesh. The second shorter text is more prosaic, although there are times when it lapses into poetic verse, especially when it talks about the king's counterattack, where he personally charges into the fray. And it focuses more on the details of the actual day of battle at the end of the long march after the month of time when

the Egyptians marched from Egypt to get to Kadesh and the events when they actually fight. And in fact, there's a third component, a textual component, that is a series of brief caption texts that are attached to the pictorial scenes. They also contain information. And all three of these textual sources overlap. And there's information contained in each of them that are not found in the other two compositions. And it's only by piecing together all three of them that we can get a complete textual account. And there are even details that actually contradict each other. And then we have the pictorial record. These are mainly two large, very complex scenes. One of them shows the events just before the battle. The Egyptians had marched

all the way to the site of Kadesh, and sight of the citadel which sat atop a mound on the banks of the Orontes River and they had set up a camp with the king's lead division. There were four divisions of the Egyptian army that were named after the four principal gods and one of them was the god Amun and and where the king was leading this first division. And they had set up a bivouac, and as they were setting it up, the Hittites had ambushed the Egyptians, sending an all-chariot force, leaving their infantry. They'd set squadrons of supposedly 2,500 chariots to ambush the king's encampment. And there's an elaborate scene that shows this encampment of Amun with the king holding council with his advisors, and they're interrogating a

couple of captured Hittite scouts when the squadron of Hittite chariots sort of breaks into one side of the camp and surrounds it. And then there's a second scene that shows Ramses in his chariot sort of breaks into one side of the camp and surrounds it. And then there's a second scene that shows Ramses in his chariot as quite literally a larger-than-life figure, which is a standard feature of Egyptian battle scenes, with the king as this sort of gigantic figure that's fighting little miniature enemies, single-handedly routing them in battle. That shows Ramses charging this mass of chaotic, defeated Hittite enemies as he charges towards the city of Kadesh and drives the hapless Hittite enemy into the waters of the Orontes River. And these are the two main scenes. Sometimes there are other little details in other scenes, such as rounding up the captured Hittite enemies or collecting war trophies from the Hittite

dead, where they would cut off the hands of the enemy dead and soldiers would then present them as war trophies and scribes would count up the tallies of the Hittite dead. But those are the main scenes and you can combine all these pictorial and textual records to sort of build up a composite picture of what happened at the Battle of Kadesh. And it's really wonderful and you can build up this picture. Even so, with this huge amount of information, you have to be, again, on guard, because we have this whole issue of ideology, again, this ideological filter.

And the way I would put it, it's sort of like we are looking at this information that Ramesses is giving it is similar to like a camera filter. Imagine if you were looking at the world through a lens that was red colored. Our lens is ideology colored. And so when you see the picture of the king and he looks like he's 20 feet tall, that's ideology. Or you're looking at the scenes of the battle and none of the Hittites are fighting. The Hittite chariots, although the text talks about them shooting arrows, in the scenes none of them are carrying bows. Of course, in the text it says they're shooting arrows, but any of the arrows they fire at the king, they scatter harmlessly in the wind like chaff. And then in the scenes, they're carrying their spears or javelins, but they're just holding them like props because they never actually use them.

And although you see Hittite getting killed, you never see any Egyptians being injured, and certainly not the king. And that's all because it's ideology. So in the images, in the text, all kinds of things are distorted by the ideology. And again, this is what I call the ideological filter. And you can say, oh, Ramses is lying to us. That's not what is happening. This is counterfactual, yes. But this reflects Egyptian ideology. And it's not because he's trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Because the purpose of this whole elaborate narrative is not to tell us the historical events of the Battle of Kadesh. It's not to tell us what happened in a kind of journalistic way.

This is not a news report. This is not a historical record. This is a celebration of the glory of Pharaoh. This is an ideological document. This is serving to record the Egyptian worldview. And so therefore, it is more about Egyptian worldview, it's more about Egyptian ideology, it's about the Egyptian religious view, it's about celebrating the pharaoh. The historical details, the factual information is really secondary. And so when we see these things that don't make historical or factual sense, from the Egyptian point of view, that's really not the point. So again, when we say Ramses is trying to deceive us or that he's lying to us, the Egyptians would say, well, that's not what this is really about.

Well, Peter, if we take that all into account, from the surviving sources that we have, were you able to figure out what really happened at the Battle of Kadesh? Or were you able to kind of construct a narrative, even if the sources are more focused on that ideology, as you say, because they have that different focus? We can present possibilities. If you're looking for absolute certainty, then you're in the wrong business studying ancient history or certainly Egyptology.

We can perhaps offer possibilities, but absolute certainty, no, we can't. I would suggest that the likely outcome was a kind of, at best, tactical victory in the sense that Ramses survived an ambush. in the sense that Ramesses survived an ambush. I think it is plausible that the Hittite ambush failed spectacularly, but strategically Ramesses failed to achieve his objective. I think neither side was as badly damaged by the incident as many would suggest. damaged by the incident, as many would suggest. In the end, the mass of the Hittite army, which the bulk of their forces would have consisted of their infantry, never engaged. And really only two of Ramzi's divisions were engaged. And the second division was ambushed, but most of it really wouldn't have been seriously damaged. And so in the end, neither army was really that badly affected, I don't think. And the Hittite

ambush ultimately failed. And so I don't think it was necessarily as epic as Ramesses might want us to believe. But I do think that tactically, Ramses probably achieved a kind of bragging rights. But ultimately, he failed to achieve his... But of course, one of the things I think also is that this battle was not nearly as decisive as many people would have us believe. Ramses managed in the coming years, in both the 8th and 10th year of his reign, to come marching right back into Syria. And actually, as far as we know, he never campaigned against Kadesh again, but that

he actually campaigned against Syrian towns belonging to the Hittites well north of Kadesh, including a town called Dapur, which he captured. Again, he couldn't hold on to them. And what ended up happening, although he fought aggressively against Hittite interest in Syria, what ensued was a classic stalemate. And the result is, after both sides fought each other to a standstill, the way would be opened for both sides to eventually come to the realization that the only way forward was a peace. And they would eventually, about a decade later, come to terms and sign a peace treaty in the 21st year of Ramses II's reign. And that is another extraordinary document that, as we've got to really start wrapping up now, maybe we can talk about it a bit, because how significant is the cooling of hostilities

between the Hittites and Ramses' Egypt, the gaining of a peace treaty between these two powers, how significant is that in the rise of Ramses and then ultimately going on to doing even more stuff in the following decades of his reign? Well, in some ways, it's not as well known, I don't think. And I'm not sure if it was decisive in essentially freeing him up to do things back at home. But it is another way that he is remarkable, I think. You could argue that the conflict became a kind of frozen one. And in fact, he did in many ways, I suspect, resist peace for about a decade. And I suspect that he did so as a way of saving face, because ultimately at the end of his military career, in terms of tangible gains, he had little to show for his efforts in terms of permanent

gains of territory, because although he achieved some temporary success on the battlefield in his later campaigns, he wasn't able to hold on to it. But his predecessors, including Seti, when it came to their Syrian conquest, were in the same boat. Egypt could temporarily capture towns that belonged to the Hittite sphere of influence, but it couldn't hold on to them. The Hittites were quite eager to get the Egyptians to sign a peace treaty, but the Egyptians were resistant to this. The ideology of conquest and of glory drove them again and again to the battlefield. The terms of any peace deal would force the Egyptians to accept the status quo ante, and that would mean they would have to relinquish any dreams of a greater Egyptian empire in Syria. But finally, a Hittite king named Hadassili III,

who had come to power by overthrowing his nephew in a coup d'etat, which made him somewhat illegitimate, and who had tried to make peace with rival empires, all of whom in the end had rebuffed him, was now eager to get Ramses to make peace and therefore to burnish his credentials by having Ramses essentially recognize his regime, finally convinced the pharaoh to make a peace treaty with him. And I think Ramses finally accepted peace because he could spin the treaty according to the traditional ideological view in the Egyptian cliche that the foreign king was coming begging the breath of life by submitting to the pharaoh. This was an old cliche of Egyptian ideological rhetoric, and it implied that the Hittite king

was submitting to pharaoh's might. And so after enough time had passed since the king's last campaign, when the memories of glory could still be maintained, but the failure to gain any permanent new territory were forgotten, he could now remind everybody that the foreign king was coming begging for peace. And he could spin the treaty as a diplomatic victory. Therefore, he could accept the peace deal as claiming that the Hittites had come begging to him. And he also made a deal about this. This was not the first time the Egyptians had made a peace treaty. In fact, back in the 18th dynasty, they had previously made a peace treaty with the Hittites. But now, Ramses publicized this and recorded on the walls of Karnak and the Ramazim at Thebes

and probably other temples that are now lost, a record of the peace treaty that he had signed with the Hittites. And this was just the first of a number of diplomatic deals he made with the Hittites, including two foreign Hittite princesses that he would marry during the course of his reign. It is so interesting if someone goes to Karnak today because it's easy to overlook that wall outside the Hypersdaled Hall where they have recorded that Egyptian version of that peace treaty, you know, one of the oldest recorded peace treaties in history, and it is remarkable. So thank you very much for highlighting that, Peter. I wish we could go into more detail and more time and talk about so many other aspects of Ramses' life, like his great wife Nefertari. We have only just

scratched the surface, but I must wrap up. Peter, this has been absolutely brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you have written a massive new book on the life of Ramses, and it is called? Ramses II, Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh. Well, Peter, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Peter Brand talking all things Pharaoh Ramesses II, the rise of Egypt's ultimate pharaoh. I hope you enjoy today's episode. As mentioned at the start, there is so much to talk about when discussing Ramesses II, so don't worry, we will be returning to his story in the future to cover his later life and of course his legacy. Stay tuned for that in the

future. It is pretty mad when you step back and think that Ramesses was living more than 3,000 years ago. And yet, despite this great distance in time, we have so much information surviving about him. I just think that's absolutely crazy. And once again, is testament to the rich archaeology of Egypt. Now, last things for me, you know what I'm going to say. If you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out, well, you know what I'm going to say. If you have been enjoying The Ancients recently and you want to help us out, well, you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue to grow The Ancients

and to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. And don't you worry, there will be plenty of episodes talking all about the Roman Empire. Let's be honest, if you're not thinking about the Roman Empire at least once a week, then what are you doing? You need to be thinking about this empire. It is insane. And we on the Ancients are here to provide you a weekly dose of information about not just the Roman Empire, but also about these other incredible ancient civilizations, these peoples who lived all across the world back in antiquity and in prehistory. It's right here. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.