Ramesses II

He was born around 1303 BCE into a family of soldiers from the Delta, the new blood of Egyptian kingship. His grandfather, Ramesses I, had been a general whom the childless Pharaoh Horemheb chose as heir, and his father, Seti I, was a hard campaigner who rebuilt Egypt's grip on Asia. His mother, Queen Tuya, came from a military line, and the boy was raised for war and rule from the start: crowned prince in his teens, married young to Nefertari, the great love of his life, and to Isetnofret, the mother of many of his heirs, and blooded on his father's campaigns in Syria and Nubia, the African land below the cataracts. When Seti died around 1279 BCE, Ramesses took the double crown at about twenty-five, with a young family, a veteran's training, and sixty-six years of kingship ahead of him, though no man alive could have guessed the number.

In his fifth year came the test that would define him. Ramesses marched north to retake Kadesh, the fortress city on the river Orontes in Syria, lost to the Hittites, the rival empire of Anatolia. His army moved in four divisions named for the gods - Amun, the hidden one, king of the gods; Ra, the sun; Ptah, the craftsman of Memphis; and Set, the lord of storms - and near Kadesh two wandering herdsmen came over, claiming the Hittite host was far away at Aleppo. They were Hittite agents, and the claim was a lie. While the Amun division made camp, Muwatalli, the Hittite great king, sent some two and a half thousand chariots sweeping across the river straight into the marching column of Ra, shattering it. Panic rolled toward the royal camp. Ramesses threw on his armour, rallied his household guard, and counterattacked along the riverbank while the Hittite crews paused to loot the fallen. His own poem swears he fought abandoned and alone, crying to Amun as a son to a father, until a reserve column that had marched up the coast arrived and broke the Hittite assault. The next day both armies bled and pulled back. Kadesh stayed Hittite, the border stayed where it was, and the tactical rescue was a strategic draw. But Ramesses had the last word, because he had the walls: he carved his account of the battle, the Poem of Pentaur, onto the temples of Karnak, Luxor, Abydos, and Abu Simbel, and for three thousand years his version was the only one on record.

The war with the Hittites smouldered on for years until exhaustion taught both empires sense. In his twenty-first year, around 1259 BCE, Ramesses concluded with Hattusili, the new Hittite king, the earliest international peace treaty that survives on earth: pledges of non-aggression, mutual defence against enemies, and the handing over of fugitives, sworn before a thousand gods of Egypt and of Hatti. The Egyptians said the tablet was made of silver; the Hittite copy, written in the cuneiform script of Babylon, was dug up at their capital, and a replica of the treaty hangs today at the United Nations in New York. Peace bloomed into friendship. Letters survive between the two courts in which Nefertari and Puduhepa, the formidable Hittite queen, exchange gifts and greetings as sisters. In his thirty-fourth year a Hittite princess arrived in Egypt with an escort of splendour to become the king's wife, taking the name Maathorneferure, She Who Sees the Beauty of Ra, and when rain fell on her arrival day, the court took it as the blessing of heaven. The rest of the reign was a golden afternoon: trade flowed, the mines of Nubia and Sinai poured out gold and turquoise, and Ramesses celebrated jubilee after jubilee, more than a dozen sed festivals to renew his strength, while Egypt grew old and rich with him.

No king ever built like him. In Nubia he had a sandstone mountain hollowed into the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, its face cut into four seated statues of himself, each twenty metres tall, with a smaller temple beside it for Nefertari, where the queen's statues stand as tall as his own, an honour almost without precedent for a wife. On the west bank of Thebes he raised the Ramesseum, his temple of a million years, fronted by a seated colossus of himself weighing about a thousand tonnes, the largest statue ever cut in Egypt. At Karnak he completed the Great Hypostyle Hall begun by his father, a forest of one hundred and thirty-four stone columns where the sunlight falls in shafts between painted capitals. He added a court and colossi to Luxor temple, built a jewel of a temple at Abydos beside his father's, raised a new capital in the Delta called Pi-Ramesses, the House of Ramesses, on the site of the old Hyksos stronghold, and scattered his statues and his name from one end of the land to the other, calmly recarving the monuments of earlier kings into his own where new stone would have served. He ruled so long that he outlived many of his children, including his fourth son Khaemwaset, the high priest of Ptah at Memphis, who spent his life restoring the pyramids and temples of kings dead a thousand years and inscribing their forgotten names anew, earning the later title of the first Egyptologist. In the end the crown passed to his thirteenth son, Merneptah, already an old man when his father died around 1213 BCE, aged about ninety.

Ramesses was buried in KV7, a vast tomb in the Valley of the Kings that the valley floods would later wreck, and within two centuries the priesthood quietly moved the royal mummies to a cliff cache for safety. There, in 1881, his body was found, and five years later it was unwrapped in Cairo: a tall, gaunt old man with a strong hooked nose and fine white hair that had once been red-gold, his arms crossed in the pose of a king. In 1974, when his mummy began to decay, Egypt flew him to Paris for treatment, and the law required a passport; his occupation was entered as King, deceased, and France received him with the full military honours due to a head of state. The Greeks had long since renamed him from his throne name Usermaatre into Ozymandias, and the Greek historian Diodorus copied the boast carved on his fallen colossus: I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone wishes to know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass some of my works. In 1816 the Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni hauled the head of that colossus out of the sand for the British Museum, where it was called the Younger Memnon, and a year later a young English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, read of it and wrote the fourteen lines that taught the world the moral of fallen pride: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair. In the 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam raised Lake Nasser over the Nubian temples, the nations of the world cut Abu Simbel into blocks and rebuilt the whole mountain sixty metres higher, beyond the reach of the water. And in the Book of Exodus, where the oppressed Israelites build the store city of Raamses, tradition has ever since placed his long shadow over the story of Moses, though no Egyptian text remembers the event at all.