Ramesses II: The Great Pharaoh of Egypt’s Golden Age

Ramesses II, known to the Egyptians as Usermaatre Setepenre and to later generations as “Ramesses the Great” (c. 1303-1213 BCE), is the most famous pharaoh of ancient Egypt after Tutankhamun and the most celebrated ruler of the New Kingdom of Egypt. He reigned for sixty-six years (c. 1279-1213 BCE), fathered more than 50 sons and 50+ daughters, and left behind a record of monuments, temples, and inscriptions so vast that almost every major Egyptian site still bears his mark. To later Greek historians he was simply Ozymandias, the king of kings.

If you want a single book on him, the older standard is Kenneth Kitchen’s Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II (1982). It is dated in places, Kitchen underweights the work of the French and German teams at Qantir and the recent redating work of the Tanis mission, but nothing yet supersedes it for sheer coverage.

Early Life and Rise to the Throne

Ramesses was born into the royal family of the Nineteenth Dynasty sometime around 1303 BCE. His father, Seti I, was one of the great warrior pharaohs of the Ramessid line, and his grandfather Ramesses I had founded the dynasty. From a young age, Ramesses was prepared for kingship. He served in military and administrative roles under his father, and at about fourteen he was given the title of “king’s eldest son” and a junior regnal role.

When Seti I died around 1279 BCE, Ramesses inherited a wealthy, well-organized empire that stretched from Nubia in the south to the eastern Mediterranean. He would go on to rule longer than almost any other pharaoh in Egyptian history, a fact that, by itself, helps explain the sheer scale of his building program.

The Battle of Kadesh

Early in his reign, Ramesses launched a military campaign against the Hittite Empire in what is now southern Turkey. The confrontation came in 1274 BCE at the city of Kadesh, on the Orontes River, in what is widely considered the largest chariot battle in the ancient world. The standard scholarly account remains W. J. Murnane’s The Road to Kadesh: A Historical Interpretation (1990), which anyone serious about the question should read alongside the Egyptian inscriptions themselves.

What happened next is told in two very different versions. The Hittite records suggest they won a decisive victory, capturing thousands of Egyptian soldiers. Egyptian records, recorded on temple walls from Abydos to Karnak to Abu Simbel, celebrate Ramesses as a heroic champion who personally saved the day by charging into enemy ranks. If you look closely at the great relief of the battle at the Ramesseum, you will see Ramesses depicted about four times the size of his enemies, a convention, but a striking one.

The truth, modern historians believe, lies somewhere in between: a tactical Egyptian disaster was turned into a strategic draw, and the two empires soon signed one of the earliest known international peace treaties, a copy of which hangs today in the United Nations headquarters in New York. I am sympathetic to the draw reading, but I think Murnane understates the propaganda value to the Egyptians of even a near-disaster survived; the public story mattered, and the public story was theirs. For the full story, see our article on the Battle of Kadesh.

Building Program: The Greatest Builder in Egyptian History

No pharaoh in Egyptian history built on the scale of Ramesses II. Across his long reign, he added to, rebuilt, or constructed from scratch an astonishing number of monuments, so many, in fact, that later Egyptian rulers, running out of stone, often took his earlier monuments apart for building material. Kitchen’s Ramesside Inscriptions (1968-1990) catalogues the surviving record in six volumes and remains an indispensable reference.

Among his most important works:

• The Ramesseum, his mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, one of the largest temples in Egypt. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described it in detail, and a fallen statue of Ramesses inspired the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to write the famous sonnet Ozymandias.
• The temples of Abu Simbel in Nubia, two massive rock-cut monuments carved into a sandstone cliff overlooking the Nile, designed to awe visitors and project Egyptian power into the south. For a full guide, see the temples of Abu Simbel and the Abu Simbel temple complex.
• The Temple of Karnak, to which he added the enormous Great Hypostyle Hall that still stands today, with 134 massive columns, 12 central columns about 21 m (69 ft) tall and 122 side columns about 15 m (49 ft) tall.
• The city of Pi-Ramesses in the eastern Delta, his new capital, which he built up into one of the largest cities of the ancient world.
• A second temple at Abydos, considered one of the most architecturally refined in Egypt.

He also built at Luxor, at Memphis, at Heliopolis, and at dozens of smaller sites. So many statues of him survive, many usurped from earlier pharaohs, that the opening phrase “Ramesses the Great” appears in more Egyptian museum catalogues than almost any other royal name.

Family, Wives, and Children

Ramesses had a famously large royal family. His chief queen was Nefertari, whose tomb in the Valley of the Queens is one of the most beautiful in all of Egypt. He also married several foreign princesses as part of his diplomatic dealings with the Hittites, including Maathorneferure and others.

He is believed to have had ~96 sons and 60+ daughters, according to the careful prosopography compiled by Kitchen. Many of his sons held important military and priestly offices, and several predeceased him. His thirteenth son, Merenptah, eventually succeeded him on the throne and became pharaoh in his own right.

Religion and Royal Ideology

Like all pharaohs, Ramesses presented himself as a living god, the earthly embodiment of the falcon god Horus and the son of Ra, the sun god. He gave particular prominence to the Ennead of Heliopolis, the nine gods of the creation myth, and his royal names were filled with solar imagery. His throne name, Usermaatre Setepenre, can be translated as “Powerful is the Justice of Ra, Chosen of Ra.”

He also identified himself closely with Amun-Ra, the king of the gods during the New Kingdom, and his temple inscriptions record the king’s personal devotion to the deity. For the broader religious backdrop, see our guide to Egyptian gods and goddesses and Egyptian mythology and beliefs.

Death, Burial, and Discovery of the Mummy

Ramesses died in his sixties, around 1213 BCE, after one of the longest reigns in Egyptian history. He was originally buried in KV7 in the Valley of the Kings, but his body was later moved to a cache at Deir el-Bahari to protect it from tomb robbers.

There the mummy lay for more than three thousand years, until 1881, when it was found in the DB320 cache, a hidden chamber containing the mummies of dozens of New Kingdom kings. The mummy is now in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, where in 2021 it was moved in a spectacular “Pharaohs’ Golden Parade.” The mummy shows a man with reddish hair, a long narrow face, and a pronounced overbite, a striking reminder of the real person behind the monuments.

Legacy

Ramesses II was remembered as a great king in his own time and was treated as a near-mythical figure in the centuries that followed. Ancient Greek writers described him as a conqueror, an empire-builder, and a king of immense wealth. The biblical tradition preserves a possible echo of him as the pharaoh of the Exodus, though this identification is disputed by modern historians. Shelley’s Ozymandias turned his ruined statue into a meditation on the impermanence of power.

Today, more than 3,200 years after his death, no pharaoh is more present in the Egyptian landscape. His temples still stand at Abu Simbel, Luxor, Karnak, Abydos, and Memphis. His mummy lies in a modern museum. His name, Ramesses, has been given to bridges, hotels, warships, and at least one modern film epic. As Aidan Dodson concludes (Monarchs of the Nile, 1995, pp. 174-198), no pharaoh’s name is more deeply engraved on the landscape of ancient Egypt.