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Rameses II: Egyptian

In vain have the chisel and the pencil perpetuated both upon the finest monuments in the valley of the Nile. In vain in the basreliefs that adorn the sanctuaries of the temples and the halls of the palaces, whereof the great Rameses was the founder, has the hyperbole of flattery been pushed so far as to cause the likeness of the supreme Egyptian deity, Ammon-Ra, to appear among those of the monarch. Ammon bestows the empire of the world, both sea and land, upon him, "his well-beloved child, the guardian sun of justice, Rameses II." Along with the image of this heathen god, is seen that of Sethos, the god of war, "who promises him a secure and upright life upon the throne of the sun, forever." With these are also found the portraits of Maut (primeval and prolific Night), and of Isis and Anuke, who dandle Ammon on their knees, refresh this singular bantling with their milk, and endow him, by virtue of this divine nourishment, with "a future prolonged for endless periods of panegyrics."* Strange confusion and extinction of all things here below! through causes of which the present condition of society permits us to get only a glimpse,† the name and personality of Rameses Mei-Amoun became * Panegyrics were the grand state occasions when the fame of the princes and the glory of the gods of Egypt were publicly extolled and celebrated with processions, chantings and festivities. t See Appendix V. mixed up, gradually, with those of his father and of two of his descendants. Greece, that grand voice which fills the trumpet of fame, knew nothing of him excepting the mythical remembrances that emerged from this confusion, and which Manetho, the only annalist of his native country, could not or would not clear away. The written history of antiquity contains but one exact mention of him, and this it owes to Tacitus; and it has required all the progress of modern science applied to the researches of the past to enable some of our contemporaries to exhume the real name of the Egyptian hero, and the true part that belongs to him in the furrow which the old land has worn through the years of antiquity. This they accomplished at last, when thirty centuries had rolled away, by disputing with the sands of the desert, the monumental legends of Nubia and the Thebais.