Home › The Names of Rameses II › The Names of Rameses II

The Names of Rameses II

[Note by M. Rougé.] If the testimony of Tacitus placed the present reading of the name of Rameses beyond dispute it did not assist us in comprehending how the Greeks had come to write a name so different from it. The condition in which the royal lists taken from Manetho have reached us still increase the embarrassment. In the nineteenth dynasty no other name had been found on these lists than the genuine Egyptian one of Rameses Mei-Amoun. The Greek chronologists who have transmitted these lists to us felt that they could not omit introducing the Sesostris of Herodotus, somewhere. A list of the Egyptian kings on which Sesostris had not been named would have seemed to them something as monstrous as a history of Greece from which the name of Alexander had been excluded. Hence these compilers of quotations found in Manetho, at the twelfth dynasty, a king whose name Sesortasen presented some analogy to that of Sesostris. More over, he was a conqueror. His monuments, which still exist to this day, show that he had advanced the frontiers of Egypt on the Nubian side, and that his memory was still held in sufficient honor to cause fresh temples to be reared to his memory many centuries after his death. Undoubtedly there were in the first extracts from Manetho some words of praise following this royal name, as there were after several others; and this circumstance, joined to the similarity of names, induced the chronologists to place the Sesostris of the Greeks just there. The writing that accompanies it is, moreover, too clear in its specifications to be accepted as the genuine text of Manetho.

APPENDIX.