Travel with Billy Carson — Ramesses II, also written Ramses and often called Ramesses the Great, was the third king of Egypt's 19th Dynasty and ruled from about 1279 to 1213 BCE, a reign of roughly 66 years. He is remembered for the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, for the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty that followed, for his Delta capital Pi-Ramesses and for a building programme that runs from Abu Simbel to Luxor, and his mummy survives today in Cairo.
Few pharaohs left a louder record. Ramesses put his name and his battles on more temple walls than almost any other king, and later ages took him at his word. Separating the king from the publicity he built for himself is what makes him worth studying, and it is where the questions that interest 4biddenknowledge readers begin: how a New Kingdom state quarried, moved and raised stone on this scale.
Who was Ramesses II?
Ramesses II was the son of Seti I and Queen Tuya, and he came to the throne around 1279 BCE on the conventional chronology. His reign of about 66 to 67 years is one of the longest in Egyptian history, long enough that he outlived many of his heirs. He was succeeded by Merneptah, his thirteenth son, around 1213 BCE. The popular idea that he was the pharaoh of the Exodus is a later tradition with no Egyptian evidence behind it, and the Book of Exodus does not name the king.
The king's throne name was User-maat-re, usually translated along the lines of "the justice of Ra is strong." Greek writers rendered it as Ozymandias, which is the name Percy Bysshe Shelley used for his 1818 sonnet about a shattered statue in the desert. The poem drew on the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a colossal statue of the king at what is now called the Ramesseum.
His chief queens were Nefertari, for whom the Small Temple at Abu Simbel was built, and Isetnofret, the mother of Merneptah. Nefertari is a different woman from the earlier Amarna queen covered in the Nefertiti guide; the names are often confused. He fathered a very large family, commonly estimated at more than 100 children, though no exact number can be fixed.
What happened at the Battle of Kadesh?
The Battle of Kadesh was fought in about 1274 BCE, in Ramesses' fifth regnal year, between the Egyptian army and the forces of the Hittite king Muwatalli II near the city of Kadesh on the Orontes River in what is now western Syria.
The Egyptian accounts come in two main literary forms that scholars call the Poem and the Bulletin, together with large battle reliefs. Versions were carved at Abu Simbel, Luxor Temple, Karnak, Abydos and the Ramesseum, and the Poem also survives on papyrus. In these texts a Hittite chariot attack throws the Egyptian army into disorder, and Ramesses, abandoned by his troops, charges the enemy and saves the day with the help of Amun.
Historians read the same sources very differently. The Hittite chariot attack was real and came close to destroying the Egyptian force, and the king survived a near-disaster rather than winning a clean victory. The campaign ended in stalemate, Ramesses withdrew south, and Kadesh stayed in Hittite hands. A later letter shows the Hittite king Hattusili III objecting to the way Egypt portrayed the battle. For Ramesses, Kadesh was less a military triumph than a propaganda one, and the reliefs at Abu Simbel remain the most visited version of that story.
What was the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty?
The Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty was a formal agreement made in about 1259 BCE, in the 21st year of Ramesses' reign, between Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III. It ended roughly two decades of rivalry over Syria and set out terms of non-aggression, mutual defence against outside attack and the return of fugitives.
What makes the treaty remarkable is that both sides' texts survive. The Egyptian version, in hieroglyphs, is carved at Karnak in a longer copy and at the Ramesseum in a shorter one; Jean-François Champollion copied part of it in 1828. The Hittite version, written in Akkadian cuneiform, the diplomatic language of the period, was found on clay tablets at Hattusa, near modern Boğazkale in Turkey, during excavations led by Hugo Winckler that began in 1906. Two of the tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums and one is in Berlin.
The treaty is usually described as the oldest known surviving peace treaty and the earliest for which both parties' texts exist. It is not the first treaty ever made: older agreements from Mesopotamia and Syria are known, including the much earlier treaty between Ebla and Abarsal. In 1970 Turkey presented the United Nations with a copper replica of the treaty tablet, which hangs in a delegates' corridor near the entrance to the Security Council chamber.
The peace was later reinforced by marriage. In about the 34th year of his reign Ramesses married a daughter of Hattusili III, who took the Egyptian name Maathorneferure. The two powers stayed at peace for the rest of his long reign.
Where was Pi-Ramesses?
Pi-Ramesses, "the House of Ramesses," was the king's capital in the eastern Nile Delta, near the modern village of Qantir, about 120 km north-east of Cairo. It put the court close to the routes into Canaan and Syria.
German teams from the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, with Edgar Pusch as a long-time director, have worked at the site since 1980. Because the city lies under fields, magnetometry has done most of the mapping, covering more than 1.5 square km. Excavation has uncovered the stables of the chariotry, estimated to have held up to about 480 horses.
The city was later abandoned as the Nile branch beside it shifted, and many of its statues and blocks were carried to the new city of Tanis. That reuse misled early scholars, who saw Ramesses' name everywhere at Tanis and identified it as Pi-Ramesses. Qantir's excavations settled the question.
What did Ramesses II build?
Ramesses was one of Egypt's most prolific builders. His best known works are the two rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel in Nubia, which were cut apart and moved in the 1960s to escape Lake Nasser. At Thebes he added the forecourt, pylon, seated and standing colossi and a pair of obelisks at Luxor Temple; one obelisk still stands at the entrance, while its twin has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris since 1836, about 23 m tall and roughly 230 tonnes. The Luxor guide covers the temple and the Valley of the Kings in detail. At Karnak he completed the decoration of the great hypostyle hall begun under his father, and at Abydos he built a temple of his own near Seti I's.
His mortuary temple, the Ramesseum, stands on the west bank at Thebes. In its court lie the broken pieces of a red granite seated colossus of the king, estimated at about 1,000 tons when intact; it is this statue that lies behind Diodorus' account and, through him, Shelley's "Ozymandias."
He also put his name on older monuments, re-carving cartouches on statues and buildings made for earlier kings. That was common practice, though he did it on an unusual scale, and it differs from the deliberate erasure of a ruler's memory, as in the case of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut.
New pieces of his statuary are still being found. In early March 2024 an Egyptian-American mission led by Basem Gehad of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Yvona Trnka-Amrhein of the University of Colorado announced the upper part of a limestone statue of Ramesses II, about 3.8 m tall, near Hermopolis (el-Ashmunein) in Minya. The lower half had been found in 1930 by the German archaeologist Günther Roeder, and the 4biddenknowledge archive covered the discovery of the upper section when it was announced.
What happened to Ramesses II's mummy?
Ramesses was buried in tomb KV7 in the Valley of the Kings. Priests later moved royal burials to protect them from robbers, and dockets on his replacement coffin record that his body was moved more than once. His mummy was finally found in 1881 in the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari (TT320), near Hatshepsut's temple, together with dozens of other royal mummies.
By the 1970s the mummy was deteriorating, with fungal damage found on the body. On 26 September 1976 it was flown to Paris, where it was received at Le Bourget by the Garde républicaine with the honours given to a visiting head of state. At the Musée de l'Homme about a hundred researchers and technicians examined it, and on 9 May 1977 it was sterilised with gamma rays at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique centre in Saclay before being flown back to Cairo.
A popular story says Egypt issued the mummy a passport for the trip; no such document has been published, and it is best treated as a story.
On 3 April 2021 Ramesses II was one of 22 royal mummies, 18 kings and 4 queens, moved in the "Pharaohs' Golden Parade" from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat, where he is now displayed.
His wooden coffin has travelled on its own. The touring exhibition "Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs," with around 180 objects, opened at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in November 2021 and moved to the de Young museum in San Francisco in August 2022. At the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, from 7 April to 6 September 2023, its centrepiece was the king's coffin, lent partly in thanks for the 1976 treatment. The mummy itself did not travel.
Billy Carson's reading
No Billy Carson talk in the 4biddenknowledge library is devoted to Ramesses II, but his short talk filmed at Luxor Temple, covered in Ancient Kemet and the Grand Illusion, stands in front of Ramesses' own forecourt and obelisk. In it Carson describes one-piece statues weighing a thousand tons and obelisks of 800 tons as evidence of the skill of the people who built Kemet. The figures are worth placing correctly: the thousand-ton estimate belongs to the fallen Ramesses II colossus at the Ramesseum, while the obelisk Ramesses raised at Luxor is about 25 m tall and roughly 250 tons.
The wider reading in that talk is Carson's own. He treats Kemet as a place where a science of consciousness was practised and encoded in stone, with Thoth as its teacher, and he reads temple symmetry as an expression of "as above, so below." Those are his positions, drawn from the Emerald Tablets, not conclusions of mainstream Egyptology.
What his approach brings to Ramesses is a set of practical questions. How did New Kingdom builders quarry a single granite block of around 1,000 tons at Aswan, move it more than 200 km downriver and set it upright at Thebes? How were temples like Abu Simbel aligned so that sunlight reaches the sanctuary on set days? Egyptologists answer with ramps, sledges, levers, river transport and large organised workforces; Carson invites readers to look at the stone and judge the scale for themselves.
Watch, read and go deeper
The Abu Simbel guide embeds Billy Carson's livestream on the temple's solar alignment and covers Nefertari's temple and the Kadesh reliefs. For his wider exploration of Egyptian temples, symbols and teachings, watch the Egyptian Mystery School series on 4BK TV. His Luxor Temple talk is broken down in the Grand Illusion companion, and the Ancient Egypt topic hub gathers every related guide, from Hatshepsut to the hieroglyphic script.
Frequently asked questions
How long did Ramesses II reign?
Ramesses II reigned for about 66 years, from roughly 1279 to 1213 BCE on the conventional chronology. That makes his reign one of the longest in Egyptian history. He was succeeded by his son Merneptah.
Did Ramesses II win the Battle of Kadesh?
Not in the way his inscriptions claim. Ramesses' own texts and reliefs present Kadesh as a personal victory, but historians read the battle of about 1274 BCE as a near-disaster that ended in stalemate. Kadesh stayed in Hittite hands.
Is the Egyptian-Hittite treaty the oldest peace treaty in the world?
It is usually called the oldest known surviving peace treaty and the earliest for which both parties' texts survive, in Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Akkadian cuneiform. Older Near Eastern treaties are known, so it is not the first treaty ever made. A copper replica given by Turkey in 1970 hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York.
Where is Ramesses II's mummy now?
His mummy is in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo. It was moved there on 3 April 2021 in the Pharaohs' Golden Parade with 21 other royal mummies. It had been found in the Deir el-Bahari royal cache in 1881.
Did Ramesses II's mummy go to Paris for the 2023 exhibition?
No. The mummy went to Paris only once, in 1976–77, for conservation treatment. The 2023 exhibition at La Villette displayed his wooden coffin, which Egypt lent partly in thanks for that treatment, while the mummy stayed in Cairo.
Sources and further reading
- K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II (Aris & Phillips, 1982)
- K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions, Translated and Annotated, vol. II (Blackwell), for the Kadesh texts and the treaty
- Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press), for the Kadesh Poem and Bulletin
- Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford University Press, new edition 2005)
- Edgar B. Pusch and colleagues, publications of the Qantir-Piramesse project (Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim)
- United Nations Gifts Collection, "Replica of Peace Treaty between Hattusilis and Ramses II" (gift of Turkey, 1970)
- Lionel Balout and Colette Roubet (eds.), La momie de Ramsès II: contribution scientifique à l'égyptologie (1985)
