59 Fun Facts About Ramesses II

Ramesses II was the third pharaoh of which Egyptian dynasty?

The Nineteenth. His name carried such weight that nine kings of the following dynasty, from Ramesses III to Ramesses XI, called themselves after him.

How long did Ramesses II reign?

66 years. He outlived his twelve eldest sons, so it was the thirteenth who finally inherited the throne.

By what name did ancient Greek sources refer to Ramesses II?

Ozymandias. The Greek historian Diodorus used the name when he quoted a boast carved on a colossus at Thebes, daring anyone who doubted the king's greatness to surpass one of his works.

Which pharaoh, Ramesses II's father, took him to war as a teenager?

Seti I. He named the boy his heir and brought him along on his wars, so Ramesses took the throne already practised at ruling and fighting.

Ramesses II's grandfather, Ramesses I, held which high office under Horemheb before being named his heir?

Vizier. Ramesses II was not born a prince: his family were soldiers from the Delta, and Horemheb, who had no son, picked his own chief minister to follow him as king.

Which novelist's 1989 book The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned brings Ramesses II back to life in 1914?

Anne Rice. Her Ramses has drunk an elixir of eternal life, so the mummy shipped back to an archaeologist's English mansion wakes up, and the dead man's daughter falls in love with him.

At Kadesh, Ramesses II led four army divisions, each named after what?

An Egyptian god. The four were strung out along the road, so when enemy chariots burst from hiding they scattered the division of Ra before the two behind it could come up.

Which sea raiders, sometimes linked to Sardinia, did Ramesses II defeat and then recruit into his bodyguard?

The Sherden. He let their ships attack and then sprang a trap off the Egyptian coast, and the captives, in their horned helmets, were soon serving in his own guard.

The Hittites, Ramesses II's great rivals at Kadesh, ruled their empire from a capital in which modern country?

Turkey. Their capital, Hattusa, stood in central Anatolia, and tablets excavated from its archives gave historians the other side of Ramesses' boasts about the battle.

What lured Ramesses II into the Hittite ambush at Kadesh?

False reports from enemy agents. Two men posing as deserters told him the Hittite army was far to the north near Aleppo, when it was in fact hidden just behind the city he was approaching.

How did the surviving Hittite charioteers get away after the Egyptian counterattack at Kadesh?

By swimming the river. They left their chariots behind and struggled across the Orontes to the city, while Ramesses bragged that he had tipped them into the water like crocodiles.

How is the Battle of Kadesh generally judged by historians?

A stalemate. Ramesses had a glorious triumph carved on temple walls across Egypt, yet he went home without taking the city he had marched north to capture.

How did Ramesses II seal his alliance with the Hittite king years after their treaty?

He married the king's daughter. The Hittite ruler's eldest girl travelled to Egypt, took the Egyptian name Maathorneferure and ranked as a Great Royal Wife beside the pharaoh's own queens.

Ramesses II claimed he fought one Syrian battle, around his tenth year, without first putting on what?

His corslet. The show of nerve bought him little: the Syrian towns he stormed without his body armour soon slipped back under Hittite control.

A replica of Ramesses II's peace treaty with the Hittites hangs at the headquarters of which organisation?

The United Nations. The two rival empires swore never to attack each other again, and the pact held: their wars ended and the old enemies settled into friendly relations.

Besides peace, what did Ramesses II and the Hittite king pledge in their treaty?

To return each other's fugitives. Each king also promised to send troops and chariots if the other were attacked, which turned two old enemies into allies.

On what material was the Hittite peace treaty delivered to the Egyptians?

A silver plaque. The original is long lost, and its wording survives because Ramesses had a copy cut in hieroglyphs into temple walls at Thebes.

At each of his Sed jubilees, Ramesses II was traditionally expected to do what?

Run a ritual course. The feast fell due only after 30 years on the throne and then every few years, so it took a reign as long as his to pile up more than a dozen.

Why was Pi-Ramesses, Ramesses II's great Delta capital, eventually abandoned?

Its branch of the Nile silted up. With the harbour useless, the city was taken apart and its statues and temple blocks were shipped off to build a new royal seat.

For decades, archaeologists mistook which other Delta city for Pi-Ramesses, the lost capital of Ramesses II?

Tanis. Later kings had carted the old capital's statues and stonework there for reuse, so excavators found his name everywhere; the real city lay buried under the village of Qantir.

Ramesses II completed the Great Hypostyle Hall, a forest of giant columns begun by his father, at which temple complex?

Karnak. His father had decorated the northern wing and died with the work half done, so Ramesses carved the southern wing himself and finished the hall.

The Ramesseum at Thebes was built to serve Ramesses II as what?

His mortuary temple. It served his cult rather than his burial, though the Greek historian Diodorus described the place as a king's tomb.

The colossal bust of Ramesses II called the Younger Memnon, hauled from the Ramesseum in 1816, stands in which museum?

The British Museum. A hole in the statue's chest is said to be the work of Napoleon's men, who tried to carry it off years earlier and had to give up.

How were Ramesses II's two temples at Abu Simbel originally made?

Carved out of a cliff. Along the top of the rock front the masons left a row of baboons, whose dawn cries were believed to welcome the rising sun the temple faces.

Which Swiss traveller, fresh from rediscovering Petra, found Abu Simbel in 1813?

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. He travelled under the Arab name Ibrahim ibn Abdallah, and at Abu Simbel he found the great temple so choked with sand that he could not get in.

The colossus of Ramesses II that stood in Cairo's Ramesses Square for 50 years greets visitors at which museum?

The Grand Egyptian Museum. Pollution was eating at the granite, so in 2006 the 83-tonne giant crept across Cairo in one piece on two flatbed trucks, a journey of ten hours.

A colossal limestone statue of Ramesses II is the centrepiece of the open-air museum at Mit Rahina, site of which ancient capital?

Memphis. The limestone giant once fronted the city's great temple, and a granite colossus dug up nearby was hauled to Cairo in 1955 to preside over the square by the main station.

Ramesses II gave the queenly title Great Royal Wife to several of his own what?

Daughters. After Nefertari died, the queen's place at his side passed in time to the next generation: princesses such as Bintanath, his daughter by a second queen, became his consorts.

Which famous pharaoh died about two decades before Ramesses II was born?

Tutankhamun. He left no heir, and within a generation the throne had passed to a family of soldiers from the Delta: Ramesses II's own.

What is one suggested cause of Ramesses II's death?

A ruptured abscess in his jaw. Examiners found a hole in the jawbone beside his teeth and judged the infection bad enough to have killed him, though they could not be certain it did.

What has left Ramesses II's tomb in the Valley of the Kings largely ruined?

Flash floods. Storm water that periodically sweeps through the valley has poured into the tomb again and again, ruining most of its wall decoration beyond repair.

Who secretly sold treasures from the cache hiding Ramesses II's mummy?

A local family. They had found the tomb years earlier and sold off its relics piece by piece to collectors, until the trail led officials to a thief who gave the hiding place away in 1881.

Which scholar was the first to unwrap the mummy of Ramesses II?

Gaston Maspero. He had taken over Egypt's antiquities service from Auguste Mariette, and it was his inquiry in 1881 that brought the hidden royal mummies to light.

To which country was Ramesses II's mummy flown in 1976 for treatment, with full military honours?

France. The scientists who examined him in Paris also learned how the old king had aged: bent by arthritis and troubled by poor circulation.

Study of the hair roots of Ramesses II's mummy indicated that in his prime his hair was what colour?

Red. He died white-haired and the embalmers' henna tinted the locks, so the colour was long put down to dye, until the roots showed he had been a redhead all along.

Why was Ramesses II's mummy irradiated before it was flown home to Egypt in 1977?

To kill fungi and insects. The body had begun to decay in its museum case, and specialists found it colonised by a host of fungi, so radiation was used to sterilise it.

In 2006, a man tried to sell which relic of Ramesses II over the internet?

Tufts of Ramesses II's hair. The seller, a postal worker, had them from his late father, a researcher who had examined the mummy in the 1970s; they were handed back to Cairo the next year.

Where did 2021's Pharaohs' Golden Parade take Ramesses II's mummy?

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. He rode there sealed in a nitrogen-filled capsule on a float of his own, one of 18 kings and four queens driven across Cairo in order of reign.

Which Italian archaeologist discovered the tomb of Nefertari, Ramesses II's most important consort, in 1904?

Ernesto Schiaparelli. Robbers had stripped the burial in antiquity, leaving a pair of mummified legs, thought to be the queen's own, which he took home to the museum he ran in Turin.

KV5, rediscovered by Kent Weeks in 1995, was built to hold the remains of whom?

Ramesses II's sons. Earlier diggers had seen only a few rubble-choked rooms and moved on; Weeks pushed past them into a maze of well over a hundred chambers, the largest tomb in the valley.

Khaemwaset, Ramesses II's fourth son and a high priest, is often called the first what?

Egyptologist. He toured pyramids and tombs that were already ancient in his day, repaired them and carved labels naming the long-dead kings who had built them.

Which successor of Ramesses II left the earliest known mention of Israel?

Merneptah. No longer young when he was finally crowned, he soon faced an invasion by Libyans and Sea Peoples and routed them in a six-hour battle.

Which poet based his famous sonnet about a ruined colossus on Ramesses II?

Percy Bysshe Shelley. He wrote it in a friendly contest with his fellow poet Horace Smith, who produced a rival sonnet on the very same pharaoh.

Which graphic novel features a character who names his costumed alter-ego after Ramesses II?

Watchmen. Adrian Veidt, called the smartest man in the world, sets out idolising Alexander the Great, sees his hero's failings on a journey through Egypt and names his costumed self after the pharaoh instead.

Who played Ramesses in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956)?

Yul Brynner. He won the best actor Oscar for his work that year, though not as the pharaoh: it went to his other royal role of 1956, the King of Siam in The King and I.

Who voiced Ramesses, speaking and singing, in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt?

Ralph Fiennes. Several co-stars handed their songs to trained singers, among them Val Kilmer's lead, but Fiennes sang the pharaoh's numbers himself.

Who played Ramesses II in Ridley Scott's 2014 epic Exodus: Gods and Kings?

Joel Edgerton. Egypt's censors banned the film for 'historical inaccuracies', among them its suggestion that Hebrew slaves had built the pyramids.

Ramesses II is credited with fathering roughly how many children?

About 100. Tallies of his offspring run from the high eighties to well over a hundred, and he had long processions of them carved on his temple walls.

Ramesses II had a well sunk in the desert for crews travelling to Nubia's mines of which metal?

Gold. He expanded the workings at Wadi Allaqi, far out in the eastern desert, and the well was dug to make the dry road to them passable.

The letters from the Hittite capital that show Ramesses II's name sounded like 'Riamessesa' are written in which script?

Cuneiform. Hieroglyphs do not normally record vowels, but the syllable signs pressed into these clay tablets do, so they preserve roughly how his name was spoken.

The Abu Simbel temples were relocated in 1968 to escape the rising waters of which reservoir?

Lake Nasser. The lake filled the valley behind the Aswan High Dam and drowned the temples' original site, so they now stand on a hilltop high above the old riverbank.

How were Abu Simbel's temples moved in the 1960s?

Cut into blocks. Crews took both temples apart piece by piece and fitted them back together on higher ground exactly as they had stood, a job of almost five years.

Twice a year the rising sun shines deep into Abu Simbel's Great Temple, lighting every statue but which god's?

Ptah. Linked with the underworld, he stays in shadow while the dawn light picks out Amun, Ra-Horakhty and the king seated beside him.

Which UN agency led the 1960s international campaign that saved Abu Simbel from the rising Nile?

UNESCO. Its appeal drew about half the money from some fifty countries, and the campaign's success led the agency to draw up the World Heritage Convention.

Abu Simbel's smaller temple honours Queen Nefertari alongside which goddess of love and joy?

Hathor. Egyptian queens were normally carved far smaller than the pharaoh, but on this temple's facade Nefertari's statues stand as tall as those of Ramesses.

Which Italian explorer, a former circus strongman, dug through the sand into Abu Simbel's Great Temple in 1817?

Giovanni Belzoni. His first dig in 1816 collapsed within days when food and money ran out, so he came back the next summer with the British consul's backing and got inside.

Abu Simbel stands close to Egypt's border with which modern country?

Sudan. The temples stand in Nubia, the old land along the Nile now split between the two countries, and Ramesses II built there to impress Egyptian power on its people.

One of the two obelisks Ramesses II raised at Luxor Temple has stood since 1836 in which city square?

Place de la Concorde. Egypt's ruler made a gift of the pair, yet only this one was ever shipped; it was raised before some 200,000 onlookers, and its twin still stands at the temple gate in Luxor.

In the 6th century BC, which mercenaries serving Egypt left graffiti on the colossi of Abu Simbel?

Greeks. They had sailed up the Nile with a later pharaoh's army, and their lines on a statue's leg record how far south the expedition got.