‘Donald Trump of Ancient Egypt’: Ramesses II’s vanity is on full display in new exhibition | Exhibitions

TThe mummy of Egypt’s most ambitious pharaoh, Ramesses II (often spelled Ramesses), is a masterpiece of mummification. The astonishingly preserved 3,000-year-old face and proud beaked nose look much as they did when he died aged 90 or 91, having ruled for 66 years, fathered more than 100 children, beaten back his enemies and made ancient Egypt great again. And that’s even before you notice how his hand seems to reach forward to eerily seize power from beyond the grave.

I have never forgotten Ramesses since I looked at his face and that hand in Cairo. But the world in general seems more interested in Tutankhamun, whose unspoilt tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.

Ramesses the Great would surely be disgusted that the boy king, who had achieved so little in his short life and was effectively erased from their history by the ancient Egyptians, had turned out to be the most famous pharaoh of all time only because his tomb remained intact. Unlike Tut, Ramesses worked hard for the eternal glory he believed he deserved. He fought wars, made peace agreements, and built giant monuments for himself. However it has become synonymous with forgetfulness, thanks to Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, one of the most famous poems in the English language.

Now there is a new opportunity for Ramses to make his mark as the gold of Ramses and the Pharaohs, as an exhibition of his treasures comes from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to Battersea Power Station in south-west London. You won’t see his mummy, but they have the coffin he was found in. It will be the greatest and most beautiful fair ever and everyone really loves it, especially in Greenland. Do I need to say that? Ramses was the ancient Egyptian Donald Trump.

You might imagine, ironically, that Trump reshaped Mount Rushmore so that all four of the sculpture’s presidential portraits are of him. Ramesses actually did this in one of the most amazing monuments in the world, the Great Temple at Abu Simbel. It contains a row of four giant seated statues, 20 meters (66 ft) high, carved from the red sandstone cliff. And each of the four is a depiction of Ramesses, commissioned by Ramesses, for this temple that honors… Ramesses.

When it came to honoring himself, Abu Simbel was just one of Ramesses’ accomplishments. At the British Museum, the torso and head of the giant statue of Ramesses that once guarded the door of one of the monuments he built himself, his mortuary temple of the Ramesseum at Thebes, rise above visitors. However, this huge image is not rough or scary, but very graceful. The face is round and symmetrical, and his lips are set in what might be a benign half-smile. When looking at the Pharaoh, you feel reassured and calm.

But it is clearly not an accurate picture of Ramesses. In his lifetime, his mummy demonstrated that he had a hooked nose and a sharp, alert gaze. In stone, he has a round, full nose and a calm, untroubled expression.

This lack of concern for reality is deliberate. When Ramesses II ascended the throne in 1279 BC, his country was still recovering from the chaotic rule of the heretical pharaoh Akhenaten, who attempted to replace the old gods with his own new god, Aten, and also insisted on painting realistic, even expressionist, portraits of himself and his wife Nefertiti. The dynasty started by Ramesses’ grandfather sought to make Egypt ancient again. The ancient religion was revived, along with a traditional artistic style that rejected reality.

Thus, at Abu Simbel, the colossal statues of Ramesses make images of his children and first wife Nefertari appear small in front of them, in a tradition of determining status by size that goes back to the earliest Egyptian art, some 2,000 years ago. In reliefs and paintings of his most famous victory, the Battle of Kadesh, he is depicted fighting the Hittite enemy alone in his chariot, slaughtering heaps of them single-handedly, and holding groups of prisoners by the hair.

Ramses demonstrated leadership at the Battle of Kadesh, where he rallied his forces and repulsed a surprise Hittite attack. Perhaps what is surprising to us today is that Egypt was fighting an imperial war in Kadesh in modern-day Syria against the Hittites, a Middle Eastern power whose homeland was Anatolia in modern-day Türkiye. Later, Ramesses negotiated a peace treaty with the Hittite Empire so that they could confront their common enemy – the rising Assyrian Empire. Just as the harmless boy king Tutankhamun is now the most famous of the ancient Egyptians, we tend to portray this enigmatic culture on the banks of the Nile as standing apart from world history, looking inward, and preoccupied with the life to come. But Ramesses the Great was a different kind of historical actor, similar to Alexander the Great or the Roman Emperor in his epic international wars and imposing his (impostor) name and face on history. Others on whom he left his mark were the Israelites: references to his architectural projects in the Book of Exodus suggest that he is the tyrannical pharaoh holding them captive until Moses leads a daring liberation.

If Ramses is a tyrant in the Book of Exodus, he is the image of the doom of tyranny in Shelley’s great political poem about art, power, and memory. When European powers fought over Egypt in the early 19th century, the British Museum’s giant statue was one of the first monuments they coveted. It still has a hole drilled in its chest as Napoleon’s army planned to use explosives to dismantle it and bring it home in fragments. But in 1817, it was instead restored intact for the British Museum by circus strongman and pioneering archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni.

As London awaits news of this archaeological marvel bound for Britain, two Romantic poets compete to write sonnets about an ancient giant. Horace Smith’s Ozymandias imagines a future traveler wondering about the desolate and mysterious ruins of London. But it was his rival Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem that proved timeless in its satire of timeless ambitions.

Ozymandias was what the ancient Greeks called Ramesses, a loose literal translation of one of his official names. The first-century BC historian Diodorus Siculus claims that the colossal statue of Ramesses bore this inscription: “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. If anyone wants to know how great I am and where I lie, let him excel me in my work.” This certainly sounds like something Ramesses might have said, and he even ordered the builders to carve his name more deeply into the monuments to prevent it from being erased or altered. These are the words that Shelley turned into a condemnation of the art of force.

In Ozymandias, the poet meets a traveler who has been in a faraway land and comes across a broken statue in the desert, two great legs of stone with no trunk, above a face half buried in the sand. It has an inscription containing the words: “Look at my deeds, O Almighty, and despair.” It is the most ironic line in English poetry. The despair of the powerful, which this ancient ruler thought would be aroused by his monumental monument, was in fact aroused, or should be, by his own degradation.

It is a nice and reassuring thought that history will erase the glory of tyrants and imperialists. But Shelley does not allow accuracy in propaganda. His statue bears a “mockery of cold orders” rather than the calm, authoritative smile of Ramesses. That we remember the gentle Tutankhamun more than the warrior Ramesses might be a warning to any Ozymandias today, but at Battersea Power Station he is back to do his due in history once again. Look at his works.