This portrait depicts the iconic 19th dynasty pharaoh, circa 1255BCE. He is shown in full regalia including the nemes headdress and crook and flail within the monumental temple built to himself at Abu Simbel at that time. It is believed the temple was commissioned when he was in his forties to extend Egyptian rule into Nubia.
The proportions of the face are taken from photographs of the pharaoh’s mummy identified from inscriptions on its coffin and bandage wrappings. These images show features that are strikingly at variance to the king’s visage on public monuments. These include a jutting chin, wide mouth with thin lips, an extremely aquiline nose, and a long narrow skull topped with thinning hair. Rameses lived to around ninety years of age and his body shows signs of healed fractures, arthritis, hardening of the arteries and a hunched back consistent with his age at death. In 1975, the Egyptian government allowed the French to take Rameses’ mummy to Paris for conservation work. A microscopic analysis of the hair, carried out by Professor Ceccaldi, the chief forensic scientist at the Criminal Identification Laboratory of Paris, found that the hair roots contained traces of natural red pigments, and determined from their structure that Rameses II was a ‘cymnotriche', wavy-haired and ‘leucoderma’, ie a fair-skinned person with wavy, ginger hair. Rameses’ father, Seti I, has also been found to have naturally red hair. This colouring is apparently shared by Berber tribes of the Nile Delta where his family is thought to have originated. In old age Rameses’ white hair was tinted with henna.
Rameses presided over the golden age of Ancient Egypt, whose empire extended from present-day Libya and Sudan to Iraq and Turkey. As well as military campaigns against the Hittites, Nubians and others, Rameses oversaw a massive building programme across Egypt, removing traces of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and restoring the cult of Amun. He embarked on the greatest temple building campaign in Egyptian history, which included the construction of colossal statues of himself, proclaiming his image and ensuring his place in history. This proliferation of his own image extended into his personal life as he fathered over 100 children by as many wives and concubines. It was not for nothing that Egyptians knew him as The Great Ancestor. It was the remains of one of his colossi that inspired Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair!
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.