YOU have all heard of Rameses the Great, whose noble presence looms up from the black night of ages, majestic, gracious, clear cut, and real almost as the monarchs of to-day.

Rameses mei Amoun, as his people delighted to call him, meaning Rameses beloved of Ammon, the great god of Egypt, was born more than three thousand years ago, in Thebes, the capital of the kingdom. His father was a pharaoh, Seti I., and his mother was the queen Livea. Old Greek historians tell marvellous stories concerning his birth. They claim that one of the gods announced to Seti in a dream that the tiny babe should become the sovereign of the whole earth. It is clear that the ambition of the father prompted him to do all in his power to secure the fulfilment of this prophecy.

With a royal liberality, he ordered that all of the male children of the realm born on the same day with the crown prince should be brought to the palace. Here nurses were provided, and they were reared with and educated like the young prince in all respects. The king believed that a company of fellow students and playmates from childhood would be bound to him in manhood by the ties of affection, the best and strongest of all. They were “skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians,” and also trained to feats of bodily skill, strength and endurance. Thus they grew up a brave company of hardy young warriors, well fitted to obey and to command.

The stone pictures of Rameses on the monuments show that he was regarded as a king even in infancy, and received the homage of the people in his cradle. There are sculptures of him as a mere infant, with the finger to the mouth, and yet wearing the “pshent,” or double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Others are in child’s dress and with the braided sidelock of hair, but having the UrÆus, or Asp, the symbol of royalty, above his head. These may be seen at the museum of the Louvre in Paris.

The inscriptions give us an address of his subjects to him after he had succeeded to the throne: “When you were yet a very little child, wearing the braided hair, no monument was made without you. You commanded armies when you were ten years old.”

Seti, his father, died when he was but fifteen years old, and after the customary seventy days of mourning for the king had passed and his splendid tomb was sacredly sealed, Rameses II. became the boy king of the mighty land of the Nile.

The first public acts of his reign show a knowledge of human nature beyond his years. He appointed his young companions the generals of his armies; he distributed among them lands and large gifts, and by every means sought to strengthen the bands of their loyalty to himself. For the people at large he forgave all fines and penalties, and opened the doors of all the crowded prisons. In this way he secured the loving faithfulness of his subjects at home, and of the great armies he was to lead in long victorious marches through an enemy’s country. Does it not read like a romance, that some of his boldest expeditions and bravest conquests were accomplished while he was still under twenty years of age? Is he not a veritable boy king? Herodotus tells us that after Ethiopia and all the nations of Asia were subdued, he passed into Europe and conquered a few wild tribes of barbarians. After each victory he erected stelÆ, or tablets, inscribed with his name and that of his country. Herodotus saw three of these tablets, and they have been found by travellers in our day. Two of them are in Palestine. Each is the figure colossal of a warrior, carved on a solid wall of rock, standing with spear in one hand and bow in the other. On the breast is the inscription, “It is I who have conquered this country by the strength of my arm.” All of his victories are also recorded on the stone walls of temples, with marvellous detail. The painted sculpture shows the wealth of tribute he exacted: gold, ivory, ebony, and timber for building his ships of war, the droves of dusky captives running before his royal chariot, and the gods bestowing honors and blessing on their well-beloved son. No monarch of earth has left a more imperishable record on the pages of history than Rameses the Great. He was the Sesostris of the Greeks, their greatest hero. He was the pharaoh whose reign was the golden age of power and splendor in Egypt. He was one of the long line who so cruelly oppressed the Israelites. Many of the magnificent monuments of his reign were builded entirely by subjugated peoples who were prisoners of war. This fact is carefully noted on tablets, and among them the “bricks without straw” of the captive Hebrews are largely represented. He is said to be the father of the princess who found the Jewish infant in his frail cradle of reeds. If this be true it was at his imperial court that Moses became “skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians.” The splendid achievements of his reign attest their wonderful knowledge of the arts and sciences.

On a stelÆ, or tablet, deciphered jointly by distinguished English and French orientalists, is a detailed account of the boring of an artesian well by the special decree of Rameses. An embassage, consisting of the chief dignitaries of a distant province, arrived at the court and begged an audience with the king. They petitioned for a spring to supply water to the slaves and animals employed in bringing gold from a far region over a parched desert road, and who they said were dying of thirst on the long journey. His majesty graciously had compassion on these his humble subjects, and in obedience to his royal mandate, water rose to the height of twenty feet on the road to Okan. The exact height was decreed by his own lips, and the dry and thirsty land was refreshed. The great canal from the Nile to the Red Sea—one of the triumphant successes of our own century—was first accomplished by the engineers of Rameses mei Amoun. The great temple palaces of Luxor and Karnak, the wonderful rock-hewn temples at Aboo Simbel and the Rameseum—or Memnonium, as it has been wrongly called—are among the stupendous monuments of his reign, the latter being his splendid tomb. Its walls are covered with painted sculptures telling the wonders of his life. Chief among these is an episode in one of his battles with the Khetas, a powerful enemy, which commemorates the great personal bravery of the king. It is a favorite subject of the sculptures of his time. It is twice given in the Rameseum and appears again three times in the principal temples that perpetuate the glories of his long reign of sixty-eight years.

He is represented in his chariot, furiously driven by his master of the horse into the midst of the foe, and although surrounded by the archers of the hostile ranks, he is dealing death with each arrow that flies from his strong bow, while he seems to bear a charmed life. The picture story of this dashing, reckless courage is curiously confirmed by a papyrus or Egyptian book in the British museum. This is an historical poem commemorating the battle, and written at the time by a court poet named Penta-ur. It was held in high honor by his countrymen, and was deemed worthy of a place on one of the walls of the temple palace of Karnak, where it is graven entire. It says, “Six times the king pierced his way into the army of the vile Khetas, six times did he enter their midst.... When my master of horse saw that I remained surrounded by many chariots he faltered and his heart gave way for fear; a mighty terror seized his limbs, and he cried, ‘My good master, generous king, halt in thy course and let us save the breath of our lives. What can we do, O Rameses mei Amoun, my good master?’ And thus did his majesty reply: ‘Have courage! strengthen thy heart, oh my comrade!... Ammon would not be a god did he not make glorious my countenance in the presence of the countless legions of the foe.’”

The portrait statues of Rameses are innumerable, from the delicately carved statuette to the huge fragments of the Colossus of the Rameseum, which was thirteen yards in height. It would seem that his majestic figure and gracious face can never be forgotten by the race of men.

There are sphinxes of rose-colored granite with the body of a lion and the noble head of Rameses. This combination, so familiar in Egypt, typified the union of physical and intellectual strength by the lion and the man. The far-famed sitting statues in front of the “Speos,” or excavated rock temple at Aboo Simbel, are the most tremendous of these portraits. Nothing even in Egypt compares with these stone giants for grandeur and power. Their measureless, voiceless, eternal strength oppresses the beholder with a sense of utter insignificance in their mighty presence. In the great halls which pierce the solid mass of the mountain, gigantic standing figures, with folded arms and the calm, placid face of Rameses, seem to uphold the everlasting hills. In another temple he is found seated between two of the gods of the land as their equal in the triad. In the rock temples of Aboo Simbel we find one of those strangely beautiful “touches of nature” that “make the world akin.” By the side of the greater one, guarded by its gigantic wardens, there is another and smaller one, called the “Speos of Athor,” the goddess of love and beauty, and the “Grotto of Purity.” It was built by Rameses for the sole use of his royal wife, called “Nofre-ari,” “the good companion.” The other temples of the country preserve the records of many kings. The one at Aboo Simbel is sacred to the glory and greatness of Rameses mei Amoun. It is by this one, then, that he builded the chapel for his queen. On the wonderful front wall of the Portico are portrait statues of the royal lady and her children, and over them the legend, “Rameses, to the royal spouse, Nofre-ari, whom he loved.” The adamantine stone has safely brought down to us the tender grace of this dedication.

Travellers tell us that every detail of ornament in the grottoes, the pillars and their flower-like capitals, the sculpture and frescoes, are all in some way connected with the beloved wife. As a token of her grateful recognition of this knightly devotion, there is on the inner wall of the chapel, after the cartouche of Rameses, this answering legend: “His royal spouse, who loves him, Nofre-ari, the great mother, has constructed this resting-place in the grotto of purity.” AmpÈre, a French traveller, tells us this in his letters from Egypt, and adds, “The queen is charming, and no one wearies of meeting her likeness everywhere, and which Pharaoh never wearies of repeating.” Are not they beautiful, these records of an imperishable love? They cause the dim dusky ages that separate us from the time of Rameses to vanish, and we seem to feel the heart-throbs of the man beneath the strange royal robes of the Egyptian king.

In the great ruin of the Rameseum, which a French scholar calls “an historical museum” of the reign of Rameses, near the colossus of himself was one nearly as large of his mother, Livea, with a triple crown, showing that she was the daughter, wife and mother of a king. In the same place were two statues of his mother and daughter, bequeathed to the world together, as they were associated in the love of the pharaoh.

In another temple, where huge caryatides of himself supported the pylon or entrance tower, were the statues of his fourteen daughters. Their names have come down to us, but do not sound very musical to our modern ears. By their crowns we know that five of them became queens. In all of the sculptures of his battles and marches, he is accompanied by some of his twenty-three sons. Their names are given, and they are known as princes by the royal dress, and by the braided and jewelled lock of hair which they wore during the lifetime of the king their father. By all of these touching records of the home affections we know that the wonderful baby king and boy warrior was in his manhood a tender, loving son, husband and father; and this knowledge adds a purer, brighter lustre even to his splendid fame.

That he reigned sixty-eight years is a fact so fully confirmed by data that it may be accepted as truth. Until the death of his eldest son, Sha-em-Jom, the crown prince, beloved by the people and dearest to his father’s heart, the history of these long years is one undimmed by misfortune. This occurred thirteen years before his own death.

From this time the monuments give only hints of the frequent deaths of his children and of the feebleness and blindness of his last years. But it is not strange that, after eighty years of his stirring life as king and conqueror, the common lot of all should overtake even the great Rameses.

It is a pleasant finish to the old story to know that one daughter of his winter years comforted him with tender, filial love till the last of earth, and he went to his magnificent completed tomb full of years and honors. No mortal ever reached a dizzier height of fame. After more than three thousand years, in a far land unknown to his time and among a race then undreamed of, his placid, majestic face is familiar to every student. One of our most ambitious young artists could find no worthier subject for his canvas, in the last salon, than a portrait of Rameses II. Very recently I saw in our “fair city by the sea,” the Thebes of our country, a magnificent mansion, the library of which was an old Egyptian hall reproduced. It abounded in lotus flowers, obelisks, sphinxes, winged globes and sacred bulls. Over the warm-hued mantel, like the red porphyry of the Nile country, was a richly framed portrait of heroic size. The gracious face, so calm and strong, the straight features, dark beard and royal head-dress of Egypt, proclaimed a strange fact. Rameses the Great, patron of libraries and learning 1400 B. C., is chosen as the guardian genius of a library in our young western capital after three thousand two hundred and seventy-seven years.

I must stop before you all grow gray and wrinkled with groping so far back through the long night of ages past. But you will not soon forget the story of the boy king of Egypt.