Harem For a Boy

No other pharaoh of Egypt can compare with Ramesses II for achievement and self-glorification. At the age of ten he was already a captain in the army and had his own harem. By the time he died in 1213 BC, aged over 90, he had ruled for 66 years (longer than Britain's Queen Victoria), fathered 111 sons and 67 daughters, built the exquisite temples of Abu Simbel and added to those at Luxor and Karnak. The great Battle of Kadesh in about 1274, in which he claimed to have subdued the Hittites, is celebrated in a gigantic relief on one of the walls of his mortuary temples on the Nile’s West bank at the Thebes. On the obelisk which is now in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, he had his glory described in these words: “Ramesses, conqueror of all crown bearers, Ramesses who fought the millions, bids the whole world subdue itself to his power…” The massive fallen statue of Ramesses at the Ramesseum of Thebes probably inspired English poet Percy Shelley’s sonnet of faded glory. Called “Ozymandias” (Ozymandias was the Greek rendering of one of the pharaoh’s names), the poem ends with the lines: “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.”