The religious reforms of Khu-n-Aten resulted in the fall of the dynasty and the Egyptian empire.  The letters from Canaan, more especially those from the vassal-king of Jerusalem, show that the power of Egypt in Asia was on the wane.  The Hittites were advancing from the north, Mitanni and Babylonia were intriguing with disaffected Canaanites, and the Canaanitish governors themselves were at war with one another.  The Pharaoh is entreated to send help speedily; if his troops do not come at once, it is reputed, they will come too late.  But it would seem that the troops could not be spared at home.  There, too, civil war was breaking out, and though Khu-n-Aten died before the end came, his sepulchre was profaned, his mummy rent to pieces, and the city he had built destroyed.  The stones of the temple of his god were sent to Thebes, there to be used in the service of the victorious Amon; and the tombs prepared for his mother and his followers remained empty.  In the national reaction against the Asiatised court and religion of Khu-n-Aten, the Canaanitish foreigners who had usurped the highest offices were either put to death or driven into exile, and a new dynasty, the Nineteenth, arose, whose policy was “Egypt for the Egyptians.”

Ramses I. was regarded as the founder of the Nineteenth dynasty.  His reign was short, and he was followed by his son Seti I., who once more led his armies into Asia and subdued the coast-land of Syria.  Seti was succeeded by his son Ramses II., who died at a great age after a reign of sixty-seven years (B.C. 1348-1281), and whose mummy, like that of his father, is now in the Cairo Museum.  He set himself to restore the Asiatic empire of Thothmes.  But the Hittites barred his way.  They had established themselves at Kadesh on the Orontes, and a long war of twenty-one years ended at last in a treaty of peace in which the two combatants agreed to respect from henceforth the existing boundaries of Egypt and Kadesh.  Egypt was left with Palestine on both sides of the Jordan, a possession, however, which it lost soon after Ramses’ death.  The treaty was cemented by the marriage of the Hittite princess with the Pharaoh.

Ramses II. was the great builder of Egypt.  Go where we will, we find the remains of the temples he erected or restored, of the cities he founded, and of the statues he set up.  His architectural conceptions were colossal; the temple of Abu-Simbel, hewn out of a mountain, and the shattered image of himself at Thebes, are a proof of this.  But he attempted too much for the compass of a single reign, however long.  Much of his work is pretentious but poor, and indicative of the feverish haste with which it was executed.

Among the cities he built in the Delta were Ramses and Pithom.  Pithom, or Pa-Tum, is now marked by the mounds of Tel el-Maskhuta, on the line of railway between Ismailia and Zagazig; it lay at the eastern extremity of Qoshem or Goshen, in the district of Succoth.  Like Ramses, it had been built by Israelitish labour, for the free-born Israelites of Goshen had been turned into royal serfs.  None had suffered more from the revolution which overthrew the Asiatised court of the Eighteenth dynasty and brought in a “new king which knew not Joseph.”