[Illustration:  238.jpg THE RAMESSEUM]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Beato; the great
     blocks in the foreground are the fragments of the colossal
     statue of Ramses II.

His hands are freed from the bandages and are crossed on the breast, and hold respectively the flail and crook; the smiling face is surmounted by an enormous head-dress.  The sanctuary with the buildings attached to it has perished, but enormous brick structures extend round the ruins, forming an enclosure of storehouses.  Here the priests of the “double” were accustomed to dwell with their wives and slaves, and here they stored up the products of their domains—­meat, vegetables, corn, fowls dried or preserved in fat, and wines procured from all the vineyards of Egypt.

These were merely the principal monuments put up by Ramses II. at Thebes during the sixty-seven years of his rule.  There would be no end to the enumeration of his works if we were to mention all the other edifices which he constructed in the necropolis or among the dwellings of the living, all those which he restored, or those which he merely repaired or inscribed with his cartouches.  These are often cut over the name of the original founder, and his usurpations of monuments are so numerous that he might be justly accused of having striven to blot out the memory of his predecessors, and of claiming for himself the entire work of the whole line of Pharaohs.  It would seem as if, in his opinion, the glory of Egypt began with him, or at least with his father, and that no victorious campaigns had been ever heard of before those which he conducted against the Libyans and the Hittites.

The battle of Qodshu, with its attendant episodes—­the flogging of the spies, the assault upon the camp, the charge of the chariots, the flight of the Syrians—­is the favourite subject of his inscriptions; and the poem of Pentauirit adds to the bas-reliefs a description worthy of the acts represented.  This epic reappears everywhere, in Nubia and in the Said, at Abu Simbel, at Beit-Wally, at Derr, at Luxor, at Karnak, and on the Eamesseum, and the same battle-scenes, with the same accompanying texts, reappear in the Memnonium, whose half-ruined walls still crown the necropolis of Abydos.

[Illustration:  240.jpg THE RUINS OF THE MEMNONIUM OF RAMSES II.  AT ABYDOS]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

He had decided upon the erection of this latter monument at the very beginning of his reign, and the artisans who had worked at the similar structure of Seti I. were employed to cover its walls with admirable bas-reliefs.  Ramses also laid claim to have his own resting-place at “the Cleft;” in this privilege he associated all the Pharaohs, from whom he imagined himself to be descended, and the same list of their names, which we find engraved in the chapel of his father, appears on his building also.  Some ruins, lying beyond