[Illustration:  246.jpg STATUE OF KHAMOISIT]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a statue in the British Museum.

He returned to Egypt after an absence of nine years, and after having set up on his homeward journey statues and stelae everywhere in commemoration of his victories.  Herodotus asserts that he himself had seen several of these monuments in his travels in Syria and Ionia.  Some of these are of genuine Egyptian manufacture, and are to be attributed to our Ramses; they are to be found near Tyre, and on the banks of the Nahr el-Kelb, where they mark the frontier to which his empire extended in this direction.  Others have but little resemblance to Egyptian monuments, and were really the work of the Asiatic peoples among whom they were found.  The two figures referred to long ago by Herodotus, which have been discovered near Ninfi between Sardis and Smyrna, are instances of the latter.

[Illustration:  247.jpg STELE OF THE NAHR EL-KELB]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

The shoes of the figures are turned up at the toe, and the head-dress has more resemblance to the high hats of the people of Asia Minor than to the double crown of Egypt, while the lower garment is striped horizontally in place of vertically.  The inscription, moreover, is in an Asiatic form of writing, and has nothing Egyptian about it.  Ramses II. in his youth was the handsomest man of his time.  He was tall and straight; his figure was well moulded—­the shoulders broad, the arms full and vigorous, the legs muscular; the face was oval, with a firm and smiling mouth, a thin aquiline nose, and large open eyes.

[Illustration:  248.jpg THE BAS-BELIEF OF NINFI]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

[Illustration:  249.jpg THE COFFIN AND MUMMY OF RAMSES II]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph taken from the mummy
     itself, by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

There may be seen below the cartouche the lines of the official report of inspection written during the XXIst dynasty.  Old age and death did not succeed in marring the face sufficiently to disfigure it.  The coffin containing his body is not the same as that in which his children placed him on the day of his obsequies; it is another substituted for it by one of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance to the face of the victorious Pharaoh.  The mummy is thin, much shrunken, and light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the figure is still tall and of perfect proportions.*

* Even after the coalescence of the vertebrae and the shrinkage produced by mummification, the body of Ramses II. still measures over 5 feet 8 inches.