gods. At length a general named Harmahib, who had served under Akhenaton, came to the throne as a whole-hearted supporter of the old religion; soon Aton and his royal following suffered the fate that they had imposed upon Ammon; their monuments were destroyed and their names and figures erased, while those of Ammon were restored. From the time of Rameses II. onwards the years of the reigns of the heretics were counted to Harmahib, and Akhenaton was described as “that criminal of Akhetaton.” Harmahib had to bring order as a practical man into the long-neglected administration of the country and to suppress the extortions of the official classes by severe measures. His laws to this end were engraved on a great stela in the temple of Karnak, of which sufficient remains to bear witness to his high aims, while the prosperity of the succeeding reigns shows how well he realized the necessities of the state. He probably began also to re-establish the prestige of Egypt by military expeditions in the surrounding countries.
Harmahib appears to have legitimated his rule by marriage to a royal princess, but it is probable that Rameses I., who succeeded as founder of the XIXth Dynasty, was not closely related to him. Rameses in his brief reign of XIXth Dynasty. two years planned and began the great colonnaded hall of Karnak, proving that he was a man of great ideas, though probably too old to carry them out; this task he left to his son Seti I., who reigned one year with his father and on the latter’s death was ready at once to subdue the Bedouin Shasu, who had invaded Palestine and withheld all tribute. This task was quickly accomplished and Seti pushed onward to the Lebanon. Here cedars were felled for him by the Syrian princes, and the Phoenicians paid homage before he returned home in triumph. The Libyans had also to be dealt with, and afterwards Seti advanced again through Palestine, ravaged the land of the Amorites and came into conflict with the Hittites. The latter, however, were now firmly established in the Orontes valley, and a treaty with Mutallu, the king of Kheta, reigning far away in Cappadocia, probably ended the wars of Seti. In his ninth year he turned his attention to the gold mines in the eastern desert of Nubia and improved the road thither. Meanwhile the great work at Karnak projected by his father was going forward, and throughout Egypt the injuries done to the monuments by Akhenaton were thoroughly repaired; the erased inscriptions and figures were restored, not without many blunders. Seti’s temple at Abydos and his galleried tomb in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings stand out as the most splendid examples of their kind in design and in Rameses II. decoration. Rameses II. succeeded at an early age and reigned sixty-seven years, during which he finished much that was begun by Seti and filled all Egypt and Nubia with his own monuments, some of them beautiful, but most, necessarily entrusted to inferior workmen, of coarse execution. The excavation of the rock temple of Abu Simbel and the completion of the great hall of Karnak were his greatest achievements in architecture. His wars began in his second year, their field comprising the Nubians, the Libyans, the Syrians and the Hittites. In his fifth year, near Kadesh on the Orontes, his army was caught unprepared and divided by a strong force of chariots of the Hittites and their allies, and Rameses himself was placed in the most imminent danger; but through his personal courage the enemy was kept at bay till reinforcements came up and turned the disaster into a victory. The incidents of this episode were a favourite subject in the sculptures of his temples, where their representation was accompanied by a poetical version of the affair and other explanatory inscriptions. Kadesh, however, was not captured, and after further contests, in his twenty-first year Rameses and the Hittite king Khattusil (Kheta-sar) made peace, with a defensive alliance against foreign aggression and internal revolt (see Hittites). Thanks to Winckler’s discoveries, the cuneiform text of this treaty from Boghaz Keui can now be compared with the hieroglyphic text at Karnak. In the thirty-fourth year, c. 1250 B.C., Khattusil with his friend or subject the king of Kode came from his distant capital to see the wonders of Egypt in person, bringing one of his daughters to be wife of the splendid Pharaoh. Rameses II. paid much attention to the Delta, which had been neglected until the days of Seti I., and resided there constantly; the temple of Tanis must have been greatly enlarged and adorned by him; a colossus of the king placed here was over 90 ft. in height, exceeding in scale even the greatest of the Theban colossi which he had erected in his mortuary temple of the Ramesseum. Towards the end of the long reign the vigilance and energy of the old king diminished. The military spirit awakened in the struggle with the Hyksos had again departed from the Egyptian nation; mercenaries from the Sudan, from Libya and from the northern nations supplied the armies, while foreigners settled in the rich lands of the Delta and harried the coasts. It was a time too when the movements of the nations that so frequently occurred in the ancient world were about to be particularly active. Mineptah, c. 1225 B.C., succeeding his father Rameses II., had to fight many battles for the preservation of his kingdom and empire. Apparently most of the fighting was finished by the fifth year of his reign; in his mortuary temple at Thebes he set up a stela of that date recording a great victory over the Libyan immigrants and invaders, which rendered the much harried land of Egypt safe. The last lines picture this condition with the crushing of the surrounding tribes. Libya was wasted, the Hittites pacified, Canaan, Ashkelon (Ascalon), Gezer, Yenoam sacked and plundered: “Israel is desolated, his seed is not, Khor (Palestine) has become a widow (without protector) for Egypt.” The Libyans are accompanied by allies whose names, Sherden, Shekelesh, Ekwesh, Lukku, Teresh, suggest identifications with Sardinians, Sicels, Achaeans, Lycians and Tyrseni or Etruscans. The Sherden had been in the armies of Rameses II., and are distinguished by their remarkable helmets and apparently body armour of metal. The Lukku are certainly the same as the Lycians. Probably they were all sea-rovers from the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, who were willing to leave their ships and join the Libyans in raids on the rich lands of Egypt. Mineptah was one of the most unconscionable usurpers of the monuments of his predecessors, including those of his own father, who, it must be admitted, had set him the example. The coarse cutting of his cartouches contrasts with the splendid finish of the Middle Kingdom work which they disfigure. It may be questioned whether it was due to a wave of enthusiasm amongst the priests and people, leading them to rededicate the monuments in the name of their deliverer, or a somewhat insane desire of the king to perpetuate his own memory in a singularly unfortunate manner. Mineptah, the thirteenth son in the huge family of Rameses, must have been old when he ascended the throne; after his first years of reign his energies gave way, and he was followed by a quick succession of inglorious rulers, Seti II., the queen Tuosri, Amenmesse, Siptah; the names of the last two were erased from their monuments.
A great papyrus written after the death of Rameses III. and recording his gifts to the temples briefly reviews the conditions of these troublous times. “The land of Egypt was in the hands of chiefs and rulers of towns, great and XXth Dynasty. small slaying each other; afterwards a certain Syrian made himself chief; he made the whole land tributary before him; he united his companions and plundered their property (i.e. of the other chiefs). They made the gods like men, and no offerings were presented in the temples. But when the gods inclined themselves to peace ... they established their son Setenkhot (Setnekht) to be ruler of every land.” Of the Syrian occupation we know nothing further. Setenkhot, c. 1200 B.C., had a very short reign and was not counted as legitimate, but he established a lasting dynasty (probably by conciliating the priesthood). He was father of Rameses III., who revived the glories of the empire. The dangers that menaced Egypt now were similar to those which Mineptah had to meet at his accession. Again the Libyans and the “peoples of the sea” were acting in concert. The latter now comprised Peleset (the Cretans, ancestors of the Philistines), Thekel, Shekelesh, Denyen (Danaoi?) and Weshesh; they had invaded Syria from Asia Minor, reaching the Euphrates, destroying the Hittite cities and progressing southwards, while their ships gathered plunder
