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Ramses II, the most famous pharaoh of them all. Warrior king, master communicator, and builder of immense monuments. He also had a lesser known side. That of a patriarch at the head of an extraordinary family that could rival today's best-selling dynasty series. This one king had more sons and daughters than a dozen pharaohs before him. Given the infant mortality rates in ancient Egypt, Ramses II must have made between 300 and 400 of them. But for some of them, they became something else. They became wives of their father. Married to more than 12 royal wives, including five of his own daughters, he gifted the mother of his first son with one of the finest monuments a queen could ever hope for. The temple and tomb
of Nefertari fascinates visitors and provides an intimate portrait of the great ancient ruler. She is described as the one for whom the sun itself does shine. He's married literally to his ex-goddess. Trained from an early age to assume the highest offices, he devoted his life to training his heirs. But his first 12 sons died before he did. He was fated to see many, not just of his wives, but also many of his children and probably even grandchildren die before him.
A natural colossus, a paragon of longevity and immortality who used the kingdom of Egypt as his family scrapbook. He appeared to be fond of his wives and children, but he must have been a bit of a pain to live with. Can you imagine being a child of a god? I have no idea. Prepare yourselves to discover another side of Ramses II, the man behind the myth, the son, husband, and father of an exceptional dynasty that left a lasting mark on history. Abu Simbel, a thousand-year-old monument preserved from the ravages of time. An extraordinary temple like no other, a testament to the reign of history's most famous pharaoh, Ramses II.
Ramses' name is emblematic of ancient Egypt. Of all the hundreds of pharaohs who ruled the country, he is the one perhaps more than anybody else who embodies the idea of a great, powerful ruler, a military man, a great builder. Ramses II was one of Egypt's most famous pharaohs even in ancient times because he was a great egoist and he made sure everyone knew about him. I think he was a boring egotistical man whom I would have smacked if I'd met him. But perhaps that does not go into a documentary.
Built in 1260 BCE to celebrate his victory of the Battle of Kadesh, this temple is also a shrine where Ramses appears as a god among the deities of the Egyptian pantheon. Although today the facade has lost some of its former splendor, Egyptologists have succeeded in faithfully reconstructing its original appearance. Today, when you see Abu Simbel, it looks golden, like the mountain behind it, like the sand in front of it. But, in ancient times, it would have been in Technicolor. It would have sparkled in the sun. It would have caught the eye and this magnificent ways. You would go down along the curve of a river and suddenly, boom, you would see the images of the living God, colossal, monumental, and painted.
On the facade of the huge temple are four large statues of a seated Ramses II. The impressive statues stand 20 m high, the same height as a six-story building. The mythical pharaoh placed his titanic gradual sculptures at the entrance to the Abu Simbel Temple to send a strong message to travelers and locals alike. It's Nubia, which was conquered by the Egyptians. When you are coming from the south, this is the most visible sign. Now, you are entering the realm of pharaoh.
Now, you are entering Egypt. This is the big man here and no one else. Though the impact of the great pharaoh's message is still felt some 33 centuries after his reign, a part of it has been long forgotten. It wasn't until 31 centuries later, when Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs, that it was revealed, a powerful message that places him firmly at the pinnacle of the most astonishing monarchs in the history of civilization. Once they were able to enter the temple, they see huge images of the king. All along the legs, you can see a whole host of statues surrounding his majesty. And unlike his predecessors, who usually just had a queen standing next to them, Ramses II
chose to showcase his family in order to emphasize the importance of his descendants. We see uh Nefertari, the king's most favored wife. We see the queen mother, the widow of Seti the first, Tuya. And we also see two of Ramses' sons and uh a few of his daughters. In all, Ramses II was accompanied by eight children. But the archaeologists still had work to do. As they gradually learned more about the heritage of the ancient Egyptians and the legacy of Ramses II, they made an astonishing A discovery that would contribute to the myth of the legendary pharaoh. Ramses II had all his children depicted on the walls of his temples. As we explore other temples, we're in fact going to see that it wasn't just eight. There were actually dozens of
other children. We don't have that for any other pharaoh. Ramses II is one king had more sons and daughters than a dozen pharaohs before him. The walls of Ramses II's family monuments list a staggering 101 children, 48 sons and 53 daughters. But according to some Egyptologists, he may have had more. Given the infant mortality rate in ancient Egypt, Ramses II must have made between 300 and 400 of them. Of course, this seems very unlikely or impossible with just one wife. So, we need to have a look at his family, a closer look. How many wives
did he actually have to produce so many sons and daughters? Why would Ramses have so many children and why would he advertise them? To understand this, we need to go back to 1303 BCE, when the future Ramses II was born. A time when nothing predestined this son of a high-ranking Egyptian army family to one day become pharaoh. At a certain point early on in his childhood, his grandfather became pharaoh. And that's a massively significant moment, not just for his grandfather, Ramses but it's a massive moment for the whole family as well. This is now the royal family of Egypt. When his grandfather died in 1294 BCE, the future Ramses II was just 10 years old. When his father, Seti became pharaoh,
their dynasty had been in existence for less than 2 years and the reign of Ramses had already begun. It succeeded the famous 18th dynasty, that of Hatshepsut, Amenhotep, Tutankhamun, and Nefertiti, which ended in chaos following the political and religious upheavals of Akhenaten, known to some as the heretic pharaoh. But the brand new 19th dynasty was in danger. There were many rivals and their rapid rise to prominence provoked all kinds of envy. To bolster his fragile position, Seti the first placed all his hopes in his son, grooming him to become the future pharaoh. He was starting to be educated in terms of religion and politics and war. Uh he was being trained as a soldier. He was being trained in the arts of uh diplomacy.
We know Ramses had at least one sister, but she never could have become a pharaoh. From that perspective, however, uh the future of the new 19th dynasty uh hung by a genetic thread. Although there were three previous cases of pharaoh queens, it was not the norm in ancient Egypt. Therefore, Ramses was the last male heir in the family and the next king. A huge responsibility both in life and in death, where he had to ensure the stability and longevity of his kingdom. If he and his father were to die without a direct descendant, that would be the end of the 19th dynasty. In order to make sure that his dynasty
survived, he had to make sure that his son had a son before Ramses even becomes king himself. When the future Ramses the second reached puberty, his father Seti the first was looking for the right woman to bear his son and ensure the future of their dynasty. But Seti wasn't just looking for a wife. A woman could have been infertile, so it was important to have as many wives as possible at an early stage to have the chance to get as many children as possible. We don't know exactly how many wives Seti chose for Ramses. The work of Egyptologists has made it possible to find the names of at least two women chosen by Seti the first for his son.
Both women had similar origins, but very different fates. One of them is Nefertari. The other one is Isis-Nofret. They would both go on to occupy the role of principal wife. Their origins are shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. They do not seem to have had any royal blood, but um they must have had some kind of high status, good family, and also were probably good political alliances. I suspect there was something of the baby race as each of his new wives uh vied to become the first to deliver a healthy baby boy who would then become the future Pharaoh's future heir.
Isis-Nofret seems to have been the first to become pregnant by the future Ramses the second, then aged 15. News that must have been celebrated by both father and son. But unfortunately for her, the baby was a girl. Who knows what would have become of Isis-Nofret had she given birth to a son? In any case, she was there to witness Nefertari's triumph. Nefertari gave him his first son, Amun-her-khepeshef, with a moon on his left arm and a moon on his left leg. So, this was the future, so to speak, of the monarchy's bloodline. de la monarchie He's now the crown prince. He is the dauphin. He is the one who will be taking over.
Seti the first and the young Ramses could rest easy. Their new dynasty was assured. But, they knew they needed to prepare this child to rule. Of course, there's no great certainty around when the king is going to die. Preparations, therefore, would have begun quite early. And the young crown prince, the heir to the throne, would have been trained in all the most important aspects of the role of the king. It would be statecraft. It would be military. It would be also being before the public in a very present way. So, he was a king or a princeling who was very conscious of his destiny.
We can imagine that Ramses was especially attentive to ensuring that his future heir would be fully capable of wielding power. This is demonstrated by an extraordinary image in the Abydos Temple. Located 150 km north of Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes, the Temple of Abydos is the funerary temple of Seti the first. Considered one of the best-preserved monuments in ancient Egypt, its thousand-year-old walls have preserved traces of Ramses II educating his son, Amun-her-khepeshef. There's a depiction of Ramses standing with his legs spread as if he's running.
Holding a large lasso in his hand with a wild bull running in front of him. And just in front of Ramses is Amun-her-khepeshef grasping the bull's tail. He, too is about to overpower it. We can imagine a father teaching his son to hunt. But the image of the bull is in fact the image of royalty. So, this scene should also be understood in a more symbolic sense. Ramses is giving his son the chance to seize power himself. On another wall of the Abydos temple, Amun-her-khepeshef is depicted as the worthy heir to Ramses II and Seti I, the first.
A future king with a glorious destiny, nurtured by his father, a prince, and his grandfather, a pharaoh. But sadly, Ramses could hardly have known that his son would never reign. Even if there was a son who was the designated heir and successor, the one that everybody expects to become the pharaoh, it doesn't mean that in the event that actually happens. And there needs to be kind of backup options. This is probably why Ramses II had more children with his two wives. Nefertari gave him at least five sons and four daughters, compared with three sons and three daughters from Isetnofret.
15 children who grew up in the best of circumstances until tragedy struck the young father's family. To everyone's amazement, his father Seti died after reigning for just 12 years. When we look at this very well-preserved mummy, it's almost as if Seti were just fallen asleep. This must have come as a great shock to Ramses when suddenly his whole world changed and he found himself alone on the throne. The young Ramses was then aged between 20 and 25. He became Ramses II. His father had prepared him well, trained him in all the duties of kingship. And in fact, he may have been one of the best trained and well-prepared future pharaohs that ever came to the
throne of Egypt. He didn't know it yet, but his destiny was going to be as glorious as it was tragic. Despite becoming pharaoh, Ramses never neglected the fact that he was also a father. After 5 years of ruling, he traveled to Kadesh in modern-day Syria to reclaim an ancient fortress from the Hittites, forerunners of the Turks. There, he did something astounding. Thanks to Kadesh, we know that part of the royal family is here. We see them pictured with him in the Battle of Kadesh and various other places. So, these boys were loyal to their father, and it really was a family concern. It wasn't just the princes who were fit to fight.
You can sense that there were wives, ladies-in-waiting, people we can hardly imagine on a battlefield. We have to understand that this wasn't just a battle or a military campaign. These military expeditions were also a kind of court ceremony. When not at war, the royal family lived in Thebes and in the brand-new capital of Per-Ramesses in the Nile Delta, which Ramses II commissioned during his reign. While he lived in his royal palace, his family did not. His wives and children lived in an institution that Egyptologists call a harem.
It's important to go beyond the clichéd image of an Eastern harem with half-dressed young women waiting on their gentleman. This was a family house, really. So, this is where the female family members, the children, all lived and where the king carried out his domestic life often. And so, this is more the comfort zone. But, the harem was more than just that. It was also an independent economic structure. There were several types of production, including fabrics. And we know that in Ramses' time, fabric orders were processed through this harem. In fact, they produced a grade or a
quality of linen that was known as royal linen. And so, as a result, royal linen, the linen produced by this royal industrial environment, ends up becoming some of the most sought-after, uh not only in Egypt, but also abroad. A special place where Nefertari, Isetnofret, and their children were forced to live side by side. But, they weren't alone. Despite these two women both achieving the supreme rank of royal wife when Ramses II ascended the throne of Egypt, the pharaoh had other companions and other children. So, we have a series of the vast majority of Ramses' children
who are almost nothing but names to us, and their mothers are complete ciphers to us. We can only know that they must have existed because certainly Nefertari and Isetnofret didn't give birth to 50 children each. All these women were probably not friends. And even though for the time of Ramses II, we don't really know about such problems, but it was most likely also a place of conflict. Of mothers who wanted to bring their children in the best position to advance their children probably to become the next king of Egypt. But Ramses II was a wise man. While his dozens of children could be considered an Achilles heel, he turned them into a strength.
Instead of being threatened by his sons, he uses them as part of his bureaucracy, his military, his control over the country. He really ruled by using his family. There was one person he used more than any other. One person without whom he couldn't be a pharaoh worthy of the name. His great royal wife and the mother of his crown prince, Nefertari. She is described as the one for whom the sun itself does shine. And so was this a love match? There is this narrative that since she gave him his firstborn child, that therefore they sort of fell deeply in love and that there was this
connection between them and that led to her being elevated. Whether this is all true, we don't really know. We don't have the love letters of Ramses to Nefertari or vice versa. What we do know is that she was no ordinary royal wife. Egyptologists have found letters written by Nefertari that prove she had a special role within Ramses the second's royal administration. She even appears to have played a role in the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and the Hittites in year 21 of her husband's reign. We have a letter that Queen Nefertari wrote to the Hittite Queen, a greeting letter where she uh greets her royal counterpart. And so here we see the queen playing a
kind of diplomatic role. By comparison with other kings and their great royal wives, it seems that Nefertari enjoys an unusual prominence. This is probably most strikingly shown by the fact that at Abu Simbel, there's not just one temple, but there are two. This is the second temple. Located just a few dozen meters from the less imposing but equally colossal temple of Ramses the second, it was built in honor of Nefertari, wife of the legendary pharaoh and mother of his crown prince, but above all, to honor Nefertari, the goddess.
She's not just his earthly wife, but she's the king's divine wife. So it's a tremendous statement of not just Ramses' power and his own divinity, but it's a great statement as well that the king's great royal wife is also a god alongside him. If the king was the living embodiment of the god Horus, this very masculine god, then the queen was the incarnation of the goddess Hathor, the god of beauty and love and sexual reproduction. She is a nurturer of children and a good mother. She's all about love and passion and excitement. One of her other titles is the lady of drunkenness.
Hathor is one of the most popular goddesses of ancient Egypt. She was revered by the royal family and the Egyptian people alike. Once a year, she was honored during the festival of drunkenness. The entire objective of the festival of drunkenness is to achieve such a state of joy both through interaction with your fellow human and also by drinking to excess and having fun and having as much joy as possible that you will have a vision of the goddess. He's married literally to a sex goddess. To a sex what?
I mean literally, that's who Hathor is. She's a sex goddess. That's her job. Though the choice of portraying his royal consort as a sex goddess may offend certain sensibilities today, it was perfectly normal in the minds of the ancient Egyptians. During the time of Ramses II, relationships towards the human body were very different from what they are today. We today have erased sexuality from our religion, from our way of life. We see it as something dirty, as something embarrassing. The Egyptians, they were not embarrassed by the function of the body. In fact, quite the opposite. They celebrated it.
The ancient Egyptians were perfectly normal and would have had sex not just because they wanted to have children, but because it they enjoyed it. On the contrary, if Ramses II associated his wife with the goddess of sex, he was doing her a great honor. His wife was represented as a creative and nurturing goddess who would help pharaonic civilization to endure. At least, that's the image we like to project onto their relationship. Not to be too cynical, um I doubted that he hated her, but on the other hand, uh this is a lot of um uh PR. What the real relationship between Ramses and Nefertari was, uh we will never know, but certainly the official version is that they were madly in love.
What we know for sure is that no pharaoh before him had built such a temple to celebrate his wife. Whether proof of love or simply a propaganda tool, this was not the only notable construction Ramses the Great commission for Nefertari. Not all sources agree on the date, but most Egyptologists fix it around 1255 BCE. Nefertari, the great royal wife of pharaoh Ramses II and the mother of his crown prince, passed away. She probably died around the age of 50, and yet she was a particularly important figure for Ramses as his first major queen. She was the one who accompanied him during the very first part of his reign.
Given what we know about the way she is shown, he must have been quite saddened and even devastated at her death. If this vision of Nefertari has made it to the day, it's thanks not only to the bas-reliefs in her temple at Abu Simbel, but also to one of the best preserved wonders of the pharaonic civilization. Located in the Valley of the Queens near Luxor, Nefertari's tomb is a poignant testament to the wife of Ramses II. It was sealed up so well that it never got flooded by the various different rainfalls, and it was never disturbed. The decoration is beautifully preserved.
It's by far one of the most stunning tombs in all of Egypt. This is probably the most fantastic, beautiful, and well-preserved tomb of a female member of the royal family. It's an absolutely remarkable treasure. To set foot in it is almost like getting slapped in the face. It's just so perfect. Every detail, every hieroglyph is a masterpiece in itself. A unique sanctuary, the tomb's thousand-year-old paintings contain a secret message about the wife of Ramses II. They reveal not only an extraordinary portrait of Nefertari, but also precious clues to the personality of the famous pharaoh.
Ramses is not represented anywhere in Nefertari's tomb. He is never named. He is never pictured. It's just about the queen, and this is something that is also totally unusual. How could this king of communication, who placed his cartouche and his face on all the monuments of ancient Egypt, leave his wife's tomb untouched by his presence? Was this a sign of love on the part of Ramses II, or could Nefertari have chosen the decoration of her eternal home while she was still alive. If we imagine the king setting aside his ego and letting his wife be alone as the
most important subject of the tomb, it's a mark of esteem and respect that should be emphasized. It's impossible, I think, to overstate how rich and overwhelming the decoration is. The substance of it um it is Nefertari's journey to the next life, journey to the afterlife. A paradise that every king must reach after a long journey fraught with obstacles, battling many enemies including the terrible and evil serpent Apep. It's also a sacred land that ancient Egyptians, including their queens, strive for after death. And as such, Nefertari was accorded a magnificent postmortem journey.
Her tomb is much more than a burial place. It's a vessel destined to transport her to her destiny. She's experiencing a journey in the afterlife with just about every god. One of the many different deities that she will come face-to-face with is the god Khepri. Khepri is uh the god who is sort of the child sun. This beetle-headed god represents daybreak and rebirth. The god Khepri is based on the dung beetle. Dung beetles collect dung and form it into a perfect ball. And they lay their eggs within this ball. and so they push the ball around with them, and then the young are born out of this ball.
The Egyptians saw this process. This becomes this wonderful symbol of resurrection for them. In the same way, the god Khepri gave Nefertari access to the afterlife. This is how Ramses II's queen was welcomed back to her family for life that the ancient Egyptians imagined would last forever. She makes this journey by herself and hopefully was reunited with Ramses in the afterlife. But Ramses was not about to join Nefertari in the afterlife.
Little did he know he would live another 40 years before finally passing on. He found himself in a predicament. For a pharaoh is not complete without a royal wife. There's a pressing need for Ramses II to have a new great royal wife to fulfill that role. The obvious candidate for that is Isetnofret. Sources differ. But it is possible that Isetnofret outlived Nefertari and became the only great royal wife at his side when the latter died. And I think she was always very unassuming. Isetnofret was never in first place. She was really crushed by Nefertari.
She must have kind of replaced Nefertari, but still she didn't get a temple like Abu Simbel. So, maybe her status was somewhat different, and we are missing something. We are missing her tomb. Although she remained in the shadows of history and lost the battle for the baby to Nefertari, a sudden event propelled her into the spotlight. In 1259 BCE, the pharaoh's eldest son, Amenherkhepshef, the crown prince on whom his father and grandfather had pinned all their hopes for the future of their dynasty and Egypt, died, throwing the royal family further into disarray. Amenherkhepshef died shortly after Ramesses celebrated his 21st year as pharaoh. He would have been in his early to mid-40s when Amenherkhepshef died.
Unfortunately, we have no record of what happened when Amenherkhepshef died, although we imagine that for Ramesses, it must have been absolutely terrible, like any loss of a child. But Ramesses II couldn't afford to let it get him down. He knew that the future of his dynasty hung by a thread. He named his second son, Ramesses Jr., as heir to the throne. Long in his older brother's shadow, it was he who was to succeed his father as pharaoh. Sources are rather vague about the circumstances and date of her death. But without a royal wife at his side, Ramesses II had to find a replacement. In year 34, there is something that is being kind of described as a wonder.
This beauty was a young Hittite princess, the daughter of his long-time rival. 15 years after the Battle of Kadesh, faced with the rise of new empires in the region, the Egyptian and Hittite kingdoms decided to join forces in peace. When the Hittite princess reaches the border of the Egyptian empire, the Egyptian text mentions a wonder. Days of winter become summer. A poetic vision that represented the importance of the arrival of this foreign princess. Her father offered her to the great Ramesses II as a new wife to cement the alliance.
The Hittite princess is arriving in Pi-Ramesses in the palace of Ramesses II together with a huge Hittite delegation and an incredible dowry. And we don't know her Hittite name, but we know her Egyptian name. She was baptized Maathorneferure. She saw the beauty of Horus, the beauty of Ra. And she was going to have a little girl with Ramesses. The union and the birth of a child were the best guarantees of certain peace between the two kingdoms. Although Ramesses II was often associated with the label of warrior, he should also be seen as a peacemaker. And in this respect, diplomatic
marriages played a key role. Letters exchanged between the pharaoh and the mother of his new royal bride, the Hittite queen, revealed that this was not the only foreigner he was going to marry. Within those letters, there are suggestions to indicate that he probably married at the very least a Babylonian princess and maybe one from Assyria and from some other foreign kingdom in Syria. And so, it sort of ensured peace for everyone in this area, which would be beneficial in the long run. You could have your trade, you could do all kinds of things without having to bash each other's heads in.
You think Pharaoh would marry off his many daughters in return to further strengthen his alliances. But Egyptians didn't do things like everyone else. The Egyptians believed they were better than everyone else. And so, as a result, they would never sully themselves by marrying a barbarian. Almost certainly, even though Ramses had at least 53 daughters to spare, not one of them would have been sent anywhere abroad. You kept the royal blood in Egypt. And so, you couldn't really do dynastic marriages with foreign princes
by giving them your daughters. This practice could offend his new allies, but Ramses II knew how to silence the critics. He sent them huge quantities of gold because he had other plans for his daughters. Princesses are also priestesses. They played essential roles in many different religious aspects of Egypt. And these daughters were most likely for a long time living in the harem. But for some of them, they became something else. Of the 53 daughters mentioned in his monuments, seven were the offspring of his unions with Nefertari and Isisnofret. Five of them in turn became their father's royal wives, bringing his list of official wives to a total of 12.
So, in fact, has been written about the notion of a father marrying his daughters. Marrying your own daughter and having intercourse with your own daughter would be something totally forbidden in most modern cultures. But in ancient Egypt actually, this might have been much more accepted and no one would have seen a real problem. Why did the great Ramses II marry five of his daughters? What kind of relationship did he have with them? The big question is whether these marriages were consummated or not. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for or against the proposition that Ramses produced children by them. We shouldn't be
thinking in terms of some kind of sexual appetite or anything else. What we're looking at is an essential political need that he had to fulfill. There is no evidence to suggest that Ramses II was involved in incestuous practices with his daughters. What is certain, however, is that by naming his daughters as royal wives, he further strengthened his dynasty. He was sending out a strong signal, that of a powerful Egypt with a strong and well-supported pharaoh. It might have also been a way to strengthen Ramses II's rule. By marrying his own daughters, he knew that also this kind of office, that the court, that
everything remained in the family's hands. And to make this known, he deified his five daughters and placed them at his side in front of the facade of his temple at Abu Simbel, erecting statues of them in the four corners of the kingdom, and building lavish tombs for them in the Valley of the Queens alongside those of Nefertari. Far from being something that was a burden on them, I think that this was probably the best thing that ever happened to them, especially for Bintanath. Bintanath is omnipresent. She is often found in front of all her sisters in the list of princesses in several places at the Ramesseum at Ramses II's funerary temple or at Abydos in the first courtyards in front of Seti I's temple.
Isisnefret's first daughter is the most represented daughter-wife of Ramses II. When she married her father, she surely had no idea that she would later marry another pharaoh. But as Ramses grew old, surrounded by his daughter-wives, goddesses, children, and grandchildren, a new tragedy shook his long life. In 1224 BCE, the 80-year-old pharaoh saw his second crown prince, Ramses Jr., die of old age. Ramses, of course, didn't predict how old he would become, how long a life he would live. One of the bitter consequences of Ramses living to extreme old age is that he was fated to see many, not just of his wives, but also many of his children and
probably even grandchildren die before him. This is how Ramses II lived his last years. The life of a living god whose exceptional longevity forced him to suffer the martyrdom of illness, but also to experience the painful emotions that came with seeing those closest to him die. To honor the memory of his sons and ensure their peaceful journey to the afterlife, he built a tomb like no other in the Valley of the Kings. With a surface area of 1,260 square meters, the equivalent of three soccer pitches, it is the largest in the Theban Necropolis. It is like an underground car park, except it's for human beings. We really unfortunately don't have the names of all of the children of Ramses who are buried there, but there are fragments.
There are traces of decoration that prove that none other than Amenherkhepeshef and Ramses Jr. were buried there. The tomb has been badly damaged by flooding and looting. New excavations are underway and could well be at the heart of new revelations about the famous pharaoh in the months or years to come. At the moment, we've cleared about 130 rooms, but we're not done yet. The corridors are still being worked on. So, there are probably still other princes waiting to be discovered. The fact that he is willing to kind of exert this amount of effort on behalf of children who are not yet dead, but may still need him, it's a very
interesting statement of who Ramses was potentially as a father. An even more moving testimony of a father to his sons, the architecture and positioning of the tomb it seems to have been designed to serve a very specific purpose. Clearly, there's a kind of communication between the tomb of Ramses II and the tombs of his children. And it's pretty much sort of diagonally across from his own tomb. So, as they were together in life, they could be together in death. Well, it's difficult to determine how many wives and daughters he buried during his lifetime, we do know that he lost 12 of his sons before he died in 1213 BCE. After reigning for 66 years and reaching the incredible age of 90,
the greatest of all pharaohs was no more. But he was able to fulfill the main mission entrusted to him by his father. With dozens of sons, he could trust that one of them would succeed him and ensure the future of the 19th dynasty. If we think of Nefertari as having won the baby race, is it not for it won the marathon to see which son would outlast Ramses and become the next pharaoh? He's being followed by his 13th son, Merenptah, someone who probably never thought of becoming king. At over 60, Merenptah knew that his time on the throne would be short. While he probably managed his father's affairs during the last years of his reign, he found himself suddenly alone with an impossible mission.
He's following a pharaoh who for the entire population of Egypt is the only king they've ever known. A king whose achievements are the perception would have been greater than any pharaoh before him. How on earth is he going to succeed? Nonetheless, Merenptah, Ramses II's successor, managed to leave an enduring legacy in the space of just 10 years. A staggering feat. His name is now celebrated among historians not just of Egypt but of the ancient world more generally because he left behind the stealer which includes the word Israel.
It is fascinating because it's one of the very first historic records that we have of the existence of Israel at this time. And incredible as it may seem Merneptah took one of his father's queen daughters as his royal wife. Isetnofret's first daughter his elder sister Bintanath. First being married to her father and then being married to the next heir. This is unusual. This is not what we normally see in traditional Egyptian representations. All of which seems crazy to us.
Bintanath, Ramesses II's first child, could have been his successor had she been a man. She outlived her father and twice held the most important position a woman could hold in two consecutive reigns. Together with her brother husband Merneptah, they represented the necessary balance for Egypt. Like their father and Nefertari, then their mother Isetnofret before them, they became the new incarnations of the deities Horus and Hathor. But succeeding a man like Ramesses II was no easy task. Can you imagine being child of a god? I have no idea. It couldn't have been easy being a child of Ramesses II unless they had inherited some of their father's temperament.
Considering the size of this man's ego, one imagines he had a certain awareness of his own potential. The reign of Ramesses II was both the golden age of pharaonic civilization and the beginning of its inexorable decline. The 19th dynasty collapsed just 27 years after his reign. The consequences of fierce competition between his descendants. This leads to the establishment of a new dynasty, the 20th dynasty. This dynasty is called the Ramesside dynasty because every pharaoh chooses to use the name Ramses in his royal titles.
It is as if they hoped by taking this name, they would gain some of the power and the magic of Ramses II, but there really was only one Ramses II. A century after his reign, Egypt descended into chaos. The kingdom split in two. It's golden age was a thing of the past. But the legacy of Ramses the Great spans the centuries and millennia. It presents us with the portrait of an exceptional family sired by a legendary man who had no idea of the destiny that awaited him the day he was born. Ramses II was a great egoist, a great propagandist, was a great fighter, and probably someone who was also a
great family man. He appeared to be fond of his wives and children, but he must have been a bit of a pain to live with. You have to imagine that we're dealing with a family so huge that we still haven't got to the end of it. Every time we say to ourselves, well, that's it. We finished the list. We're pretty sure about the number of children. We discover a new one. And just recently, another child of Ramses II was found on a statue of Ramses II in Tanis. The image of the pharaoh par excellence, the one who alone personifies the civilization of the ancient Egyptians. That was his wish, and that's why he had himself represented in the four corners of his kingdom, alone or with his family. In the end,
the members of the royal family were mirrors of his greatness. It was all about Ramses. A unique pharaoh who did all he could in his own lifetime to make his mark on Earth. Father to 100 children, an ingenious builder, and a king of communication, Ramses the second did everything to become immortal in the history of humankind.
