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Seti I., the father of Ramses II., seems to have been too fully engaged in his wars in Northern Syria, and in securing the road along the coast of the Mediterranean, to attempt the re-conquest of Palestine. That seems to have come later with the beginning of his son's reign. On the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes there are pictures of the storming and capture of the Palestinian cities.
The lotus-bud or clustered column gives similar results. At Karnak, in the aisles of the hypostyle hall, the capital is 10 feet high, the shaft 33 feet, and the base diameter 6-3/4 feet. At the Ramesseum, the capital is 5- 1/2 feet high, the shaft 24-1/2 feet, and the base diameter 5 feet 10 inches. We find the same irregularity as to architraves.
As I sat in the Ramesseum that morning, I recalled his face the face of an artist and a dreamer rather than that of a warrior and oppressor; Asiatic, handsome, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, aristocratic, and refined.
We now leave the great necropolis and turn to the later temples of the Western Bank at Thebes. These were of a funerary character, like those of Dêr el-Bahari, already described. The most imposing of all in some respects is the Ramesseum, where lies the huge granite colossus of Ramses II, prostrate and broken, which Diodorus knew as the statue of Osymandyas. This name is a late corruption of Ramses II's throne-name, User-maat-R
To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter, and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a woman in 1500 B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise them.
Here were fixed four great wooden masts, formed of joined beams and held in place by a wooden framework fixed in the four openings above mentioned. Such was the temple of Khonsû, and such, in their main features, were the majority of the greater temples of Theban and Ptolemaic times, as Luxor, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habû, Edfû, and Denderah.
In the hypostyle hall of Karnak, at Abydos, at the Ramesseum, and at Medinet Habû, various other ornaments, as triangular leaves, hieroglyphic inscriptions, or bands of cartouches flanked by uraei, fill the space thus unfortunately obtained. Neither is the abacus hidden as in the campaniform capital, but stands out boldly, and displays the cartouche of the royal founder.
In actual superficies this temple covered an extent of ground within which the temples of Karnak, Luxor, and the Ramesseum, at Thebes, could have stood, but has now almost entirely disappeared, having been used as a quarry for two thousand years.
Still nearer the road, but always on the left, stood the Ramesseum, a beautiful though not very large temple which was built by Ramses II. The entrance to this edifice was guarded by statues with the royal insignia in their hands. In the forecourt towered the statue of Ramses II to the height of sixteen meters.
A bound like that the soul gives when you sit in the Ramesseum, and see the crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of palm-trees, and the drowsy mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond the Nile. And you look up, perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a lotus column near you, relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man singing. A young man singing!
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