20
Statue of Ramesses II
Granite statue, found at Thebes (near Luxor), Egypt
AROUND 1250 BC
In 1818, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired by a monumental figure in the British Museum to write some of his most widely quoted lines:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Shelley’s Ozymandias is actually our Ramesses II, king of Egypt from 1279 to 1213 BC. His giant head with a serenely commanding face looks down at visitors from a very great height, dominating the space around it.
When it arrived in England, this was by far the largest Egyptian sculpture that the British public had ever seen, and it was the first object that gave them a sense of the colossal scale of the Egyptian achievement. The upper body alone is about 2.5 metres (8 or 9 feet) high, and it weighs about 7 tonnes. This is a king who understood, as none before, the power of scale, the purpose of awe.
Ramesses II ruled Egypt for an astonishing sixty-six years, presiding over a golden age of prosperity and imperial power. He was lucky – he lived to be over 90, he fathered around a hundred children and, during his reign, the Nile floods obligingly produced a succession of bumper harvests. He was also a prodigious achiever. As soon as he took the throne in 1279 BC he set out on military campaigns to the north and south, he covered the land with monuments, and he was seen as such a successful ruler that nine later pharaohs took his name. He was still being worshipped as a god in the time of Cleopatra, more than a thousand years later.
Ramesses was a consummate self-publicist, and a completely unscrupulous one. To save time and money he simply changed the inscriptions on pre-existing sculptures so that they bore his name and glorified his achievements. All across his kingdom he also erected vast new temples – like Abu Simbel, cut into the rocky sides of the Nile Valley. The huge image of himself there, sculpted in the rock, inspired many later imitations, not least the vast faces of American presidents carved into Mount Rushmore.
In the far north of Egypt, facing towards neighbouring powers in the Near East and the Mediterranean, he founded a new capital city, modestly called Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu, the ‘House of Ramesses II, Great and Victorious’. One of his proudest achievements was his memorial complex at Thebes, near modern Luxor. It wasn’t a tomb where he was going to be buried, but a temple where he would be venerated in life and then worshipped as a god for all eternity. The Ramesseum, as it’s now known, covers an immense area, about the size of four football pitches, and contained temple, palace and treasuries.
There were two courtyards in the Ramesseum, and our statue sat at the entrance to the second one. But, magnificent though it is, this statue was just one of many – Ramesses was replicated again and again throughout the complex, a multiple vision of monumental power that must have had an overwhelming effect on the officials and priests who went there. The sculptor Antony Gormley, who created the Angel of the North, places such monumental sculpture in context:
For me as a sculptor the acceptance of the material as a means of conveying the relationship between human-lived biological time and the aeons of geological time is an essential condition of the waiting quality of sculpture. Sculptures persist, endure, and life dies. And all Egyptian sculpture in some senses has this dialogue with death, with that which lies on the other side.
There is something very humbling, a celebration of what a people can do together, because that is the other extraordinary thing about Egyptian architecture and sculpture, which were engaged upon by vast numbers of people, and which were a collective act of celebration of what they were able to achieve.
It is an important point. This serenely smiling sculpture is not the creation of an individual artist, but the achievement of a whole society – the result of a huge, complex process of engineering and logistics – in many ways much closer to building a motorway than making a work of art.
The granite for the sculpture was quarried from Aswan, more than 150 kilometres (90 miles) up the Nile to the south, and extracted in a single colossal block – the whole statue would have originally weighed about 20 tonnes. It was then roughly shaped before being moved on wooden sleds, pulled by large teams of labourers, from the quarry to a raft which was floated down the Nile to Luxor. The stone was then hauled from the river to the Ramesseum, where the finer stone-working took place. An enormous amount of man-power and organization was needed to erect even this one statue, and the whole workforce had to be trained, managed, coordinated and, if not paid – many of them would have been slaves – at least fed and housed. To deliver our sculpture a literate, numerate and very well-oiled bureaucratic machine was essential – and that same machine was also used to manage Egypt’s international trade and to organize and equip its armies.
Ramesses undoubtedly had both great ability and real successes, but, like all supreme masters of propaganda, where he didn’t actually succeed he just made it up. He was not exceptional in combat, but he was able to mobilize a considerable army and supply them with ample weaponry and equipment. Whatever the actual result of his battles, the official line was always the same – Ramesses triumphs. The whole of the Ramesseum conveyed a consistent message of imperturbable success. Here is the Egyptologist Dr Karen Exell, on Ramesses the propagandist:
He very much understood that being visible was central to the success of the kingship, so he put up as many colossal statues as he could, very quickly. He built temples to the traditional gods of Egypt, and this kind of activity has been interpreted as being bombastic – showing off and so on – but we really need to see it in the context of the requirements of the kingship. People needed a strong leader, and they understood a strong leader to be a king who was out there campaigning on behalf of Egypt and was very visible within Egypt. We can even look at what we can regard as the ‘spin’ of the records of the battle of Qadesh in his year five, which was a draw. He came back to Egypt and had the record of this battle inscribed on seven temples, and it was presented as an extraordinary success, that he alone had defeated the Hittites. So it was all spin, and he completely understood how to use that.
This king would not only convince his own people of his greatness: he would also fix the image of imperial Egypt for the whole world. Later, Europeans were mesmerized. Around 1800 the competing aggressive powers in the Middle East, then the French and the British, vied with each other to acquire the image of Ramesses. Napoleon’s men tried to remove the statue from the Ramesseum in 1798, but failed. There is a hole about the size of a tennis ball drilled into the torso, just above the right breast, which experts think came from this attempt. By 1799 the statue had been broken.
In 1816 the bust was successfully removed, rather appropriately, by a circus-strongman-turned-antiquities-dealer named Giovanni Battista Belzoni. Using a specially designed system of hydraulics Belzoni organized hundreds of workmen to pull the bust on wooden rollers, by ropes, to the banks of the Nile, almost exactly the method used to bring it to the Ramesseum in the first place. It is a powerful demonstration of Ramesses’ achievement that moving just half the statue was considered a great technical feat 3,000 years later. Belzoni then loaded the bust on to a boat, and the dramatic cargo went from there to Cairo, to Alexandria, and then finally to London. On arrival, it astounded everybody who saw it and began a revolution in how we Europeans view the history of our culture. The Ramesses in the British Museum was one of the first works to challenge long-held assumptions that great art had begun in Greece.
Ramesses’ success lay not only in maintaining the supremacy of the Egyptian state, through the smooth running of its trade networks and taxation systems, but also in using the rich proceeds for building numerous temples and monuments. His purpose was to create a legacy that would speak to all generations of his eternal greatness. Yet, by the most poetic of ironies, his statue has come to mean exactly the opposite.
Shelley heard reports of the discovery of the bust and of its transportation t
o England. He was inspired by accounts of its colossal scale, but he also knew what had happened to Egypt after Ramesses – with the crown passing to Libyans and Nubians, Persians and Macedonians, and Ramesses’ statue itself squabbled over by the recent European intruders. As Antony Gormley puts it, sculptures endure, and life dies; Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ is a meditation not on imperial grandeur but on the transience of earthly power, and in it Ramesses’ statue becomes a symbol of the futility of all human achievement.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
PART FIVE
Old World, New Powers
1100–300 BC
About 1000 BC new powers arose in several parts of the world, overwhelmed the existing order, and took its place. Warfare was conducted on an entirely new scale. Egypt was challenged by its former subject peoples from Sudan; in Iraq a new military power, the Assyrians, built an empire that eventually covered much of the Middle East; and in China, a group of outsiders, the Zhou, overthrew the long-established Shang Dynasty. There were also profound changes in economic behaviour: in both what is now Turkey and China coins were used for the first time, leading to a rapid growth of commercial activity. Meanwhile, quite separately, the first cities and complex societies in South America began to emerge.
The people of Lachish led into exile by the Assyrians
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Lachish Reliefs
Stone panels, found at the Palace of King Sennacharib, Nineveh (near Mosul), northern Iraq
700–692 BC
By 700 BC, the Assyrian rulers based in northern Iraq had built an empire that stretched from Iran to Egypt and covered most of the area that we now call ‘the Middle East’. Indeed it could be argued this was the beginning of the very idea of the Middle East as a single theatre of conflict and control. It was the largest land empire yet created, the product of the prodigious Assyrian war-machine. The heartland of the Assyrian Empire lay on the fertile Tigris river. It was an ideal location for agriculture and trade, but it had no natural boundaries or defences, and so the Assyrians spent huge resources on a large army to police their frontiers, expand their territory and keep potential enemies at bay.
Lachish, today known as Tell ed-Duweir, over 800 kilometres (500 miles) south-west of the Assyrian heartland but only about 40 kilometres (25 miles) south-west of Jerusalem, stood at a vital strategic point on the trade routes that linked Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean and the immense wealth of Egypt. In 700 BC it was a heavily fortified hill town, the second city, after Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Judah which had managed – just – to stay independent of the Assyrians. But in the final years of the eighth century BC, Hezekiah, King of Judah, rebelled against the Assyrians. It was a big mistake. King Sennacherib mobilized the Assyrian imperial army, fought a brilliant campaign, seized the city of Lachish, killed its defenders and deported its inhabitants. An Assyrian account of the episode in the British Museum gives us Sennacherib’s view of what happened, allegedly in his own words:
Because Hezekiah, King of Judah, would not submit to my yoke, I came up against him, and by force of arms and by the might of my power I took 46 of his strong-fenced cities; and of the smaller towns which were scattered about, I took and plundered a countless number. From these places I took and carried off 200,156 persons, old and young, male and female, together with horses and mules, asses and camels, oxen and sheep, a countless multitude.
Lachish was just one victim in a long series of Assyrian wars. Its story is particularly fascinating because we also know it from the other side, from the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Kings tells us that Hezekiah, King of Judah, refused to pay the tribute that Sennacherib demanded:
And the Lord was with him: and he prospered whithersoever he went forth: and he rebelled against the king of Assyria, and served him not.
Siege engines lead the way up artificial ramps with archers following closely behind
The Bible understandably glosses over the disagreeable fact that Sennacherib responded by brutally seizing the cities of Judah until Hezekiah was crushed, gave in and paid up.
The resounding success of the Assyrian campaign is recorded in these carvings in shallow relief, about eight feet (2.5 metres) high. They would have run in a continuous frieze almost from floor to ceiling around one room of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, near modern Mosul in Iraq. They would once have been brightly painted, but even without any colour today they are astonishing historical documents – like a film in stone, an early Hollywood epic, perhaps, with a cast of thousands. The first scene shows the invading army marching in, then comes the bloody battle in the besieged town, and then we move on to the dead, the injured and the columns of passive refugees. Finally we see the victorious king presiding triumphantly over his conquest: Sennacherib, ruler of the great Assyrian Empire, and the terror of the ancient Middle East.
Like the director of any good propaganda war film, the sculptor has shown us the Lachish campaign as a perfectly executed military exercise. He sets the city among trees and vineyards, while below the Assyrian soldiers, archers and spearmen are marching. As the frieze progresses, wave after wave of Assyrians scale the city walls and eventually overwhelm the resident Judaeans. The next scene shows the aftermath. Survivors flee the burning city, carrying what they can. These lines of people, carrying their worldly goods and heading for deportation, must be one of the earliest depictions of refugees that exists. They are almost unbearably poignant. It’s impossible, looking at them close up, not to think of the millions of refugees and displaced people that this same region has seen over the centuries, and is still seeing.
Prisoners of war and refugees are led away from Lachish
We showed the Lachish Reliefs to Lord Ashdown, soldier, politician and international diplomat, who’s had long experience of the human cost of military conflict, especially during his work in the Balkans:
I saw refugee camps right across the Balkans and, frankly, I could never stop the tears coming to my eyes, because what I saw was my sister and my mother and my wife and my children. But I saw Serbs driven out by Bosnians, Bosnians driven out by Croats, Croats driven out by Serbs, and so on. I even saw the most shameful refugees of all … the Roma people, a huge camp of Roma people, maybe 40–50,000, and they were driven out when my army, the NATO army, was in charge. And we stood aside as their houses were burnt and they were driven from their homes. And that made me feel not just desperately sad, but also desperately ashamed. What is true, and what the reliefs show, is in a sense the immutable and unchangeable character of war. There are always wars, there are always deaths, there are always refugees. Refugees are normally the sort of flotsam and jetsam of war. They are left where they were washed up when the war finished.
The people that we see on the relief are the victims of war who pay the price of their ruler’s rebellion. Families with carts packed high with bundles are being led into exile, while Assyrian soldiers carry their plundered spoils towards the enthroned King Sennacherib. An inscription credits the king himself with the victory: ‘Sennacherib, King of the World, King of Assyria, sat on a throne and watched the booty of Lachish pass before him.’ He presides over the sacked city and its defeated inhabitants as an almost divine overlord, watching the citizens as they are deported to another part of the Assyrian Empire. This practice of mass deportation was standard Assyrian policy. They moved large groups of troublesome people from their homelands to resettle them in other parts of the empire, including Assyria itself. Deportation on this scale must have been logistically challenging, but the Assyrian army went through so many campaigns that the programme of moving people around would have been refined to a point of industrial efficiency.
‘Sennacherib, King of the World … watched the booty of Lachish pass before him’
; The strategy of shifting populations has been a constant phenomenon of empire ever since. Perhaps our nearest equivalent – just about in living memory – is Stalin’s deportation of peoples during the 1930s. Like Sennacherib, Stalin knew the value of moving rebellious peoples out of strategic areas and relocating them far away from their homelands.
The military historian Antony Beevor puts these two imperial heavies – Sennacherib and Stalin – in historical perspective:
Well I think one sees the way that in the past, for example in the deportation of the Judaeans after the siege of Lachish, rulers wished to establish their total power. It was a demonstration of their supremacy.
By the twentieth century there was a much greater element of notions of treason, particularly political treason, as one saw with Stalin and the Soviet Union. When it came to the real waves of deportations which were punishing whole peoples, this was because Stalin suspected that they had collaborated with the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union from 1941 onwards.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 13