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RAMESES

(Egyp. R{-ms-sw)

(PERSON)

Colossi of Rameses II. Exterior of Great Temple, Abu Simbel (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)

A royal name used by a number of Egyptian kings of the 19th and 20th (or Ramesside) Dynasties of the New Kingdom.

1. Rameses I. General and vizier of Horemheb, the last king of the 18th Dynasty, who became the successor of Horemheb and the founder of the 19th Dynasty. He is credited with a reign of two years (1306-1305 b.c.e.) and was succeeded by his son Seti I (1305-1290).

2. Rameses II. The son of Seti I, who reigned for some 67 years (1290-1224). In the fifth year of his reign he fought a major campaign against the Hittites, and in his 21st year he concluded a treaty with the Hittite king ³attušili which established Egypt’s control over Canaan. The treaty has survived in Egyptian in inscriptions in the temple at Karnak and in the Ramesseum and in a Babylonian cuneiform copy recovered from the Hittite capital. Rameses was also responsible for monumental construction projects, including colossal statues; the temples at Abu Simbel; and his mortuary temple, the Ramesseum. Some interpreters identify the cities of Pithom and Rameses (Exod. 1:11) with Per-Atum and Per-Rameses in the eastern Delta and suggest that Rameses II may have been the king of Egypt at the time of the Israelite Exodus. A monument erected by his son and successor Merneptah (1224-1204) includes the first known extrabiblical reference to Israel as a people in the territory of Canaan.

3. Rameses III (1183-1152). The son of Setnakht, who had founded the 20th Dynasty and ruled ca. two years. During his reign he dealt with incursions by Libyans and others into Egyptian territory. Reliefs at the mortuary temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu depict his battles against the Sea Peoples in the eighth year of his reign. One of these groups, called the Peleset by the Egyptians, settled on the southern coastal plain of Canaan and are known in the OT as the Philistines and perhaps also the Pelethites of David’s bodyguard (2 Sam. 8:18).

4. Rameses IV-XI. Rameses III was followed on the throne by a series of kings who also took the name Rameses and who ruled until 1085. During the reigns of these kings the power of the Egyptian Empire declined, and there were growing internal problems. A number of factors were probably involved in the decreasing effectiveness of the Egyptian monarchy evidenced during the latter years of the 20th Dynasty, including an unusual pattern of succession — a number of elderly kings with relatively short reigns who followed Rameses III, administrative inefficiency, and changing relationships between the king and the civil government and the army.

Bibliography. K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II (Warminster, 1983); A. B. Knapp, The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt (Chicago, 1988); B. G. Trigger et al., Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Cambridge, 1983).

Keith L. Eades

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

RAMESES

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)