by Peter » Fri 20 Feb 2015 4:06 pm
There is clearly a problem with the age of the body identified as Ramses the Great. However, I believe that it has been correctly identified. This is because he is depicted as a child sitting on the knee of Sethos the Great when crowned as his heir and in a text quoted by Velikovsky in his section “how long did Seti and Ramses II reign” in his book, “Ramses II and his Time” says he was crowned as a child sitting in the lap of Sethos. As we have an inscription dated to his 67th year and other references to the length of his reign we can be confident that it did total 66 years, but if it began when he was an infant he would have been around 70 when he died not around 90.
In my chronology the 19th Dynasty Sethos ruled the eastern delta from his capital of Pi-Ramses from 837 to 782 BC, for the first 4 years as child co-regent to his father, and the whole of Egypt for 18 years after the death of Horemheb in 800 BC. A 30 year reign for Horemheb from 830 to 800 BC conforms to Velikovsky’s 18th Dynasty history revision dating as set out in Ages in Chaos. My dates for the crowning of Ramses as child co-regent to Sethos and for the year of his death are 788 BC and 722 BC. The fact that Ramses is given a reign length of 60 years as well as one of 66 years suggests 6 years of co-regency and an age of 10 or 11 when he succeeded Sethos as sole ruler of Egypt. I think that he was not the son of Sethos, but the great grandson.
The major problem with this is that we have the Ramses war annals inscribed on temples built by Ramses the Great, Abu Simbel being one, that tell of him campaigning in northern Syria in his second year and unquestionably the writer of the war annals could not have been a child in his second year.
Velikovsky, in Ramses II and his Times, identified the king called Necos in the Bible as the writer of the Ramses war annals and his father, Psammetichus, as the writer of the Seti the Great war annals. He thought that the 26th Dynasty Egyptian rulers were alto-egos of the 19th Dynasty kings, but this idea was rejected by most people who read it, myself included. I am, however, sure that he was correct in attributing the Seti the Great and the Ramses war annals to the Psammetichus and Necho and believe that these kings, much to the confusion of later scholars, inscribed their campaign annals on temples built by their famous ancestors using their ancestors names; indeed at Abu Simbel and other temples Ramses actually depicts himself praising a God with the same name as him.
Herodotus was certainly confused. The Greeks he talked to when he was in Egypt less than 150 years after the death of Necho told him about the 26th Dynasty kings using their Greek names and gave him their reign lengths. However, the Egyptian priests who told him about them and their Asian campaigns used the names that were inscribed on their war annals that they knew well and could, of course, read. Herodotus has been called the prince of liars, but it would appear that he recorded what he was told without realising that they were stories about the same kings.