Fruitless bloodshed

The next day, the forces faced off for the battle that would decide supremacy. But both sides had sustained so many casualties the day before that neither had anything left and after fruitless bloodshed the a ceasefire was called.

Justices of the Egyptian courts, they collected taxes, managed the grain reserves, settled territorial disputes and kept careful records of Nile river levels and rainfall. Treasurers managed the finances of 'church' and state and ran the stone quarries that built national shrines. If an average Egyptian had a grievance, he would take it up with the local governors in charge of each of Egypt's 42 names or states. Governors reported to the viziers, who met daily with the pharaoh for counsel.

During his long life, Ramesses renovated or constructed more temples than any pharaoh in all 30 ancient-Egyptian dynasties. He also placed his figure prominently inside each and every one of them, often on equal footing with the gods.

At first, this appears to be an unparalleled act of hubris. But seen through the lens of the Egyptian religious mind, this spiritual self-promotion starts to make sense. If the highest goal of Egyptian civilisation is to achieve ma'at or divine harmony, then you need a supreme leader whose very will is in absolute harmony with the gods. Through his numerous construction projects, Ramesses proved his devotion to the gods while also nurturing his own thriving cult of personality.

Ramesses built some truly refined and subtle temples, especially his small addition to his father Seti I's monumental temple complex at Abydos.

But refined and subtle was not in his nature. For starters, he liked to do things quickly. In traditional temple construction, all decorative motifs on the outside of a temple were hewn using incised relief, in which images and hieroglyphs are carved into the stone to accentuate the contrast of sun and shadow. In the darkened interiors of temples, however, artists used the more time-consuming bas-relief method, in which drawings and symbols are raised relative to the background. In the interest of time, Ramesses ordered all of his temples to be etched in incise relief inside and out. That's one reason why Ramesses built more temples than any king before or since.

Critics of Ramesses' theatrical and selfcongratulatory construction style have irrefutable evidence in the two temples at Abu Simbel. Both structures are carved directly into the living rock on a sheer cliff overlooking a switchback curve in the Nubian Nile. Ramesses dropped all pretence of piety with the construction of the larger temple at Abu Simbel, appropriately called the Temple of Ramesses-beloved-of-Amun. Four monumental