“Whose statue is that?” I asked Ahmed, our guide.
“That is Ramses.” He answered.
“What about that one?” I asked.
“That also is Ramses.” He answered again.
This is a scene that would repeat itself all over Egypt. You can find statues of other Pharaohs, if you look for them, but wherever you will go, you will find a statue of Ramses the Great (1303–1213).
Far in the south of Egypt (Upper Egypt, as they call it, because the Nile flows north toward the Mediterranean Sea), about 15 miles from the Sudanese border, you come to Abu Simbel. This placed used to mark the end of Egyptian rule. People would come from the south and enter Egyptian land at this place.
In order to show upstart Kushites and Nubians who was boss, Ramses the Great built a temple. He carved this temple into a mountain. At the front of the temple, there are four 70 foot stone carved figures of Pharaohs. “Who are these?” I asked our guide, also named Ahmed, but a different Ahmed than the first.
“They are all Ramses.” He said.
When you enter the temple, you find smaller but still tall statues of Pharaohs. “And who are these?” I asked.
“All of them are Ramses.” Said Ahmed. It’s as if Theodore Roosevelt had overseen the construction of Mount Rushmore and commissioned four carvings of himself. Definitely would give you a different feeling, wouldn’t it?
The temple at Abu Simbel has all of the features of a traditional Egyptian temple. There is an outer court. There is the holy place. There is the holy of holies. Read about these temples here. However, this is dedicated to Ramses, the incarnation of Horus, in the Egyptian perspective.
We have to give Ramses credit, though. He also built another temple, for the favorite of his 43 queens, Nefertari. It is much smaller. It does features statues of Nefertari. It also has a lot of stone carvings of . . . wait for it . . . Ramses!
There are many impressive statues of Ramses the Great in Egypt. One of the most impressive apart from Abu Simbel is in Memphis, Egypt. Today, Memphis is a small town on the Nile. To give you an idea of what it is like, when we were there, they were digging up a septic unit for one of the houses in town. They were just beginning to put in a city sewer for the residents. In the Old Kingdom, this town was the capitol of the Kingdom of Egypt. During the New Kingdom, in which Ramses reigned, Memphis probably served as a secondary capitol or administrative center in the Northern part of Egypt.
We passed through the dusty streets and came to an unassuming museum. There was one building and an open courtyard with a variety of artifacts. We entered into the building and ascended a flight of stairs. There, below us was a 33 foot statue of Ramses the Great. It was a beautiful piece carved with tremendous care, detail, and precision. It was not completed. The statue has no feet, but it was still a colossus.
This was Ramses the Great. Some say that he is the Pharaoh of the Exodus. I do not think this is likely, but it is possible.
Whether it was Ramses the Great or another Pharaoh, it is not at all difficult to imagine what a Pharaoh might have said when Moses came into his presence. Moses said, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness’” (Exodus 5:1).
Pharaoh responded, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go” (v. 2). After seeing what Ramses thought of himself, this seemed like a totally believable response. You can almost see the “frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” that Percy Bysshe Shelley described in his poem “Ozymandias” (the Greek name for Ramses).
Egypt became a symbol in the Bible for the pride of power. As the prophet Ezekiel said, “They will shatter the pride of Egypt, and all her hordes will be overthrown” (Ez. 32:12). This was captured in Shelley’s poem, and you can see this theme developed in Breaking Bad (see their allusion to this idea in this advertisement).
It’s one thing to read about and hear of the pride of Egypt. It’s another thing to see it with your eyes. That’s the advantage of traveling to Egypt.
I want to conclude by noting that the negative evaluation of Egypt is similar to how God evaluates other nations in the Bible. All humans have to learn humility. In addition, there is a positive evaluation of Egypt that I will explore in a later article. It’s important to keep that in mind as we consider the “pride of Egypt.”
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