d began the great colonnaded hall of
Karnak, proving that he was a man of great ideas, though probably too
old to carry them out; this task he left to his son Seti I., who reigned
one year with his father and on the latter's death was ready at once to
subdue the Bedouin Shasu, who had invaded Palestine and withheld all
tribute. This task was quickly accomplished and Seti pushed onward to
the Lebanon. Here cedars were felled for him by the Syrian princes, and
the Phoenicians paid homage before he returned home in triumph. The
Libyans had also to be dealt with, and afterwards Seti advanced again
through Palestine, ravaged the land of the Amorites and came into
conflict with the Hittites. The latter, however, were now firmly
established in the Orontes valley, and a treaty with Mutallu, the king
of Kheta, reigning far away in Cappadocia, probably ended the wars of
Seti. In his ninth year he turned his attention to the gold mines in the
eastern desert of Nubia and improved the road thither. Meanwhile the
great work at Karnak projected by his father was going forward, and
throughout Egypt the injuries done to the monuments by Akhenaton were
thoroughly repaired; the erased inscriptions and figures were restored,
not without many blunders. Seti's temple at Abydos and his galleried
tomb in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings stand out as the most
splendid examples of their kind in design and in decoration. Rameses II.
succeeded at an early age and reigned sixty-seven years, during which he
finished much that was begun by Seti and filled all Egypt and Nubia with
his own monuments, some of them beautiful, but most, necessarily
entrusted to inferior workmen, of coarse execution. The excavation of
the rock temple of Abu Simbel and the completion of the great hall of
Karnak were his greatest achievements in architecture. His wars began in
his second year, their field comprising the Nubians, the Libyans, the
Syrians and the Hittites. In his fifth year, near Kadesh on the Orontes,
his army was caught unprepared and divided by a strong force of chariots
of the Hittites and their allies, and Rameses himself was placed in the
most imminent danger; but through his personal courage the enemy was
kept at bay till reinforcements came up and turned the disaster into a
victory. The incidents of this episode were a favourite subject in the
sculptures of his temples, where their representation was accompanied by
a poetical version of the affair an