d crook; the smiling face is surmounted by
an enormous head-dress. The sanctuary with the buildings attached to
it has perished, but enormous brick structures extend round the ruins,
forming an enclosure of storehouses. Here the priests of the "double"
were accustomed to dwell with their wives and slaves, and here they
stored up the products of their domains--meat, vegetables, corn, fowls
dried or preserved in fat, and wines procured from all the vineyards of
Egypt.

These were merely the principal monuments put up by Ramses II. at Thebes
during the sixty-seven years of his rule. There would be no end to the
enumeration of his works if we were to mention all the other edifices
which he constructed in the necropolis or among the dwellings of the
living, all those which he restored, or those which he merely repaired
or inscribed with his cartouches. These are often cut over the name of
the original founder, and his usurpations of monuments are so numerous
that he might be justly accused of having striven to blot out the memory
of his predecessors, and of claiming for himself the entire work of the
whole line of Pharaohs. It would seem as if, in his opinion, the glory
of Egypt began with him, or at least with his father, and that no
victorious campaigns had been ever heard of before those which he
conducted against the Libyans and the Hittites.

The battle of Qodshu, with its attendant episodes--the flogging of the
spies, the assault upon the camp, the charge of the chariots, the flight
of the Syrians--is the favourite subject of his inscriptions; and the
poem of Pentauirit adds to the bas-reliefs a description worthy of the
acts represented. This epic reappears everywhere, in Nubia and in the
Said, at Abu Simbel, at Beit-Wally, at Derr, at Luxor, at Karnak, and
on the Eamesseum, and the same battle-scenes, with the same accompanying
texts, reappear in the Memnonium, whose half-ruined walls still crown
the necropolis of Abydos.

[Illustration: 240.jpg THE RUINS OF THE MEMNONIUM OF RAMSES II. AT
ABYDOS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

He had decided upon the erection of this latter monument at the very
beginning of his reign, and the artisans who had worked at the similar
structure of Seti I. were employed to cover its walls with admirable
bas-reliefs. Ramses also laid claim to have his own resting-place at
"the Cleft;" in this privilege he associated all the Pharaohs, from whom
he imag