The very richness of the find proved somewhat of an embarrassment to the authorities at the Cairo Museum, and it was several years before the results of Brugsch’s great haul of Pharaohs were properly sorted out and classified. It was not till May, 1886, that the unwrapping of the mummies began, and the task was only completed in the end of June. The figure of supreme interest was that of Ramses II, who was then believed to be the Pharaoh of the Oppression of the Israelites, and who was then taken more at the estimate of his own overweening vanity than he is at present. The mummy of the great king was solemnly unwrapped in the presence of an illustrious gathering, the Khedive of Egypt himself verifying the existence of the later inscription of the priests of the XXIst Dynasty on the wrappings around the body, before the process of unwrapping began. The state of the mummy agreed with the historical evidence as to the length of the reign of Ramses. The king must have been nearly one hundred years old when he died, and his body bears the marks of extreme old age. “The mummy,” says Maspero, “is thin, much shrunken, and light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the figure is still tall and of perfect proportions. The mask of the mummy gives a fair idea of that of the living king; the somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose, displays itself with an air of royal majesty beneath the sombre materials used by the embalmer.” The hero of the battle of Kadesh must in his prime have been a man of large and powerful frame. “Even after the coalescence of the vertebræ and the shrinkage produced by mummification, his mummy still measures over 5 feet 8 inches”; so that we may picture him as a formidable figure over 6 feet in height, perhaps nearer 7 feet with the high war helmet of the Pharaohs crowning his head, as he charged with arrow drawn to the head, in his rattling war-chariot upon the Hittite ranks. His conduct at Kadesh suggests a good trooper, but a dull general, and his mummy does nothing to cause a revision of the judgment.