History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12)Maspero, G. (Gaston)
History
History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12)
Maspero, G. (Gaston)
Civilization, Ancient; Egypt -- History -- To 640 A.D.; History, Ancient; Middle East -- History
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph taken from the mummy
itself, by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
There may be seen below the cartouche the lines of the official report
of inspection written during the XXIst dynasty. Old age and death did
not succeed in marring the face sufficiently to disfigure it. The coffin
containing his body is not the same as that in which his children placed
him on the day of his obsequies; it is another substituted for it by one
of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance
to the face of the victorious Pharaoh. The mummy 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.*
* Even after the coalescence of the vertebrae and the shrinkage produced
by mummification, the body of Ramses II. still measures over 5 feet 8
inches.
The head, which is bald on the top, is somewhat long, and small in
relation to the bulk of the body; there is but little hair on the
forehead, but at the back of the head it is thick, and in smooth stiff
locks, still preserving its white colour beneath the yellow balsams
of his last toilet. The forehead is low, the supra-orbital ridges
accentuated, the eyebrows thick, the eyes small and set close to the
nose, the temples hollow, the cheek-bones prominent; the ears, finely
moulded, stand out from the head, and are pierced, like those of a
woman, for the usual ornaments pendant from the lobe. A strong jaw and
square chin, together, with a large thick-lipped mouth, which reveals
through the black paste within it a few much-worn but sound teeth, make
up the features of the mummied king. His moustache and beard, which were
closely shaven in his lifetime, had grown somewhat in his last sickness
or after his death; the coarse and thick hairs in them, white like those
of the head and eyebrows, attain a length of two or three millimetres.
The skin shows an ochreous yellow colour under the black bituminous
plaster. The mask of the mummy, in fact, 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 disappearance of the old hero did not produce many changes in the
position of affairs in Egypt: Minephtah from this time forth possessed
as Pharaoh the power which he had previously wielded as regent. He was
now no longer young. Born somewhere about the beginning of the reign of
Ramses II., he was now sixty, possibly seventy, years old; thus an old
man succeeded another old man at a moment when Egypt must have needed
more than ever an active and vigorous ruler. The danger to the country
did not on this occasion rise from the side of Asia, for the relations
of the Pharaoh with his Kharu subjects continued friendly, and, during a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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