Our October ZOOM meeting looks at the later years of the reign of Ramesses II with Peter J Brand.

Monday 9th October doors open 7:30pm lecture begings 8pm (GMT+1)

All welcome! Free to MAES members. Guests can book by Eventbrite.

In his 34th year as Pharaoh, Ramesses II celebrated his second jubilee, married a Hittite princess and, unbeknownst to him, reached the halfway point of his sixty-seven-year reign. The occasion also signalled an increased emphasis on his status as a living god expressed through temples, statuary, imagery, and literature dedicated to his worship and glorification as Ramesses-the-great-god. As the years rolled on, the king grew older and increasingly frail. Divine kingship became a useful façade behind which the elderly king could be shielded from public view as age and infirmity overcame him. While he continued to reign until the end, in his last years, the crown prince Merenptah ruled in his name. Remarkably, Ramesses II’s mummy has survived as a unique artefact of his reign and tells us more about his humanity than any statue or inscription. From it we know what medical afflictions troubled him over the course of a lifespan that stretched into his late eighties or early nineties. 

Dr Peter J. Brand is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis, USA. He is also a director of the Karnak Hypostyle Hall Project, and specialises in the history and culture of ancient Egypt during its imperial age (c. 1550-1100 BC). He is the author of ‘The Monuments of Seti I and Their Historical Significance’ and ‘Ramesses II, Egypt’s Ultimate Pharaoh’.