A Voice Carved in Stone
Ramesses II spoke about himself the way a mountain might if mountains could talk. His temple inscriptions at Karnak, Abu Simbel, and the Ramesseum present a voice of absolute, serene, cosmic certainty. “I found that Amun came when I called to him. I found him better than millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of chariots.” That’s from the Poem of Pentaur, his account of the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE. In Ramesses’ telling, he charged alone into the Hittite army while his own troops fled. He fought single-handedly until Amun intervened. Then he won.
He almost certainly did not fight alone. The battle was probably a draw. Doesn’t matter. Ramesses had the version carved into every temple he could find, in inscriptions so long and so detailed that they constitute one of the most extensive first-person military narratives from the ancient world. The voice in those inscriptions is grandiose, rhythmic, and constructed for eternity — each phrase balanced, each title accumulated like stones in a wall. “Son of Ra.” “Strong Bull, Beloved of Maat.” “Lord of the Two Lands.” The titles stack. The voice builds. And underneath the cosmic certainty, every sentence is designed to be read aloud by priests for a thousand years after Ramesses is gone.
He lived to roughly ninety. Fathered over a hundred children. Outlived most of his sons, most of his enemies, and most people’s ability to remember a time before he was pharaoh. By the end, his voice was probably reduced to a whisper. His mummy shows severe dental abscesses, arthritis so advanced his spine was fused, and the general wreckage of a body that served nine decades on the throne. The man who narrated himself as eternally young and powerful spent his last years in pain.
The Inscriptions
The primary evidence is epigraphic — carved into temple walls across Egypt. The Poem of Pentaur (the Kadesh inscription) survives in multiple copies at Karnak, Luxor, Abu Simbel, and the Ramesseum, making it one of the best-preserved texts from ancient Egypt. Kenneth Kitchen’s Ramesside Inscriptions (Blackwell, 1968-1990) is the full collection and translation of these texts.
The Hittite peace treaty (c. 1259 BCE), preserved in both Egyptian hieroglyphics and Akkadian cuneiform (the Hittite version was found at Hattusa), shows Ramesses’ diplomatic voice — formal, measured, strikingly pragmatic compared to his martial bombast. A copy hangs in the United Nations headquarters in New York as the earliest known international peace treaty.
For pronunciation, we rely on the extensive work of scholars like Antonio Loprieno (Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1995) and James P. Allen (Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, Cambridge University Press, 2000). Egyptian was an Afroasiatic language related to Semitic and Berber languages, but with its own distinct phonological system.
Late Egyptian
Late Egyptian — the form spoken in Ramesses’ era, the 19th Dynasty — was a transitional phase between the literary Middle Egyptian used in formal inscriptions and the later Demotic spoken language. It had pharyngeal consonants (produced deep in the throat), emphatic consonants (produced with a constricted pharynx), and a triliteral root system — features it shared with Semitic languages like Akkadian and Hebrew.
Ramesses’ own name gives us a pronunciation clue. It was not “RAM-uh-seez,” the anglicized version. Egyptian and Akkadian transcriptions suggest something closer to “Ria-meh-su” or “Ra-mes-su” — meaning “Ra has fashioned him.” The vowels are reconstructed from Akkadian cuneiform transcriptions of Egyptian names, since hieroglyphics didn’t write vowels.
Court Egyptian was a formal register, distinct from how Ramesses likely spoke in private. Temple inscriptions were composed by royal scribes in a deliberately archaic, elevated style — the equivalent of a modern government writing in Shakespearean English. The spoken language of the palace would have been more colloquial, faster, less polished. We’ll never hear it. What survives is the performance version: carved in stone, intended to impress gods and outlast dynasties.
Three Registers
“I found that Amun came when I called to him. I found him better than millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of chariots.” From the Poem of Pentaur. The voice is first-person, addressing the gods, narrating divine intervention in battle as lived experience. The parallelism — “millions of soldiers,” “hundreds of thousands of chariots” — is formulaic, built for recitation. Priests read this aloud in temple ceremonies for centuries after Kadesh.
“My love, my beautiful one — the Mistress of the Two Lands, Nefertari.” From inscriptions in the small temple at Abu Simbel, dedicated to Nefertari. A different register entirely. Where the military inscriptions are monumental, the Nefertari texts are tender — the one place where Ramesses’ voice softens from cosmic authority to personal warmth.
“Let peace be between us forever, between Hatti and Egypt.” From the Egyptian version of the Hittite peace treaty. Diplomatic language. Spare, pragmatic, almost modern in its directness. The pharaoh who narrated himself fighting alone against armies speaks here as a negotiator who understands that some wars are better ended than won.
Abu Simbel, 1255 BCE
It is approximately 1255 BCE. Abu Simbel is almost complete — four colossal statues of Ramesses, each sixty-six feet tall, flanking the entrance carved into the living rock of a cliff above the Nile. Inside, in the smaller temple dedicated to Nefertari, priests recite inscriptions in Late Egyptian — the pharyngeal consonants resonating off stone walls, the triliteral root words landing with the weight of carved granite. The voice they recite is Ramesses’, or the version of it his scribes composed: “Ria-meh-su, Son of Ra, Lord of the Two Lands, Strong Bull Beloved of Maat.” Each title is a declaration. Each phrase is balanced like architecture. The language carries sounds that no European language possesses — throat consonants, emphatic stops, vowels that shift meaning with length. Outside, the Nile reflects sunlight onto the colossi. Ramesses is perhaps sixty years old and has been pharaoh for forty of them. He has already outlived the reasonable lifespan of any ancient Egyptian. He will reign for another twenty-five years. The temples will speak his words long after his voice fails.
Sources
- Kitchen, Kenneth. Ramesside Inscriptions: Translated and Annotated. Blackwell, 1993-2014.
- Loprieno, Antonio. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II: The New Kingdom. University of California Press, 1976.
- Bryce, Trevor. Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East. Routledge, 2003.