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Ramesses' place in history, meanwhile, has been amply documented. The ruler himself saw to that. In fact, grandiosity was part of the job description for pharaohs. One of their primary duties was to make sure the gods were properly thanked for their continuing bounty and protection (and begged for them when they were in short supply). The accepted way to do that was to erect plenty of heroic structures-and then to adorn them with detailed records of the pharaoh's good and dutiful works. Says Kenneth Kitchen, professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool and the author of an authoritative book on Ramesses II: "He was determined to do this better than anyone else."
The great building boom got under way as soon as Ramesses took the throne at age 25, right after he discovered that the great temple his father Seti I had begun at Abydos was a shambles. The new pharaoh summoned his courtiers to hear his plans for completing the work. From there he went on to build dozens of monuments, including a temple to Osiris at Abydos, expansions of the temples at Luxor and Karnak and the cliff temples at Abu Simbel, which were rescued from waters rising behind the Aswan Dam in the 1960s.
Another part of the pharaoh's job was to fight constant battles with encroaching enemies. Four years after Ramesses succeeded Seti, the Egyptians' age-old rivals the Hittites appeared on the horizon from the north. The novice pharaoh hurriedly raised an army of 20,000 soldiers, a huge number by the standards of the day, and marched up through the present-day Gaza Strip to confront a Hittite force nearly twice as big. The battle ended in a stalemate; after many more inconclusive skirmishes over the next 15 years, Muwatallis' successor, Hattusilis III, requested a peace treaty, and the Egyptians accepted.
The treaty lasted for the rest of Ramesses' reign. The peace was helped along, no doubt, by his strategic marriage to Hattusilis' daughter Maat-Hor-Neferure in 1246 B.C.-a wedding that almost didn't come off when Ramesses and Hattusilis got into an argument over the dowry. The pharaoh later married another of the Hittite king's daughters, whose name is unknown.
The Hittite princesses were Ramesses' seventh and eighth wives; he had taken his first two, Nefertari and Istnofret, at least a decade before he ascended to the throne. Then there was also a harem. "If he got tired of huntin', shootin', rootin' and tootin'," says Liverpool's Kitchen, "he could wander through the garden and blow a kiss at one of these ladies." By the time he took over from Seti, Ramesses had at least five sons and two daughters. One of Istnofret's sons was Merneptah, Ramesses' 13th boy, who eventually succeeded him (the older ones are presumed to have died before their father did). Family ties were particularly close for the pharaohs: Ramesses' remaining wives were his younger sister Henutmire and three of his daughters: Bint-Anath, Meryetamun and Nebettawy.
Although they had little choice in their marriage partners, women in the royal families of ancient Egypt were generally considered the equals of men. Two of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, in fact, belong to the female rulers Hatshepsut and Twosret. Huge statues of Ramesses' first and most important wife Nefertari stand next to those of the pharaoh at Abu Simbel, attesting to her significance.