PI-RAMSES the city in the Delta
PI-RAMSES the city in the Delta
| Ramses built more than any other pharaoh of ancient Egypt. During his reign he realized an incredible number of temples, buildings, statues and obelisks. Why did he do it? Mainly to show his power through great architectural works and to glorify his status of a living god. To reach his aim he didn’t hesitate in taking possession of more ancient monuments. He restored some of them and put on the cartouche with his name, or he enclosed them inside greater constructions built by him. Other ones, then, were dismantled and used as “depositis” of raw material to be used again in new architectural works. Even Chefren’s pyramid (Giza) paid the costs, from it whole blocks of granite were taken to build the base of Ptah’s Great Temple in Menfi. Even the style chosen by Ramses was used to praise his greatness: in the temples, for example, the statues of colossal sizes and the columns richly decorated with hieroglyphics a stylized drawings, were multiplied beyond measure. The walls of the temples and of the buildings, full of sacred and war representations, had to celebrate the divinities and the sovereign’s undertakings. Ramses himself went to the building sites and often he went to the quarries to choose the most beautiful stones. Some inscriptions, as the ones on the Stele of the VIII year (today in the Museum in Cairo), report words of incitement and of praise by the pharaoh to the workers. He cared a lot about them, making sure they never lacked food, clothes, sandals and abundant fresh water, so all of them could work without discomfort. Among the great projects that Ramses realized there was the one of a new capital, that would equal the pomp of the other two great crucial centers in Egypt: menfi and Tebe. Pi-Ramses (Ramses’s house) that’s how he called it, was a reality already in the fifth year of his reign and the pharaoh moved there his residence. The city was in ancient Avaris, in the oriental delta of the Nile, a place dear to him because there already was his father’s, Sethi I, summer residence. But almost certainly the choice of the place had other purposes. “It was his family’s cradle and this was certainly the main reason. But there were also military and strategic reasons for the construction of Pi-Ramses. It was in fact on the eastern border, an area that had to be controlled because exposed to the danger of continuous invasions; moreover it was an important commercial point that connected the Egyptian world to the Asian one”. The new capital was very rich. The fields were luxuriant and productive, the rivers full of fish and the deposits full of food. The population was made of people from various areas of the reign as Libya, Nubia, Canaan and Amurru. There were many prisoners of war, but the relations with the Egyptians were peaceful and all were prosper in those places. The glory of Pi-Ramses was obscured only when the sovereigns of the XXI dynasty, more than a century after Ramses’s death, decided to move the capital to Tanis and to give it splendor, they ravaged many buildings of the city. |
