The battle of Qodshû, with its attendant episodes--the flogging of the spies, the assault upon the camp, the charge of the chariots, the flight of the Syrians--is the favourite subject of his inscriptions; and the poem of Pentaûîrît adds to the bas-reliefs a description worthy of the acts represented. This epic reappears everywhere, in Nubia and in the Said, at Abu Simbel, at Beît-Wally, at Derr, at Luxor, at Karnak, and on the Eamesseum, and the same battle-scenes, with the same accompanying texts, reappear in the Memnonium, whose half-ruined walls still crown the necropolis of Abydos.
[Illustration: 240.jpg THE RUINS OF THE MEMNONIUM OF RAMSES II. AT ABYDOS]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
He had decided upon the erection of this latter monument at the very beginning of his reign, and the artisans who had worked at the similar structure of Seti I. were employed to cover its walls with admirable bas-reliefs. Ramses also laid claim to have his own resting-place at the Cleft; in this privilege he associated all the Pharaohs, from whom he imagined himself to be descended, and the same list of their names, which we find engraved in the chapel of his father, appears on his building also. Some ruins, lying beyond Abydos, are too formless to do more than indicate the site of some of his structures. He enlarged the temple of Harshafîtû and that of Osiris at Heracleopolis, and, to accomplish these works the more promptly, his workmen had recourse for material to the royal towns of the IVth and XIIth dynasties; the pyramids of Usirtasen II. and Snofrûi at Medûm suffered accordingly the loss of the best part of their covering. He finished the mausoleum at Memphis, and dedicated the statue which Seti had merely blocked out; he then set to work to fill the city with buildings of his own device--granite and sandstone chambers to the east of the Sacred Lake,* monumental gateways to the south,** and before one of them a fine colossal figure in granite.*** It lay not long ago at the bottom of a hole among the palm trees, and was covered by the inundation every year; it has now been so raised as to be safe from the waters. Ramses could hardly infuse new life into all the provinces which had been devastated years before by the Shepherd-kings; but Heliopolis,**** Bubastes, Athribis, Patûmû, Mendis, Tell Moqdam, and all the cities of the eastern corner of the Delta, constitute a museum of his monuments, every object within them testifying to his activity.