Friday, May 29, 2015

History Post: Khaemwaset

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

When I was in high school, I read Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias for the first time. It became the first and probably still only poem I know by heart. Coincidentally, I also read Watchmen for the first time that same year, wherein a super-intelligent hero goes by the alias Ozymandias.

I learned quite a bit about the real Ozymandias- Ramesses II. Despite Shelley making him synonymous with great rulers forgotten by the world they once ruled, he was not. In fact, he's still quite renouned as one of the most powerful kings in antiquity. Heck, he's a major character in the most popular book ever written: he's the Pharoah in Exodus.

I started using the name Ozymandias online shortly after that. Not really that seriously- I had the teenage tendency to just glom onto whatever I liked at the time and use it as my screen name. It just so happened that that was pretty much the last time I did that so it stuck.

However powerful and interesting Ramesses II was, though, he wasn't the person in his family I like most. Dude had a few sons and daughters- somewhere between 40-50 total. And not all of those sons were destined for the throne, obviously, not least of which because he lived to be 91 and outlived at least 10 of those sons.

One of those sons was Khaemweset. He never took the throne- he died well before his father did. So he got to spend his whole life as a member of the royal family without any particular responsibility. He took one up of his own choosing- history.

Ancient Egypt is popularly viewed as one big lump of history. Pyramids, Pharoahs, the Sphinx, all of it took place in the same big nebulous 'ancient Egypt.' Reality, of course, is far different. The life of Ramesses II took place 1000 years after the Great Pyramids were built. His son spent his entire life looking up at them and was determined to make sure they were understood and not lost to history.

He studied them, learned everything he could about them from local legends and what was already known at the time. He restored them as best he could do they could weather the sand and ages. Whenever he learned new facts, such as the names of kings entombed within them, he carved their names into them so they would not be forgotten.

In that big nebulous area of the past we simply refer to 'ancient history', Khaemwaset was the most determined ancient historian. While his father was poetically linked with the ruination of monuments, he will be forever linked with their preservation and study.

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