So when Egyptologists started trying to parse out the history of Egypt, they ran into a really weird set of discoveries. Throughout the country, they kept finding all these monuments that essentially said “Ramesses II made this.” The problem was that these monuments spanned hundreds of years, so it was impossible that a single pharaoh had put them all up. It was a mystery for some time, with many assuming there were a series of kings with the name name and number, until they pieced it all together.
The reason Egyptian pharaohs were fond of huge monuments was two-fold. One was tied to the economy of Egypt. Egyptian society revolved around the flooding of the Nile. It was how their agriculture worked; you had these very brief periods during the year where you needed an enormous workforce to handle planting and harvesting. If you didn’t get enough crops planted during that window, or you didn’t get them harvested in time, you’d be looking at a famine.
Of course, once the planting or harvesting was done, then you had a bunch of unemployed workers sitting around drinking, and that’s a really good way to get yourself deposed. So the pharaohs decided enormous construction projects, designed to keep the proles busy during the off season, would be a great way to get things done. (A lot of people have the mistaken belief that these monuments were built by slaves; while slavery definitely existed in Egypt, these were public works projects akin to the things the American government did during the Depression.)
This dovetailed nicely with a fundamental tenet of Egyptian theology. The Egyptians believed in essentially a physical afterlife, where you would live on with your stuff, which is why they’d preserve bodies and bury kings with their loot. But you only maintained that afterlife as long as you were remembered. So to ensure they spent a long and happy afterlife, they’d put their names on enormous monuments. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
Ramesses II was crafty, though. He built his own monuments, sure, but one day it occurred to him that all these other monuments were just sitting around not serving any purpose. So he sent his craftsmen out to chisel off his predecessors’ names and put his on instead. So he got the credit for all their works, and each one was yet another way of ensuring his remembrance and his afterlife.
And so that’s why Egyptologists tend to call Ramesses II by the sobriquet, “The Great Chiseler.”
I learned this from Professor Bob Brier’s wonderful Egyptology lecture series from the Great Courses. Highly recommend it; I wasn’t an Egyptology nerd before finding his lectures, but I am now. He’s famous for being the first modern human to mummify a corpse using the traditional methods, and my favorite part of that story is finding out how the brain hook really works. He even said all the right prayers over the donated corpse, in the hopes that maybe thousands of years later some rando would wander into the Egyptian afterlife and confuse the fuck out of Anubis.
If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I’ll follow you into the dark