Ramses I. was regarded as the founder of the Nineteenth dynasty. His
reign was short, and he was followed by his son Seti I., who once more
led his armies into Asia and subdued the coast-land of Syria. Seti was
succeeded by his son Ramses II., who died at a great age after a reign
of sixty-seven years (B.C. 1348-1281), and whose mummy, like that of his
father, is now in the Cairo Museum. He set himself to restore the
Asiatic empire of Thothmes. But the Hittites barred his way. They had
established themselves at Kadesh on the Orontes, and a long war of
twenty-one years ended at last in a treaty of peace in which the two
combatants agreed to respect from henceforth the existing boundaries of
Egypt and Kadesh. Egypt was left with Palestine on both sides of the
Jordan, a possession, however, which it lost soon after Ramses' death.
The treaty was cemented by the marriage of the Hittite princess with the
Pharaoh.

Ramses II. was the great builder of Egypt. Go where we will, we find the
remains of the temples he erected or restored, of the cities he founded,
and of the statues he set up. His architectural conceptions were
colossal; the temple of Abu-Simbel, hewn out of a mountain, and the
shattered image of himself at Thebes, are a proof of this. But he
attempted too much for the compass of a single reign, however long. Much
of his work is pretentious but poor, and indicative of the feverish
haste with which it was executed.

Among the cities he built in the Delta were Ramses and Pithom. Pithom,
or Pa-Tum, is now marked by the mounds of Tel el-Maskhuta, on the line
of railway between Ismailîa and Zagazig; it lay at the eastern extremity
of Qoshem or Goshen, in the district of Succoth. Like Ramses, it had
been built by Israelitish labour, for the free-born Israelites of Goshen
had been turned into royal serfs. None had suffered more from the