During the Nineteenth Dynasty (ca. 1292-1191), King Ramses II tried to reestablish Egyptian control over the Syrian city of Kadesh, which the Hittites of Anatolia had conquered in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. He recorded the epic battle that he fought at Kadesh against the Hittite Empire and its allies in a series of reliefs, which he had carved onto temple walls throughout Egypt. These reliefs preserve multiple textual and pictorial accounts of Ramses’ struggle. In this lecture, I will consider how the Egyptians portrayed the Hittite king and his coalition in the Kadesh texts and images in order to shed light on both the Egyptian conception of foreigners and the purpose of these reliefs inside the Egyptian temple.
The Frederick R. and Margaret B. Matson Lectureship for Near Eastern Archaeology and Archaeological Technology
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