King, four times repeated, silent, majestic, superhuman—­with features marked by profound repose and tranquillity, touched perhaps with a little scorn, looking out eternally on the grey-white Nubian waste, which stretches far away to a dim and distant horizon.  Here, as you sit on the deep pure sand, you seem to see the monarch, who did so much, who reigned so long, who covered, not only Egypt, but Nubia and Ethiopia with his memorials.  “You can look at his features inch by inch, see them not only magnified to tenfold their original size, so that ear and mouth and nose, and every link of his collar, and every line of his skin, sinks into you with the weight of a mountain; but those features are repeated exactly the same three times over—­four times they once were, but the upper part of the fourth statue is gone.  Look at them as they emerge—­the two northern figures—­from the sand which reaches up to their throats; the southernmost, as he sits unbroken, and revealed from the top of his royal helmet to the toe of his enormous foot"[26] Look at them, and remember that you have here portrait-statues of one of the greatest of the kings of the Old World, of the world that was “old” when Greece and Rome were either unborn or in their swaddling clothes; portrait-statues, moreover, of the king who, if either tradition or chronology can be depended on, was the actual great oppressor of Israel—­the king who sought the life of Moses—­the king from whom Moses fled, and until whose death he did not dare to return out of the land of Midian.

According to the almost unanimous voice of those most conversant with Egyptian antiquities, the “great oppressor” of the Hebrews was this Ramesses.  Seti may have been the originator of the scheme for crushing them by hard usage, but, as the oppression lasted close upon eighty years (Ex. ii, I; vii. 7), it must have covered at least two reigns, so that, if it began under Seti, it must have continued under his son and successor.  The bricks found at Tel-el-Maskoutah show Ramesses as the main builder of Pithom (Pa-Tum), and the very name indicates that he was the main builder of Raamses (Pa-Ramessu).  We must thus ascribe to him, at any rate, the great bulk of that severe and cruel affliction, which provoked Moses (Ex. ii, 12), which made Israel “sigh” and “groan” (ib. 23, 24), and on which God looked down with compassion (ib. iii. 7).  It was he especially who “made their lives bitter in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field”—­service which was “with rigour.”  Ramesses was a builder on the most extensive scale.  Without producing any single edifice so perfect as the “Pillared Hall of Seti,” he was indefatigable in his constructive efforts, and no Egyptian king came up to him in this respect.  The monuments show that he erected his buildings chiefly by forced labour, and that those employed on them were chiefly foreigners.  Some have thought that the Hebrews are distinctly mentioned as employed by him on his constructions under the term “Aperu,” or “Aperiu”; but this view is not generally accepted.  Still, “the name is so often used for foreign bondsmen engaged in the very work of the Hebrews, and especially during the oppression, that it is hard not to believe it to be a general term in which they are included, though it does not actually describe them."[27]