Mod3Egypt2

Hi my friends, greetings. We are going to be dealing with the last session of this fantastic, um, civilization of Africa, Ancient Egypt. And we, um, we are coming now to the New Kingdom period, one of the most astonishing and remarkable periods of the, of the ancient Egyptian history.

So, you remember my friends, I just, just a bit of background. You remember that the Hyksos had invaded, Hyksos had invaded Egypt, and they ruled in Egypt, especially the Lower Egypt, Egypt part, from 1750 to 1570, right? Okay. So, uh, so this is the background that I want you to keep in mind. So the Hyksos have come already into Egypt, right? Uh, at the end of the Middle Kingdom period. I.e., foreign, yeah, Egypt comes out of its isolation, right? Egypt, you know, the foreign Egypt begins to get, right, at the end of the New Kingdom period, right, connected to Syria, Palestine, and connected to what? Mesopotamia, uh, as we will see.

So, um, this connection, right, and then there comes the intermediate period, during which period the Hyksos are, second intermediate period, during which time the Hyksos are, um, are ruling. In the second intermediate period, right? So you come to the New Kingdom, right, with, with an Egypt, uh, Egypt that is, um, that becomes connected to the outside world. And Egypt that, and, and now we will see what, what we will later on see what this outside world looks like, right? Um, but, um, but this is, this is, you know, this is the age of empires, right? Great empires, and Egypt becomes one of them, right? So becoming connected to the outside world, right, it means that the Egyptians adopted the war technology, new warfare technology that the Hyksos had brought in, right? Um, and, and, and it is during this period that the kings officially become called as Pharaohs. And it is during this period that Egypt not only gets connected to the outside world, but Egypt becomes imperial, right? You get to have militant, uh, god-kings who are waging wars against outside powers and, and foreign, um, enemies. As we will see, these wars begin to bring other kinds of connections, right? I mean, for, in the case of the Hyksos, they brought out the, the, you know, technological innovations and technological information. New technological, um, you know, achievements of the outside world become integrated into Egypt. And, and as we will see, the trade of Egypt gets so much expanded that inner Africa, right, becomes, you know, sub-Saharan Africa becomes, you know, was connected already to Nubia. Nubia was connected already to Egypt, right? And, and all of this, right, all of this becomes connected to, uh, to the Eastern Mediterranean world, to the Fertile Crescent, and to, as we will see, the Mycenaean, the Minoan, and Mycenaean Greeks, right?

Now, um, specifically the Mycenaean Greeks. So during this period, literacy expands, right? Had already expanded during the Middle Kingdom period, but in the New Kingdom, writing and reading, right, more people are, are able to write and read. And I, I want you to pay attention, my friends, we're talking about the ancient period, right? Um, we were talking about 3,500 years ago, or so, right? Where, where, you know, ancient populations were literate, right? And, and we have to consider the degree of illiteracy in our modern world when we talk about this, right? Okay.

So, being connected with the outside world means that you eventually come to have diplomatic relations with them, right? And, and conduct trade with them, right? You know, conducting trade and, and diplomatic relations involves the writing of contracts and letters being, being sort of, um, exchanged between kings and Pharaohs of Egypt, and bills of sales being, being used, and, and so on and so forth. So, in each of these empires that we will, we will come across later on, also as well as the empire of the New Kingdom Egypt, you have large bureaucratic networks, right? And in the case of New Kingdom Egypt, you have one of the most, um, most sort of, uh, informative periods of Egyptian history for us, right? Because we have vast amounts of written material that comes to us from the New Kingdom Egypt, right?

So now, I want to just consider you to consider just the pyramid of Egyptian society. That by, what, by now, we have, uh, talked about all of them, right? We have talked about the Pharaohs, the great house, right, as we will see, um, the, the god-kings, right, govern. Below whom there are the, all the government officials, you know, that, that sustain this enormous bureaucracy. Under whom are the soldiers who are defending the realm and expanding it. Under that, I want you to keep in mind how important writers and scribes were, right? And then the merchants, and then the artisans and farmers. We have talked about all these groups, except for the slaves. And I would like you to, um, to read up on the slaves in, um, ancient societies, especially in the Egyptian context, uh, from your book. Yeah.

My friends, so when you come to the New Kingdom, you see its maximum territorial extent, right? It has once again conquered Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush, and it has gotten access to the wealth, the world, the enormous wealth of Nubia. In the, in the, in the case of, in, in this case, gold, right? And you'll see that the, the extent of the empire, right, it, it reaches, remember my friends, it reaches here for us, um, here, um, it reaches here for us, the Taurus Mountains, right? It begins to get into Anatolia. It gets as far as Anatolia, right? So, okay. So they, it, it had come into contact with Hyksos, that we, we think might, but they're coming from the land of Kanaan, right? So it has come into contact with the Semitic population, right? And you see that it is during this period that it comes across two great other, two other great empires of Western Asia and becomes, uh, in contact with them. And we will talk about them, um, the Hittite and the Assyrian Empire later, right?

So, the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, yeah, the, the, I, what I want you to keep in mind is that, um, the, um, the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, right? The New Kingdom goes from, goes through 18th, 19th, and 20th, right? Um, 18th Dynasty of Egypt, I want you to keep in mind. Look at it, it, you basically are ruling, uh, for, um, for 300 years here, right? 1550 to 1292, give and take, 300 years. So, 18th Dynasty is a very, very, very, very, very important dynasty in the New Kingdom, right? My friends, and it starts obviously with, um, Ahmose, right? And we know who Ahmose was, right? And was the, the one who expelled, um, the, the Hyksos, right? And then Ahmose, you see, has, um, a number of, um, offsprings, right? Um, and, and Ahmose's wife, yeah, it's the beautiful Nefertiti. Right? And then we get to, um, Amenhotep. And I want you to keep in mind the, um, the, um, okay, I want you to keep in mind the, the "Amun" in the names of, in the name of Amenhotep, right? And, and then Amenhotep the First. And you see that Ahmose has another son, Thutmose, right? Who marries to, with, no, no, Fred, right? Egyptian queen Mutnofret, right? And they bear Thutmose the Second, right? And, um, and, um, Thutmose, and, and, um, right? I mean, the Thutmose, um, has Hatshepsut as, as wife, right? And then we get to Thutmose the Third, and Amenhotep the Third, and so on and so forth. And then we get to the Amarna period, and we're going to talk about that. And finally, we get to, um, very important, Amenhotep the Fourth. I again, I wish you to notice the "Amun" again in the name. And but the name was changed to Akhenaten, and we'll see why. Um, and then again, we see that in the next generation, already, you'd again get "Amun." Right? These are all the names of the gods, right? Um, that the, the, the, so the Pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, who ruled for close to 300 years, bear, right? 19th and 20th Dynasty, again, we go to, just to get, sort of, um, familiar with these names, right? Um, you get, um, Ramesses the First, right? And Ramesses the Second, right? And, and, and Seti, right? And which are very, very important. And we will see again, um, about them a little bit. And then the 20th Dynasty, right? The 20th Dynasty actually becomes the Ramesside Dynasty, right? Because it is basically goes from Ramesses II to Ramesses the Third. I'm sorry, Ramesses III to Ramesses the Fourth. Where are we? Well, that's the Fifth, that's the Sixth, and that's the Eighth. I don't see Ramesses the Fourth. Um, so he was probably not important, or some other, um, important information about his rule that we are skipping over, right?

So, my friends, so New Kingdom, 18th, 19th, and 20th, um, Dynasty, 300 years, 100 years, about, and 100 years, right? That makes the 500 years of the New Kingdom, right? That takes us through the second half of the second millennium, right? Yeah, um, from, um, 1750s, right, to 11 something, right? We're gonna get to it, right? So, uh, Pharaoh has become, and the great house, meaning, um, yeah, um, Pharaoh meaning great house, which is, it is the Greek, uh, Greek version of the Egyptian *per-aa*, meaning royal residence, right? So, um, okay.

So, the New Kingdom period, right? The best-known Pharaohs of the New Kingdom period are Hatshepsut, right? Thutmose the Third, Akhenaten. And 19th Dynasty, the Ramesses, the Ramesses the Great, Seti. And the 20th Dynasty, the Ramesses, right? So now, um, okay, this is just giving you some, some pictorial imagery with which you can conceptualize, right? These figures, these important figures of, um, ancient human history, right? This is Ahmose, right? Uh, and, and his, uh, his, um, statue. This fragmentary statue will be, look, is in the, in the Met, right? This is the actual mummified head of Ahmose, right? This is the axe blade of him, and this is the cartouche of his name, right? My friends, yeah. And this is an image of Ahmose fighting the Hyksos, right? We remember this image, the light chariots of the Hyksos, right? And, and, uh, you know, Ahmose basically taking over this technology and fighting the Hyksos with their own technology, so to speak, right?

So, Ahmose was a, reared, he was raised by a warrior queen, right? Like, um, an Egyptian queen, a North African queen, right? Called Ahhotep, right? And the son of the, um, and Ahmose became Thutmose the First. And Thutmose did something incredible, right? I mean, Thutmose again subdued the Nubians to the south, right? And one of the most important things of the, result of it was that, um, was that he was able to gain access and control of the Nubian gold that was previously traded, right? But now the, the New Kingdom takes over. Ahmose takes over that, that wealth. Drives deep into, um, Palestine and Syria, as we have seen on the map, and Roan be heard, right? Egypt that was introverted and so somewhat, um, of course, not isolated, right? None of these regions were ever isolated, right? We know, we know that, you know, our ancient essences came out of Egypt, right? Again, um, but, um, but, uh, during, uh, this period, they really became, become connected, right? And Egypt, and, uh, Ahmose, in fact, excuse me, claims to rule. Remember how deep into Nubia our cataracts went, my friends, right? And you see that Ahmose claims to rule beyond the Ninth Cataract, right? From deep into Nubian territory, right? To the bank of the Euphrates, right? And as a result of all of this, right, Egypt acquires sort of a strong military presence in the, in Western Asia. North Africa comes to have a strong, um, sort of, um, military presence in, uh, Western Asia, yeah, to put it otherwise, not, not, not using the nomenclature of Near East and Middle East and what not, right? Okay.

So, um, so they had, uh, Hatshepsut was also a very, very interesting figure in the New Kingdom period in that she was again, right, um, as we will see, a warrior queen, right? And in fact, a queen who ruled Egypt strongly and exerted control over imperial Egypt, right? So, for, for close to 20, uh, wife, 20, um, 20 years, right? She was the sister and wife of Thutmose II. Yeah, you see, sister and wife, right? So, I.E., brothers and sisters could marry. Why do you think my brothers and sisters would marry, or, or fathers and, and daughters would marry, or, um, or mothers and sons would marry in ancient societies? Who do you think would, would indulge in this practice? Right? I want you to think about it, my friends, yeah. Um, to what purpose are they doing this? Right? And the very first thing that comes to mind, right, is what? Is that they, you know, they wanted to keep wealth in their own family, right? So, sister-brother marriages, right, are very, very common in, what? In Egyptian royal family. Not for everybody else, the Egyptian royal family. And though this was not the way to produce royal offsprings, right? At any rate, Hatshepsut, right, ruled as Pharaoh for 21 years, like her great-grandmother Ahhotep. Right? Hatshepsut was a warrior, right? But, but there was something very, very curious about her. And well, not really curious, because you are, you are obviously dealing with a patriarchal society. Ancient societies had matriarchies, my friends, right? Um, but, but settlement, settlement, and, and the, and, and the desire to know one's offspring, right? Yeah, made of our societies patriarchal societies. And why would you want to know your, um, offspring, right? Again, because you want to keep wealth in your own family, right? So, um, the, but anyway, the curious thing about Hatshepsut was she depicted herself not only as a woman, right? But also as a man, right? You see the man with a beard, even, right? But in the writings about her, she's always referred to as a female, right? This is the brother and husband of, um, Hatshepsut, right? In, um, well, Thutmose, right? In our famous, famous Karnak Temple, right? So, um, so, yeah, routinely, uh, depicted with masculine figure and beard, but not a man, right? Inscriptions indicated that he was, uh, indicate her gender. She claimed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, right? And her statecraft, right, was crucial to the continuing success of Egypt. And she, she promoted trade, right? And strongly promoted trade, right? And here you will be, you will see that it, it is, it is trading. She is trading, right? Not only with Arabia, but also with Eastern Mediterranean, right? And, but, but also, uh, with the coastal regions of Africa, with whom is she issuing trading during, during this period in Africa? Well, another naval, um, naval Afro-Asiatic power, I.E., Phoenicians, right? Then, and, and we will get to them, um, as well. Yeah.

Your picture is getting complicated. Nobody said, my friends, right, that the ancient world was, was, it had a simple history. No, it had a very, very complicated history. There were balances of power at issue at this point, especially, right? The access to resources, right? In other words, you know, diplomatic relationships, yeah, international trade. You see on, in front of you, international trade, right? And I, I want you to keep in mind, right? That at this point, right, Africa, yeah, is also trading with these itty-bitty, um, peninsulas, right? The Greek, um, peninsula, right? Of Greece, right? And the Italian one, which is kicking, yeah, Italy is always kicking, Sicily, right? My friends, yeah, this little thingy here is Sicily. So, international trade, right? So, um, never, never think that your ancient world was, was a simplistic sort of, um, sort of affair, right? Between, between sort of uncivilized people. No, you have to think of your ancient world as the context for your modern history, right? And all, all these are present is, uh, pretensions to, um, to, excuse me, global, um, one thing or another is simply that, pretensions, right? Right? Okay. This trade, of course, are shared in decades of prosperity during her two decades of reign for, um, for, um, Egypt, right? Excuse me, sometimes this happens. I don't know why this happens, um, in, [Music] in, sometimes in my presentations, um, at any rate, I will fix it for, for, for the later periods, my friends. I'm trying to, to make this, um, concise and not too long, so you won't be bored with my lectures, right? If I had time, I would tell you a joke, but, you know, I'm not very good at that, right? If this was a Zoom session, I could have danced for you, perhaps, but, okay, no, I'm just kidding. Okay.

So, this is, this is for you, the achievements of a female ruler, 3,000 years ago in Africa. So I want you to keep in mind that to this day, with all our pretensions, the United States of America, right, has not even, uh, come close to having a Vice President who is a woman, right? Let alone a President. Okay. One other thing that Hatshepsut, um, sort of inaugurated, right, is that she, she kind of changed the funerary practices of Egyptian society from, uh, from, from the, from the building of, of, of, um, pyramids and, and whatnot, to mortuary temples, right? And one of the most remarkable mortuary temples that she created was the Valley of the Kings' temples, right? Where successive, um, Pharaohs were buried there. Then thereafter, right? It was the New Kingdom's answer to the pyramids, and it was Hatshepsut's doing. So, the most beautiful woman, um, in, in, in the middle of the second millennium, BC, right, is Hatshepsut. And who, who claims to authority over both genders, right? Okay.

So, this is her Valley Temple, right? Again, in Luxor, right? In the Valley of the Kings, right? And again, you have to imagine, my friends, that your normal human is this height, right? When you enter the temple, right? So, okay. Again, this is the, um, statues of Hatshepsut in the Valley of the Kings, and you see that again here, she is, um, branded with a beard, right? No.

Okay, we come to a very, very important phenomenon in, in the New Kingdom period, right? And that is the growth in the power of the priesthood, right? Why, why is the priesthood, um, sort of becomes so powerful? Remember, we know, of course, that they were one of the center, best, besides the pharaonic, um, complex, right? The priesthood were the, the other important sort of, um, center of power for Egyptian society, like the Mesopotamian society, right? But, but the, um, the, the sort of, the defeat of the Hyksos, it starts with the defeat of the Hyksos, and then the imperialism of Egyptians, and their their access to resources of the others, of the other societies that they come into contact, for the most part in Eastern Mediterranean, um, and, and, and Western Asia, and, and whatnot, right? This brings to the Egyptian society mind-boggling riches, right? It, it brings prosperity, right? And of course, who do you think claim to, to, to, to, to be behind this, this amazing victories of Egyptians? Of course, their gods, right? Yeah, I mean, it's never think that we don't use our gods in our contemporary societies for, um, for creating warfare, right? And it's now, yeah, I mean, if you think that this is confined to Muslim societies, for instance, my friends, or, or, um, I don't know, any other, uh, non-Western sort of societies, you better think again, right? Because the history of the, uh, of even our modern period is closely intertwined with our religious thought, right? That is why still we carry, um, coinage that says "In God We Trust," right? And, and, you know, when we, we invaded Iraq, right? It was the Christian God who had helped us, right? Invade Iraq. So don't, don't think that that this is, this is some, some sort of, you know, [Music] demoted antiquarian sort of, um, sort of, uh, conception, right? That our gods help us, you know, win over our enemies. No, right? It, it, it, it had our modern conception has ancient true roots, right? So, uh, so temples and priests, of course, those who were the intermediaries between your regular earthlings and the divine gods, right? Were temples and priests. As in our modern period, they became rich, right? They became extremely rich, extremely, extremely rich. So they became even a stronger, um, center for power. And they, they started, obviously, to vie, yeah, with the Pharaohs, with the great houses, who claimed, remember, divinity themselves, right?

So, again, I'm sorry here, um, and please forgive me, this, I didn't pay attention to this one, apparently, okay. Um, so, and, and who was the major god, right? That had made these possible? One of the important gods of Egypt, right? And the god of skies, right? Amun, right? And the father of gods, right? And, and therefore, the priests of Amun at Thebes, right? Became a formidable force, right? And during the Ramesses period, um, you know, they, they also gained great influence, right? So, and, and, and how can we appreciate really the power and wealth of Amun? Well, in the Temple of Karnak, right? And remember, I told you, in the temple, you have to imagine priests and scribes and, you know, um, you know, I said hundreds of priests, right? Well, we know that in the New Kingdom, in the, uh, Temple of Amun at Karnak, there were 80,000 priests. 80,000 priests. Imagine how many mouths to be fed, right? Okay, my friends, here we go again. Um, so the Temple of Amun at Thebes becomes very rich. Thebes, in fact, becomes the, the capital of the New Kingdom, right? Most sacred temple of Thebes, of course, is Karnak, right? And Amun becomes, right, during this period, the god of very creation itself, right? And, and, um, and, um, and around, you know, 1550, right, Amun already becomes identified with the sun god Ra, right? We will see the implications of this.

So now, this is the god Amun. Remember, we have briefly touched upon him, and we're going to talk about the gods of Egypt later on when we talk about the gods of Mesopotamia, Mesopotamian gods. Um, and that was the god Amun, right? And remember, we have talked about the fact that the god Ra, as the sun, right? What had the sun disk, right? Yeah. So this is Amun, but I'm sorry, this is Ra itself, right? The sun disk with this on risk. But this is, right, Amun plus Ra, right? Amun plus Ra, meaning the sun, right? Amun-Ra, right? And of course, this is the Temple of, um, Karnak, Amun-Ra's Temple of Karnak, right? At Karnak, Karnak Temple, right? In Thebes, right? And, and, and this is the one in which I, imagine, I asked you, I bid you to imagine the number of priests, and we now know is 80,000, right? And this is, this is again, you know, architectural development, obviously. All of this wealth meant that there were grand scale architecture, including the one of, um, you know, the Temple of Karnak, right? And here is the Temple of Thutmose, and again, I want you to pay attention to the beautiful colors that have, have, um, have, um, have survived to this day, right?

So now, I want you to see, my friends, um, that in the middle of the, um, of the New Kingdom period, basically, give and take, right? You see that you have, um, a very important Pharaoh coming into the, in, into, you know, in the pharaonic sort of dynasties, uh, reigning over Egypt, 1352 to 1336, again, around two decades. And you see that first, it, it's name, in, in his name, there is the god Amun, right? And his name is Amenhotep, right? Um, Amun is pleased, right? Who, who had inherited a vast, well-governed kingdom, right? And, and, um, vast, well-governed kingdom in which the power of priesthoods, and priesthoods that served all these, on all these multiplicity of gods, right? Was growing by the day, right? So what better way, right? What better way to, to do away with the power of these, these priests than to come up with a new god, right? Yeah, okay. So, and that's what Amenhotep did, right? And, and, and he said, look, the new god, right, is, is, um, is not Amun, but Aten, right? And, and, and, and Aten is what? Is the sun, right? And, and, and, and, and then the sun is the, is this Aten is the source of creation. So all of a sudden, in the middle of the, um, you know, 14th century BCE, right? You see, well, we wonder, we wonder, is this all of a sudden, right? We see a move towards monotheism. Mono, one, theos, god, yeah. No, we have talked about this faith, believing in one god, right? And that is the sun god, right? Um, and, and he goes even further than this, right? And then he says, you know, which means what? Which means that if, if there is only one god, so to speak, and that is the sun god, right? So what happens to the Pharaoh's divinity? Yeah, oh, okay. The divinity of Pharaohs, yeah, is decreased, right? As the power of this god, this sole god, is increased, right? But, but, but so does, right? So does the power of, of the priests, the 80,000 so priests who were serving at the, at the Temple of Karnak, right? Um, and the, um, the, um, the iconography of Ra as a, of god as falcon, right? Is replaced, um, with, um, sun, Aten's sun rays, right? And Amenhotep changes his name to Akhenaten, yeah, he who is profitable to the, to Aten, right? And he builds a new capital, you know, right?

So, well, this is Amenhotep and his mother, right? And now again, we get to, and continue with, so, um, closer his theology becomes closer to, uh, to monotheism. Aten could not be depicted as taking human or animal form, which was the, which was the custom before, right? Um, himself, yeah, human depictions without gods, um, sort of imposing on him or anything, except for the god, excuse me, Ra, right? And, and together, and together with his beautiful wife, right? Yet another beautiful African queen, Nefertiti, and their children, become the worshippers of Aten, right? So this becomes, you know, dangerous to the ideology of, um, of royal power, right? And multiplicity of the gods, right? It becomes dangerous to the power of all these priests, right? And therefore, Akhenaten's revolution had enormous political implications, right? And, well, what does this priesthood, right? That has, has become so rich as a result of the, um, of the riches of Egypt, right? Um, what happens to them when their power is, there is, is destroyed? Well, they, they exert strenuous resistance, right? And, and since he did not pursue Egypt's interest abroad either, he lost the support of nobility. He didn't have the support of the, the, um, priesthood any, any longer, right? So he was succeeded by his younger son, Tutankhaten, right? Once again, and you see that he begins with Aten in his name, right? Tutankhaten, his son, begins by Aten in his name, but as we see, he changes very quickly his name, right? To a name that reflects the major god of, uh, Egyptians before sun Ra, namely Amun, right? So here is Akhetaten. So this, this period is also known as the Amarna period of, of Egyptian New Kingdom. And the, the, the capital that had had constructed, right? Was later abandoned. And this is beautiful wife Nefertiti, right? And this is the house altar of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their daughters, their three daughters, circa 1350 BCE, right? For middle of the 14th century BCE. This is another depiction of the family worshipping Aten, and you see the sun and the rays of the sun here, right? And here is once again, um, and Nefertiti, late in the rule, right? And this is another small temple, uh, of Aten at Akhetaten, right? And remember, I told you, when you, when you see temples, right? You have to also imagine scribes in the temples, right? Well, these are, these are scribes' children with papers, papyrus, right? And pen, right? And the relief is what? Is from the Amarna period, um, from the temple of Akhetaten had constructed, right? His son, I believe it was his son, Tutankhaten, right? That that replaces his father, is, um, only a child of nine years old. That means what? That means that you can be sure other people are ruling instead. The nobility are ruling in his stead, perhaps, and the priesthood are ruling in, instead. So, and he rules, and, you know, because he's only nine years old, right? So they change his name from "in the sun" in the, in the name, right? Again, um, the name is changed to Tutankhamun, um, with the god Amun returning, right? To, and to, um, to, um, to, to ascendancy, right? Um, okay.

So, and this is the death mask, which is very, very familiar to you now. You know where, what it is, and what is the significance of Tutankhamun, right? And you can tell your friends and, and acquaintances that, uh, hello, you know, the importance of the death mask. Where else you find his statue, but in Vienna, right? So, Horemheb, Horemheb is the last Pharaoh of the 18th century, right? 18th Dynasty, right? And, um, he was a general, right? Um, and after his death, right, um, the rule passes to another general, right? I.E., therefore, you're not talking about the royal family now, right? But someone who, a general who begins another, um, royal family, I.E., the 19th Dynasty, right? Ramesses would restore Egypt's glory, right? In the Near East after, uh, has, you know, sort of neglected his near, his political and economic endeavors of of his empire, right? So the 19th Dynasty, again, you know, founded by Ramesses, right? Continued the, the works of his predecessors in, in adding to the Temple of Amun, right? And he was old, Ramesses was an elderly man when he came to power. So he authorized Seti to carry out military expeditions and to win back the territories that were lost during the Amarna period. And this is a picture of a picture depicting Ramesses, I mean, the head of Ramesses, and this is Seti, right? In charge of, um, recreating the empire. And then after him becomes Ramesses the, the Second, known as Ramesses the Great, right? Who, who, you know, during whose reign we have a brilliant sort of renaissance, right? Of Egyptian history. During the reign of Ramesses the Great, and I wish you to see that we're coming to the end of our Middle Kingdom period, close. We're getting to it, little by little, right? And, um, and you see that, um, that, um, okay, uh, that Ramesses the Second rules during the 13th century BCE. Well, the 13th century BCE, he is supposed to have been identical to the unnamed Pharaoh in the Bible, right? During whose time the Exodus takes place. Well, but we know, we have so much. Remember, we said that this is the most well-documented period of Egyptian history. We know that there was no such a thing as, there is no any mention of, you know, Hebrew slaves, plagues, or the mass migration of upward of half a million people from Egypt, right? During the Ramesses the Great's empire. So, we know that the Exodus story, if there is any truth to it, and we will get to the, to the truth of our biblical stories, or the comparative truth, if you will, of our biblical story soon, yeah, in our religion segment. So, and so here we go. You have, this is Ramesses' mummy, right? This is the depiction of Ramesses at Abu Simbel, which is a village in the Egyptian part of Nubia, right? And this, yeah, my friends, this is Abu Simbel, Temple of, of, of, uh, Ramesses. And again, I want you to know, we are yay big, right? Compared to it. Or that's, that's even too high, I think. I don't know, maybe this big, this tall, okay? So, yeah, um, okay. So that is as far as Ramesses is concerned. Let's, okay. This is again, the Temple of Abu, uh, Temple of Ramesses, right? But this is Ramesses the First at Abu Simbel. Um, so, and, and, and you remember, okay, so Ramesses, this is again, the height of Egyptian, um, empire, right? It has gone, uh, it has extended again into Eastern Mediterranean, and it has covered most of Eastern Mediterranean. And yo, and behold, lo and behold, not you and behold, yeah, lo and behold, they come across another people, right? Another people. But these people are not the possibly, um, possibly Semitic group of populations that we were dealing when we were dealing with the first foreigners that come to Egypt, the Hyksos, namely. But these are the Hittites, and in the European, uh, population that they have created an, an empire of their own, during this period. Remember, this is the age of empires, great land-based empires, right? The, the, the second millennium BC is the age of great land-based empires, right? So anyway, Ramesses defeats the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274. We will learn more about the Hittites. And he also stops an invasion by the Sea Peoples, whose identity it is not still unclear. We may, we suspect perhaps potentially they were Phoenicians. We don't know, right? I, and I must say, I'm not up to date on the research on this, my friends, yeah. So, okay. It's already, uh, one hour. I want to sort of end here. And we talked about the achievements of, um, of Ramesses. One of the things that I want you to know is that he built a capital called Avaris in the Delta, right? On the eastern parts of the Delta, right? And perhaps he was trying to blend Egyptian culture with that of Syria-Palestine, right? And from the Hittites, again, the Egyptians get new, even lighter chariots, new war technology, right? And here, of course, you have, as you had the depiction of Ahmose, right, sort of, um, defeating the Hyksos under their, the foot of their chariots. Here too, you have in the Temple of Ramesses, Ramesses the Second, uh, in, in, in Luxor, right? After his victory against the Hittites at the city of Kadesh. And we will see all of this, right? They are being crushed beneath the wheels of Egyptian warfare. So, um, I will leave you at this. And I beg you to keep in mind that, yeah, um, the Egyptian Empire has come, not yet, not really, but close to the Taurus Mountains, right? And I want you to look at this empire that it, with which it comes into contact, yeah, an Indo-European population, right? With which we will be dealing, um, in our next sessions. Okay, my friends, um, I hope you have stopped and and gone back to this, uh, to this, uh, um, video, so that you won't get tired, right? And I hope you feel even more enlightened. I hope. And then, until our next video, I bid you farewell, and I wish you, uh, splendid days and, and nights in good health, my friends. Bye.