Ramesses II

Yes, yeah.

She's not, like, one of those guys who's rehabilitating George W. Bush, right? She's like, Ramesses the Great, the guy who destroyed half of Nubia.

Have we considered

that the, you know, power dynamic between pharaohs and their subjects is a little bit imbalanced and problematic? Yeah.

Not just in the sense that their people kind of worship, like they're considered full-blooded gods.

So you can't exactly point out faults in pharaohs if they're full-blooded gods, right? It sort of upends the entire political socioeconomic structure if you will point out that, hey, you know, Ramesses made a mistake, right? Ramses did a thing that was very human because he's not human.

He's a god.

So what happens in a lot of these reliefs from the Egyptian point of view about a lot of these different pharaohs is they will only say that the pharaoh did all of these amazing things.

But what they eventually uncovered was a pristine 3,200-year-old temple complex that we now know as Abu Simbel.

And this complex was built around 1244 BC for the legendary pharaoh Ramesses the Great.

And when we say colossal, we mean it in the truest sense of the word.

The main temple is guarded by four statues of Ramesses that are 64 feet tall, carved directly into the living rock of the mountain.

marvel.

But the traditional mainstream archaeological explanation for Abu Simbel is purely ego and theology.

The accepted theory is that these were built simply so the Egyptians could visit, be awed by the sheer scale, and worship their pharaoh as a living god incarnate in his absolute perfection.

But when you look at the architectural and mathematical precision of Abu Simbel, the purely symbolic explanation starts to feel, well, inadequate.

You have

Ramses II.

I

have

Ramses II.

It's like everybody in Egypt is Mohammed of Ramses II.

It's like, what are you going to do? I know six words.

Try me.