Tristan Hughes

I mean, I'm not an expert on that, but that's what I would say.

And so you get Mehrem Batar for a decade or so, and he is successful in beating off the Sea Peoples, the first emergence of the Sea Peoples on the sea.

So Meremtar dies after some 10 years or so.

What happens following that?

Does it all go to pieces quite quickly after he dies?

He must be around 80 years old by that time.

Do you think Tawazret's reign as pharaoh was always destined to end that way because just how they viewed a woman as a pharaoh?

So within, yes, like three or four decades after the death of Ramses II, his dynasty has come crashing down.

Yes.

It is too interesting, Campbell, how, you know, it's still a long time, I guess, in the grand scheme of things, between Ramses II and then Ramses III, which you say is another of those kind of big name figures.

The strength of Ramses II, is it more just...

a personal image that you know dies out soon after his death and actually he doesn't really leave anything that can endure for a long long time he doesn't build anything with an idea that it's he plans for it to endure for hundreds of years

Is it very much, it's just an image of his strength during his reign and then that just disappears and the solidity that he thought he'd created evaporates, rather than him actually wanting to create something stable for, well, maybe in his eyes, millennia?

So it's not functional.

So it's unforeseen, you know, future events that kind of really hinder his legacy rather than him not actually paying attention to it.

It does beg the question, is Ramses II, is he really the great or is he just the absolute master of spin?

Well, that was the one, the first, if not the first, that Champollion figured out, wasn't it?

Well, I'm glad you mentioned the 19th century because I have a copy here of the famous Percy Shelley poem, Ozymandias.

And Ozymandias, he's a Greek rendering for the name.

He's a poem that highlights the inevitable decline of rulers and their hubris.