Ramses the Great and other ancients

Is anyone else here familiar with information surrounding Pharaoh Ramses the Great (Ramses II)?

From what I've seen in documentaries or read, he ruled for roughly sixty years, and according to one documentary, led his armies in conquest into his 40s. He eventually died in his 80s, apparently from an absessed cavity in one of his molars, I believe.

Ramses II also is credited by orthodox Egyptologists with the largest amount of construction for any Pharaoh, which is easy to do if you reign for twice the length of anyone else of course. And in some recent stories, it is believed that he may have been the actual Pharaoh represented in the story of the Exodus in the Bible. This is supposedly the only major loss his armies ever faced. I say supposedly because we all know that the victors write the histories. So to say the least, he was an important historical figure.

Now what makes all of this so interesting to me is that you have to consider that it is currently accepted that the average lifespan for a man was 30 years at the time. So in terms of the modern world, imagine someone taking office at the end of the American Civil War era and finally leaving office due to his death this year, after serving in a prominent military role until the beginning of the 20th century.

All of this makes me wonder about lifespans of the ancients and the claims that the line of Pharaohs were descended from the gods. Someone of such a very long lifespan, who maintainted control of such a vast area, for the time would have been considered a god, for sure.

So have orthodox Egyptologists unwittingly opened the door to further research into the lifespans of the ancients, which they have downplayed so far? Was there some supernatural force at work to explain his successes? Was Ramses II simply a feak of nature, a mutation of some sort?

If anyone has any further information, questions, or comments, I'm very interested.

Maybe he just got really lucky when it came to age.

Well I see no reason to believe that ancient kings and queens and other leaders could not live a long time. They would have been well looked after and except for natural disease or accidents should have a healthy existance.

Likely many of them succumbed more oftenly to attack or attempts to poison them etc.

While we know that modern medicine is much better than that of the past we probably greatly underestimate the effectiveness of ancient methods used by skilled practioners.

maybe its about having a good sex life, didnt he have like 800 children?

bdubb,

LOL, you have a point there!

Originally posted by bdubb
maybe its about having a good sex life, didnt he have like 800 children?

He did have somewhere around 110, according to some of the sources I've read. That's an average of just under two per year of his 66 year reign, but you know he hd to have it better than that .

Originally posted by THENEO
Well I see no reason to believe that ancient kings and queens and other leaders could not live a long time. They would have been well looked after and except for natural disease or accidents should have a healthy existance.

Likely many of them succumbed more oftenly to attack or attempts to poison them etc.

While we know that modern medicine is much better than that of the past we probably greatly underestimate the effectiveness of ancient methods used by skilled practioners.

I'll agree with this, but one thing that modern scholars seem to agree on is that he was a great warrior as well as Pharaoh. Either he was a one-man army, or he was very lucky to have survived so long in combat. Like I said, we think he went into combat into his 40s. That's pretty impressive for the time, no matter how good his medical care was.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but in my view he was either the luckiest of the Pharaohs or he had gifts of some kind (natural abilities and/or weapons) from another age.

He was a great king, he managed to kill off his rivals (and didn't succumb to poison), and he had a lot of physicians around him.

(wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org... )

While living to 80 in those days is as unusual as living to 100 in these days, it was not an impossible feat. Remember the lifespan is determined as an AVERAGE age -- so if you have 1,000 peasants who die (from bad medicine, poison, suicide, work accidents, diseases, childbirth, childhood diseases) at an average age of 27 and one noble who lives to be 80, the "average age" of that population is going to be around 30.

...in spite of the one who lives a long time.