Ancient EgyptianHistoricalPharaoh's name
Meaning: Ra has fashioned him.
Ramses
| Origin | Ancient Egyptian — rꜥ-ms-sw, carried by eleven kings of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Ra has fashioned him, from Ra (the sun god) + mes (to bear, fashion, give birth to) |
| Pronunciation | RAM-seez by convention; scholars write Ramesses. Egyptian script recorded consonants and left the vowels out, so this respelling is a modern scholarly convention, not a recovered pronunciation. |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; the one name in this group with any modern currency, chiefly among Egyptian Copts |
| Variants | Ramesses, Rameses, Ramsès (French), Ramzes (Polish); Ozymandias renders his throne name User-maat-Ra |
| Nicknames | Ram, Rams and Ramy in English use; Egyptian had no short form |
| Best-known bearer | Ramesses II, on the throne about 66 years, roughly 1279 to 1213 BC |
History & meaning
The sentence behind the name is Ra has fashioned him — the same verb mes that builds Ahmose and Thutmose, here with the sun god as the one doing the fashioning. The two English spellings reflect two different jobs: Ramesses is what Egyptologists write when they want to stay close to the consonants, Ramses is what everyone else says. Neither is a pronunciation in any strict sense. Egyptian recorded no vowels, so RAM-seez is a modern habit inherited through Greek and Latin, and the Egyptian original is unrecoverable.
Eleven kings used it, and one of them made it famous. Ramesses II took the throne in his twenties and held it for about sixty-six years, long enough to outlive most of his own children. He fought the Hittites to a standstill at Kadesh in 1274 BC and then had the battle carved on temple walls as a personal triumph; fifteen years later he signed a treaty with Hattusili III that survives in both an Egyptian temple version and an Akkadian tablet from the Hittite capital, making it the earliest international peace treaty known from both sides. He cut the temples at Abu Simbel out of a cliff, built the Ramesseum, and founded a delta capital, Pi-Ramesses. Ramesses III, of the following dynasty, was the last New Kingdom king with real power: he beat off the Sea Peoples, recorded it at Medinet Habu, and died in a palace conspiracy, a CT scan of his mummy in 2012 showing his throat had been cut.
The name today
This one has not entirely stopped. Ramses is used in modern Egypt, mostly by Coptic Christian families, and the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef, who founded the weaving centre at Harrania outside Cairo, is a real twentieth-century bearer. It is also everywhere in Cairo as a place name — Ramses Square and Ramses Station take their name from the colossus that stood there from 1955 until it was moved out to the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2006. Even so, it is uncommon: the ordinary Egyptian names for a boy are Ahmed, Mahmoud, Youssef, Sherif and, among Copts, Mina or Boutros.
Middle names for Ramses
The hissed ending rules out middles starting with s: Ramses Elliot, Ramses Michael, Ramses David, Ramses Antoine. The middle names guide lists the other consonant collisions to avoid.
Famous Ramseses
Ramesses II is the bearer everyone means, and his afterlife is unusual: Shelley's Ozymandias of 1818 was written about him, taking the Greek form of his throne name, and his mummy was flown to Paris in 1976 for conservation work at the Musée de l'Homme. Ramesses III holds Medinet Habu and the Sea Peoples reliefs. In the modern world, Ramses Wissa Wassef, 1911 to 1974, is the best-documented living-memory bearer.
Consider instead
Seti, his father, ran the same dynasty and left the finest painted tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Thutmose gives you the other great warrior-pharaoh name. Youssef trades the monument for a name in daily Egyptian use.