Ancient Egypt in Focus: A Hero Among Cowards: Ramses II and the Battle of Kadesh

Thursday, October 24 at 6-8 p.m.

A Hero among Cowards: Ramses II and the Battle of Kadesh

By Dr. Tara Prakash, Benson Harer Egyptology Scholar in Residence in the Department of History at CSUSB and Assistant Professor of Ancient Art at the College of Charleston.

During the Nineteenth Dynasty (ca. 1292-1191), King Ramses II tried to reestablish Egyptian control over the Syrian city of Kadesh, which the Hittites of Anatolia had conquered in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. He recorded the epic battle that he fought at Kadesh against the Hittite Empire and its allies in a series of reliefs, which he had carved onto temple walls throughout Egypt. These reliefs preserve multiple textual and pictorial accounts of Ramses’ struggle. In this lecture, I will consider how the Egyptians portrayed the Hittite king and his coalition in the Kadesh texts and images in order to shed light on both the Egyptian conception of foreigners and the purpose of these reliefs inside the Egyptian temple. 

Dr. Prakash received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and after holding postdoctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Johns Hopkins University, she joined us at CSUSB.  Her research focuses on issues of ethnicity and identity, foreign interactions, artistic agency, and the visualization of pain and emotion in ancient Egypt.  Her current book project is the first comprehensive study on the prisoner statues, a unique series of Egyptian statues that depict kneeling bound foreigners.