Excerpt from The Egyptian Obelisks, Vol. 4: To Which Is Added a Supplement to the First Three Parts, Which Form the First Volume IV. The obelisk at the Porta del Popolo, and that at the Trinita de' Monti, that before the Pantheon, and that in the Villa Mattei on the Coelian, all four bear the names of Rameses II., the king who was the greatest of all Egyptian conquerors and builders, who has left the most numerous monuments, and whose historical reign is the principal of those which are blended and confused together in the fabulous accounts of Sesostris. But the obelisk at the Porta del Popolo bears also the name of Seti, the father of Rameses II., who seems to have made at the opening of his reign two campaigns in Mesopotamia with such brilliant success as to have gained a re nown equal to that of any other Egyptian conqueror, though he was wounded in his second year, and lost his sight, so that his reign is marked as having lasted less than two years, while his son Rameses II. Reigned sixty-six years and some months. But the magnificent tomb of Seti, discovered by Belzoni, proves that though he may have been incapacitated from reigning, he really lived on after the apparent accession of his son, who seems to have put his father's name on no fresh monuments, but only on those which were already commenced when he lost his sight, and to have been too selfish to allow any other compensation for the loss of actual power, than that of continuing to increase the magnificence of his tomb, a monument hidden from the eyes of all contemporaries in the bowels of the rock. The inscription of the name of Seti on the obelisk at the Porta del Popolo must have been cut in b.c. 1487. V., VI., VII. The other three obelisks mentioned above as belong ing to the reign of Rameses II. After the blindness of his father, must have been erected at dates lying between the years 1486 and 1420 b.c. During this period it was that Ehud and Shamgar judged Israel; and during the same period, near its beginning, after Rameses II. Had in nine years overrun Western and Central Asia, certain colonists from Egypt, especially Danaus, the father of a line of Argive kings, settled in Greece. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.