The aim of Professor Kenneth Kitchen’s magisterial Ramesside Inscriptions is simple—to make available the principal historical and biographical texts of the Ramesside age (c.1300–1070 bc) in a comprehensive, compact and accurate edition that should be comprehensive but handy to use. It does not, however, include purely literary, ritual and funerary texts.

The inscriptions in this volume span the full reign of Ramesses II (66+ years), and represent the main documentary evidence for the personal ambitions and achievements of this illustrious pharaoh and the principal members of his immediate family. The most celebrated texts in this corpus are the monumental inscriptions documenting Ramesses’ military exploits during the early years of his reign, together his famous peace treaty with the Hittites in year 21 and his twin marriage contracts. Other notable texts are the renowned series of ‘Rhetorical’ stelae from Pi-Ramesse and beyond, a variety of inscriptions attesting to the celebration of more than a dozen Royal Jubilee (‘Sed’) Festivals, and the famous ‘List of Princes’. A considerable portion of this volume is devoted to the abundance of inscriptions that bear witness to the instigation by the king of a monumental programme of building works both in Egypt’s major metropolitan centres and in strategic sites throughout his wider empire.

First published in twenty-four individual fascicles between 1969 and 1979 by B. H. Blackwell (Oxford), this volume is re-printed here for the first time in a single, handsome, book.