Ashmolean The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin’s teaching collection at Oxford

The engraving shows an expansive scene filled with many incidents, broadly arranged in two registers. On the top, a pharaoh in a chariot attacks a city situated in a river, surrounded by more chariots and soldiers; on the bottom, from the left, an army of chariots and footsoldiers is drawn up in ranks, and then shown encamped; an enthroned pharaoh is shown is shown receiving suppliants; and a battle occurs on the right edge. The event is the Battle of Qadesh; the pharaoh is Ramesses II (c.1187-c.1156 BC), and the relief occupies an entire wall of the Great Hall of the Temple at Abu Simbel (Porter & Moss, "Topographical Bibliography", 2nd ed, Oxford (Clarendon Press & Griffith Institute): 1960-1999, vol. VII, pp. 103-104).

The print is taken from the first volume of plates from Ippolito Rosellini's "Monumenti dell' Egitto e della Nubia", published in 1832. It was first catalogued by Ruskin in the "Catalogue of Examples" of 1870, as no. 103 in the Standard Series; in the 1872 catalogue of the Standard and Reference Series, it was renumbered as no. 178 in the Reference Series. It was placed alongside other plates from Rosellini, including a detail of the scene of Ramesses receiving supplicants at no. 176.

In a note in "The Ethics of the Dust", explaining how the individual aspects of the Egyptian deities were still largely unknown, Ruskin was somewhat sceptical of Rosellini's qualities: 'for the full titles and utterances of the gods, Rosellini is as yet the only - and I believe, still a very questionable - authority' (Ethics of the Dust, note III = XVIII.363). In his entry below nos 176-180 in the Reference Series, Ruskin again questioned Rosellini's accuracy, noting that the colours were sometimes conjectural, 'slight traces of the original pigments, and those changed by time, being interpreted often too arbitrarily' (Standard and Reference Series catalogue, p. 22).