In 1226 BCE, his sixty-seventh year of rule, the long life of Ramesses II finally ended. We explore his final decades, the difficult life revealed by his mummy, his ascent to status of “living god,” and the aftermath of his reign.
Music: Luke Chaos.
Prologue
In 1226 BCE, mid-November, a royal barge arrived in Waset (modern Luxor). The ship sailed upriver, its great sails unfurled to catch the breeze, and rowers adding momentum.
Soon, the ship turned to starboard, heading west. It entered a canal and cruised, slowly, along the way. Soon, the ship docked at the quay before a grand temple pylon. Labourers, hauling on ropes, drew the ship alongside the stone walkway. Tying up, the vessel arrived at its final destination; the temple that we call the Ramesseum.[1]
A crowd, gathered in the temple’s courtyard, watched as priests disembarked the great ship. Burning incense, they raised their voices in hymns of prayer. Alongside, priestesses shook their sistrum-rattles and joined the singing. It was a melancholy song.
From the deck, porters brought forth a bed. Atop lay a white parcel. A body, wrapped in fine linen, and glittering with gold. It was the mummy of Egypt’s pharaoh.
Ramesses II was dead.
The Staff of Old Age
Four months earlier, Ramesses began his sixty-seventh year on the throne.[2] By any metric, he was now one (maybe the) longest-reigning monarchs in Egyptian history. For two and half generations, people had been born, lived, and died, under a single monarch. Politically, and religiously, it was an era of continuity not seen in centuries.
Beyond Egypt, other kingdoms could only dream of such enduring stability.[3] The Hittites, for example, had seen three rulers die in the span of Ramesses’ reign.[4] The Assyrians had lost two monarchs in the same time.[5] The Babylonians were onto their sixth king, five rulers having reigned and died in the time of Ramesses.[6] In the Nile Valley, generations had lived in quiet stability.
That continuity was carefully managed, even at the end. In the last decade of his reign, we hear very little of Ramesses himself. The king is largely a ceremonial figure, the god-ruler, ensconced in his palace.[7] In the public eye, monuments put his son front and centre. It seems that Merneptah, the crown prince, directed government policy for his aging father.[8] That wasn’t unusual or even bad. In fact, the Egyptians had a phrase for this very phenomenon. They called it the mdw-iAwi, or “staff of old age.”[9] It was an epithet, not a specific job. It recognised those times when an office-holder, too old to perform his duties, would delegate to his son or heir. An ancient wisdom text, called the Maxims of Ptahhotep, describes the idea:
“My lord and master… Permit your humble servant to appoint a staff of old age. Let my son … succeed to my position (job). To that end I will instruct him in… the wisdom of those who lived in earlier ages, the ones who hearkened to the gods. So may the same be done for you…”[10]
Merneptah filled this role for Ramesses, in the last years of the royal life. Whether he showed such deference, we can only guess; but you get the idea. For more than a decade, he was the support to his father; and in the public realm, Merneptah provided a face to royal power and a promise of continuity when the day came.
Unfortunately, on the personal front, the last years of Ramesses’ life were painful. Studies of his mummy, by X-Ray and CT-scans, show that he suffered multiple ailments towards the end.[13] The King’s teeth are badly worn, probably from grit in his bread. His gums were inflamed, and chewing was an uncomfortable experience at best. Movement became an issue, as arthritis attacked his limbs; his spine developed a hump, and scoliosis bent him slightly to the right. Eventually, these back issues caused him to walk bent over, perhaps hobbling with a staff. The King suffered from atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) which restricted blood flow and caused cold feet and hands. The winter months must have been particularly cruel.
Remainder of the transcript, as well as a PDF booklet of images and notes, available on Patreon.
[1] For an introduction to this temple see Wilkinson, R. H. (2000). The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt, 182—186. For a detailed description see Leblanc, C. (2019). Ramsès II et le Ramesseum: De la splendeur au déclin d’un temple de millions d’années.
[2] For the length of reign see E. Hornung, Ancient Egyptian Chronology, 211—212 with references; Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions, VIII, 70—73.
[3] Kitchen, K. A. (1982). Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt, 224.
[4] Bryce, T. (2005). The Kingdom of the Hittites (2nd ed.).
[5] Chen, F. (2020). Study on the Synchronistic King list from Ashur, Appendix I.
[6] Paulus, S. (2022). Kassite Babylonia. In K. Radner, N. Moeller, & D. T. Potts (Eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (pp. 801–868); see also Glassner, J.-J. (2004). Mesopotamian Chronicles.
[7] Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant, 206—207.
[8] Brand, Ultimate Pharaoh, 437—439.
[9] Shehab El-Din, T. (1997). The title , “mdw jAwj”: “the staff of old age” “’ukkāza aš-šayḫuḫa.” Discussions in Egyptology, 37, 59–64. Available at Academia.edu.
[10] Tobin, V.A. (2003), “The Maxims of Ptahhotep,” in W.K. Simpson (ed.) The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 129—148.
[11] Shehab el-Din, “The Staff of Old Age,” 62. Available at Academia.edu.
[12] Kontopoulos, “Getting old in Ancient Egypt,” 221, cf. Urk. IV, 1408—1413.
[13] The following description is based on the following works: Balout, L. et al. (1985). La momie de Ramsès: Contribution scientifique à l’Egyptologie; Hawass, Z. A., & Saleem, S. N. (2016). Scanning the Pharaohs: CT Imaging in the New Kingdom Royal Mummies, 160—166, 250; Harris, J. E., & Weeks, K. R. (1973). X-Raying the Pharaohs, 153—156.
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Shehab El-Din, T. (1997). The title, “mdw jAwj”: “the staff of old age” “ ‘ukkāza aš-šayḫuḫa.” Discussions in Egyptology, 37, 59–64. Academia.edu.
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