Fighting In Egypt And The Harem Conspiracy

Returning to Egypt for a moment, we find a picture similar to that characterizing sites elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Aegean, and yet different. The Egyptians had ended the thirteenth century BC on a relatively high note, having defeated the first wave of Sea Peoples during the reign of Merneptah, in 1207 BC. The twelfth century began calmly, under the rule of Seti II and then Queen Twosret, but by the time Ramses III came to the throne in 1184 BC, events were growing tumultuous.

In the fifth year of his rule, and again in his eleventh year, he fought major wars against the neighboring Libyans.130 In between, in his eighth year, he fought the battles against the Sea Peoples that we have been discussing here. And then, in 1155, after ruling for thirty-two years, he was apparently assassinated.

We are told the story of the assassination in a number of documents, the longest of which is the Turin Judicial Papyrus. It is thought that some of these documents might be connected with one another and may originally have been part of a single fifteenfoot-long papyrus scroll. All are concerned with the trial of his accused assailants, known to Egyptologists as the Harem Conspiracy.

The conspiracy seems to be unrelated to anything else going on in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time and was simply a plot hatched by a minor queen in the royal harem to have her son succeed Ramses III. There were as many as forty accused conspirators, both members of the harem and court officials, who were tried in four groups. A number of them were found guilty and received the death penalty; several were forced to commit suicide right in the court. The minor queen and her son were among those sentenced to death.

Although it is known that Ramses III died before the verdicts were reached in this case, it is not clear in these documents whether the plot had actually succeeded. But apparently it had, although this fact has only recently come to light.

Ramses III’s mummy has long been known. He had originally been buried in the Valley of the Kings in his own tomb (known as KV 11) but had later been moved by priests for safekeeping, along with a number of other royal mummies. These were all found in 1881, in the Deir el-Bahari cache near Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple.

In 2012, Egyptologists and forensic scientists conducted an autopsy of Ramses III’s body and reported in the British Medical Journal that his throat had been cut. The sharp knife that caused the wound had been thrust into his neck immediately under the larynx, all the way down to the cervical vertebra, cutting his trachea and severing all of the soft tissue in the area. Death was instantaneous. Subsequently, during the embalming process, a protective Horus-eye amulet had been placed in the wound, either for protection or for healing, though it was far too late to help the king in this life. In addition, a thick collar of linen was placed around his neck, in order to hide the stab wound (70 mm wide). It was only during the X-ray analysis that the scientists were able to see through the thick cloth and identify the injury that killed the king.

A second body, of a male aged between eighteen and twenty and known only as “Man E,” was found with Ramses III. Wrapped in a ritually impure goatskin and not properly mummified, the body may be that of the guilty prince, according to DNA tests which indicate that he was probably Ramses III’s son. The forensic evidence, including facial contortions and injuries on his throat, suggests that he was probably strangled.

With the death of Ramses III, the true glory of the Egyptian New Kingdom came to an end. There would be eight more pharaohs during the Twentieth Dynasty before it ended in 1070 BC, but none of them accomplished anything of merit. Of course, it would have been fairly remarkable had they done so, given the state of affairs elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, although the last king, Ramses XI, did send his emissary Wenamun to Byblos in order to purchase cedars of Lebanon, only to have him shipwrecked on Cyprus on the homeward voyage in about 1075 BC.

SUMMATION

Although it is clear that there were massive destructions in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century BC, it is far from clear who—or what—was responsible. Among the open questions is even the identity of the manufacturers of the pottery known as “Mycenaean IIIC1b,” which appears at many of these Eastern Mediterranean sites following the destructions of ca. 1200 BC, including Ras Ibn Hani and Ras Bassit near Ugarit.

This pottery, which was earlier seen as the product of displaced Mycenaeans who had fled to the east, following the destructions of their hometowns and cities on the Greek mainland, seems instead to have been produced in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean, most likely after importation of the real Aegean ware had ceased. As Annie Caubet, of the Louvre Museum, has said regarding the reoccupation of Ras Ibn Hani, near Ugarit: “Certainly, resettlement on the site in a stable and continuous way is undeniable. What remains to be proved is that the inhabitants were now a part of the Sea Peoples and not the local population which had returned after the troubles were over.”136 Other innovations observable in Cyprus and the Levant at this time, such as the use of ashlar masonry in architectural building techniques, and new funerary rituals and vase types,137 may indicate contact with the Aegean or even the presence of displaced Aegean individuals, but Aegean styles do not necessarily indicate Aegean people, so these could also be simply a manifestation of the globalization that was in place even during the tumultuous years that characterized the end of the Late Bronze Age.

As for the end itself, it may have taken much more than the simple depredations of the roving marauders recorded by the Egyptians—the “Sea Peoples,” as we call them now. So often fingered by earlier scholars as the sole culprits responsible for the end of civilization in this widespread area, they may have been as much the victims as the oppressors, as we shall see in the next chapter.