A team of scientists has shed light on one of the most abiding mysteries of ancient Egypt: what happened to Pharaoh Ramesses III?

Ramesses, who reigned from approximately 1186 BCE-1155 BCE, is regarded by Egyptologists as Egypt’s last great monarch. But the later years of his reign appear to have been a time of disarray. The increasingly penurious state found itself unable to pay the workmen who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which resulted in the first recorded strike in history.

Amidst this general turmoil, members of his court planned a coup to replace him with one of his sons, Prince Pentaweret. The details of the conspirators’ trial are preserved in three documents, the Judicial Papyrus of Turin, the Rollins Papyrus, and the Lee Papyrus. Thanks to these records, we know that the accused included a wide range of individuals, from royal women to palace officials. At some point during the course of the trial, some of the women seem to have tried to seduce the judges, who suffered the loss of their noses and ears as punishment for consorting with the accused. As for the hapless Prince Pentaweret, he was said to have committed suicide (probably in lieu of execution). We do not know what became of his mother, Queen Tiye, who appears to have been the driving force behind the plot.

But the biggest mystery of the whole affair is what happened to Ramesses III himself. The official records are silent as to his fate, though they imply that he died during the course of the trial. This led many scholars to wonder if the coup failed, or if it merely took a while for the king to die.

Now, thanks to the recent CT scans of the king’s mummy, we have the answer: his throat was slit. The wound was so severe that it went all the way down to the spine, severing the trachea, esophagus, and major blood vessels. The result would have been almost instantaneous death. Until now, the wound was overlooked because the neck retained its original bandaging. Interestingly, the CT scan also revealed that the embalmers placed an Eye of Horus amulet in the wound, perhaps to ensure that it healed in the afterlife.

“[The cut] might have been made by the embalmers but this is very unlikely,” said Dr. Albert Zink, a paleopathologist at the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Italy who took part in the investigation. “I’m not aware of any other examples of this.”

The researchers also made another surprising discovery: an unidentified male mummy found in an unmarked coffin is probably Prince Pentaweret. The body had not undergone the usual mummification process, and was found wrapped in a goat skin, which was considered ritually impure by the ancient Egyptians. Marks on his neck suggest that he might have been strangled, though the lack of fractures to the laryngeal skeleton make it impossible to say so with certainty.

Furthermore, genetic analysis indicated that Unknown Man E and Ramesses III were closely related. ”From our genetic analysis we could really prove the two were closely related. They share the same Y chromosome and 50% of their genetic material, which is typical of a father-son relationship,” said Dr. Zink.

Although the genetic data does not prove that Unknown Man E is in fact Pentaweret, his dishonorable burial would seem to be consistent with that of a condemned criminal. Burying him in an unmarked coffin without the usual mummification process was probably intended to deny him a posthumous existence in the afterlife.

A full report of the team’s findings can be found on the website of the British Medical Journal.

Image Courtesy : G. Elliot Smith [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Last month, a team of scientists from Italy and Germany found intact red blood cells, using nanotechnology, in the wounds of Ötzi the 5,300 year old “iceman” mummy.

“Up to now there had been uncertainty about how long blood could survive – let alone what human blood cells from the Chalcolithic period, the Copper Stone Age, might look like,” Albert Zink – who is a part of the team and Head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman European Academy Bozen-Bolzano (EURAC) – states in the EURAC news release.

Ötzi, the oldest European mummy, was discovered naturally preserved in a glacier at the Ötzal Alps on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991. The cause of his death has been a mystery. Considering the location, scientists deduced that he may have died from the cold, fatigue, and starvation.

However, other speculations express that he was murdered or had been a part of a ritual sacrifice. The bruises on his head indicate that he was hit on the head with a rock, there is an arrowhead wound on the back of his left shoulder, and a wound on the back of his right hand. Furthermore, he was found lying in a rather strange posture. It has been considered that Ötzi specifically died from the arrow wound, immediately.

According to the team’s research paper, head-authored by Merek Janko, “Blood can indicate the general health status of a[n] individual and it can be analyzed to detect pathological conditions or to provide valuable information in forensic crime scene investigations,” further providing more information about Ötzi, his state of health when he died, and the manner of his death.

Scientists in the past attempted to find blood cells before, in Ötzi’s aorta, but were unsuccessful. With his colleagues Janko and Robert Stark, both of whom work at the Center of Smart Interfaces at Darmstadt Technical University, Zink studied layers of tissue from the arrowhead wound and the right hand laceration with an atomic force microscope. Through scanning the tissue with a fine probe, the team created a three dimensional image, which showed the familiar torus shape of the red blood cell.

The team further confirmed their findings by conducting a follow-up study with a method that allows one to recognize molecules. They took a Raman spectroscopy sample of the tissue by illuminating it with a laser beam, and found that the shapes of the cells corresponded with those of the present day samples of human blood cells. In addition, whilst the team was examining the arrowhead wound, they found the tissue fibrin, a protein involved with blood clotting.

“Because fibrin is present in fresh wounds and then degrades, the theory that Ötzi died some days after he had been injured by the arrow, as had once been mooted, can no longer be upheld,” Zink says.

For more information about Ötzi, visit the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology’s webpage.

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