Almost 3200 years ago, Pharaoh Ramses III died at the hands of conspirators. The criminals were quickly found, tried and punished according to all the ancient Egyptian rules. The case appears to be closed.
For three thousand years, investigative materials have been gathering dust in the archive of world history, and the pharaoh led an ordinary afterlife. But in the middle of the 19th century, Ramses III came to the attention of representatives of a new science, Egyptology. Having learned to read ancient hieroglyphs, scientists began to translate everything with enthusiasm.
In 1865, a translation of the Turin Legal Papyrus was published. It turned out that this very entertaining document of the 12th century BC contains the materials of the trial of the conspirators, the names of the defendants and the sentence passed by the court. Contrary to the logic of detective investigations, the end of the Ramses III case became known to scientists even before the actual corpse of the murdered was found.
The mummy of Ramses III was found pretty quickly, in 1881, just 15 years after the publication of the translation of the Turin papyrus. Pharaoh rested in Deir el-Bahri, in the tomb DB (TT) -320, in the company of fifty other kings, queens, princes and princesses, priests and other representatives of the nobility - the tomb turned out to be a hiding place, where dozens of mummies were transferred long ago in an attempt to protect the noble remains from the ubiquitous robbers. (By the way, in 1998-2005, a joint Russian-German archaeological expedition was engaged in a repeated study of the TT-320 tomb, the results of this work are set out in the book "The Tsar's Cache and the History of a Mysterious Burial")
Back in the 1880s, Egyptologists, who knew the circumstances of the death of Ramses III, tried to examine the body, but could not unclothe the mummy - the burial bandages were so thickly soaked in resin that scientists considered it a mistake of the embalmers. The mummy was sent for storage to the Cairo Egyptian Museum, and Ramses III was again forgotten for a while.
History was waiting for the right person and the right means to meet. Since 2002, the ubiquitous and indefatigable "Egyptian Indiana Jones" Zahi Hawass has masterfully harnessed the power of modern science and media, once again turning Egyptology into a fascinating detective story and a source of world sensations.
In the 2000s, Hawass began several projects to research royal mummies. Thus, the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut was discovered and the real cause of Tutankhamun's death was revealed. Discoveries excite the minds of ordinary people and scientists to this day. Recently "Vesti. Nauka" talked about the discovery of secret rooms in the tomb of Tutankhamun ("Whose mummy is this? Why paleogenetics is an inexact science" and "Investigation of secret rooms in the tomb of Tutankhamun: all the details and background").
Promotional video:
The mummies from the tsar's cache TT-320 did not escape another forensic examination. But before Ramses III, scientists took up another man, whose remains intrigued Egyptologists since the discovery of the body in 1886. It is about the mummy of "Unknown Man E", better known by the eerie nickname "Screaming Mummy".
The results of the study, published in 2008, led scientists and the pseudo-scientific public to recall the assassination of Ramses III and the trial of the conspirators, described in the Turin Legal Papyrus. Hawass put forward a reasonable assumption that the "Screaming Mummy" is the prince Pentaur, the son of Ramses III, because of whom all this mess with conspiracy and murder, which remained in history as a "harem conspiracy", was brewed. Then one of the younger wives of Ramses, Tiye (Teye), set out to kill her husband and enthroned her son, bypassing the heir indicated by the Pharaoh. The conspiracy was only half successful: the pharaoh was killed, but the intruders were caught, tried and sentenced to death under Ramses IV, who legally inherited the throne of his father.
Pentaur's fate is found in the third of five long lists of convicts listed in the Turin papyrus: "… Pentaur, who was called by a different name. He was brought in because of a conspiracy he made with Tye, his mother, when she made speeches with women of the harem to make a rebellion against his lord. He was presented before the butlers to question him. They found him guilty. They left him in place. (cited by I. M. Lurie, "Essays on Ancient Egyptian Law of the 16th - 10th centuries BC")
From this record it follows that Pentaur is not the real name of the prince ("… who was called by a different name"), and that by the court's verdict he was most likely forced to commit suicide.
From the very beginning, the attention of scientists was attracted by an unusual method of mummification: a young man of about twenty was buried contrary to all the rules, as if he had committed a terrible crime and was left without hope for a decent afterlife. His internal organs were not removed, moisture was not completely removed from the body, embalming resins were poured directly into the throat of the corpse, to complete the punishment, the body was wrapped in an unclean, according to Egyptian beliefs, goatskin and left forever nameless. And yet it was a non-standard, but a mummy - from which the researchers concluded that the remains did not belong to an ordinary criminal, with whose body no one would stand on ceremony, but to a high-born person punished for a terrible atrocity.
The expression of excruciating agony, frozen on the face of the "Screaming Mummy", scientists explained in a very prosaic way: the point is not in the dying sufferings of Pentaura, but in the posthumous behavior of the mummies, whose heads are thrown back over time.
It remained to carry out genetic tests to confirm the hypothesis of the relationship between Ramses III and "Unknown Man E". Geneticists have confirmed that, with a high degree of probability, "Unknown Man E" is the son of Rameses III. Well, the ancient Egyptians knew a lot about punishments: for three thousand years, father and son were forced to endure each other's company.
They were even examined together. In 2012, the medical journal The BMJ published the results of anthropological, forensic, radiological and genetic studies of the mummies of Ramses III and Pentaura, father and son.
The study by computed tomography (CT) showed how the prince was forced to commit suicide: the folds of skin on Pentaur's neck correspond to the picture of death by strangulation.
The tomograph also managed to penetrate the funeral bandages of the mummy of Ramses III (it is still impossible to remove them), revealing the details of the murder 3200 years ago. Scientists for the first time received confirmation of the story set forth in the Turin Legal Papyrus - before it was not entirely clear whether the pharaoh died as a result of a conspiracy and how exactly this happened.
“A wide and deep wound on the neck was made with a sharp knife or other sharp blade. The incision damaged the trachea, esophagus, and large blood vessels. Death was instantaneous,”the scientists dryly reported in a scientific article published in The BMJ.
In the process of mummification, they took special care of the terrible wound: the embalmers covered the pharaoh's neck with a multi-layered “scarf” made of strips of fabric, and put a wadget inside the wound - an “eye of Horus” amulet, which, according to beliefs, had healing power even after death.
All these details became known back in 2012. Why was Ramses III remembered again in March 2016? Recently, fresh information about a long-standing murder became known, which scientists literally sucked from the finger. Pharaoh's big toe.
In February 2016, the results of many years of research on royal mummies were released in the form of the book Scanning the Pharaohs: CT Imaging of the New Kingdom Royal Mummies. By Zahi Hawass and Sahar Salem, a radiologist at the University of Cairo.
From this book, journalists learned new heartbreaking details of the murder of Ramses III. It turned out that there were at least two killers. This conclusion was made by Sahar Salem: a CT scan showed that the pharaoh's big toe was cut off by a weapon such as an ax or a sword. Since there were no signs of the wound healing, this means that it was inflicted just before the death of the pharaoh.
“The leg wound is anatomically different from the previously discovered wound on the victim's neck. The shape of the shattered toe bones indicates that the leg wound and the neck wound were inflicted by different weapons. Consequently, one of the assassins, armed with an ax or a sword, attacked the pharaoh from the front, while the second assassin, armed with a dagger or knife, attacked from behind. Both killers acted simultaneously,”Sahar Salem said in a letter to Live Science.
The priests worked hard to hide the unaesthetic lack of a thumb, so necessary in the afterlife. Back in the 1880s, Egyptologists noticed an excessive amount of resin soaked in the pharaoh's funeral bandages. “It seems to me that the embalmers did this on purpose to disguise a big secret: a missing toe,” says Salem.
Such discoveries say a lot about human nature, the treachery of fate, about the achievements of modern science and the effectiveness of the judicial system of Ancient Egypt (emphasize the necessary). The conspiracy to assassinate the ruler is an integral part of world history, the Egyptians were not even the first to start. Russia also did not stand aside. It is this course of events - a conspiracy, murder, cruel punishment and a list of murderers that have survived for centuries - very much resembles an episode from Russian history: the murder of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky in 1174 and the list of his murderers found in December 2015, scrawled on the wall of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in Pereslavl-Zalessky (details in our material "Less than 900 years: a complete list of the murderers of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky was found").