The Discovery Channel program “Rameses: Wrath of God or Wrath of Man?” showed the discovery of the tomb of the eldest son of Pharaoh Rameses II, Amon-her-khepeshef. The program showed the opening of the tomb and how the body appeared in situ: a mere skeleton, like any other grave. One would expect that Egyptian royalty got the mummy treatment. Especially the eldest son of the greatest pharaoh of all time. Why he wasn’t mummified was not brought up in the program, but it had me wondering. The archaeologist Kent Weeks was quoted as saying the tomb where he was found “broke all the rules of tomb design.”
As for the “murder mystery” of the Discovery Channel show–The program’s hypothesis was that the 10th Plague of Egypt was a Bible writer’s metaphor for a slave revolt in which the Hebrews lured the Egyptian chariots into a marsh called the Reed Sea (yam suf), where the chariots could not maneuver, and the armed escapees massacred the Egyptians, including the commander Amon-her-khepeshef. The back of his skull was bashed in. The show had an actor playing Moses smiting the pharaoh’s son with the hilt of a sword.
They kept saying that speculation has often identified Rameses II as the one drowned in Exodus, but didn’t say why anyone made this identification.
Other speculation identified this pharaoh as Rameses’s successor Menkaure. I read about this years ago, that some pious archaeologists unwrapping Menkaure’s mummy found salt deposits on his skin and thought aha! obviously here’s someone who drowned in seawater. But the Dicovery Channel program mentioned that theory and debunked it: the salt-looking deposits on Menkaure are natron, a mineral mined in Egypt and used to desiccate mummies as part of the normal mummification process.
I also remember reading about his autopsy, where they found calcification of his heart tissues and that was another aha! as the pious researchers remembered the Bible verse: "“And the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh…” This was left out of the program but I really don’t see how anyone besides a Biblical literalist could be expected to take it seriously.
Another theory about Moses is that he was of Egyptian birth, not Semitic, and that monotheism of the Jewish religion was taught to the Israelites by Moses as a survival of Akhenaten’s disgraced religion. The show dramatized this theory by showing a clean-shaven Egyptian “Moses” leading a congegation of Hebrews chanting “A-ten! A-ten! A-ten!” as though they were at a friggin’ football pep rally, for crying out loud. Not having any idea of what an Aten worship service might have actually been like, the poverty of the Discovery Channel writers’ imagination to make up something plausible is embarrassing.
But one interesting thing they showed was a recent archaeological discovery that the Aten religion actually did survive the death of Akhenaten by about a century. Some priest in Lower Egypt, a refugee from the ruins of el-Amarna, had carved in an out-of-the-way temple an Aten glyph. Based on this, they felt they had some concrete evidence for the possibility that Atenic monotheism survived underground into Moses’s time and that Moses taught it to the Hebrews and then led the Exodus to escape persecution-- because the priests of Amun really had a big grudge against Akhenaten for displacing them from power, and were determined to wipe out the last trace of his religious reforms with a vengeance.
This theory is the basis for the book The Moses Mystery by Gary Greenberg, president of the Biblical Archaeology Society of New York. Greenberg argues that the dating of the Biblical patriarchs in Genesis was copied from the Egyptian dynasties, and he crunches the numbers to prove it. He argues that the whole Jewish religion was copied from Egypt. However, he got no mention in the Discovery Channel program.
Anyway, what about the failure to mummify the son of Rameses II? This was surprising to me. Was I mistaken to assume that Egyptian royalty always got mummified?
Closest thing they had to proof was the only mention of Hebrews they could find (Charlie Sennet was doing investigative reporting) in any of the recorded history of the pharaohs. They said the exodus would never have been recorded by Rameses, because pharaohs didn’t record things that made them look bad.
There was a mention in what looked like some sort of monument to the pharaoh after Rameses (and I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten his name) about a defeat of the Hebrews that took place 5 years into his reign. Somehow (based on what they could determine about Rameses) they figured his reign started 35 years after the exodus, which means the battle with the Hebrews would have coincided with the end of the Biblical story of the Hebrews wandering the desert for 40 years.
The show didn’t present the story as either proving or disproving the Bible. It was more a case of here’s what the Bible says, here’s what we can tell from historical records, and this is one possible theory to reconcile the two.
I thought the show was interesting. The linking of Moses to the Egyptian montheistic religion, and the possibility of it being carried forward and becoming Judaism (considering Moses is the one credited with writing the Torah) was intriguing.
Now I need to go get The Moses Mystery (thanks Jomo). I guess the concept shouldn’t be too hard to believe, considering what happened with the Greeks and the Romans, but the possibility that the basis for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam could have been borrowed from ancient Egyptian disgraced religion, well, seems to me like it should be getting more discussion than what I’ve heard (which is nothing until now).
I haven’t seen the Discovery Channel show in question, but Weeks’ investigations of KV5 (this is part of his excellent Theban Mapping Project website) have conclusively convinced everybody, via the inscriptions and the like, that the tomb originally contained all (or at least most) of Rameses II’s sons.
This is much, much more speculative. Simply as one of the greatest pharaohs and being of a plausiblish date, it’s inevitable that much speculation has centered on Rameses II. But it’s worth noting that in his (excellent) 1998 book on the project, The Lost Tomb, Weeks was very, very cagey about a link to the Bible. He discusses how Rameses has in the past been linked to the pharaoh of Exodus on much those grounds, but it’s pretty clear that, as an archaeologist, he doesn’t give much credence to any possible connection. Though he is prepared to consider the speculation.
As for the OP, back in 1998 Weeks wasn’t prepared to identify any body as Anum-her-khepeshef. What’s changed?
Menkaure. The Menkaure Stele wasn’t just discovered by the Discovery Channel; it’s been famous among Biblical archaeologists for many years. You can’t pick up any text of Biblical archaeology without finding mention of it, since it’s one of the few concrete pieces of evidence to corroborate, even in a vague way, any of the stories from the Pentateuch.
The show mentioned at least two or three times — they repeated themselves a lot, just before and after each of the commercial breaks, as though having scant faith in the viewers’ memory or attention spans — that the dating of Exodus to the reign of Rameses II has been called into question. But they didn’t actually state why it was in doubt. Only that Rameses was in his eighties and too old to lead a chariot charge, and besides, it would be beneath the dignity of a lofty pharaoh to go chasing escaped slaves. That task (so the program speculated) would likely fall to his son, as the likely commander of the army.
All this to put Amon-her-khepeshef in the marshes where he could get beaned by a warrior Moses. They started from the fact that the back of his skull was bashed in and concocted a scenario to blend that with something resembling the Exodus story.
They had experts in craniometry making precise measurements of both skulls: the skull from the KV5 tomb and that of Rameses’s mummy (based on computer imaging of the latter, of course). These experts concluded there was a close family resemblance between the 3 skulls from the tomb and the skull of Rameses. Then they had a digital computer face reconstruction expert make computer images of both heads. Based on the resemblance, it seemed to satisfy Weeks that they skull they found really was the son of Rameses, as the inscription on the tomb wall said it was.
So how come bodies buried in the royal tomb weren’t mummified? I know ordinary commoners in Egypt weren’t mummified; the process was too expensive and elaborate. It was reserved for royalty and nobles. So it was surprising that the son of the most powerful, longest-reigning pharaoh wasn’t mummified. Unless I’m mistaken and he was mummified, but decayed anyway because the mummification somehow failed over time?
Because the Bible said the Pharoah chased the Hebrews to the Red Sea. The show said that Rameses would have been in his 60s, and by this time had ruled so long that he would have been elevated to god status, so it would have been beneath Rameses, and physically difficult, for him to chase the slaves himself.
The theory was that his son was sort of an “acting Pharoah”, and would have been commander of the army, so if anyone chased Moses and the slaves, it was the son.
Then they brought out the idea of “Red Sea” being a mistranslation of “sea of reeds”. They showed a marshy area full of reeds and explained how people on foot could have crossed it, but chariots would have gotten bogged down and stuck.
Then they suggested that maybe the slaves hadn’t been the unarmed, helpless people they have been portrayed as, and they actually attacked the Egyptians. Which led to the theory that Rameses’ son was actually killed in battle, possibly by Moses himself, by a blow to the head (the skull had a hole in it that suggested death was in this manner).
Then they wrapped it all up in a neat little package by explaining how the words of the Bible could have been metaphor for what they theorized happening. The tenth plague was a metaphor for Moses killing the son, the Egyptians dying in the Red Sea being a metaphor for the battle - things like that.
All in all, it was all speculation, and they admitted there would never be any real proof of what happened, but it was an interesting theory.
Even assuming that that body was prince, remember, KV5 had been looted by grave robbers. So, is it possible that he was mummified, and then the mummification was later destroyed?
I wanted to pit this show. It mixed up myth, evidence, conjecture and pure fantasy so completely it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. Archaeological evidence tends to point to the Israelites having come out of Canaan, not Egypt anyway and Moses to be a mythological figure, which make the whole theory of theirs pretty absurd, but whatever. Wouldn’t want to irritate the believers by pointing that out. A nice, completely confusing mix of science and religion which implied that the former supported the latter, which it doesn’t.
As for the OP, my take on why he wasn’t mummified was because he wasn’t his son.
As for the pharoh of the Exodus, if he did drown in the Red Sea (or some other body of water that might be referred to as a “sea,” then I’d think that he probably wouldn’t have a tomb at all. His body would be been part of a giant all-you-can-eat buffet for the local aquatic life. Especially if he had been wearing some kind of armor.
I know nothing about this particular subject, but as the previous post mentioned, if the body had to be transported some distance under difficult conditions, and possibly was already damaged severely in some way, perhaps there wasn’t much left to be mummified.
You thought their theory ended up supporting the religion?
I guess I thought the exact opposite. I think the theory attempts to explain events in the Bible, but undermines the religions of the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam completely by suggesting Moses lifted everything from the Egyptian monotheistic religion.
Unless there’s something to indicate that the writings attributed to Moses were more a continuation of the Egyptian religion, in which case it may not undermine, but it would certainly change the perceptions of, his work.
The Valley of the Kings is one of the dryest places on earth.
Still, every few decades, it does get some rain.
Every few centuries, it even gets flash floods.
One of the reasons it took so long to excavate is that they had to dig through the flood debris.
If I understood the program correctly, Amon-her-khepeshet’s remains were found fairly close to the entrance. So, anytime the tomb got flooded, the mummy would have been drenched. So it’s not surprising that the soft tissues rotted away.
In the interest of full disclosure, I missed the beginning and end of this show (I got fed up), so maybe there was a surprise ending I missed. Also, I don’t want to get this moved to GD or Cafe Society, but, briefly, I do take your point, but overall I thought the show served more to make the biblical story more naturalistic and palatable for a modern audience than to seriously examine the archaeological evidence of what actually happened. It felt like the goal was to find ways that the biblical story - no matter how unlikely - might be true in some * sense. I don’t think it seriously threatened Abrahamic religious belief by bringing in Atenism. If you’re a believer you could easily take that as - here was a Pharaoh who had an inkling of what God really was.
To make this post more relevant to the OP the upshot for me was was you had to take most of their suggestions (including the possibility or probability that this was the son of Ramses) with a grain of salt.
*reminded me of a bible study leader I once heard who insisted on the literal truth of the bible, except where a passage was problematic or contradictory, in which case said passage was more “symbolic” but still “literally true.” It’s a fascinating exercise in which everything is always true, but sometimes you just have to be creative in finding the ways in which it is true. He helped his audience get over rough patches in the bible that way without taxing their faith.