Rameses IV was succeeded by his son, who became Rameses V (11471143 BC) upon his accession. A major crime and corruption scandal among the priesthood at Elephantine, which had in fact evolved during the reign of his father, is the main event known from his reign, although he also continued the latter’s mining activities in Timna and Sinai. After four years, Rameses V died of smallpox at a young age.
The next king, Rameses VI (1143-1136 bc), was a younger son of Rameses III. He usurped the royal tomb and mortuary temple begun by his nephew, whose burial had therefore to be delayed until an alternative tomb had been found for him in Rameses Vi’s year 2. It has, therefore, been concluded by some researchers that the succession was accompanied by civil unrest, especially as there are some entries in a necropolis journal that state that the workmen of Deir el-Medina, whose numbers were soon afterwards reduced to sixty again, stayed at home ‘for fear of the enemy’. This does not seem very probable, however, although the mere fact that most officials remained in office from one reign to the next is hardly enough proof to the contrary, for the same had been the case at the end of the i8th and 19th Dynasties, when there had certainly been troubles. The ‘enemy’ mentioned in the journal is more likely to have been a group of Libyans, who continued to be a nuisance in the area. Rameses VI reigned for seven years; he is the last king whose name is attested in Sinai. During the seven-year reign of Rameses VII (1136-1129 bc), grain prices soared to their highest level, after which they gradually came down again. His successor Rameses VIII was probably yet another son of Rameses III, which might explain why his reign was so brief.
The exact family background of the last three Ramessid rulers is unknown. The eighteen years or so of the reign of Rameses IX (11261108 BC) were marked by increasing instability. In regnal years 8-15 we regularly hear of Libyan nomads disturbing the peace in Thebes, and there were also strikes again. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that this period witnessed the first wave of tomb-robberies, known from a whole series of papyri that record the trials of the thieves who had been apprehended. However, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were not involved; in fact only one lyth-Dynasty royal burial in Dra Abu el-Naga and a number of private tombs were robbed, and various thefts from temples were also investigated. At the beginning of the reign, Ramesesnakht (the high priest of Amun mentioned above) had died; he was succeeded as high priest firstly by his son Nesamun, and then by the latter’s brother Amenhotep. In two reliefs at Karnak Amenhotep had himself depicted on the same scale as Rameses IX, a fair indication of the virtual equality that now appears to have existed between the king and the high priest of Amun. One of these scenes commemorates an event in year 10, when Rameses rewarded Amenhotep for his services to king and country with the traditional ‘gold of honour’. The many gifts bestowed upon him on this occasion must certainly have been very impressive, but their quantities are nevertheless a revealing illustration of the state of the economy, or at least of the king’s wealth. Among the gifts received by Amenhotep were 2 hin of a costly ointment; some 200 years earlier, during the reign of Horemheb, one of Maya’s subordinates, a mere scribe of the treasury, had contributed 4 hin of the same ointment to the burial goods of his master.
Almost nothing is known about the reign of Rameses X, which seems to have lasted for nine years. Rameses XI (1099-1069 bc), on the other hand, ruled for thirty years, although certainly during the last ten years the geographical extent of his power was virtually reduced to Lower Egypt (that is, the Delta). During his reign, the crisis that had gripped the Theban area in the previous decades deepened even firrther: persistent trouble with Libyan gangs preventing the workmen on the west bank from going to work, famine (the ‘year of the hyenas’), further tomb robberies and thefts from temples and palaces, and even civil war. At some point, in or before year 12, Panehsy, the viceroy of Nubia, appeared in Thebes with Nubian troops to restore law and order, perhaps at the request of Rameses XI himself In order to feed his men in a city that was already suffering from economic malaise, he was given, or perhaps usurped, the office of‘overseer of the granaries’. This must have brought him into conflict with Amenhotep, the high priest of Amun, whose temple owned the bulk of the land and its produce. The conflict quickly escalated and during a period of eight or nine months (sometime between years 17 and 19) Panehsy and his troops actually besieged the high priest at Medinet Habu. Amenhotep then appealed to Rameses XI for help and this resulted in a civil war. Panehsy marched north, reaching at least as far as Hardai in Middle Egypt, which he ransacked, but probably actually pushing much further north, until he was eventually driven back by the king’s army, which was almost certainly led by a general called Piankh. Eventually Panehsy had to withdraw to Nubia, where trouble persisted for many years, and where he was eventually buried.
In Thebes, General Piankh took over the titles of Panehsy as well as styling himself vizier, and after the death of Amenhotep, who may or may not have survived Panehsy’s assault, he also became high priest of Amun, uniting the three highest offices of the country in one person. With Piankh’s military coup begins the period of the wehem mesut, the ‘renaissance’, a term that had also been used by kings at the beginning of the i2th and 19th Dynasties to indicate that the country had been ‘reborn’ after a period of chaos. In the Theban area documents were now dated in years of the ‘renaissance’ rather than regnal years of the king. Years i to 10 of the renaissance were identical with regnal years 19 to 28 of Rameses XI. After the death of Piankh, his son-in-law Herihor took over all his functions, and after the death of Rameses XI the former even assumed royal titles. In the north of the country Smendes (1069-1043 BC) mounted the throne, and with these two men the 21st Dynasty begins.
After Rameses III the Egyptians finally lost their provinces in Palestine and Syria, which after the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the disappearance of the Hittite empire had broken up into several small states. Problems in the north had been made worse by the gradual sanding-up of the harbour of Piramesse owing to the slow but inexorable eastward shift of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile. Nor did the kings of the 20th Dynasty any longer have the power and the resources to mount major expeditions to the gold mines in Nubia. Towards the end of the dynasty the treasury of the temple of Amun sent some small-scale expeditions to the Eastern Desert in search of gold and minerals, but the quantities with which they came back were small. During the years of the renaissance, Piankh and his successors, assisted by the descendants of the workmen of Deir el-Medina who were now living at Medinet Habu, began to tap a different source of gold and precious stones: the very same tombs in the Valley of the Kings that their fathers and grandfathers had carved and decorated, as well as many other tombs both royal and private in the Theban necropolis. Over the next century and later, the tombs were gradually despoiled of their gold and other valuables; eventually they would be emptied out completely, and even the mummies of the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom would be unwrapped and stripped of their precious amulets and other trappings and reburied together in an anonymous tomb in the Theban cliffs. By some strange irony only two royal mummies would escape this fate: that of Tutankhamun (in KV 62) and that of his father, Akhenaten, the ‘enemy of Akhetaten’ (in KV 55).
World History
