The Pharaoh Murdered By His Own Harem

Ramesses III was the last truly great pharaoh of Egypt. He ruled from about 1186 to 1155 BC, fought off the mysterious Sea Peoples who were tearing the Mediterranean apart, and held his kingdom together through invasion, drought and economic collapse. His reign was so strained that his own tomb workers staged the first recorded labour strike in human history, downing tools because their wages hadn’t been paid. In the end, what killed him wasn’t a foreign army. It was the women of his own household.

THE HORROR Like other pharaohs, Ramesses III had a principal wife and a harem of secondary wives, living together with their children and servants inside the palace. Between them they gave him perhaps a hundred children — and that made the harem a nest of dynastic ambition, because every one of those mothers wanted her son on the throne.

One of them decided to make it happen. Her name was Tiye. Ramesses had already named his heir — a son by a more senior wife. Tiye wanted her own son, Prince Pentawere, to be pharaoh instead. So she began recruiting.

What she built was staggering. Tiye pulled in more than forty conspirators: other harem women, the chief of the harem chamber, treasury officials, butlers, a royal scribe, army commanders, and — in a detail that tells you exactly what world we’re in — court magicians, who were to use wax figurines and spells to get the assassins past the royal bodyguard. The plan was to kill the pharaoh and his heir, incite rebellion across Egypt, and crown Pentawere in the chaos.

Then, at some point around 1155 BC, they came for him.

And here’s what’s remarkable: we’ve known about all of this for two centuries. In the 1820s, an eighteen‑foot papyrus scroll was bought in a market. It’s now known as the Judicial Papyrus of Turin, and it is the actual court record of the treason trial that followed — the names of the accused, the charges, the confessions, the verdicts. The chief of the harem chamber confessed to rallying the women. A scribe admitted forging royal seals. Punishments were brutal and precisely graded by rank: the ringleaders, including Pentawere, were condemned to take their own lives; others were beheaded, impaled, or had their noses and ears cut off. In a detail almost too good to be true, some of the judges appointed to try the case were themselves caught partying with the accused women — and punished for it.

But the papyrus never answered the one question that mattered. Did the assassination actually work?

The document is maddening. It describes Ramesses III convening the court that tried the plotters — as though he survived. But it also calls him “the Great God”, a title only ever used for a pharaoh who was already dead. Scholars argued for more than a century. Maybe he was wounded and lived just long enough to appoint the judges. Maybe his son Ramesses IV ran the trial and quietly wrote his dead father into it. And the mummy, at first, gave nothing away. The X‑rays taken in the 20th century showed no obvious injury at all. Some historians began to conclude the plot had failed — a footnote, a minor wife’s fantasy.

THE MODERN RELIC Then, in 2012, an international team put Ramesses III’s mummy through a CT scanner and published the results.

They found it almost immediately. Hidden beneath a thick collar of linen wrappings at the pharaoh’s throat was a wound seven centimetres wide, cut so deep it reached the vertebrae in his neck — slicing through his windpipe, his arteries, and every soft tissue at the front of his throat, the cut ends of the trachea pulled apart by several centimetres. It was a killing blow. He would have died in seconds.

The plot had worked. After three thousand years, the murder was confirmed.

And then it got darker. The scans showed that the pharaoh’s big toe had been hacked off — a wound with no sign of healing, meaning it happened at the moment of death. Crucially, that injury was made by a different weapon than the throat cut: a heavier blade, like an axe or sword, not a knife. Which means Ramesses III wasn’t killed by a lone assassin. He was attacked by at least two, simultaneously — one coming at him from the front with a heavy blade, another behind him with a knife at his throat. He was surrounded, and cut down in a coordinated strike.

The most human detail is what his embalmers did next. They tried to mend him. They packed his throat wound and covered it with an amulet of Horus — the god of healing — as if trying to repair the king in the afterlife. They fashioned him a false toe out of linen so he would be whole again. And they poured such heavy resin over the wrappings that when nineteenth‑century researchers tried to unwrap the mummy’s feet and neck, they couldn’t get through it. That was almost certainly deliberate: the embalmers were hiding the secret of how their king died, and they succeeded for three thousand years.

There is one last relic, and it’s the eeriest object in Egyptology. For over a century, a body found in the same cache was known only as “Unknown Man E” — the Screaming Mummy. He’d been buried in disgrace: wrapped in a ritually impure goat skin, not properly mummified, his hands and feet bound, his face frozen in a contorted, agonised scream. Later analysis showed he shared Ramesses III’s paternal line. He was the pharaoh’s son. Almost every expert now believes he is Pentawere — condemned by the court, denied a proper burial, and buried in a way designed to destroy his soul for eternity. His lungs were found overinflated, consistent with the death the court records say he was forced into.

You can see all of it. Ramesses III lies in the Royal Mummies Hall at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo. The Screaming Mummy is in Cairo too. The Judicial Papyrus of Turin sits in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. And the pharaoh’s own mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, on the west bank at Luxor, still stands, its walls carved with his triumphs — a monument built by a king who had no idea his wife was already counting the days.

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