The mummy of Ramesses IIIBMJIn 1155 BC, Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses III faced a bloody demise. According to a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, his throat was slit by conspirators, and his son, Pentawere, may have led the charge. The study also revealed that Pentawere himself was then likely strangled.
Paleopathologist Albert Zink of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Italy and his colleagues inferred this new information on the basis of DNA samples and CT scans taken from two mummies—that of Ramesses III himself, and another of a unidentified young man that was found with him in his royal tomb near the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. In the scans of Ramesses III, the researchers identified a 2.7-inch-wide gash across his throat, just below the larynx—a wound that could have caused immediate death, forensic analysts concluded.
Historians had long suspected Ramesses’s demise to be the result of an assassination conspiracy. The Judicial Papyrus, an ancient document of the Egyptian courts, details four separate trials for potential conspirators, including one of Ramesses’s ...
