by Nancy Moses
I looked around at his parlor. It was clear from the floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with books and Egyptian trinkets that ancient Egypt had long been an abiding passion. “I’ve been acquiring the library for over thirty years,” he said. “You need a lot of books, especially since good Egyptological libraries are few and far between.”
“Why are so many people so fascinated with Egypt?” I asked, while admiring a lovely Egyptian Revival clock that reminded me of the objects made in France soon after Napoleon returned from Egypt in the early nineteenth century.
He thought for a moment. “I think it’s a lot of things—the age, the mystery, beautiful things. Egyptian antiquities are easy to relate to. The art from other ancient peoples in places like South and Central American and Asia is a bit removed from our aesthetic, so it’s not immediately accessible. Egyptian art is nearer to the way we depict things. The people look like us.”
I said, “I know you were instrumental in bringing a royal mummy to the Carlos Museum and returning it to Egypt. Did you think that it was Ramesses I?”
“Actually, we are not sure it is Ramesses I,” he answered. “There is enough evidence to say for certain that this mummy is a royal from the New Kingdom, but not enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s Ramesses I. The evidence is key. You need to look at the evidence.”
When I looked into it, I was surprised by how much evidence there actually was about Ramesses I, given that he was born around 1330 BCE. To understand his life and times, we must first understand where he fits into the three thousand years in which the pharaohs ruled Egypt. During this time, there were some 350 kings, most of whose names we know from ancient Egypt’s “king lists.” The three thousand years are divided into kingdoms—the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom—with numbered intermediate periods in between. These periods are divided into dynasties. An Egyptian prince named Manetho is credited with this classification system, which clusters the descendants of each king in a single dynasty. Ramesses I lived in the New Kingdom, Nineteenth Dynasty.
Ancient Egyptians sought immortality. Their literacy, as well as their luck, took them a long way towards this end. They left exquisite records: hieroglyphics written onto papyrus and also incised on the walls of tombs and temples and monumental statues and steles. These, along with colorful wall paintings, document virtually every aspect of their life, every hope for their afterlives, every custom and religious ceremony. The luck lay in their hot and arid climate, which retards the disintegration of organic material. Tombs are the perfect environments in which to preserve ancient bodies and possessions. Such preservation was critical because the dead needed an intact body and an eternity’s worth of goods in order to enjoy the next chapters in their existence. Many of the wall paintings, statues, pottery, weapons, musical instruments, and other funerary items remain remarkably fresh even today.
Some Egyptologists believe that succession passed through the female line: the pharaoh’s oldest daughter was the legal heir to the kingdom, though a pharaoh generally selected a son as the actual heir, and the son usually married his sister to signify his right to the throne. A pharaoh could have as many wives as he wished, but there was only one, generally his sister, who counted as his queen. A dynasty ended when a pharaoh ran out of descendants.
That happened in 1319 BCE, when Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, had produced no heirs and, therefore, appointed his most trusted adviser, Paramessu, to succeed him. Horemheb was not of royal blood, and neither was Paramessu: both were military officers who had spent twenty years re-establishing order after the chaos left by the iconoclastic Pharaoh Akhenaten and his followers. When Horemheb became pharaoh, he acknowledged his debt to Paramessu by appointing him vizier, awarding him a string of impressive titles—Master of the Horse, Commander of the Fortress, Controller of the Nile Mouth, Charioteer of His Majesty, King’s Envoy to every Foreign Land, Royal Scribe, General of the Lord of the Two Lands—and, eventually, leaving him the throne.[2] Some believe Horemheb selected Paramessu as his successor because Paramessu had a son and a small grandson, which promised a stable line of dynastic succession. A stone head from a statue of Paramessu is now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, its blank face surrounded by a cap of stylized hair.
When Horemheb died, Paramessu was forty, rather old for the time. He took the name Menpehtyre Ramesses, which means “eternal is the strength of Re, Re has fashioned him.” In hieroglyphs, the name is represented by a circle with a bull’s eye, next to something akin to a pitchfork, next to a staff, next to a stalk with four leaves, next to a standing bird in profile. Menpehtyre Ramesses, or Ramesses I, shared the throne with his son and heir Seti I, who seemed to hold his father in especially high regard: the evidence can be seen in inscriptions and in the chapel that Seti I built in honor of his father at Abydos. The chapel is now in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Nineteenth Dynasty spawned by Ramesses I was a Golden Age, an era of great luxury, high artistic achievement, and general well-being, especially for the royals and the wealthy. They slept on beds with linen sheets and feather pillows; in their homes, oil lamps diffused through alabaster illuminated the dark. The women rouged their cheeks, reddened their lips, darkened their eyelashes, and dyed their hair. The children played with rag dolls, hoops, and toy figures, went to school, and learned to read and write. Parents attended parties at which they were entertained by singers, orchestras, and dancers, played table games, and gambled with dice. Skilled physicians took care of them when they were sick, treating ailments with potions that mixed pharmacology and sympathetic magic.
Ramesses I died unexpectedly. The evidence is that his tomb was only partially completed at the time of his death. His body was mummified and placed in his unfinished tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes, where other New Kingdom rulers were buried. If you were anybody in Egypt you were mummified, because an intact body was essential in order for your soul or ka-spirit to live on. In predynastic times, Egyptians buried their dead in arid desert sands that dried out organic material like body parts, a form of natural mummification. When they began to place their dead in sealed tombs, the bodies were better protected from the elements but also more likely to decay. That’s where mummification came in.
Mummification practices changed over time and were more or less elaborate depending on the embalmer’s skill and the family’s wealth. Ramesses I received the royal treatment. After he died, embalmers sliced across the body from the hipbone to the pubic area close to the thigh and extracted the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines, which were placed in canopic jars, special vessels Egyptians used to hold body parts. Embalmers then inserted linens soaked in expensive resin deep into the incision to absorb moisture and retain Ramesses I’s body’s shape after it was wrapped. The heart, which Egyptians considered the source of all knowledge and center of the soul, was left in place. Ramesses I’s brain was removed in a particularly pragmatic and gruesome manner. The embalmer took a chisel and inserted it into the left nostril until it broke the ethmoid bone that separates the nasal cavity from the brain. After that, the embalmer took a metal rod with a tiny ladle at the end, stuck it up the nostril into the brain, swirled the rod around until the brain broke into tiny pieces, and scooped the pieces out with the ladle. Then the rod was extracted, resin poured into the hole, and the skull filled half-full. Ramesses I’s nails were then painted, possibly with henna. By the time the process was over, what had once been a balding, late middle-aged man had become a shiny black mummy with orange fingernails.[3]
As befitting a king, Ramesses I’s genitalia were wrapped separately, and his toes were splayed; perhaps each was wrapped separately and encased in a golden toe stall. His arms were crossed over his chest, right over left, with the left hand clenched, probably to hold a royal scepter. Finally the embalmers sewed up the incision on the side of the body or sealed it with resin, then waterproofed the entire body with a resin layer.
When this was done, Ramesses I was ready to be wrapped in linen, a process that took fifteen days and many solemn priestly prayers, and placed in a painted wooden coffin with a royal portrait carved on its lid. Mourners, perhaps including some hired for the occasion, escorted the king to his tomb in the Valley of the Kings directly across from the tomb of his patron, Horemheb. Ramesses I’s coffin was placed in his red granite sarcophagus, the crypt was filled with a wealth of funerary statues and goods, and the tomb was sealed—forever, it was hoped. Except for the priests responsible for funerary rituals, it was forbidden for anyone to enter the tomb and disturb the dead, especially a pharaoh. Archaeologist James F. Romano explained this as follows:[4]
If the mummy or tomb statue were damaged or destroyed, if the deceased’s name were somehow forgotten, if the appropriate offerings were not left, or if the ka- priests neglected their responsibilities to the funerary cult, the ka would cease to function as an animate force with ties to the living. Rather, it would face an eternity of dark, formless oblivion. This was the ultimate fear of the ancient Egyptians.[5]
For virtually all of Egypt’s most illustrious pharaohs, this ultimate fear became a reality. Despite their best efforts to hide tombs in secure locations in the most inhospitable terrain, grave robbers have successfully looted tombs since antiquity: the draw of their treasures has been just too much to resist, especially in times of economic turmoil. By the time Western archaeologists arrived in the Valley of the Kings in the early 1800s, every tomb they found had been opened. In a number of cases, even the pharaoh himself, in the form of a mummy, was missing.[6]
This was Ramesses I’s fate. Within four hundred years of his burial, his eternal life fell victim to a wave of ancient tomb robbing. His tomb was penetrated, the gold and other valuables removed, and his sarcophagus violently pried open.
But nobody knew that Ramesses I was missing from his tomb until 1817, when an Italian circus strongman-turned-water engineer-turned-explorer named Giovanni Baptista Belzoni chanced by the entrance to Ramesses I’s tomb while touring the Valley of the Kings. Belzoni and his wife had come to Egypt to sell hydraulic irrigation machines to the Viceroy, but when that scheme failed, Belzoni was hired by British Consul Henry Salt to move colossal Egyptian monumental sculptures from their sandy resting places down the Nile and back to England. You might wonder why Egyptians were willing to let foreigners remove their precious cultural heritage, until you realize that the Egyptians were not in charge. At the time, Muhammad ‘Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt under the Ottoman Turks, was keenly aware of the economic and political potential of Egypt’s antiquities, so he offered Western nations permits to excavate ancient sites and allowed them to export obelisks.[7]
Belzoni was among the first to rediscover many tombs in the Valley of the Kings. On his second trip there in October 1817, he stumbled upon a small one. As he later wrote, “The appearance of the entrance indicated it would be a very large one, but it proved to be only the passage of one that was never finished.” This one belonged to Ramesses I.
If you would like to see Ramesses I’s tomb, it can be found on a website created by the Theban Mapping Project.[8] The address of the tomb is KV16. When I found it on the website, I opened a cross-section of Ramesses I’s tomb and imagined what it would have been like to join Belzoni in his discovery. I imagine standing next to him as he lights a torch and leads me down a long flight of stairs, a downward-sloping corridor, and another flight of stairs, the temperature dropping slightly as we descend. At the base is a small chamber dominated by a large red granite sarcophagus with a damaged lid. I imagine Belzoni holding his torch close to the wall as together we admire the beautiful figures with faces painted in profile.
“The painted figures on the wall are so perfect that they are the best adapted of any I ever saw to give a correct and clear idea of the Egyptian taste,”[9] Belzoni later wrote.
“It’s the Book of Gates, a guide to the underworld,” I comment to him.
We look around. Much of the funerary equipment is missing, and so is the mummy.
Belzoni published an account of his discovery of what is now known to be the tomb of Ramesses I. It had the same long corridors and style of wall painting as of the tomb of Ramesses’ famous son, Seti I, but it was much smaller because it was incomplete. Ramesses’ sarcophagus was broken, and his casket and mummy had been missing since antiquity. Where did it go? Why would anyone steal a mummy?
The answer to these questions lies in an incident that occurred around 1860 at the cliffs of Dier el-Bahri, located near the Valley of the Kings. In that year, two brothers, Mohammed and Ahmed Abd el-Rassul, came across a shaft cut deep into the raw grey rock. They thought it might lead them to a tomb. Ahmed let himself be lowered down on a rope until he hit bottom. He found a sealed tomb entrance, broke through, entered a passage, and eventually came to a burial chamber that was filled with funerary statues, canopic jars, libation jars, a funeral tent, and coffins with strange inscriptions on them. When Mohammed joined him, the brothers could see that this was a remarkable find, valuable enough to support their family for years. They knew they needed to keep it secret. Late that night they returned to the tomb and deposited a dead donkey in the shaft, reasoning the noxious odor of its decay would keep the others away. By selling a small number of items at a time, they would maximize their value and avoid detection by the authorities. The Abd el-Rassul brothers arranged for a respected dealer, Mustapha Aga Ayat, to sell their antiquities.
“Zahi Hawass told me that the Abd el-Rassul family were grave robbers. Was this true?” I asked Lacovara.
“Yes,” he answered, “there were lots of grave-robbing families and a couple of famous ones in Luxor. The Abd el-Rassul family was the most famous. They were the Donald Trumps of tomb robbery.” He smiled.
“Was it a respectable occupation?” I asked.
Lacovara paused, thinking this over. “Well . . . not from our perspective. But they certainly became very wealthy from it and they seemed to do well. They continued on, they opened a big hotel with the proceeds, and they’re still around. They worked for the Antiquities Service. They are a very colorful bunch.”
Soon after the brothers’ discovery, a small number of items bearing royal insignia began to appear discreetly on the antiquities market. They were soon traced back to Mustapha Aga Ayat. By 1881, the Egyptian government had learned that royal antiquities were being purchased; they sent the German archaeologist Emile Brugsch, a former assistant to Gaston Masparo, director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service who was then out of the country, to investigate. Posing as a tourist, Brugsch began buying antiquities in Luxor, becoming familiar with the locals, and eventually learned that the Abd el-Rassul family was the source of these special goods.[10] The government cracked down hard on the brothers, first attempting to bribe them into telling the source of the royal antiquities and, when that failed, brutally torturing them.
Eventually, another brother revealed the secret source in return for a hefty bribe. Mohammed Abd el-Rassul then agreed to take the officials to the secret tomb. He led Brugsch and Police Inspector Ahmed Effendi Kamal up a steep cliff at Dier el-Bahri to the hidden opening in the rock, dropped a coil of rope down the hole, and invited Brugsch to let himself down. At the bottom of the shaft, Brugsch found a breathtaking sight: a room filled with coffins and funerary items. By the light of his torch, Brugsch could read on the coffins the names of some of Egypt’s most illustrious kings. Unable to read the inscriptions, the grave robbers had never known the true identities of the inhabitants.
In all, what is now called the Royal Cache held six thousand smaller objects and forty mummies belonging to New Kingdom royalty, members of the priestly families of the Third Intermediate Period, and other unidentified private individuals. Brugsch later described these as “mummies of royal personages of both sexes” and “mummy-cases of stupendous size and weight.”[11] Included was Ramesses I’s illustrious son, Seti I, and even more illustrious grandson, Ramesses II. They also foun
d the damaged coffin with Ramesses I’s name on it. There were some linen wraps inside, though the mummy itself was missing. But Ramesses I had originally been buried in his own small tomb, not the Royal Cache. How did he get to the Royal Cache in the first place?
As it turns out, Ramesess’ mummy was moved out of his tomb during antiquity. Ramesses I lived in the Nineteenth Dynasty, and by the Twentieth Dynasty his tomb already had been breached. In the Twenty-First Dynasty, the high priests of Amun removed many of the royal mummies whose tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been violated. They reconsecrated the mummies and placed them into the Deir el-Bahri cache and another tomb. According to dockets found in the Deir el-Bahri cache, Ramesses I’s mummy and the mummies of Seti I and Ramesses II were interred there during the Third Intermediate Period.[12]
I wondered why anyone would want to move the mummies.
“The high priests said they removed the mummies for their safekeeping,” Lacovara said, “but it was actually to recycle all their gold and jewels for their own king. There was all that wealth just sitting in the tombs, so it was sort of official tomb robbery. We know the army must have done it, since no tomb robber would have been strong enough to move the top off of a heavy sarcophagus.”
Ramesses I’s casket showed that his mummy had been placed in the Royal Cache in ancient times. By the time the Egyptian officials arrived in 1881, it had been removed. The next time we see the mummy is in the Niagara Falls Museum and Daredevil Hall of Fame more than one hundred years later. How did he get there and why?
Peter Lacovara has a theory about this. He thinks that one of the first coffins the Abd el-Rassuls found when they entered the Royal Cache still held the mummy of Ramesses I. They pried open the coffin and unwrapped the mummy, looking for the gold and jewels typically found in the wrappings. When they realized there was none, the grave robbers surmised that none of the mummies held riches. Lacovara thinks that Ramesses I’s unwrapping may have saved the other mummies from having their caskets destroyed and their bodies unwrapped. Remember, the grave robbers had no idea these were royal mummies, because they couldn’t read the inscriptions.