Ramesses III

Ramesses III was the last pharaoh to hold real power in Egypt, beat off the Sea Peoples, faced the first recorded strike in history, and was murdered in a harem conspiracy. He is not Ramesses II, who reigned a century earlier and with whom he is regularly confused; he took the name deliberately. His reign coincided with the Late Bronze Age collapse, which destroyed the Hittite empire, Mycenaean Greece and the cities of the Levant within a generation. The Sea Peoples came at Egypt twice, once overland through Palestine and once by sea into the Delta, and the reliefs at Medinet Habu record a naval battle fought in the river mouths where Egyptian archers on the banks shot into crowded ships - the earliest depiction of a sea battle anywhere. Egypt survived and was exhausted. In his twenty-ninth year the tomb workers of Deir el-Medina, unpaid, downed tools and sat outside the mortuary temples until the grain arrived; the papyrus recording it is the first documented labour strike. He was killed in 1155 BC by a conspiracy organised in his own household around a secondary wife who wanted her son on the throne. The judicial papyri survive, and a CT scan of the mummy in 2012 found his throat cut to the vertebrae, settling an argument that had run for a century. His mortuary temple at Medinet Habu is among the best preserved in Egypt and its reliefs are the main source for the Sea Peoples, who are otherwise nearly invisible - one of the groups named there, the Peleset, is generally identified with the Philistines. What Egypt lost in his reign was its Asian empire and its purchasing power; within eighty years the priesthood at Thebes was governing the south and the New Kingdom was over.

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