For almost every assassination in the ancient world, all we usually have are rumors. For this one, we have documentation of the entire trial: the case file, names, surnames, ranks, how it was organized, who informed on whom, what sentence each conspirator received, and — this is the incredible part — we even know what happened to some corrupt judges who took bribes and tried to help the defendants during the trial itself. It's preserved in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy, written in hieratic hieroglyphic characters on papyrus, and it is the most complete judicial document to survive from Ancient Egypt. It tells how a secondary wife organized the assassination of the most powerful pharaoh of her century to put her own son on the throne, and how the Egyptian state hunted her down afterward, accomplice by accomplice. I'll tell you now: there's a final detail, uncovered in Egypt only in 2012, that gives anyone goosebumps.
The setting: an empire that shone on the outside and cracked on the inside
Ramesses III was the second pharaoh of the 20th Dynasty and the last truly powerful king of the New Kingdom. He reigned about thirty-two years, between 1186 and 1155 BC. He stopped the savage and bloodthirsty Sea Peoples — among them the Peleset, the future Philistines — who had already destroyed the entire Mycenaean and Hittite world with their destructive fury, and he recorded his victories on the walls of Medinet Habu, which you can still walk through and see today. So this guy, Ramesses III, was a great pharaoh in every sense of the word.
But let's put this in perspective, because what's happening in the background matters. Beneath that monumental splendor of stone, schist, lapis lazuli, and marble, Egypt was cracking. In the twenty-ninth year of his reign, for example, the workers of the Deir el-Medina necropolis — the men who dug the royal tombs — stopped receiving their wages and rations and went on strike. The first documented strike in human history happened under this man's reign. A state that can't pay the people building the king's own tomb is a failed state, or at the very least a state with serious problems. Though it's also possible those funds and rations existed, but were siphoned off into some corrupt administrator's or official's pockets without the king ever knowing. Who knows…
Either way, in that climate of chaos, discontent, and confusion, someone inside the palace calculated that with such a weak and unpopular king at that moment, the throne was within reach for anyone with the nerve to rise up and take it.
The plot: a wife, a son never meant to rule, and a steward
The mastermind behind the coup was Tiye, a secondary wife of the pharaoh. Her goal was simple and as old as time itself: push aside the designated legitimate heir — the future Ramesses IV, son of another woman, Tyti, the principal wife — and put her own son, Pentawer, on the throne instead.
The operational brain was an official named Pebekkamen, chief steward of the pantry. Pay attention to that title, because it explains the entire plot: the man who controls everything that goes in and out of the king's kitchen also controls the palace. Alongside him, a cast that sounds pulled from a Renaissance palace-intrigue novel set in Medici Florence: Mastesuria, a cupbearer. Panhaiboni, overseer of the cattle. Panuk, overseer of the royal harem. Pendua, scribe of the harem.
The plan had two layers. The first: a coup d'état through the assassination of the pharaoh. The second — and this is the one that reveals the true scale of the ambition — stirring up a popular uprising to back it. The trial records preserve the message Pebekkamen circulated outside the palace to his fellow agitators, and it's chillingly modern: "Stir up the people. Kindle hostility everywhere to start a rebellion against their lord."
And there was a third layer that Egyptologists still argue about, but one I personally consider very likely to have happened: the Rollin and Lee papyri mention magic. Wax figurines pierced with pins, magical formulas, ritual objects used to paralyze the king's guard through esoteric means. Whether it actually worked is beside the point; what matters is that the conspirators believed it did, and that the tribunal treated it as an additional charge to be punished harshly.
The strike: the Beautiful Festival of the Valley
The conspirators picked the best possible day: the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, the great Theban celebration — the Egyptian city known today as Luxor — during which the pharaoh's entire court crossed the Nile to the west bank, the same side where the sun set and which was considered sacred to the dead, to visit their family tombs. A day of crowds that must have been very similar to the Day of the Dead celebrated in Mexico, with processions, chanting, wine, joy, and disorder. A day when no one, least of all the guards, was keeping track of who came and went.
And it worked. Ramesses III died that day.
How do we know exactly what was done to the king?
For over a century, Egyptologists debated whether the attack had actually succeeded or only been attempted, because the trial records describe the conspiracy but never the crime itself, and never say whether the victim died on the spot or sometime later. The mummy of Ramesses III himself was no help: it was wrapped up to the neck in thick bandages that no one dared remove for fear of destroying it.
In 2012, however, a team led by Albert Zink and Zahi Hawass — yes, the professor you've seen in every Egypt documentary wearing that Indiana Jones–style hat — ran the mummy through a CT scanner, a computed axial tomography machine. And there it was, under the neck bandages: a cut more than seven centimeters deep, reaching all the way to the vertebrae, that severed the trachea, esophagus, and major vessels — arteries and veins. One single cut. Fatal. He bled out in a minute and a half, at most.
The embalmers covered it up, tucked an amulet of Horus right inside the wound so it would heal in the afterlife, and wrapped the neck generously. Three thousand one hundred seventy years later, a 21st-century machine lifted that bandage without ever touching it.
The trial: twenty-eight executed and ten forced suicides
This is where the plot falls apart. Because the pharaoh did die, yes, but Pentawer never made it to the throne. The legitimate heir crowned himself in a hurry as Ramesses IV, seizing control of the administration and the army with decisiveness and iron will, backed by his legal and divine right as the designated heir, and his first act as king was to set up the largest public criminal trial we know of in Egyptian history.
The Turin Judicial Papyrus records five sessions of the tribunal. The names of the accused are often swapped for damning pseudonyms — one is called "Mesedsure," meaning "Ra Hates Him"; another is called "Binemwese," meaning "Evil in Thebes" — and so on with all the rest, because in the Egyptian mindset, writing down a criminal's real name was like handing him the prize of eternal existence.
The numbers: twenty-eight people executed. Ten more, including the son himself, Pentawer, "permitted" to take their own lives — the pious formula for a prince's death sentence. The records dispatch it with a coldness that chills: they left him where he was, and he took his own life.
As for Tiye, the instigator, the papyrus says nothing about what became of her. Not a single line. But given what happened to everyone else, drawing a conclusion about her fate doesn't take much imagination.
And those who knew and stayed silent were prosecuted too. In Egypt, silence in the face of regicide was a crime.
The detail that turns a court record into literature
The fourth and fifth sessions no longer judge the conspirators. They judge the tribunal itself.
During the trial, several members of the court — including two senior judges, Paibes and Mai, and the chief of police — were caught partying with the very accused women they were supposed to be trying. Dinners, wine, dancing, and whatever else you can imagine.
The sentence against those corrupt officials was Egyptian to the core: they had their noses and ears cut off. A fourth person implicated, a high-ranking figure of considerable standing at court, got off with nothing more than a verbal reprimand — which says quite a lot about his social rank. And for a fifth, a certain Hori, the Turin papyrus doesn't even record the punishment.
There you have it, dear readers: in the trial for the murder of the greatest, most powerful king then known to the world, they had to open a separate case because the judges were getting drunk and probably sleeping with the defendants. Human nature hasn't changed one bit in three thousand years.
The screaming mummy
And now, the ending — the kind you don't forget.
In the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari, where the high priest Pinedjem, centuries later, hid the royal mummies to save them from tomb robbers, a body catalogued as "Unknown Man E" turned up among the mummies of the great pharaohs. The unknown man had no name, no inscription, no proper coffin, and was, on top of that, wrapped in goatskin — a ritually impure material no respectable Egyptian would have tolerated on his corpse. He hadn't even been mummified: they'd covered him in natron without removing his organs. And his face was frozen in an open grimace that earned him the name he's known by today: the screaming mummy. And yet, this apparent nobody was lying there among half a hundred perfectly mummified, jewel-laden kings and queens.
DNA analysis, also carried out in 2012, established beyond doubt that this man was a son of Ramesses III. And the position of the skin around his neck showed severe compression at the moment of death: the kind left by a rope or a cloth someone would have used to hang himself.
It is, almost certainly, Pentawer. The prince who wanted to be pharaoh was buried without a name, without rites, and wrapped in goatskin, to make sure he wouldn't exist in the next life. In Egyptian theology, that isn't just a humble burial for a wicked man — it's a second death sentence, the eternal and final one.
Ramesses III wasn't the first: the royal harem as the pharaoh's weak point
This plot didn't come out of nowhere, and here's what almost no one tells you.
Eight hundred years earlier, under the 6th Dynasty, in the 24th century BC, another great pharaoh, Pepi I, who enjoyed a long fifty-year reign, had already survived a very similar conspiracy hatched inside his own harem. Uni, an official he trusted completely and who years later would rise to become Grand Vizier under another pharaoh, investigated the case in the strictest secrecy, and his own account of it, carved in full on the walls of his tomb, deliberately keeps quiet about how it ended. That story, with its unknown ending, is a whole other matter — and another article.
And in between, in the 12th Dynasty, around 1991–1802 BC, Pharaoh Amenemhat I was assassinated at night, in his own bedchamber, after dinner. We know this because his son Senusret I commissioned an extraordinary text, the Instructions of Amenemhat, in which the dead king speaks in the first person and describes his own murder to warn his heir about the dangers of ruling. The Tale of Sinuhe, the jewel of Egyptian literature, opens precisely with the panic that swept through the court that night — the panic that sends humble Sinuhe fleeing Egypt.
Three pharaohs, eight centuries apart, and always the same blind spot. Egyptian power was nearly unassailable from the outside: no foreign army breached the Nile Valley for dozens of centuries. But the back door was always open, and through it walked the chief steward, the cupbearer, the harem scribe, and a secondary wife with a son and a wicked plan.
Sources and references
- Turin Judicial Papyrus (Museo Egizio), together with the Rollin, Lee, Varzy, and Rifaud papyri — records of the five trial sessions.
- Zink, Hawass et al., "Revisiting the harem conspiracy and death of Ramesses III" (British Medical Journal, 2012) — CT scan of the mummy and DNA of Unknown Man E.
- The Instructions of Amenemhat I and The Tale of Sinuhe — on the assassination of Amenemhat I.
There is NO fiction in this article
The names, the titles, the call to rebellion, the five hearings, the twenty-eight executions, the ten forced suicides, and the mutilation of judges Paibes and Mai for fraternizing with the accused are all in the Turin Judicial Papyrus. The cut to Ramesses III's throat and the family relation of Unknown Man E were established through CT scan and DNA testing in 2012 and published in the British Medical Journal. What appears nowhere is Queen Tiye's fate: the papyrus stays silent, and when I say her ending "doesn't take much imagination," that's me reasoning it out, not quoting a source. The identification of Unknown Man E as Pentawer is highly probable but unproven: the DNA shows he was a son of Ramesses III, not what his name was. The literary voice is David S. Matrecano's.
Ibiza, August 2026
