Ramses the Great, has his mummy been found?

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Ramses the Great, has his mummy been found?

Postby dragonsteeth » Fri 17 Oct 2014 5:25 pm

Egyptian records said their King Ramses II lived to be over ninety years of age, but Velikovsky noted that the reports on the bones indicated an age of about sixty years. Were the Egyptian records wrong, was Velikovsky wrong, or has the Cairo Museum got the wrong mummy?

This mummy was found beneath a coffin lid dating from around Tutankhamun's time, so could this an Amarna mummy? We already have the mummy of Amenophis III. A facial reconstruction of the Am III mummy by Tanya Balueva clearly matches the portraiture for Akhenaten's father.

But facial reconstructions for the mummy called Ramses do not match his surviving 19th Dynasty portraits. However they do show some similarities to Tutankhamun's successor Ay .

In a study of royal mummification techniques, Joann Fletcher of York Univ. claimed that 18th Dynasty Pharaohs were mummified using liquid salt solutions, whereas 19th Dynasty Pharaohs Seti I and Mereneptah were mummified using the traditional dry salt crystals. I believe the 'Ramses' mummy was treated in the same way as the 18th Dynasty mummies and that there is a high probability that this mummy belong to the sixty year old Amarna King maker Ay.
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Re: Ramses the Great, has his mummy been found?

Postby Phillip » Sun 16 Nov 2014 7:11 pm

This is quite a good explanation for the physical and facial characteristics of the mummy of Ramses II. However, I don't suppose anyone has replied because you can't really, unless you have some positive evidence. Never the less, and the point of this response, is that it was a good post and thought provoking. Keep them coming.
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Re: Ramses the Great, has his mummy been found?

Postby Peter » Fri 20 Feb 2015 4:06 pm

There is clearly a problem with the age of the body identified as Ramses the Great. However, I believe that it has been correctly identified. This is because he is depicted as a child sitting on the knee of Sethos the Great when crowned as his heir and in a text quoted by Velikovsky in his section “how long did Seti and Ramses II reign” in his book, “Ramses II and his Time” says he was crowned as a child sitting in the lap of Sethos. As we have an inscription dated to his 67th year and other references to the length of his reign we can be confident that it did total 66 years, but if it began when he was an infant he would have been around 70 when he died not around 90.

In my chronology the 19th Dynasty Sethos ruled the eastern delta from his capital of Pi-Ramses from 837 to 782 BC, for the first 4 years as child co-regent to his father, and the whole of Egypt for 18 years after the death of Horemheb in 800 BC. A 30 year reign for Horemheb from 830 to 800 BC conforms to Velikovsky’s 18th Dynasty history revision dating as set out in Ages in Chaos. My dates for the crowning of Ramses as child co-regent to Sethos and for the year of his death are 788 BC and 722 BC. The fact that Ramses is given a reign length of 60 years as well as one of 66 years suggests 6 years of co-regency and an age of 10 or 11 when he succeeded Sethos as sole ruler of Egypt. I think that he was not the son of Sethos, but the great grandson.

The major problem with this is that we have the Ramses war annals inscribed on temples built by Ramses the Great, Abu Simbel being one, that tell of him campaigning in northern Syria in his second year and unquestionably the writer of the war annals could not have been a child in his second year.

Velikovsky, in Ramses II and his Times, identified the king called Necos in the Bible as the writer of the Ramses war annals and his father, Psammetichus, as the writer of the Seti the Great war annals. He thought that the 26th Dynasty Egyptian rulers were alto-egos of the 19th Dynasty kings, but this idea was rejected by most people who read it, myself included. I am, however, sure that he was correct in attributing the Seti the Great and the Ramses war annals to the Psammetichus and Necho and believe that these kings, much to the confusion of later scholars, inscribed their campaign annals on temples built by their famous ancestors using their ancestors names; indeed at Abu Simbel and other temples Ramses actually depicts himself praising a God with the same name as him.

Herodotus was certainly confused. The Greeks he talked to when he was in Egypt less than 150 years after the death of Necho told him about the 26th Dynasty kings using their Greek names and gave him their reign lengths. However, the Egyptian priests who told him about them and their Asian campaigns used the names that were inscribed on their war annals that they knew well and could, of course, read. Herodotus has been called the prince of liars, but it would appear that he recorded what he was told without realising that they were stories about the same kings.
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Re: Ramses the Great, has his mummy been found?

Postby dragonsteeth » Tue 12 May 2015 6:23 pm

For a hundred years art historians argued that ancient Egyptian artists had no interest in making lifelike portraits. Now that several facial reconstructions have been made it is clear that it was the art historians and not the Egyptian artists who were in error. There is a superb portrait of Ramesses at the Turin Museum.

DNA has been taken from various 18th and 19th dynasty mummies and a little slow progress has been made regarding their family tree. I am sure that if DNA could be taken from the 'Ramesses' mummy it would reveal whether it belongs with the 19th dynasty or amongst the Amarna family. But so long as politics trumps science his DNA will be kept hidden.

I also believe that it is likely that the so called younger woman is Meritaten the consort of Smenkhere and the eldest daughter of Nefertiti. This Princess played a prominent role in Velikovsky's book on Akhenaten's family which is titled Oedipus and Akhenaten,
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