Nefertari, Great Queen of Ramses II

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The Abu Simbel temple dedicated to Queen Nefertari and other evidence of her superior status compared to other queens, suggests that Nefertari was a royal heiress and that Ramses’s marriage to her secured Egyptian acceptance of the new, foreign supported regime known to us as the Egyptian 19th Dynasty.

Currently historians and Egyptologists all seem to agree that the first pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty was called Ramses and that he ruled for just 1 year. According to Manetho, his successor, Sethos, ruled for either 51 or 55 years, which suggests 4 years as his father’s co-regent and makes the one year given to Ramses I questionable. Sethos was followed by Ramses II who ruled for 61 or 66 years, again implying a co-regency, this time one of 5 years. All seem to assume that the Sethos to Ramses succession was father to son, but this is clearly nonsense. Mid to late teen marriages were almost certainly the norm for Egyptian royalty and it seems likely that Ramses II was the great grandson of Sethos, not his son or grandson.

The interesting thing that everyone seems to ignore, is that Manetho includes Ramses II in his 18th dynasty king-list succeeding Ramses I and before him a ruler called Harmais, who is given a reign of 4 or 5 years. Before Harmais, the king-lists show 2 kings called Acencheres, both given reigns of 12.5 years, a Rathotis, who ruled for 9 years, who is universally identified as Tutankhamun, and the sister of Rathotis called Acencheris, who is also given a reign of 12 years. This Queen can only have been the sister, probably sister-wife, of Tutankhamun that Ay married to secure his power. Given the way Ay was expunged from the record after his death, she may well have been pregnant when Ay married her, because her child is unlikely to have been accepted as the royal heir if it was Ay’s child.

If Acencheris was the sister-wife of Tutankhamun, we have in the Manetho 18th Dynasty king lists, ignoring the 1 year of Ramses I, 42 years of named succession between Tutankhamun and Ramses II. During these 42 years, the 19th Dynasty, Sethos was, it would seem, ruling the Eastern Delta region of Egypt from Pi-Ramses, which is universally recognised as being the new capital of Ramses I. Was Thebes the original capital of Ramses I? Did he rule in Thebes for just a single year? Immanuel Velikovsky, in Oedipus and Akhnaton (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1960), identified Ramses I as Smenkhkare, the elder brother of Tutankhamun who was deposed and exiled in his second year. If this is right, Ramses I must have ruled in Pi-Ramses for the 9 years of Tutankhamun’s reign in Thebes. After he and Tutankhamun died, in battle according to Velikovsky, Sethos ruled the Eastern Delta while Ay ruled Middle and Upper Egypt for the first 3 of the 18th Dynasty king-list’s 42 years and Horemheb for the next 30. Note, Sethos was not the Seti who campaigned in Syria, as many historians and Egyptologists seem to believe; the enemies of Sethos were to the south, not the north east.

His Abydos temple king-list shows Sethos as the successor of Horemheb, whose 30 years reign was from 830 to 800 BC in my catastrophe based, chronology (see SIS C & C Review, 2017:3. An Inverted Earth and C & C Review 2020:3, The Heliacal Rising of Sirius and Ancient History). We don’t know when Sethos gained control of Central and Upper Egypt, but the Manetho story about Acencheres II ruling Argos in Greece after being exiled suggests that Sethos sized control of Middle Egypt and Abydos 4 or 5 years before he conquered Upper Egypt. Although still a child, Harmais was pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty for these 4 or 5 years. 42 years after the death of Tutankhamun, in my chronology, would be 791 BC which would allow an adequate 9 years for Sethos’s massive, but unfinished building work at Karnak. Although unlikely, it is not biologically impossible that Harmais, the grandson of a child born in 833 BC, was already a father in 791 BC. More likely, a teenaged Harmais remained in Sethos’s court as an honoured guest after Sethos’s conquest of Upper Egypt and fathered a daughter heiress before 788 BC, which is when Ramses II, in my chronology, was proclaimed Sethos’s heir; he is depicted as a child sitting on Sethos’s knee when this was announced.

The marriage of Nefertari, the 18th Dynasty heiress, to Ramses, the 19th Dynesty heir, was undoubtably a unifying success. It is quite possible that Ramses was named heir and the marriage arranged while the father and grandfather of Ramses were still alive and that after the death of Sethos, they, in turn, ruled the Eastern Delta region of Egypt as Ramses II’s co-regents; they feature as kings in some genealogy lists. They are called Libyan by historians and Egyptologists, but this geographical association may be a translation error; the miss translated word possibly being a collective name for foreigners, like the Roman word, Barbarian.

Velikovsky was almost certainly right when, in Oedipus and Akhnaton, he said the mother of Sethos was the daughter of an Asian king and that Sethos had Asians serving in his army when he sized control of Upper Egypt. This Asian king would appear to have ruled a nomadic tribe that Manetho, in his Book of Sothis, called Ethiopian. According to Manetho, they had migrated from the east and settled on the borders of Egypt during the reign of Amenhotep III; the Bible (Chronicles 2, 21:16) tells of Ethiopians living near to the Philistines in the 9th century BC. Sethos was, it would seem, the first of the 18 Ethiopian kings and the single Ethiopian Queen that Herodotus, book 2, 100, was told had ruled Egypt; Tausret was the one ruling Queen. Many of the Asian tribesmen of Sethos’s mother must have lived in Pi-Ramses and served in Sethos’s army during his reign, hence the archaeological evidence for the long-term settlement of an Asian population at Tell El-Dab during the first half of the 1st millennium BC.