How Did Ramesses II Die?

One of the most renowned pharaohs of his time and ours, Ramesses II, the third ruler of ancient Egypt's 19th dynasty, built cities, temples and monuments at home and fought campaigns abroad to bring the New Kingdom of Egypt to the peak of its power.

Born around 1279 B.C., he inherited the throne from his father, Seti I, as a teenager and ruled Egypt, according to ancient sources, for a jaw-dropping 66 years and two months, before dying at nearly triple the average ancient Egyptian lifespan. Known to Greeks and Romantic poets as Ozymandias and to much of the English-speaking world as Ramses the Great, Ramesses II left many records of his achievements during life, including the world’s oldest known peace treaty, signed with the Hittites around 1259 B.C. But the second-longest-reigning pharaoh in history left little record of the nature of his death beyond its date, which corresponds to early August of 1213 B.C.

Like many of the roughly 180 pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt over a span of 3,000 years, Ramesses II was carefully embalmed, mummified and placed in a purpose-built tomb in the Valley of the Kings after his death. Over the centuries, his remains were relocated and eventually thought to be lost. His reputation, however, endured.

Stemming in part from his fame and the length of his reign, a tradition developed over time arguing that Ramesses II was the Egyptian ruler in the Bible’s account of the Exodus. That narrative records the Hebrew leader Moses’ negotiations with an unnamed pharaoh to free his people from slavery in Egypt, and the pharaoh’s eventual drowning along with his army in the Red Sea.

In 1818, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ozymandias,” a meditation on modern travelers’ rediscovery of monumental fragments of Egypt. Apart from fragments and nearly obliterated inscriptions celebrating the ruler as depicted in the poem, Shelley writes: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.”

Fast-forward to 1881, when Gaston Maspero, a French researcher working for the Egyptian government to trace the source of looted antiquities, discovered a hidden tomb on the west bank of the Nile. There, he and his workers recovered 40 royal mummies, including Ramesses II, whose outer bandages contained a written record of 500 years of postmortem relocations by priests hoping to stay ahead of grave robbers.

On June 1, 1886, Maspero staged a public unwrapping of the mummy in the presence of Tewfiq Pasha, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt. In the report he published afterward, Maspero offered detailed measurements of Ramesses II’s forearms, hands, shoulders, nose, the distance between his eyes and the contours of his mouth. He wrote that Ramesses II’s face had “an air of sovereign majesty which still shines through under the grotesque apparatus of embalming.” Maspero did not speculate on the exact cause of death but noted that “the bones are weak and fragile, the muscles are atrophied by senile degeneration—Ramesses II must have been almost a hundred years old when he died.”

Nearly a century after Maspero’s investigation, Ramesses II’s mummy developed a mold problem, exacerbated by years of storage and display under poor conditions in the Egyptian Museum. With much fanfare and extensive paperwork, the mummy was flown from Cairo to Paris for formal study and preservation, including an examination by Pierre-Fernand Ceccaldi, head of France’s national forensic laboratory.

In a series of reports that followed, scientists offered new details on everything from the sand found in Ramesses II’s hair to the pollen in his nose, while X-ray scans revealed the fragile condition of the king’s bones and the presence of a presumably painful abscess at the root of his left second molar.

Ceccaldi was able to conclude where Ramesses II had likely died, but not how. Grains of marine sand suggested a death in Egypt’s north, but the absence of water plant pollen placed it relatively far from the Nile, likely in his built-to-order capital at Pi-Ramesses. In addition to poor bones and bad teeth, Ramesses II showed other ailments of a man well over 70, including some hardening of the arteries, but nothing conclusive. To stave off further fungal growth, the French Atomic Energy Commission bombarded Ramesses II with gamma rays for 12 hours and 40 minutes before shipping the pharaoh back to Egypt.

Over the last 50 years, further scientific study, including scans using new technologies, has fleshed out details of Ramesses II’s ailments—ruling out one hypothesized spinal disorder, ankylosing spondylitis, in favor of another, diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis. Death by drowning, as in the Exodus story, is impossible to rule out, simply because Ramesses II’s lungs, which would have held the evidence, were removed during embalming. Still, he would have been old and frail to have mounted a chariot for a military pursuit.

In 2016, a pair of Egyptian scientists, Zahi Hawass and Sahar N. Saleem, analyzed a series of detailed computerized tomography (CT) scans of the mummy. In their book Scanning the Pharaohs, they wrote: “Ramesses II was probably crippled with arthritis and walked with a hunched back for at least several years of his life. He also suffered from painfully poor dental health. However, there were no definite CT findings to suggest cause of death.”

On April 3, 2021, the Egyptian government loaded Ramesses II and 21 other royal mummies into specially designed vehicles for “The Pharaoh’s Golden Parade,” a 5-mile procession from the Egyptian Museum to the newly built National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, where they are housed and exhibited in climate-controlled comfort.

More recently, a team of scientists using enhanced scans employed digital facial reconstruction techniques to depict Ramesses as he might have looked alive, both just before his death and at age 45. The resulting images attempt to capture not just how the pharaoh looked in old age, but how he might have appeared at the height of his powers. Still, they require the same kinds of judgment calls that interpreters of Ramesses II’s mummified appearance have always had to make. Was his facial expression in death best described as grotesque or regal? What was the precise color of his skin or the texture of his hair before the resinous embalming treatments were added?

Between the records of his reign and the evidence of his preserved body, we know more about Ramesses II than nearly any other person of his era. Scientists and researchers have gotten better at filling gaps in the historical and physical record with evidence-based guesses, but some mysteries will always remain.