Ramesses III

While the Greek administrative tablets baked in catastrophic palace fires, a massive story of survival was carved into the distant temple walls of Medinet Habu in Egypt.

There, Pharaoh Ramesses III commissioned enormous stone reliefs, boasting of his victory over a terrifying mystery.

He defeated a loose coalition of maritime raiders that history simply calls the Sea Peoples.

These attackers lacked a unified empire or a coordinated national army.

These magnificent ancient luxury vehicles were instantly rendered obsolete by swarms of highly mobile infantry who executed coastal ambushes and fought aggressively in rough terrain.

Once the vital ports fully closed, the maritime trade routes for essential metals like tin were completely severed, and the highly centralized palace economies simply could not function without raw materials.

Ramesses III ultimately saved Egypt by winning huge battles and surviving the onslaught through vast agricultural reserves and immense riverboats.

His poorer neighbouring kingdoms lacked similar buffers and dissolved immediately back into the dirt.

Uh, Sea Peoples is a generic terms, uh, term for those, you know, r- sources that reference peoples who came from the sea.

We don't really know who they are, but, uh, ultimately, they're depicted in the representation of Ramesses III, who successfully fought them off.

Now, w-well, in past decades, it was assumed that the Sea Peoples were some kind of invading army.

The truth is that they were probably just migrating people groups trying to settle in territories that were already claimed.

On the banks, hidden in the reeds, and behind the walls of the river towns, are the archers of Egypt, rank after rank of them, waiting for the ships to come close enough.

The king of Egypt that year was Ramesses III.

He had been on the throne for eight years.

He had taken the name of the pharaoh who made the peace, and he admired the old king so much that he modeled his own great temple on his.

By counting back through the reigns of the kings who came after him, historians have put the year of that mourning at about 1177 BC.

Ramesses III had a clearer picture of what was coming than any pharaoh before him.

His scribes later set it down in words that read like a map of everything that had already fallen.

The peoples from the sea, they wrote, had made a plan together in their islands.

The, the Egyptian goddess is Hathor, and we have a, a unique, uh, temple of her, uh, close to, uh, Solomon Pillars.

We also have a unique sign, a picture of her giving, uh, Ramses III, uh, something to, to, a, a present.

Mm-hmm.

That was, uh, sculptures and, uh, findings that, uh, remind us that the Egyptians was, were here 3,500 years ago.

These groups don't appear for the first time at Medinet Habu either.

An earlier Egyptian inscription, the Merneptah Stele, dated several decades before Ramesses III's reign, already names some of the same peoples in connection with an earlier attempted invasion of Egypt, showing this wasn't a single sudden crisis, but pressure-building across multiple generations before the collapse reached its full severity.

Modern scholars grouped these names together under a single label, the Sea Peoples.

A term worth knowing was coined by a 19th century French Egyptologist.

In ancient Egypt in 1157 BCE, The judicial papyrus of Turin, while individual hiring contracts from ancient Egyptian workers are rare, the state recorded precise labor agreements and disputes.

The famous records detailing the first recorded labor strike by royal tomb builders at Deir el-Medina under Ramses III document the specific terms of their state employment, guaranteed distributions of grain, fish, and clothing.

So that's some pretty cool earliest labor agreements that I've found.

What do you guys think?

Jars and vessels decorated with snakes indicate that serpent cults existed in early Canaan.

We uncovered a two-handled cylindrical receptacle, dating to Ramses III, 1198-1166 BC, at Beth-Shan, a major city between the Jezreel and Jordan valleys.

Experts suggest that sacred rites associated with agriculture may have used this cultic object, decorated with serpents coiled around the sides from bottom to top, with doves perched on the handles.

Researchers have found 34 more objects displaying serpent imagery among the strata of Beth-Shan than at any other site in the Holy Land.

At Karnak, on the north wall of the hypostyle hall, and again at Medinet Habu, the faults of the original design were not noticed till the sculptor had finished his part of the work.

The figures of Seti I and Ramses III were thrown too far back and threatened to overbalance themselves, so they were smoothed over with cement and cut anew.

Now the cement has flaked off and the work of the first chisel is exposed to view.

Seti I and Ramses III have each two profiles, the one very lightly marked, the other boldly cut into the surface of the stone.

Figure 180.

The sculptors of ancient Egypt were not so well equipped as those of our own day.

The Egyptians treated bas-relief in three ways, either as a simple engraving executed by means of incised lines, or by cutting away the surface of the stone round the figure, and so causing it to stand out in relief upon the wall, or by sinking the design below the wall surface and cutting it in relief at the bottom of the hollow.

The first method has the advantage of being expeditious and the disadvantage of not being sufficiently decorative.