Seqenenre Tao

On July 6th, 1881, a group of Egyptian officials and archaeologists arrived at an unassuming opening set deep in a hillside outside the city of Luxor.

Laid out in the valley below was a vast complex of monuments, including the mortuary temples of Queen Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, some of ancient Egypt's most iconic reminders of the power and glory of the pharaohs.

Aside from one local family that had been quietly visiting the site for at least a decade for some light pillaging, nobody knew that the shaft cut into that steep hillside led to royal treasures even more precious than the temples themselves.

a cache of more than 50 mummies, belonging to some of ancient Egypt's most powerful and famous rulers.

Ahmosa I, the founder of Egypt's last golden age, the New Kingdom, was among them.

So too were Thutmose the Great, who built the New Kingdom's empire outside Egypt.

Ramesses II, who ruled for nearly 70 years, fought the apocalyptic Battle of Kadesh, and was the real person behind Shelley's Ozymandias, King of Kings.

and Ramesses III, the last great ruler of the New Kingdom, victor over the Sea Peoples during the dark days of the Bronze Age Collapse.

As Egypt fragmented and the new kingdom gave way to the third intermediate period after 1200 BC, grave robbing became an increasingly attractive way of life for residents of Upper Egypt.

To counteract the rampant theft of the hundreds of rich tombs around Thebes, one of the first independent rulers of Upper Egypt following the country's split, Herahor, high priest of Amun and effectively king of southern Egypt, ordered that the older king's tombs be inspected and repaired.

Finding the tombs in a sorry state, the mummies were removed to this hillside cache for safekeeping.

The entrance was covered and subsequently lost for nearly 3,000 years, until the Abd al-Rasul family quite literally stumbled upon the cache sometime in the 1860s or 1870s.

The subsequent uncovering of the mummies by scholars in 1881 created a sensation.

Here were the faces of ancient Egypt's most famous and powerful rulers, lost for millennia and now rediscovered.

One of the oldest, if not the oldest, mummies in the cache didn't inspire nearly as much excitement as the remains of Ramesses the Great or his ilk when the discovery was made.

While all of the mummies had suffered during the thousands of years that separated their lives from those in the 19th century, this one was in particularly bad shape.

The process of preparing the body for burial had been haphazard, and the individual had suffered obvious, ghastly injuries even before the emergency funerary rites that saw his internal organs removed.

He hadn't been a famous pharaoh, but he was a king.

The second-to-last ruler of the 17th dynasty and the father of Kamosa, the founder of the new kingdom.

Today, we'll come face to face with one of Egypt's less renowned but no less important monarchs and attempt to understand how he died and why.

The answers to these questions will take us deep into the world of Egypt in the Near East, as the nadir of the Second Intermediate Period was giving way to the heights of the New Kingdom.

Purposefully, Past Lives is not a show about kings and elites, but every once in a while, it's helpful to turn our focus to one of the people occupying the highest rungs of a given society's ladder.

Not because people like Sekinen Hatao mattered more than their contemporaries, but because we have his physical remains, detailed studies of his final moments, and a good sense of how and why he died in the manner he did.

Death is the great equalizer, and despite his exalted status as a near-divine being in life, Second Internet Tao's end was anything but dignified or royal.

When we have the opportunity to explore a crystallized moment in time that occurred more than 3,500 years ago, we have to take it.