Rameses III, King of Egypt: His Life and Afterlife

The last great ruler of Egypt’s New Kingdom—a golden age of economic prosperity and political power, from the 16th to the 11th centuries BCE—Rameses III (r. 1186–1155  BCE) was your quintessential warrior king doing best what Egyptian pharaohs were born and expected to do: crush enemies and boast about it widely on steles and temple walls. But wars cost money. Strains on the treasury prompted history’s first-known labor strike during the 29th year of the pharaoh’s reign. In the end, palace intrigue and his own family did him in. At the instigation of one of his wives, conspirators cut the pharaoh’s throat in the confines of the royal harem. This new, comprehensive, illustrated biography charts Rameses III’s dramatic rise and fall, as well as his monumental legacies and “revived appreciation of him” in recent decades as Egypt’s “last great pharaoh.”