Latest / Ramses the Great: Egypt's Most Powerful Pharaoh — Fexingo History / Ramses the Great's Son Khaemwaset: High Priest and Egypt's First Egyptologist
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Ramses the Great — his wars, his temples, his diplomacy, his monuments. But one of his sons had a career that was completely different from the usual prince's path. No major battles, no grand building projects on the scale of Abu Simbel. But in his own way, he might have been the most interesting of Ramses's many children. Luna: You're talking about Khaemwaset, right? The one they call the first Egyptologist? Lucas: Exactly. Khaemwaset was Ramses's fourth son, born to Queen Isisnofret, the same mother who gave us Merenptah. He was made High Priest of Ptah in Memphis — one of the most important religious posts in the kingdom. Ptah was the creator god, the patron of craftsmen, and Memphis was the ancient capital. But Khaemwaset didn't just perform rituals. He became deeply interested in the past. Lucas: And when I say the past, I mean really old stuff. By Ramses's time, the pyramids at Giza were already about 1,300 years old — that's as old to them as the fall of the Roman Empire is to us. Khaemwaset started going around to these ancient monuments, many of which were already crumbling, and he had them restored. He even left inscriptions on them recording his work. Luna: So he's literally restoring monuments that were ancient to him. That's why people call him the first Egyptologist. Lucas: Right. One of the most famous examples is the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. That pyramid was already more than a thousand years old when Khaemwaset had it repaired. He added a stone block inscribed with his name and a record of the restoration. It's one of the earliest examples we have of someone consciously preserving an ancient monument. Lucas: But his big legacy — the one you can still see today without any digging — is the Serapeum at Saqqara. That's the burial place of the Apis bulls. Luna: The sacred bulls that were manifestations of Ptah, right? Lucas: Exactly. The Apis bull was believed to be the living incarnation of Ptah, and when it died, it was mummified and buried with great ceremony. Khaemwaset oversaw the construction of a vast underground gallery at Saqqara, with huge granite sarcophagi — I mean, these things weigh sixty or seventy tons each — to house the bull mummies. It was a massive engineering project, and it became the official burial place for Apis bulls for centuries after. Lucas: He was also a scribe, a scholar. He's associated with a lot of religious and wisdom texts. There's even a famous text called the 'Setna Khaemwaset' stories — written down many centuries later, in Ptolemaic times — that turn him into a kind of legendary magician who goes on adventures, breaks into tombs, and confronts ghosts. Luna: So he became a folk hero? Like an ancient Egyptian Sherlock Holmes meets Indiana Jones? Lucas: Pretty much. In those stories, he's called Setna Khaemwaset — 'Setna' being a corruption of his title. He's depicted as a wise but sometimes reckless priest who delves into forbidden magic. It tells you how much he was remembered as a figure of learning and mystery. Lucas: But there's a political side too. Khaemwaset was Ramses's fourth son, and for a long time, he was the heir apparent. The first three sons had died relatively young. So for decades, Khaemwaset was the crown prince. But he never became pharaoh. He died in Ramses's fifty-fifth year — that's about twelve years before his father. So the throne eventually passed to his younger brother Merenptah, who was also Isisnofret's son. Luna: Do we know how he died? Was it natural causes? Lucas: The records don't say explicitly, but it seems to have been a natural death. He was probably in his sixties. His tomb has never been found, though it's assumed to be somewhere in Saqqara. But there's a beautiful statue of him as a young man — it's in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — where he's holding a small shrine with an image of Ptah. That's actually one of my favourite pieces from the entire New Kingdom. Lucas: And speaking of things that last — it's funny, we spend so many episodes on grand temples and epic battles, but this one guy, a priest, ended up shaping how later generations even thought about their own history. He might not have built a city or won a war, but he helped invent the idea that the past is worth preserving. Luna: It's a nice thread to pull on. It also makes me think about how our own show is doing something similar — just in a different medium. Lucas: That's a good point. And honestly, it's part of why conversations like this one matter to us. If you've been coming along through these episodes on North Africa, or any of the other series we've been doing, you probably know we put a lot of work into getting the details right and telling stories that don't just skim the surface. And that only works because of listeners who chip in a little — a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it's a small thing that adds up. And it keeps the show independent, which is nice. Lucas: Exactly. So back to Khaemwaset — one of the things I love is how his restoration work wasn't just about vanity. He seems to have genuinely revered the old kings. On one of his restorations, he wrote that he was 'acting according to the desire of his majesty Ptah' and that he did it 'so that the name of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Djoser might live.' He mentions Djoser by name, which is remarkable because that name had been obscure for centuries. Luna: So he's literally keeping the memory of someone who lived over a thousand years earlier alive. Lucas: Yes. And he did it for other pharaohs too. There's an inscription he left at the pyramid of Userkaf, the first king of the Fifth Dynasty. And another at the tomb of Shepseskaf, the last king of the Fourth. He seems to have gone on a systematic tour of the Memphite necropolis, identifying and repairing monuments that were falling apart. Lucas: Now, we should also talk about the Serapeum in a bit more detail, because it's genuinely one of the most impressive underground structures in Egypt. The main gallery is about two hundred meters long, cut into the bedrock. On either side are these enormous niches that held the granite sarcophagi. Each sarcophagus was carved from a single block of granite, and the lids alone weighed several tons. They had to be lowered down a shaft and then moved into place. It's an incredible feat of engineering, especially for a secondary prince's project. Luna: Wait — how many bulls were buried there initially? Lucas: The gallery Khaemwaset built had room for about twenty-four sarcophagi, but over the centuries, the complex was expanded. Eventually, there were multiple galleries, and the burials continued all the way into the Ptolemaic period — so for over a thousand years. The last known Apis burial was in 30 BCE, just around the time Egypt became a Roman province. Lucas: Khaemwaset didn't just build the gallery; he also set up a system for how the bulls were chosen. The Apis bull had to have specific markings — a white triangle on its forehead, a crescent on its side, a scarab mark under its tongue. When a bull died, there was a nationwide search for its replacement, and Khaemwaset formalized the process. Luna: So he's like a project manager for sacred cows. Not what you expect from a pharaoh's son. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what makes him so unique. He wasn't trying to be a warrior or a builder of colossi. He was a scholar-priest who saw value in continuity and preservation. In a way, he was the opposite of his father — Ramses II was all about creating new things to shout his name to eternity. Khaemwaset was about keeping the old things alive. Luna: And yet he's also remembered as a magician in those later stories. There must have been something about his personality that lent itself to legend. Lucas: Absolutely. The 'Setna Khaemwaset' tales — they're actually two stories, 'Setna I' and 'Setna II', preserved on papyri from the Ptolemaic period. In the first, Setna hears about a magical book written by the god Thoth that is hidden in a tomb. He breaks into the tomb, finds the book, and then has a series of adventures involving ghosts, a beautiful sorceress, and a game of senet that determines life and death. Luna: A ghost story starring a real historical figure. That's basically ancient fan fiction. Lucas: It is! And it shows how much Khaemwaset's reputation as a learned, slightly dangerous character persisted. The stories are full of authentic details about Egyptian magic and religion, and they give us a window into how later Egyptians thought about their own past. They also show that even a thousand years later, people remembered that there was a prince who was deeply interested in old tombs and ancient writings. Lucas: One more thing — Khaemwaset was also the first to use the title 'Controller of the Two Houses of Silver and Gold', which basically meant he was in charge of the treasury of Ptah. So he had real administrative power. And he organized the funeral of an Apis bull in Ramses's 30th year, which was a huge state event. The bull was mummified and buried with gold jewelry, amulets, and a stone sarcophagus. That event is actually recorded on a stela that survives. Luna: So he was effectively running the religious bureaucracy of Memphis. That's a lot of responsibility. Lucas: It was. And it might have been a deliberate choice by Ramses. Ramses had many sons, and he seems to have given each of them a different sphere. Khaemwaset got the religious and scholarly side. He was never a military commander, unlike, say, his brother Merenptah. But in a way, his influence was as lasting as any battlefield victory — because he helped shape how Egypt remembered its own history. Luna: And that kind of preservation, in a way, is what we're trying to do here too — keeping these stories alive. Lucas: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's a good place to leave it.