Latest / Ramses the Great: Egypt's Most Powerful Pharaoh — Fexingo History / Ramses the Great's Prince Khaemwaset: Scholar, Priest, Magician
Transcript
- Lucas: We've talked a lot about Ramses the Great — his battles, his monuments, his wives, his capital. But today I want to look at someone who moved in his shadow, yet carved out a completely different kind of legacy. His fourth son, Khaemwaset. Luna: Khaemwaset — the one they called the 'Prince of Restorations'? I've heard that name but I don't know much about him. Lucas: Exactly. He wasn't a general or a builder of colossi. He was a priest, a scholar, and — according to legend — a magician. He held the title of High Priest of Ptah in Memphis, which was one of the most important religious offices in the land. Ptah was the creator god of craftsmen and architects, so that city, Memphis, was his cult center. Lucas: But what makes Khaemwaset truly fascinating is that he seems to have been obsessed with Egypt's own past. While his father was busy covering the country with new temples, Khaemwaset went around restoring old ones — particularly the pyramids and tombs of the Old Kingdom pharaohs, which by then were already over a thousand years old. Luna: Wait — he restored pyramids that were already ancient to him? That's like us restoring a Neolithic burial mound. Lucas: Exactly. Saqqara, the great necropolis of Memphis, was his main focus. He restored the pyramid of Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, and added inscriptions to the pyramid of Djoser, the Step Pyramid. And he didn't just clean up stone — he recorded what he found. On the pyramid of Unas, he left a graffito saying he restored it 'because he loved the ancients so greatly.' It's one of the earliest examples of someone consciously preserving history. Luna: That's incredible. He was basically an archaeologist eighteen hundred years before archaeology existed. Lucas: Right. And he had access — as High Priest of Ptah, he controlled the archives at Memphis. He studied the old texts, the Pyramid Texts, the medical and magical papyri. He built a library at Memphis that contained works on medicine, magic, and ritual. Later Egyptian tradition, in the Demotic stories called the 'Stories of Setne Khaemwaset,' turned him into a wizard who could travel to the underworld and contend with ghosts. Lucas: Those stories were written centuries after his death, but they show how powerful his reputation had become. In one tale, 'Setne Khaemwaset' — Setne being a corruption of his name — steals a magical book from the tomb of a prince. The book is guarded by spirits, and Setne uses his wits and spells to outsmart them. It's a ghost story, really, with a moral about hubris. Luna: So his legend lived on long after Egypt lost its independence. The Greeks and Romans must have heard those tales too. Lucas: They probably did. Another of his major achievements was overseeing the burial of the Apis bulls at Saqqara. The Apis bull was a living god, an incarnation of Ptah, and when it died, it was mummified and buried with great ceremony in a series of underground galleries called the Serapeum. Khaemwaset built a new burial chamber for the bulls, a vaulted gallery lined with granite sarcophagi. He even had inscriptions carved that recorded the bulls' reigns, dates, and the names of the priests who buried them. Luna: That sounds like a renovation of a major cult site. Did this help him politically? Lucas: It certainly raised his profile. He was a priest, but he was also a prince — and for a while, he was the crown prince. Ramses lived so long that he outlived many of his children. Khaemwaset was the fourth son; the first three died before him. So by his late middle age, Khaemwaset was the designated heir. But he never became pharaoh. He died, probably in his sixties, just a few years before his father. The throne passed to his half-brother Merenptah, Ramses's thirteenth son. Luna: Do we know how he died? Was it natural causes? Lucas: The records are silent. We know he was still active in year 52 of Ramses's reign, and then he disappears. His tomb has never been identified, though some scholars think he was buried in the Serapeum itself, among the bulls he loved. That would be fitting — a priest of Ptah entombed in the catacombs of the god's earthly incarnation. Lucas: But what he left behind is remarkable. Without Khaemwaset, we would know far less about the Old Kingdom. He copied inscriptions, restored monuments, and preserved texts that would otherwise have crumbled into sand. His work is the reason we have some of the Pyramid Texts today. Luna: He was a historian before the word existed. And he did it all in the shadow of his father, the most famous pharaoh in history. Lucas: That's the thing about Ramses's reign — it was so long and so monumental that it produced not just warriors and builders, but also a son who looked back. Khaemwaset reminds us that the past was always something the Egyptians cared about. They saw themselves as inheritors of a civilization that went back to the dawn of time. And Khaemwaset took that inheritance seriously. Luna: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, it really helps. And speaking of the past — Khaemwaset's restorations are a direct link to that earlier age. When you stand at Saqqara today, you're seeing stones he touched. Lucas: So next time you think of Ramses the Great, remember his son, the prince who spent his life saving the past instead of building over it. That's a legacy, too. Luna: Absolutely. Thanks for exploring that with me.