Ramesses VI Nebmaatre-Meryamun (sometimes written Ramses or Rameses, also known under his princely name of Amenherkhepshef C) was the fifth ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. He reigned for about eight years in the mid-to-late 12th century BC and was a son of Ramesses III and queen Iset Ta-Hemdjert. As a prince, he was known as Ramesses Amunherkhepeshef and held the titles of royal scribe and cavalry general. He was succeeded by his son, Ramesses VII Itamun, whom he had fathered with queen Nubkhesbed.
After the death of the ruling pharaoh, Ramesses V, who was the son of Ramesses VI’s older brother, Ramesses IV, Ramesses VI ascended the throne. In the first two years after his coronation, Ramesses VI stopped frequent raids by Libyan or Egyptian marauders in Upper Egypt and buried his predecessor in what is now an unknown tomb of the Theban necropolis. Ramesses VI usurped KV9, a tomb in the Valley of the Kings planned by and for Ramesses V, and had it enlarged and redecorated for himself. The artisans’ huts near the entrance of KV9 covered the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb, saving it from a wave of tomb robberies that occurred within 20 years of Ramesses VI’s death. Ramesses VI may have planned and made six more tombs in the Valley of the Queens, none of which are known today.
Egypt lost control of its last strongholds in Canaan around the time of Ramesses VI’s reign. Though Egyptian occupation in Nubia continued, losing the Asiatic territories strained Egypt’s weakening economy and increased prices. With construction projects increasingly hard to fund, Ramesses VI usurped the monuments of his forefathers by engraving his cartouches over theirs. Yet he boasted of having “[covered] all the land with great monuments in my name […] built in honour of my fathers the gods”. He was fond of cult statues of himself; more is known to portray him than any Twentieth-Dynasty king after Ramesses III. The Egyptologist Amin Amer characterises Ramesses VI as “a king who wished to pose as a great pharaoh in an age of unrest and decline”.
The pharaoh’s power waned in Upper Egypt during Ramesses VI’s rule. Though his daughter Iset was named God’s Wife of Amun, the high-priest of Amun, Ramessesnakht, turned Thebes into Egypt’s religious capital and the second centre of power on par with Pi-Ramesses in Lower Egypt, where the pharaoh resided. Despite these developments, there is no evidence that Ramessesnakht’s dynasty worked against royal interests, which suggests that the Ramesside kings may have approved of these evolutions. Ramesses VI died in his forties, in his eighth or ninth year of rule. His mummy lay untouched in his tomb for fewer than 20 years before pillagers damaged it. The body was moved to KV35 during the reign of Pinedjem I and was discovered in 1898 by victor Loret.
Family
Parents and early life
Ramesses VI was a son of Ramesses III; the latter was considered the last great pharaoh of the New Kingdom period. This filiation is established beyond doubt by a significant relief in the entrance of the Medinet Habu temple of Ramesses III, known as the “Procession of the Princes”. The relief shows ten princes, including Ramesses VI, worshipping their father. Ramesses III’s sculptors seem to have left the relief incomplete; only the figures of the king and princes appear, and no names are written in the spaces next to them. The relief seems to have originally been executed when Ramesses VI was still a young prince, as he is shown wearing the sidelock of youth used to denote childhood. When Ramesses VI became king, he added his princely name, “Ramesses Amunherkhepeshef”, inside royal cartouches as well as the titles he held before ascending the throne as “king’s son of his body, his beloved, crown prince, royal scribe [and] cavalry general”. He altered his youthful figure on the “Procession of the Princes” with a uraeus underscoring his royal status. Further, He completed the relief with the names of all his brothers and sons, except for Ramesses IV, who had already written his royal title on the relief.
Speculation in Egyptology during the 1960s and 1970s concerning the chronology and genealogy of the Twentieth Dynasty, as well as uncertainties affecting the identity of the king shown on the “Procession of princes” relief, led some scholars to propose that Ramesses VI was a grandson of Ramesses III and the son either of an unknown prince or the infamous Pentawer involved in the murder of Ramesses III. Such hypotheses have now been conclusively rejected, and the relief is understood to exactly mean what it shows: that Ramesses VI was the son of Ramesses III. Ramesses VI’s mother was probably Iset Ta-Hemdjert, Ramesses III’s Great Royal Wife, as suggested by the presence of Ramesses VI’s cartouches on a doorjamb of her tomb in the Valley of the Queens.
Consort and children
Ramesses VI’s Great Royal Wife was queen Nubkhesbed. The Egyptologists Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton believe that she bore Ramesses VI a total of four children: the princes Amenherkhepshef, Panebenkemyt and Ramesses Itamun—the future pharaoh Ramesses VII who succeeded his father for a short while on the throne—and princess Iset who was appointed to the priestly role of “Divine Adoratrice of Amun”. A stela recounting this appointment was discovered in Koptos and demonstrated that Nubkhesbed was indeed Iset’s mother.
Prince Amenherkhepshef died before his father and was buried in tomb KV13 in the Valley of the Kings, built initially for Chancellor Bay, an important official of the late Nineteenth Dynasty. The tomb decoration was updated in consequence, some reliefs notably mentioning Nubkhesbed. Amenherkhepshef’s sarcophagus was usurped from Queen Twosret.
The filiation of Ramesses VII is established by an inscription on a doorjamb from Deir el-Medinah which reads “the good god, lord of the two lands, Usimaare-meryamun-setepenre, Son of Re, lord of epiphanies, Ramesses [VII], (It)-Amun, god, ruler of Heliopolis—he has made as his monument for his father, (may) live the good god, lord of the two lands, Nebmaare-meryamun, Son of Re, [Ramesses VI]”.
The Egyptologists James Harris, Edward F. Wente and Kenneth Kitchen, have also proposed, based on circumstantial evidence, that Ramesses IX was a son of Ramesses VI and thus a brother to Ramesses VII. They note that Ramesses IX honoured Ramesses VII on two offering stands, suggesting they were close kin. Ramesses IX named one of his sons Nebmaatre, Ramesses VI’s prenomen, possibly as a means to honour his father. Other scholars, including Dodson and Hilton, contested this hypothesis, who believed that Ramesses IX was instead a son of prince Montuherkhopshef and thus a nephew to Ramesses VI. They base their conclusion on other circumstantial evidence: first is a depiction of Montuherkhopshef in KV19 on which Ramesses IX’s prenomen had been added. The second is that Ramesses IX’s mother was named Takhat, and Montuherkhopshef’s spouse might have been a lady of the same name, possibly the same person.
Reign
The scholarly consensus is that Ramesses VI reigned in the mid-12th century BC for eight years and lived for two months into his brief last regnal year. More precisely, the Egyptologist Steve Vinson proposed that he reigned between 1156 BC and 1149 BC, while the Encyclopædia Britannica reports 1145–1137 BC, Jürgen von Beckerath gives 1142–1134 BC, Erik Hornung 1145–1139 BC, Nicolas Grimal 1144–1136 BC making him a contemporary of Nebuchadrezzar I of Isin, Ian Shaw, Jacobus van Dijk and Michael Rice 1143–1136 BC, and 1132–1125 BC in a 2017 study.
In 1977, the Egyptologist’s Wente and Charles van Siclen were the first to propose, upon reviewing the chronology of the New Kingdom period, that Ramesses VI lived into his eighth year of reign. This hypothesis was vindicated the following year by the Egyptologist Jac Janssen, who published an analysis of an ostracon which mentions the loan of an ox in the seventh and eighth years of an unnamed king who can only have been Ramesses VI. Two years later, Lanny Bell reported further evidence that Ramesses VI not only reigned into his eighth regnal year but most likely completed it and lived into his ninth. Ramesses VI’s eighth year on the throne may also be mentioned in Theban graffito 1860a, which names the then serving High Priest of Amun, Ramessesnakht. This graffito has also been ascribed to Ramesses X, but this interpretation has been contested, and its ascription to Ramesses VI has been proposed as an alternative. The subject remains debated. An essential piece of evidence first recognised by Jansen in 1978 but fully exploited only five years later by the Egyptologist Raphael Ventura is found on the Turin Papyrus 1907+1908, which covers the period from Ramesses VI’s fifth year until Ramesses VII’s seventh year on the throne. The reconstruction of the document proposed by Ventura shows that the simplest solution available to explain the chronology of the period covered by the papyrus is that Ramesses VI enjoyed a reign of eight whole years, died in his ninth, and was succeeded by Ramesses VII rather than Ramesses VIII, as had been debated until then.
Activities and situation in Egypt
Immediately after he acceded to the throne, Ramesses VI and his court may have visited Thebes on the occasion of the Beautiful Festival of the Valley or the Opet Festival, concurrent with Ramesses V’s burial preparations. Ramesses VI visited the city on at least another occasion during his reign when he installed his daughter as Divine Adoratrice of Amun. The situation in the south of Egypt at the time of Ramesses VI’s accession was not entirely stable, as attested by records showing that the workmen of Deir el-Bahari could not work on the king’s tomb owing to the presence of “the enemy” in the vicinity. This situation occurred for at least fifteen days during Ramesses VI’s first year on the throne. This “enemy” was rumoured to have pillaged and burned the locality of Per-Nebyt, and the chief of the Medjay of Thebes—essentially the police—ordered the workmen to remain idle and watch the king’s tomb. It is unclear who these enemies were. The term could designate parties of Libyan Meshwesh, Libu and Egyptian bandits, or as the Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý conjectured, a full-blown civil war between followers of Ramesses V and Ramesses VI, a hypothesis supported by Rice but which has been firmly rejected by Kitchen and, to a lesser extend, by Grimal and van Dijk. A short military campaign might have ensued, and from Ramesses VI’s second year on the throne onwards, these troubles seem to have stopped. This campaign could be connected with an unusual statue of Ramesses VI showing him holding a bound Libyan captive, as well as with a depiction of Ramesses VI triumphing over foreign soldiers on the second pylon of the Karnak temple. This triumph scene was the last to be made in Egypt until the later reigns of Siamun (986–967 BC) and Shoshenq I (943–922 BC).
Other indications in favour of strife and military activities early in Ramesses VI’s reign are the names he adopted upon ascending the throne, his Horus name meaning “Strong bull, great of victories, keeping alive the two lands”, as well as his Nebty name “Powerful of arms, attacking the myriads”.
Later reign of Ramesses VI
Following these events, in his second year of rule, Ramesses VI finally buried Ramesses V in an unidentified tomb in the Valley of the Kings, having usurped the tomb prepared initially for his predecessor. On this visit to Thebes, Ramesses VI installed his daughter Iset as God’s Wife of Amun and Divine Adoratrice of Amun in the presence of his mother, the acting vizier Nehy and other court officials. That same year, he ordered the reduction of the gang of workmen working on the king’s tomb from 120 members to its former number of 60, which had been changed under Ramesses IV. Following this, the community of workers at Deir el-Medina gradually declined, finally abandoning the settlement in the subsequent Twenty-first Dynasty. Despite the reduction, the Turin papyrus indicates that Ramesses VI ordered the construction of six tombs in the Valley of the Queens. This number might include the hasty completion of the tomb of Iset Ta-Hemdjert, Ramesses’ mother. It is unknown whether these tombs were finished; in any case, they are now unidentifiable.
At some point in his reign, a cult statue of Ramesses VI was installed in a shrine of Ramesses II in the temple of Hathor of Deir el-Medina. The figure was called “Lord of the Two Lands, Nebmaatre Meryamun, Son of Re, Lord of Crowns, Ramesses Amunherkhepeshef Divine Ruler of Iunu, Beloved like Amun”. A complete description of it is given on the verso of the Turin Papyrus Map, celebrated for being the oldest surviving topographical map. The papyrus indicates that the statue was made of two essences of painted wood and clay, showing the pharaoh wearing a golden loincloth, a crown of lapis-lazuli and precious stones, a uraeus of gold and sandals of electrum. The statue is said to receive three services of incense and libations every day. The text of the papyrus is a letter directly addressed to Ramesses VI asking that a confident man be put in charge of the offerings. The letter seems to have been received favourably by the king, as the author’s grandson is known to have held the title of “High Priest of Nebmaatre [Ramesses VI], Beloved of Amun”.
Ramesses VI was fond of such cult statues. No less than ten statues and a sphinx have been discovered in Tanis, Bubastis and Karnak, more than any other Ramesside king of the Twentieth Dynasty following the reign of Ramesses III. The tomb of Penne, a high Egyptian official in Nubia, reports that Penne donated lands to generate revenue for the upkeep of yet another cult statue of Ramesses VI. Ramesses VI was so satisfied with this deed that he commanded his Viceroy of Kush, “Give the two silver vessels of ointment of gums to the deputy [Penne]”.
While few of Ramesses VI’s activities are known in detail, he is well attested by numerous reliefs, inscriptions, statues and minor finds from Karnak, Koptos and Heliopolis.
Economic decline
Over the period spanning the reigns of Ramesses VI, VII and VIII, prices of essential commodities, particularly grain, rose sharply. With Egypt’s economy weakening, Ramesses VI turned to usurp the statues and monuments of his forebears, frequently plastering and then carving his cartouches over theirs, particularly those of Ramesses IV, which figured prominently along the processional routes in Karnak and Luxor. In other examples, he usurped a statue of Ramesses IV, columns of texts inscribed by Ramesses IV on an obelisk of Thutmose I in Karnak, and the tomb of Ramesses V. Kitchen warns not to over-interpret these usurpations as signs of antagonism on behalf of Ramesses VI to his older brother and nephew. The usurpations were not thorough but targeted the most prominent places where Ramesses VI’s cartouches would be most visible. Besides, Ramesses VI did leave cartouches of Ramesses IV intact in many areas, including in places where both his name and that of his brother feature close to one another, such as in the Medinet Habu temple of Ramesses III, so the hypothesis of a damnatio memoriae—whereby all references to someone are systematically eliminated to remove this person from memory and history—can be eliminated.
A piece of possible evidence for genuine architectural works on Ramesses VI’s behalf is found in Memphis, where an inscription on a granite gateway cornice of the temple of Ptah claims that he erected a great pylon of fine stone. Ramesses VI then boasts of “covering all the land with great monuments in my name […] built in honour of my fathers the gods”. Overall, the Egyptologist Amin Amer characterises Ramesses VI as “a king who wished to pose as a great pharaoh in an age of unrest and decline”.
Dilution of power
High officials
Some high officials of Ramesses VI are known, such as his finance minister and overseer of the treasury Montuemtawy who was in office since the end of Ramesses III’s reign; the vizier Neferronpe in office since Ramesses IV’s time on the throne; his son the vizier Nehy; Amenmose, the mayor of Thebes and the king’s butler Qedren. To the south, the troop commander of Kush was Nebmarenakhte and the administrator of Wawat—the land between the first and second cataracts of the Nile—mayor of Anîba and controller of the Temple of Horus at Derr was Penne.
The dynasty of Ramessesnakht
In Thebes, the high priesthood came under the control of Ramessesnakht and his family at the time of Ramesses IV, possibly owing to Ramessesnakht’s father Merybaste’s high control over the country’s financial institutions. Ramessesnakht was officially Ramesses VI’s Vizier of the South, and his power grew at the expense of that of the pharaoh even though Iset was connected to the Amun priesthood as well “in her role as God’s Wife of Amun or Divine Adoratice”. If fact, Ramessesnakht most likely oversaw the construction of the funerary building of Iset in the tomb complex K93.12, and while, as the Egyptologist Daniel Polz puts it, “he and his relatives were the most powerful individuals in Egypt at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty”, his activities were not directed against royal interests. Ramessesnakht often attended to the distribution of supplies to workers and controlled much of the activity connected with the construction of the king’s tomb, possibly because the treasury of the high priest of Amun was now at least partially funding these works. Ramessesnakht’s son Usermarenakhte was made into the Steward of Amun and became administrator of large swaths of land in Middle Egypt. He also inherited the role of Merybaste as controller of the country’s taxes, ensuring that Ramessesnakht’s family was in complete control of both the royal and Amun’s treasury. Other high offices, such as those of the second and third priests and of “god’s father of Amun”, was given to people who entered Ramesesnakht’s family by marriage.
Ramessesnakht was powerful enough to build for himself one of the largest funerary establishments of the entire Theban cemetery at the end of the New Kingdom when royal building projects, including Ramesses VI’s, usurped the mortuary temple that had been abandoned. Ramessesnakht’s monument in Dra’ Abu el-Naga’ reused an earlier building dating back to the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Dynasties and was refurbished to show its owner’s political and economic standing. Overall, Egyptologists now estimate that Ramessesnakht and his dynasty essentially established the second centre of power in Upper Egypt, seemingly on behalf of the Twentieth Dynasty kings who ruled from Memphis and Pi-Ramesses in Lower Egypt. This effectively made Thebes into the religious capital of Egypt and an administrative one on a par with its northern counterpart, laying the foundations for the rise of the Twenty-first Dynasty under Herihor and Pinedjem I, 50 to 70 years later.
Final decline in Canaan
Egypt’s political and economic decline continued unabated during Ramesses VI’s reign. He is the last king of the New Kingdom period whose name is attested on inscribed wall fragments as well as two pillars of the temple of Hathor of the Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai, where he sent expeditions to mine copper ore.
Egypt may nonetheless still have wielded some influence or at least still had some connections with the remnants of its empire in the Levant, as suggested by the base of a fragmented bronze statue of Ramesses VI discovered in Megiddo in Canaan and a scarab of his from Alalakh on the coast in southern Anatolia.
Egyptian presence in Canaan was terminated during or soon after Ramesses VI’s rule, with the last garrisons leaving southern and western Palestine around the time and the frontier between Egypt and abroad returning to a fortified line joining the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. A 2017 archaeological study reached the same conclusion, namely that Ramesses VI’s reign is the terminus post quem for the presence of the Egyptian military in Jaffa, which was twice destroyed around this period. Opponents of the Egyptian authority were of local extraction, probably originating in Canaanite cities of the Levantine coastal plain, an opposition to Egyptian hegemony ultimately resulting from the arrival of the Sea People in the region during the reign of Ramesses III. The loss of all Asiatic territories further strained the redistributive economy of Egypt’s New Kingdom society, depriving the subsequent kings of much of their legitimacy.
Continuing presence in Nubia
The Egyptian control of Nubia seems to have been much firmer at the time, owing either to the advanced Egyptianisation of the local population or to the economic importance of this region. Ramesses VI’s cartouches have been uncovered on Sehel Island near Aswan and in Ramesses II’s temple in Wadi es-Sebua. Ramesses VI is mentioned in the tomb of Penne in Anîba, not far from the Third Cataract of the Nile. Penne also recounts punitive military raids further south, from which he claims to have brought back loot to the pharaoh.
Funerary monuments
Ramesses VI was buried in the Valley of the Kings in a tomb known as KV9. The tomb was first built for Ramesses V, who may have been buried in it for a short period necessary for another, likely undecorated tomb, to be cut for him somewhere else in the Valley of Kings and which remains to be discovered. The usurpation of Ramesses V’s burial may be a sign that Ramesses VI did not hold his predecessor in high regard, which would explain why he had Ramesses V’s name obliterated and replaced by his own on more than one occasion. Alternatively, it may reflect the king’s pragmatic concern for economic measures. In any case, Ramesses VI commanded that KV9 be entirely refurbished for himself with no space left for Ramesses V’s permanent burial, who was finally led to rest in Ramesses VI’s second year on the throne, possibly because stability had returned to Thebes at the time.
The renewed works on KV9 are responsible for the preservation of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the entrance of which was buried beneath huts built for the artisans working on Ramesses VI’s tomb. These works seem to have been completed during Ramesses VI’s sixth reign. At this point, Ramessesnakht received 600 Debens (The deben was an ancient Egyptian weight unit) of blunted copper tools in the grand forecourt of Amun in Karnak, probably indicating the end of the construction works on the tomb. Furthermore, if the Theban ostracon 1860a does refer to Ramesses VI and not Ramesses X, then it indicates that the burial was finally ready for the king in his eighth year on the throne, at which point he might have been ill and nearing death. Once finished, the tomb was 104 m (341 ft)-long and included one of only three complete renditions of the Book of Gates known from the royal funerary context, as well as a full version of the Book of Caverns.
Within 20 years of Ramesses VI’s burial, the tomb was most probably desecrated and ransacked by grave robbers, who hacked away at the hands and feet of Ramesses’ mummy to access his jewellery. These events, occurring during the reign of Ramesses XI, are described in the Papyrus Mayer B, although the identification of the tomb mentioned in this source is not entirely sure. Ramesses VI’s mummy was subsequently moved to the tomb KV35 of Amenhotep II during the reign of Pinedjem of the early Twenty-First Dynasty, where it was discovered in 1898 by Victor Loret. A medical examination of the mummy revealed that Ramesses VI died around forty and showed severe damage to his body, the head and torso being broken into several pieces by an axe used by the tomb robbers.
