Pentawer (also Pentawere and Pentaweret) was an ancient Egyptian prince of the

20th Dynasty The Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt (notated Dynasty XX, alternatively 20th Dynasty or Dynasty 20) is the third and last dynasty of the Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom period, lasting from 1189 BC to 1077 BC. The 19th and 20th Dynasties furthermore toget ...

, a son of Pharaoh

Ramesses III Usermaatre Meryamun Ramesses III (also written Ramses and Rameses) was the second Pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty in Ancient Egypt. He is thought to have reigned from 26 March 1186 to 15 April 1155 BC and is considered to be the last great monar ...

and his secondary wife,

Tiye Tiye (c. 1398 BC – 1338 BC, also spelled Tye, Taia, Tiy and Tiyi) was the daughter of Yuya and Thuya. She became the Great Royal Wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III. She was the mother of Akhenaten and grandmother of Tutankhamun. I ...

., p.193 He was involved in the so-called "

harem conspiracy The Harem conspiracy was a plot to assassinate the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III in 1155 BC. The principal figure behind the plot was one of the pharaoh's secondary wives, Tiye, who hoped to place her son Pentawer on the throne instead of the p ...

", a plot to kill his father and place him on the throne. The details of his trial are recorded in the

Judicial Papyrus of Turin The Judicial Papyrus of Turin (also Turin legal papyrus) is a 12th-century BCE ancient Egyptian record of the trials held against conspirators plotting to assassinate Ramesses III in what is referred to as the "harem conspiracy". The papyrus cont ...

; he killed himself following his trial. A candidate for his body is a mummy known as Unknown Man E, discovered in the Deir el-Bahri cache in 1881. This mummy is unusual as it found wrapped in a sheep or goat skin and was improperly mummified, being left with all his organs. Bob Brier has suggested that this mummy does indeed belong to the disgraced prince; DNA analysis has confirmed a father-son relationship with Pentawer's known father, Ramesses III, with both sharing the same paternal haplogroup and half of their Y chromosomal DNA.

Conspiracy

The actual name of this prince is unknown, "Pentawer" being a

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

given to him on the

.James Henry Breasted, ''Ancient Records of Egypt'', Part Four, Chicago 1906, § 421 He was to be the beneficiary of the harem conspiracy, probably initiated by his mother Tiye, to assassinate the pharaoh. Tiye wanted her son to succeed the pharaoh, even though the chosen heir was a son of the queen Tyti. According to the Judicial Papyrus, Pentawer was among those who were made to stand trial for their participation in the conspiracy. He was forced to kill himself:

James Henry Breasted James Henry Breasted (; August 27, 1865 – December 2, 1935) was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he ...

argued that Pentawer "was in all probability only an unfortunate tool" in the conspiracy. Susan Redford speculates that Pentawer, being a noble, was given the option to kill himself by taking poison and so be spared the humiliating fate of some of the other conspirators who would have been

burned alive ''Burned Alive: A Victim of the Law of Men'' is a best-selling book, ostensibly a first-person account of an attempted honor killing. The author, Souad, is described as a Palestinian woman now living in Europe who survived an attempted murder by ...

with their ashes strewn in the streets. Such punishment served to make a strong example since it emphasized the gravity of their treason for ancient Egyptians who believed that one could only attain an

afterlife The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's identity or their stream of consciousness continues to live after the death of their physical body. The surviving ess ...

if one's body was mummified and preserved — rather than being destroyed by fire. In other words, not only were the criminals killed in the physical world, but they also did not attain an afterlife. They would have no chance of living on into the next world, and thus suffered a complete personal annihilation. By killing himself, Pentawer could avoid the harsher punishment of a second death. This could have permitted him to be mummified and move on to the afterlife. A recent study of the remains of 'Unknown Man E' which are a candidate for his suggest that he died by

strangulation Strangling is compression of the neck that may lead to unconsciousness or death by causing an increasingly hypoxic state in the brain. Fatal strangling typically occurs in cases of violence, accidents, and is one of two main ways that hanging ...

hanging Hanging is the suspension of a person by a noose or ligature around the neck.Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. Hanging as method of execution is unknown, as method of suicide from 1325. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' states that hanging i ...

. If the remains indeed are his, then he would have been about 18-20 years old at the time of his death.

Probable mummy

In recent times, the Egyptologist

Bob Brier Robert Brier (; born December 13, 1943) is an American Egyptologist specializing in paleopathology. A senior research fellow at Long Island University/LIU Post, he has researched and published on mummies and the mummification process and has appea ...

has revived the old hypothesis that the famed

mummy A mummy is a dead human or an animal whose soft tissues and organs have been preserved by either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity, or lack of air, so that the recovered body does not decay fu ...

of the "Unknown Man E" found in the

Deir el-Bahari Deir el-Bahari or Dayr al-Bahri ( ar, الدير البحري, al-Dayr al-Baḥrī, the Monastery of the North) is a complex of mortuary temples and tombs located on the west bank of the Nile, opposite the city of Luxor, Egypt. This is a part of ...

cache (

DB320 The Royal Cache, technically known as TT320 (previously referred to as DB320), is an Ancient Egyptian tomb located next to Deir el-Bahri, in the Theban Necropolis, opposite the modern city of Luxor. It contains an extraordinary collection of mum ...

) might, indeed, be Pentawer. The mummy is very unusual because it appears to have been embalmed quickly, without removing the brain and viscera, and to have been placed in a

cedar Cedar may refer to: Trees and plants *''Cedrus'', common English name cedar, an Old-World genus of coniferous trees in the plant family Pinaceae *Cedar (plant), a list of trees and plants known as cedar Places United States * Cedar, Arizona * ...

box, the interior of which had to be crudely hacked to widen it. Brier hypothesizes that Pentawer was mummified very rapidly and placed in an available coffin, likely by a relative, in order to give him a proper burial.Brier, Bob, "Unknown Man E, A Preliminary Examination", ''Bulletin of the Egyptian Museum, Volume 3'', Supreme Council of Antiquities, American University in Cairo Press, 2008, pp.23-7. Subsequent DNA analysis supports the theory that the mummy was a son of Ramesses as they both share the paternal

Y-DNA haplogroup In human genetics, a human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup is a haplogroup defined by mutations in the non- recombining portions of DNA from the male-specific Y chromosome (called Y-DNA). Many people within a haplogroup share similar numbers of sh ...

E1b1a Haplogroup E-V38 is a human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. It is primarily distributed in Sub Saharan Africa. E-V38 has two basal branches, E-M329 (formerly E1b1c or E1b1*) and E-M2 (formerly E3a & E1b1a). The E-M329 subclade is today almost excl ...

and half their DNA.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pentaweret Ancient Egyptian mummies Ancient Egyptian princes People of the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt Ramesses III Ancient people who committed suicide Pseudonyms Forced suicides