Is This A Pharaoh's Mummy

It's 1881. Several men are venturing into the heart of an ancient pyramid, in constant danger of being crushed and ground to pieces at the slightest touch of the ancient stones suspended above them. They finally reach the innermost chamber, and find that its walls are covered in hieroglyphs, naming the long-forgotten king it was made for. At the west end of the chamber lies a massive sarcophagus, and on the floor beside it lies the mutilated, yet astonishingly well-preserved mummy of a young man. And that's the question we're going to be answering today. Hi, I'm Steve, also known as the Pharaoh Nerd. A couple of weeks ago, this channel blew up because of the AI art videos I created, but rest assured, it's still devoted to ancient Egypt and obscure history as a whole. But thank you so much for all the support you've given me. It really means a lot. And I swear to you, it isn't as boring as you might think upon first glance. So without further ado, let's jump right into it. Unlike the genuine but fragmentary mummy of Pharaoh Neferefre I covered last week, this mummy is almost entirely complete, and not just in fragments. But of course, its identification with the pharaoh whose pyramid it was found within isn't as certain. I'm referring to Pharaoh Merenre I, also known as Merenre Nemtiemsaf, since that was his birth name. You see, every pharaoh had to have a bunch of wacky names. Merenre was the fourth king of the Sixth Dynasty, the last dynasty of the Old Kingdom, a.k.a. the Pyramid Age, when the pharaoh's authority was steadily diminishing. This was right before everything went to ---- in the First Intermediate Period. Merenre was the son of a guy called Pharaoh Pepi I, who may have taken the unprecedented step of co-ruling with his son before his death, possibly because the succession was threatened by some palace conspiracies. The main evidence for this is a little golden pectoral, which just has both of their names on it. I know that's a bit... reaching, but it's the kind of thing that our understanding of a lot of major events in ancient history is based on. Merenre ruled for a little over a decade, and he seems to have been very interested in Nubia, which is just to the south of Egypt. He personally received the submission of various Nubian chieftains, as attested by two reliefs found around the border at the First Cataract near Aswan. He also sent out three expeditions into Lower Nubia, led by the famous autobiographer Harkouf, to procure luxury goods there. So, like, little shopping trips. Merenre made another famous contemporary autobiographer, which there were a surprising number of, a guy called Weni, the first governor of all Upper Egypt, and sent him out into the Eastern Desert to gather stone for the building of his pyramid. Around the time of Merenre's reign, Weni also dug a canal parallel to the Nile at the First Cataract in order to bypass its treacherous waters. That's the ancient Egyptian equivalent of building a highway, so pretty important. But Merenre soon died, and he was succeeded by his probable son, one of the longest-reigning monarchs in human history, Pepi II, who he had with his wife, who was also his stepmother and aunt. I swear, I'm not making this up. That means Pepi II's own mother was also his step-grandmother and great-aunt. Let's just say, not a lot of people attended the Sixth Dynasty family reunions. But incest aside, Merenre was buried in his likely incomplete pyramid deep in the desert at South Saqqara, southwest of his father's pyramid, and that of Jedkare Izezi, whose fragmentary mummy was also found in his pyramid. Nowadays, Merenre's pyramid is so ruined that it's hard for visitors to even find, which you probably shouldn't even go to the trouble of doing because it's closed. But his burial chamber is still in pretty good shape. Its roof is speckled with stars, and Merenre's sarcophagus is still complete. But most importantly, its walls are inscribed with pyramid texts, the king's guide to the afterlife. It was the interest in these texts that led to the discovery of the pyramid, and the potential mummy of Merenre, in the first place. Auguste Mariette, the French founder of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, firmly believed that none of the pyramids contained any inscriptions. But in May 1880, squeezes were made of hieroglyphs that had just been discovered in the late Old Kingdom pyramids of South Saqqara, and these were sent to him. Mariette couldn't investigate these himself, since he was busy dying of the diabetes he'd been suffering from for half his life, and was bound to his sickbed. So he asked his longtime friend Heinrich Bruch to investigate the pyramids, and settled the issue, along with his brother, Emil Bruch. On January the 4th, 1881, so almost exactly 142 years ago today, sort of, Heinrich and his brother entered the pyramid of Merenre and found its walls covered in inscriptions. But most importantly for us, they also found a mummy lying on the floor besides the sarcophagus. According to Gaston Maspero, Mariette's successor and the guy who published the pyramid texts, its lid had been pushed back, but without being thrown on the ground, and is held in a rather unstable balance, which it's still in today. In his memoirs, Heinrich referred to Merenre's fine wrappings as almost transparent and cobweb-like, and said that they had been torn off the body and were strewn about everywhere, probably because of the actions of local looters in the Middle Ages. Anyways, when he first saw the mummy, Heinrich immediately concluded that it had to belong to a man who had died young, which might fit with Merenre's relatively short reign. Maspero also agreed that he must have died very young. The mummy's hair is even combed into a side lock, which was a hairstyle usually associated with young boys in ancient Egypt. The brothers Grimm left Saqqara that evening to report their findings to Mariette, and Heinrich thought it would be nice to show Mariette the mummy, so they brought that along with them too. In his own words, But their journey back to Cairo went hilariously wrong. They had ridden to Saqqara on donkeys, so the king was placed in an ancient coffin freshly turned up by nearby excavations and laid diagonally in front of Emil on his donkey. It took them two hours to reach the nearest railway station, arriving just minutes before the train was due to leave for Cairo. The railway officials were, understandably, a bit surprised by the brothers' traveling companion, so the Brush brothers told them that he was just an old village magistrate from the village of Saqqara, and together with the mummy, they all boarded the baggage car, since the brothers didn't want to let their eyes off it. Just within sight of Cairo, the train suddenly stopped, because the rails happened to be broken. They were still a half hour's walk from the nearest carriage stand, and the sun was just about to set. So, the two brothers carried the coffin by its two ends like a sofa through the desert, the dead barrow seemingly becoming heavier minute by minute. Eventually, they just ditched the coffin, which was itself a priceless antiquity, by the way, and started carrying the mummy by itself, which, in hindsight, wasn't a very good idea. As you can imagine, mummies are pretty brittle, and aren't really suited to being moved like sofas, so the body snapped in the middle and broke into two parts. Each brother then tucked one half under their arms, and kept going on. After finally getting into a carriage, they were stopped by a customs official in front of the Qasr-en-Nil Bridge, notable for being the place where Dio died in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I'm not making that up. The customs official asked if there was anything taxable in the carriage, and the brothers, being staunch libertarians, of course said no, but then the customs official pointed to the two halves of the mummy and asked, but what is this here? Which is what he's literally quoted as saying. Heinrich answered that it was salted meat, as he pressed a coin into the customs official's hand. Mariette was entertained by the story, and gracefully accepted that his theory was wrong, but was understandably repulsed by the mangled mummy. So where did Maren Re question mark end up after this debacle? Well, he was actually on display in the Cairo Museum and its two forerunners in Bulac and Giza for many years, and in 1915, Maspero even describes it as sitting in the same case as what was labeled as the bones of Pharaoh Unas, the last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty. Unfortunately, it didn't end up in the modern Egyptian museum's old royal mummy room, and for a while, no one knew exactly where it went. But in 1975, Dr. Maurice Boukale tracked it down and found it lying in a random stairwell. He is reported as saying that there was an indescribable stench of putrefaction coming from it. How lovely. Ironically, it's actually the only royal Old Kingdom mummy you can readily see today, since it was recently transferred to Saqqara's Imhotep Museum, and is now on display there with a sheet covering his face up to his eyeline. That's because, as you might have noticed, his jaw, part of his neck, and some of his upper teeth are missing. Additionally, the upper part of the chest was smashed in and the head was torn loose. So the mummy was definitely roughed up a bit by looters searching it for treasure. So now we get to the big question, Well, maybe. The hands of the mummy are laid flat against the outer thighs, unlike the mummies of New Kingdom pharaohs that we have. But because all the other known mummies of Old Kingdom pharaohs, like Neferefreys and Jidkareys, are so fragmentary, we just don't know if that was done or not in the Old Kingdom. The most serious argument against this being Merenre is from the physician Grafton Elliot Smith, famous for analyzing all the New Kingdom royal mummies. He assigned Merenre's mummy to the 18th dynasty based on the technique used to wrap him. But recently, some modern Egyptologists have suggested that it is in fact Merenre's mummy after all. The only way to verify if it really is his would be to carbon date it. And I hope that happens in the near future, but for now, it'll just have to remain a mystery. So I guess I didn't really answer the question in the title, but come on, I did my best. Thank you so much for watching. All the sources used for this video will be linked in the description, so feel free to check them out. The story of Merenre's trip to Cairo, according to Heinrich Bruch, is definitely worth a read.