By the mid-2nd millennium BC, the New Kingdom empire was unravelling.
The Sea Peoples were attacking Egypt's coasts.
Economic instability produced what historians consider the world's first recorded labour strike — tomb workers who stopped work when their grain rations didn't arrive.
Ramesses III was the last great pharaoh who held it together.
He repelled the Sea Peoples in two military campaigns — but was then killed by members of his own court, the Harem Conspiracy: a secondary wife who wanted her son on the throne.
CT scans in 2012 confirmed that his throat had been cut.
He was around ninety years old.
This is the lower half of his sarcophagus — seven tons of red granite, carved inside with spells from the Book of the Gates to guide him through the afterlife.
The lid has been in Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum since the early 19th century.
Fun fact: this room, called the Crypt of Osiris, is positioned deliberately below the ground floor.
You are, symbolically, standing in the Egyptian underworld.
Exactly where the Egyptians would have wanted you to be.
