Certificate of Completion
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Rameses III and the birth and death of a dynasty
Professor Aidan Dodson
5 lectures delivered over Monday evenings. 15th June - 13th July 2026. 7.30-9pm UK time
We love to see you for the live lectures, but if you have to miss one, don't worry, you can of course catch up (or watch again) at your leisure via the recordings. You will have access to the recorded lectures for a whole month after the last live lecture. Recordings will be available until the 13th August.
At the beginning of the twelfth century BC, Egypt was in crisis. A four-year struggle for the throne following the death of Merenptah, son and successor of Rameses II, split the country in two, and soon after its end, the country had a child-king, under the tutelage of a pair of shadowy figures – the Chancellor Bay and Queen Tawosret. A few years later, Bay had been executed, and soon afterwards the young king was dead, with Tawosret now female pharaoh. However, from the outset she was opposed by a certain Sethnakhte, who after a two-year struggle himself became pharaoh – the founder of the Twentieth Dynasty.
Within two years, he was also dead, leaving the throne to his son, Rameses III, often dubbed (incorrectly) as the ‘last of the great pharaohs’. In parallel with Egypt’s own upheavals, the whole Levant had been convulsed by events that led to the eclipse of most of the polities of the region, and it fell to Rameses to successfully defend Egypt’s borders against the advancing hordes known as the ‘Sea Peoples’. However, the collapse of the international order, and doubtless the aftershocks of Egypt’s own internal conflicts, contributed to economic and political problems that culminated in the pharaoh’s assassination. Although stability was briefly restored, a few decades later, Egypt was again wracked by civil conflict, bringing not only the Twentieth Dynasty, but the whole New Kingdom to an end, heralding the new Third Intermediate Period, at one point so impoverished that the dead had to share coffins.
We will explore this period over five evenings, as follows:
Monday 15th June
Lecture 1. Poisoned Legacy: the Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty
Monday 22nd June
Lecture 2. A New Dynasty & the ‘Last Great Pharaoh’
Monday 29th June
Lecture 3. Family and Murder
Monday 6th July
Lecture 4. From Houses of Eternity to Resurrection
Monday 13th July
Lecture 5. The Death of a Dynasty
Professor Aidan Dodson
Aidan Dodson is honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol, where he has taught since 1996. He received his BA from the University of Liverpool in 1985, and his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, in 1986 and 1995, being elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2003. Aidan was Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo for the spring of 2013, and Chair of Trustees of the Egypt Exploration Society from 2011 to 2016. He is the author of some thirty books, among which is Rameses III King of Egypt His Life and Afterlife (2019) and Poisoned Legacy:The Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty (2016).
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