One Day in the Life of an Egyptian Pharaoh

Four in the morning. You open your eyes in total darkness. The air smells of cedar oil, cold stone and dying lamp smoke. Somewhere beyond the wall a man coughs and immediately goes silent. He is not allowed to make that sound within thirty paces of you. Eleven servants have been awake for an hour, waiting for you to open your eyes. And before this sun sets, you will decide whether a man lives or dies. #ancientegypt #history #pharaoh You are Ramesses the Second. It is roughly 1250 BC, and you are about forty years old. Now forget everything the films have told you. No golden throne room where you lounge and point at things. No fan-bearers waiting on your mood. You do not own this kingdom the way a king owns a country — you are a function, and the function has a schedule you cannot break. If you skip today's morning ritual, Egyptians believe the sun may not rise. Not as poetry. As a working assumption about reality. This is one day, hour by hour, from the moment you wake until the lamps go out: — 4:15 — why you will never wash yourself again, and why that isn't laziness — The wig and the false beard: both are equipment, not decoration — and you're bald underneath — 5:45 — the Opening of the Mouth, and how hundreds of priests perform it as you, simultaneously — 6:30 — sand in the flour, and why the most powerful man alive had constant toothache — 7:00 — Egypt isn't run by armies. It's run by inventory, and by scribes who never starve — 9:00 — the correction that matters most: the builders were paid, housed, and went on strike — The attendance records that survive, including the man absent because he was embalming his mother — 14:00 — Kadesh, and the earliest peace treaty we can read from both sides — 15:00 — a theft case reaches your seal, and you aren't deciding guilt — 20:00 — the answer: why your body isn't yours, and it has nothing to do with vanity Everything here is built from what the evidence actually supports — attendance records, wage lists, treaty texts, medical examination of the mummy itself. Where the popular story is wrong, we say so by name. #documentary #ancienthistory #dayinthelife Honest caveats: — Ramesses II is unusually well documented, partly because he documented himself. He put his name on monuments built by earlier pharaohs, repeatedly. — The Kadesh inscriptions describe a magnificent victory. Hittite records describe the same battle as their victory. The likely truth is a draw neither side could exploit. — "Slave" is the wrong word for the workers at Deir el-Medina. They were paid, housed and fed by the state, and their complaint documents include the first known labour strike. — Most Egyptians never saw a pharaoh or entered a temple sanctuary. The day in this video was experienced by a handful of people, ever. The peasant in the Delta had a completely different day, and left almost no records in his own words. Subscribe to Wake Up In History — one day, one life, hour by hour. Not battles, not kings, not dates to memorise: the ordinary day almost nobody bothered to write down. New video every week. #wakeupinhistory #immersivehistory #egyptology