The Silver Pharoah Mystery

The Silver Pharoah Mystery

 
The Egypt history has a dark age. This age is called the intermidiate period (1069-525 B.C.) During this period Egypt passed trhough economic downturns, civil war, and a country spid between North and South .
Before this age, the ruler of Egypt was Ramses II, the most famous pharaoh in all the Egyptian history. Cleopatra ruled after the dark age. Egypt has had around 170 pharaohs.
 
Psusennes was the pharaoh at the intermidiate period. He ruled Egypt from 1097-1001 B.C.
 
Psusennes was discovered by the professor Pierre Monter in the 30's. He discovered a vast temple in Tanis. This temple was dedicated to Amun. The temple was walled. When Monter was exploring the temple he fell down in a chamber, a royal tomb (from 850 B.C.). There Monter noticed that the chamber where he fell, was already opened, but he didn't give up, he digged farther from the first chamber, surprisely he found another chamber. This one was intact and it had a sarcophagus.
Inside the sarcophagus was Psusennes. Its casket was forge in silver. Something very rare between pharaohs, because they usually forge their caskets with gold; however, inside the casket, the death mask of Psusennes was solid gold.
Because of the World War II, the excavation was closed. Hitler was going to invade Egypt.
 

Psusennes was a strong, healthy, and powerful man. He had a short body (his height was 1.66m), he was a little bit fat in my opinión. He succeeded as a leader, because he had a strong body and he was long lived. He ruled for 46 years (the longest period of reign in Egypt).
Psusennes was a pharaoh and a high priest. High priests were important and wealthy people. They run businnes, they were political leaders and they also could control military forces. There was a time when high priests had almost the same power than the pharaoh. Psusennes became wealthy and powerful by using his family conncetions (his father and brothers were high priests), making political marrying, and alliances.
His most impressive contribution was that he rescued an old capital city, Pyramses. Pyramses was where the pharaoh Rameses II ruled. Psusennes ordered to bring all the monuments from Pyramses to the place he ruled, Tanis.  
 
He died very old, at the age of 80. He had a disease in his back, he also lost a lot of teeth. A theory of why does Psussennes decided to use silver instead of gold in his casket is:  "that silver wouldn't be cheaper, it was not as expensive as gold, but the amount of work in the craft involved was considerable" (Jon Privett).The casket was 19 kilograms of pure silver.