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The private mausoleum of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses The Great  is located in the Valley of the Kings. This final resting place of a God-King bears the cryptic for a burial site name - Tomb KV7.  

There is not really much left of the burial chamber - flash floods damaged it badly destroying much of the decoration beyond repair. None of the famous  monuments erected by mausoleum architects survived either. 

However, Ramesses II still lucked out because his mummy is still safe and sound. It is exhibited in the Cairo’s Egyptian  Museum. How did it happen?

It turns out that Tomb KV7 did not have pharaoh’s body for thousands of years.  In fact, the mummy was found by archeologists in another location quite by chance.

Several centuries passed after Ramesses died. The looting of the ancient tombs was on the rise. Egyptian priests decided to take drastic measures in order to preserve mummies of the great pharaohs. They developed a big plan that can easily be used as a plot of a great detective story. 

Priests removed pharaoh from the tomb, rewrapped it all over again and transferred it to the tomb of the queen Amhose Inhapy from the 17th dynasty of ancient Egypt. But, obviously, it was not good enough, as within 72 hours priests removed Ramessess from that burial site and placed it in the tomb of High Priest of Amun at Thebes, named Pinedjem II who died in 10th century B.C.

We learned about these multiple reburials because priests recorded them in hieroglyphics on the linen covering the mummy of Ramesses. Yet, this is not the end of the story. Driven by unknown to us events, priests gathered the whole pile of other mummies and left it in the same tomb.  When it was discovered in 1881 archeologists discovered other famous pharaohs of 18th and 19th dynasties, including the mummy of Ramesses’ own father.

The discovery of this unintentional family mausoleum led to the largest studies of famous pharaohs.  Thanks to this massive entombment we know how the most powerful pharaohs looked like and even establish the cause of death.

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