Ramesses has been able to reorganize Egyptian…

1161 BCE to 1150 BCE

Ramesses has been able to reorganize Egyptian society into classes grouped by occupation and to finish his great funerary temple, palace, and town complex at Madinat Habu, in western Thebes.

He also builds additions at Karnak, the great Theban temple complex.

He encourages trade and industry, dispatching a seaborne trading expedition to Punt, a land on the Somali coast of Africa, and exploiting the copper mines at Sinai and probably also the gold mines of Nubia, Egypt's province to the south.

After a prosperous middle reign, administrative difficulties and conspiracy trouble the last years of Ramesses.

About the year twenty-eight of the king's reign, circa 1159, the vizier of Lower Egypt is ousted because of corruption.

A year later the workers employed on the royal tombs at Thebes go on strike—the first known labor strike in recorded history—because of delay in the delivery of their monthly rations.

The main reason for this deficiency is due to the massive and extended 1159 BCE to 1140 BCE eruption of the Hekla III volcano in Iceland, which expels large amounts of smoke and rock into the atmosphere thereby causing large-scale failures of the crop harvest.

The presence of significant quantities of volcanic soot in the air prevents much sunlight from reaching the ground and will also arrests global tree growth for almost two full decades.

The result in Egypt is a substantial inflation in grain prices under the later reigns of Ramesses VI-VII whereas the prices for fowl and slaves remained constant.

The eruption, hence, affects Ramesses III's final years and impairs his ability to provide a constant supply of grain rations to the workman of Deir el-Medina community.

Only the intervention of the Upper Egyptian vizier, who has assumed responsibility for the whole country, end the work stoppage.

Toward the end of Ramesses' reign, Tey, one of his two principal wives, seeking to place her son on the throne, plots to assassinate the king.

The plan is somehow betrayed and probably foiled, as the plotters are successfully brought to trial.

The king, who dies at Thebes in the thirty-second year of his reign, may have died as a result of the plot, or soon afterward; but documents contain no information about the year of the conspiracy, and the king's mummy displays no wounds.

His tomb is one of the largest in the Valley of the Kings.

He is succeeded by the crown prince Ramesses IV, who commissions the Great Harris Papyrus or Papyrus Harris I, which chronicles his father's vast donations of land, gold statues, and monumental construction to Egypt's various temples at Piramesse, Heliopolis, Memphis, Athribis, Hermopolis, This, Abydos, Coptos, El Kab and other cities in Nubia and Syria.

Ramesses IV initiates a substantial building campaign program on the scale of Ramesses II by doubling the size of the work gangs at Deir el-Medina to a total of one hundred and twenty men and dispatching several major expeditions to the stone quarries of Wadi Hammamat and the Sinai.

Several inscribed stela at Wadi Hammamat record that the largest expedition consisted of 8,368 men alone including two thousand soldiers.

Part of his program included the extensive enlargement of his father's Temple of Khonsu at Karnak and the construction of a large mortuary temple near the Temple of Hatshepsut.