Ramesses XI (Menmaatre Setepenptah)

The collapse of the New Kingdom

Ramesses XI was the final pharaoh of the New Kingdom. During his reign, the central government entirely lost control of Upper Egypt. Desperate citizens in Thebes violently ousted the corrupt High Priest of Amun, Amenhotep, leading to a civil war known as the "War of the High Priest."

A fractured state

The conflict ended when a general named Herihor took military control of Thebes. Herihor declared himself both vizier and High Priest of Amun, effectively operating as an independent king in the south and initiating what he called the "Era of the Renaissance." When Ramesses XI died without a male heir, a military commander named Smendes assumed power in the north, moving the capital to Tanis. This official split marked the end of the New Kingdom and plunged Egypt into the Third Intermediate Period.

A tomb turned into a workshop

Ramesses XI's own tomb, KV4, was quarried in the Valley of the Kings, but construction appears to have been abandoned and no evidence has been found that he was ever buried there. Instead, once the royal necropolis administration began systematically dismantling and reprocessing older royal burials during the early Third Intermediate Period, KV4 was converted into a workshop used to strip and rewrap funerary equipment recovered from earlier tombs, including those of Thutmose I, Thutmose III, and Hatshepsut. Centuries later, during the Coptic period, the same tomb was even used as a dwelling.