Pentawer

Pentawer was an Egyptian prince involved in the harem conspiracy against Ramesses III. Judicial records indicate that the plot sought to place him on the throne; he was condemned and apparently compelled to take his own life. Pentawer was born in Thebes and died in Egypt.

The Judicial Papyrus of Turin records proceedings against conspirators associated with Pentawer and his mother Tiye; a mummy identified by some researchers as the prince has been studied as possible evidence for the manner of his death, though the identification remains debated.

Pauline Gedge’s House of Dreams places Prince Pentawer inside the harem conspiracy against Ramesses III, where Queen Tiye and her allies hope to remove the pharaoh and redirect the succession towards her son. House of Illusions returns to the aftermath seventeen years later, when the surviving secrets of the plot threaten men who have built new lives on concealment and force a new generation to investigate Pentawer’s place in the attempted coup and its official memory.