Merenptah

Succession in the family of Ramesses II was a matter of patience: Merenptah (d. c. 1203 BC), the king's thirteenth son by Queen Isetnofret, became heir only after twelve elder brothers had predeceased their long-lived father. He had served as a general and as crown prince effectively administering the kingdom during Ramesses's last years, and he was probably in his sixties when he finally acceded around 1213 BC.

The decade of his reign was dominated by defense. In his fifth year a coalition of Libyans under the chief Merey, joined by contingents of the migrating groups Egyptologists call the Sea Peoples, advanced on the western Delta; Merenptah's forces defeated them decisively in a battle commemorated at Karnak and elsewhere. He also reports suppressing a revolt in Nubia and conducted or claimed operations in Canaan. Egypt's borders held, though the pressures his reign first registered on this scale would return under the 20th Dynasty.

His most famous monument owes its celebrity to five words. The great granite stela he set up in his mortuary temple at Thebes — discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896, and originally carved for Amenhotep III before Merenptah reused its back — closes a hymn on the Libyan victory with a list of defeated enemies in Canaan that includes the line "Israel is laid waste, its seed is not." It is the earliest generally accepted mention of Israel in any ancient text, written with the determinative for a people rather than a place, and it has made the "Israel Stele" a fixed point in debates over early Israelite history far beyond what its author intended.

Merenptah moved the administrative center back to Memphis, where he built a palace, and quarried much of his Theban mortuary temple from his father's neighboring monuments. He died around 1203 BC and was buried in KV8 in the Valley of the Kings; his mummy was found in 1898 in the cache in the tomb of Amenhotep II. His death opened a disordered period in which his son Seti II faced the rival king Amenmesse, the beginning of the dynastic quarrels that closed the 19th Dynasty.