People seem to forget that the average lifespan in Ye Olden Days wasn’t low because everyone was a withered crone by fifty. The single biggest factor dragging the average down is how difficult it was to live through infancy, which gave you a good chance to live to five, which gave you a better shot at making it to twelve, at which point you would probably make it to your twenties, and so on. The hard part was surviving childhood diseases. As an adult, while illness could happen, some of our current illnesses (heart disease, diabetes, certain lifestyle-related cancers) weren’t as common. For adults (20+) the most likely causes of death were infections (the most likely reason a woman would die from childbirth was childbed fever, systemic infection contracted through the very-not-sterile birth practices, ahead of ‘bad’ deliveries, though there it could be deadly too without reliable c-sections as an option, and of course things that would be minor cuts and burns to us post-antibiotics could turn septic, lockjaw was a real risk from punctures) or accidents.
There’s no set date where humans drop dead without medicine propping us up. Even the low life expectancy of earlier eras is highly skewed by high childhood mortality. If someone lived past 3–5 years old, the odds of them living to old age were pretty decent. I mean, a lot of things could go wrong. An infected cut could kill you, a lot of injuries that would be survivable nowadays weren’t back then. And the older you get, the higher your odds of developing cancer, heart disease, lung problems, or some other illness which they had no real treatment for.
But some people just don’t get those. Even in modern times, some people never have heart disease, some people never get cancer, some people never develop appendicitis. And some people just never get serious injuries.
Rameses just never happened to contract anything that killed him. Whatever illnesses he did get either got better on their own, or were survivable. A lot of other people of the era died much sooner, but he happened to get lucky.
Ramases was a prince and pharaoh. He wasn’t in a position to have accidents as much as, say, a farmer or stonecutter or sailor would be. He wasn’t going to be giving birth. He would have had access to the best food, sanitation, and health practices of the time. He apparently avoided accidents or death in battle. And apparently he had no genetic/inherited disorders that might shorten his life. He was in the best position someone could be to maximize their life expectancy
He survived infancy, and then didn’t become injured or seriously ill during his lifetime.
Mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses II
People seem to misunderstand the statistics of longevity. Just because the average life expectancy in the pre modern era was 30-50, doesn’t mean our forebears didn’t reach that age. The reason that our average lifespans were so much shorter then than they are today is because the majority of kids did not make it past childhood. Add that to the fact that every time a woman got pregnant, she had a 1 in 3 chance of dying in childbirth, as well as a ridiculously high infant mortality rate to match, and you have yourself a recipe for a dismally low average life expectancy. When you have a charming Lady like Nefertiti, you wish not to die and leave such a beautiful woman for another man to enjoy being with.
The name that Ramesses II gave to Nefertiti means “ The Pretty Arrived ” ;
see how His Majesty was overwhelmed by her beauty.
I tell you as a man of experience with women;
Beauty alone is not enough. She must have had wit and sophistication that made her the favorite and also the dearest to our Greatest Pharaoh ever existed, His Majesty Ramesses II.
Ladies/Gentlemen
Please accept my apology for mishandling the sequence of our Pharaohs of Egypt. I wasn’t alert enough for that sequence when I wrote my answer. As Mr Stephen Bell wrote in his comment; the lovely Queen Nefertite was the wife of Akhenaten not Ramesses II. This philosopher Pharaoh is contradicting my reasoning in the above answer. He had the most beautiful woman on Earth but he was too distant from her with the mutiny he triggered on the basic foundations of the religion of his people.
But if you weren’t a child and weren’t an expecting woman, your odds of survival to old age were almost as high as they are today. So long as you didn’t contract a serious disease or infection, and you weren’t killed in battle, you could live into your 80s.
In the case of the Ramesses II, by virtue of being the Pharaoh of Egypt at the height of its power, he was given the best food, the cleanest water, and indeed, the most advanced medical care in the ancient world. It’s not shocking to learn that he lived into his 90’s. The only impressive facet of his particular longevity is that he managed to survive a great many battles without being severely injured or killed.
Instead, most Egyptologists believe Ramesses II died of a toothache. That’s not a joke. It’s very likely a tooth abscess killed him at the age of 91.
Rest In Peace, oh King of Kings.
Picture Source Quora
Thanks for Reading
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