Mountains of the Pharaohs The Untold Story of the Pyramid Builders

Chapter One The Reign of Sneferu King Sneferu was very pleased. His brother Rahotep, an energetic, handsome young man with black hair and a debonair mustache, had returned from his raid across the southern border into Nubia laden with booty. The Nubians had put up very little fight and surrendered with hardly any bloodshed. The might of the Egyptian king was already a legend in foreign lands; and the arrival of his well-trained troops, breaching the rocky impassability of the First Cataract with speed and efficiency, had struck fear into the hearts of the enemy. Seven thousand healthy men and women had surrendered themselves and two hundred thousand head of precious cattle to the royal expedition; these families would be put to work tilling the royal estates scattered up and down the river Nile, tending the royal herds, and helping to build the royal monuments. Sneferu was so pleased with his young brother that he ordered the royal sculptors to carve exquisite statues of the prince and his wife, the beautiful Nofret, out of fine limestone. Little did he dream that archaeologists would stumble across these same statues over four thousand years later or that the workman who first laid eyes on the lifelike painted faces of Rahotep and his wife, their eyes gleaming with inlaid crystal, would be so frightened that his heart would stop forever. *** Sneferu was a king revered throughout pharaonic history as a wise and beneficent ruler. He was one of the most powerful kings of ancient Egypt and the founder of a great dynasty; he ushered in a period of impressive achievement, an era of power and mystery. Sneferu was an energetic monarch who sent both trading and military expeditions into neighboring lands and carried out an ambitious building program within Egypt's borders, leaving behind no less than four pyramids. Given the name Ptah-Sneferu ("Ptah is the one who makes things beautiful"), he was remembered by later Egyptians as the archetype of an excellent king. He was held in such high honor that he was deified five hundred years after his death; his cult remained active for thousands of years. Sneferu's mother was a queen named Mersyankh, the wife of Huni, the last king of the 3rd Dynasty. Since Sneferu was considered to have inaugurated a new dynasty, we believe that Mersyankh was not the principal wife of Huni but was instead a secondary queen. Huni and his principal queen, whose name we do not know, had a daughter named Hetepheres. If the main royal couple had any sons, they all must have died before their father. To ensure the line of succession, Huni married Sneferu to his half sister Hetepheres, and made him the new heir to the throne. In ancient Egypt, queens--the king's chief wife, his mother, and sometimes his eldest daughter--symbolized the female principle and were essential to proper rule. Some of these queens exerted considerable authority and power of their own--we know of four queens dating from various periods of Egyptian history who actually ruled Egypt, even though this was contrary to the fundamental tenets of Egyptian kingship. We do not truly understand the rules of succession in the Old Kingdom, although it is generally assumed that the next king should be the eldest son of the reigning king and his principal queen (although there is no particular evidence for this except the better-known practices of Middle and New Kingdom kings). I myself am not certain that the eldest son was supposed to inherit the throne, since we know of many king's eldest sons who held important administrative titles but were never kings. In any case, when, for whatever reason, the successor was the son of a minor wife or came from a secondary branch of the royal family, his claim was usually consolidated by marriage to a royal daughter, especially a daughter of the chief wife. Often this would mean marrying a half sHawass, Zahi A. is the author of 'Mountains of the Pharaohs The Untold Story of the Pyramid Builders', published 2006 under ISBN 9780385503051 and ISBN 0385503059.