n, depicting the king’s name inside a niche façade of the palace, representing the god’s name on earth; (2) the Nebty Name: the name representing the “two Ladies” or goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt; (3) the Golden Horus Name: the two golden falcons, unframed, like the Horus Name, believed to represent the king’s initiation name; (4) the Throne Name: Khnum-Khufu in the case of Khufu, written inside a cartouche and represented with an ideogram of a Bee; and (5) the Nomen, or Birth Name: (Knhum)-Khufu in the case of Khufu, preceded by the phrase ‘son of Ra’. The incarnations of the king’s royal name are confusing, as is the fact that Manetho refers to Khufu as Suphis, and the Kings Lists show Khufu or Khufuf, while Khufu’s alternative names down through history include Khuf, Chufu, Khoufou, Cheops and Kheops.
With such complexity, one must be careful in drawing conclusions. However, it is fair to inquire why, by the onset of the Fourth Dynasty, and especially by the time of Khufu – its 2nd pharaoh – a Horus Name and not a cartouche would have been used to portray the royal name of the most important king of the Dynasty? And lastly, Abydos, the location where the statue was discovered, only really became a cult centre of Osiris and Isis from the end of the Old Kingdom (not its beginning, which Khufu’s reign represents), so the likelihood of an effigy of the king being found there, although entirely plausible given Abydos’s special status as a religious centre, is not as tidy as it might otherwise be.
Remarkably, the 3-inch ivory statue is all that remains of an Egyptian king who ruled for over two decades and who built the greatest monument of his or any other day. Other images have been thought to represent the great king, such as a giant head, now in the Brooklyn Museum, and a miniature head in a museum in Munich. However, all that links these images with Khufu is their stylistic similarity to the headless statue Petrie found in Abydos; no cartouche, Horus Name or identifier suggests Khufu. So, the evidence is rather underwhelming, to say the least. Are there lost Khufu artefacts waiting to be discovered? One thing for certain is that the evidence, like our understanding, needs re-examining.
Other, non-image bearing objects have been attributed to Khufu, such as an artefact known as the “Ring of Cheops”, which was thought to have belonged to the king, as it bears his cartouche, but is now believed to have been the possession of a priest from a 25th Dynasty (760 BC to 656 BC) cult that worshipped Khufu at Giza. This raises the question: was this cult venerating the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid, or the god of the River Nile, the bringer of the life-giving inundation, who was also the protector of children? Disappointingly, even objects that contain the King’s cartouche do not bring us closer to understanding his true identity. So where does that leave us?
If the 3-inch ivory statue from Abydos is the most famous image of Khufu in existence, then the most famous cartouche – and the king’s strongest link with the Great Pyramid – is scribed in red masons’ marks in the relieving chambers of the Great Pyramid. The ‘quarry marks’, as they are known, were discovered by Major-General Sir Richard William Howard Vyse in 1837, after deploying gun powder to gain entrance to the previously sealed chamber. To this day, Vyse’s discovery represents the only hieroglyphics discovered inside the Great Pyramid. Not surprisingly, Vyse found references not only to Khufu, but to Khnem-Khufu, as well.
Vyse’s discovery has undergone much scrutiny, and many have accused him of forging the cartouches in order to lay claim to the proof that Khufu built the Great Pyramid; after all, masons’ marks were painted, not etched, and could be easily recreated. However, while the quarry marks match others at Giza and appear to be authentic, the silver bullet that exonerates Vyse is the fact that Khufu’s cartouche actually spans the side of a wedged pyramid block, and thus could not have been added after the pyramid’s construction. So, why was a cartouc