sewhere, not an individual.
Where the name Khufu has been etched in the archaeological record, we often find Khnum-Khufu and this has given rise to considerable debate amongst scholars. A possible explanation is that the concept of a cartouche, or the oblong enclosure containing the hieroglyphic representation of a royal name, had only been introduced by Sneferu, at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty. As far as I am aware, there are no earlier references to Khnum-Khufu and Khufu before the Fourth Dynasty. Might the practice of including a god’s name in a cartouche have been an early rendition of the evolving cartouche protocol?
Egyptologist, James P Allen, offers an intriguing and relevant insight in his book, ‘Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs’ (2000): “Of the five royal titularies it was the throne name, also referred to as prenomen, and the “Son of Re” titulary, the so-called nomen, i.e., the name given at birth, which were enclosed by a cartouche.” The ‘name given at birth’; in the early Fourth Dynasty, might that have included the name of the creator god, Khnum? This prompts the question, could the precursor to the cartouche – the ‘Horus Name’, or the incarnation of god on earth – shed further light on Khufu’s true identity?
Khufu in the Archaeological Record
For the pharaoh who constructed the most famous monument of the ancient world, few – if any – images remain. Conventional thinking suggests they were looted or removed out of reverence and then lost, or reused elsewhere; or, alternatively, they never existed in the first place. The most convincing evidence for their existence was found in Khufu’s Mortuary Temple. Here, Reisner discovered what appeared to be ruined statues of Khufu, albeit with only the feet remaining, while other damaged reliefs bearing Khufu’s name only serve to portray fragmented images of a faceless king. These tantalising, incomplete carvings do nothing to divulge the personality of the king, and while today we can stare into the eyes of Khafre in the form of his famous diorite statue, in Khufu’s case we have no defining image and his identity seems instead to be shrouded in mystery and intrigue.
Mortuary Temples were standard components of all large scale pyramids and were used to commemorate the deceased pharaoh, and it is in these temples that that statues of other Fourth Dynasty pharaoh’s have been discovered, suggesting that Reisner may have correctly identified the remnants of a once equally grand statue of Khufu that was irrevocably damaged in antiquity.
Bizarrely, the sole surviving statuette of the king is a miniature, 3-inch ivory figurine, discovered in Abydos in 1903 by the famed English Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie. And even that is shrouded in controversy, for the body of the statue, which bears Khufu’s ‘Horus Name’, was discovered without its head, prompting Petrie to stop all excavations until it was discovered in the rubble a few weeks later.
Just why it took an entire team of workers several weeks to sift through the sand to locate the head has never really made sense, and only Petrie’s stellar reputation prevented further speculation on the authenticity of the hugely significant find. Petrie would have, undoubtedly, been aware of the significance of his discovery; he had uncovered the world’s first – and to this day only – statue of the king who built the Great Pyramid.
However, upon closer inspection, Khufu’s faded Horus Name looks indistinguishable from the Horus Names of other pharaohs. Of equal concern is the fact that Horus Names were only used as the primary identifier of royalty in the First, Second and Third Dynasties (and again in the early Eleventh Dynasty) before being transformed into the cartouche in the Fourth Dynasty by Sneferu, Khufu’s father. Although Horus Names continued to be used in conjunction with other naming conventions, by the time of Khufu, the cartouche had become the primary identifier of the pharaoh.
In reality there were five primary names for a king: (1) the Horus Name: the oldest naming conventio