WHO WAS KHUFU?
By ANDREW GOUGH
The Pharaoh Khufu built the most audacious and sublime monument in history, the Great Pyramid of Egypt. So, what do we know about this legendary king from the Fourth Dynasty? Surprisingly, testament to his life, let alone pyramid is conspicuously scant, casting doubt over his true identity. Nevertheless, there are several viable candidates for the figure known as Khufu, including the traditional attribution championed by most orthodox academics, for evidence suggests that the oft-maligned field of Egyptology may, in fact, be right. But there are others, one being that Khufu’s real name was confused with the ‘oath of protection’ bestowed by his parents, while another, albeit controversial, possibility is that the celebrated king was actually a woman.
Lifting the Veil on the Fourth Dynasty
For an era that produced the spectacular pyramids of Meidum, Dashour, Giza and Abu Roash, embodying the pinnacle of Egyptian building prowess, the Fourth Dynasty (circa BCE 2575 – 2465) remains veiled in anonymity. Take, for instance, the five-volume, 1500-page ‘Ancient Records of Egypt’ (1922) by J.H. Breasted, which is indexed by Dynasty and Pharaoh and includes texts transcribed from ancient documents and artefacts, yet includes only 13 pages on the prodigious pyramid builders of the Fourth Dynasty. This is but one of many other examples, particularly in regards to Khufu, the second king of the period known as the Egyptian Old Kingdom.
Khufu was one of several children born to King Sneferu and Queen Hetepheres and had fifteen daughters and nine sons of his own, including his successor, Radjedef. According to the Turin King List, Khufu reigned for 23 years. Other sources ascribe varying lengths: Manetho 65 years; Herodotus 50. Regardless of the differences, one thing is certain; history does not remember Khufu kindly. In fact, for a man of his apparent renown, it hardly remembers him at all.
Khufu’s father, Sneferu, was the first pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, an accomplished builder in his own right, who constructed two impressive pyramids at Dashour and a third at Meidum. American Egyptologist, Mark Lerner, comments on Khufu’s achievement relative to his father’s, in his authoritative work, ‘The Complete Pyramids’: “If Khufu did not equal the total mass of his father’s monuments, he came close in his single pyramid and far surpassed his father’s pyramids in size and accuracy.” So Khufu literally built upon his father’s legacy and succeeded in creating the grandest pyramid of them all – the Great Pyramid, which, we are told, he referred to as the “House of Isis”, a peculiar detail that we shall return to shortly.
While Sneferu, the ‘Good King’, was remembered as a kind and benevolent ruler, Khufu’s legacy is quite the opposite. This is reinforced in many tales, including the writings of the Fifth Century BCE historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt two thousand years after Khufu and recorded an account that portrays the pharaoh as an oppressive tyrant, despised by his people; a heartless man who let his own daughter work in a brothel in order to fund the construction of her pyramid. Herodotus recounts:
“Kheops [the Ancient Greek name for Khufu] brought the country into all kinds of misery. He closed the temples, forbade his subjects to offer sacrifices, and compelled them without exception to labor upon his works. The Egyptians can hardly bring themselves to mentionKheopsso great is their hatred.”
Two thousand years after Herodotus, we find that history is less critical, yet more quizzical, of Khufu’s legacy, as Egyptology authority Joyce Tyldesley recounts in her 2003 book, ‘Pyramids: The Real Story Behind Egypt’s Most Ancient Monuments’: “In fact, there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that Khufu ever opposed his people, but then, leaving his prodigious building achievements aside, there is virtually no evidence of his reign, good or bad.”
Still others, such as William R. Fix, question the validity of the Fourth Dynasty as a whole, in his 1978 book, ‘Pyramid Odyssey’:
“There are just not enough his