afre 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 convention, 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 r