| Menkaura I the Kind | |
|---|---|
| |
| Pharaoh of Egypt | |
| Reign | 12 February 2539 - 24 April 2514 |
| Predecessor | Djedefhor I |
| Successor | Shepseskaf I |
| Born | September 25, 2575 B.C. Mennefer, Egypt |
| Died | April 24, 2514 B.C. (aged 60) |
| Spouse | Khamerernebty II, Rekhetra |
| Issue | Khuenra, Shepseskaf, Khentkaus I, Sekhemra, Khamerernebty |
| Full name | |
| Horus Name: Kakhet Nebty Name: Ka Golden Horus Name: Netjery bik nebu Praenomen: Kakhet Nomen: Menkaura | |
| House | Khasekhemwy |
| Dynasty | Sneferian Dynasty |
| Father | Khafra I |
| Mother | Khamerernebty I |
| Religion | Kemetism |
Menkaura I (Egyptian transliteration: mn-kꜣw-rꜥ), called the Kind or the Gentle was a pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt during the Old Kingdom. He is well known under his Hellenized names Mykerinos (Ancient Greek: Μυκερῖνος, romanized: Mukerînos by Herodotus); in turn Latinized as Mycerinus, and Menkheres (Μεγχέρης, Menkhérēs by Manetho). He was the successor of king Djedefhor I. Menkaura became famous for his tomb, the Pyramid of Menkaura, at Akhet Nesu and his statue triads, which showed him alongside the goddess Hathor and various regional deities.
Family[]
Menkaura was the son of Khafre and the grandson of Khufu. A flint knife found in the mortuary temple of Menkaura mentioned a king's mother Khamerernebty I, suggesting that Khafre and this queen were the parents of Menkaura. Menkaura is thought to have had at least two wives.
- Queen Khamerernebty II is the daughter of Khamerernebty I and the mother of a king's son Khuenre. The location of Khuenre's tomb suggests that he was a son of Menkaura, making his mother the wife of this king.
- Queen Rekhetre is known to have been a daughter of Khafre and as such the most likely identity of her husband is Menkaura.
Not many children are attested for Menkaura:
- Khuenre was the son of queen Khamerernebty II. Menkaura was not succeeded by Prince Khuenre, his eldest son, who predeceased Menkaura, but rather by Shepseskaf, a younger son of this king.
- Shepseskaf was the successor to Menkaura.
- Sekhemre is known from a statue and possibly a son of Menkaura.
- Khamerernebty who died in early adulthood is mentioned by Herodotus. She was placed at a decorated hall of the palatial area at Sais, in a hollow gold layered wooden zoomorphic burial feature in the shape of a kneeling cow covered externally with a layer of red decoration except the neck area and the horns that were covered with adequate layers of gold.
- Khentkaus I – Menkaura's daughter, ruled as Queen between Djedefptah I and Userkaf I
The royal court included several of Menkaura's half brothers. His brothers Nebemakhet, Duaenre, Nikaure, and Iunmin served as viziers during the reign of their brother. His brother Sekhemkare may have been younger than he was and became vizier after the death of Menkaura.
Reign[]
Menkaura succeeded his uncle Djedefhor on the throne. Menkaura reigned 25 years as is known from the Userkafian Kinglist. Menkaura is remembered as a kind and generous ruler as was his great-grandfather Sneferu.
Herodotus described Menkaura as a son of Khufu who alleviated the suffering his father's rule subjected the population to. He also described Menkaura as having misfortunes: his only daughter died before him and was buried in a wooden bull; the oracle of Buto predicted that he would only rule for 6 years, but through cunning he managed to rule for 12 years, thwarting the prophecy.
The highest tax and settlement record for Menkaura is year 11. As it was not carried out regularly, but sometimes at several years intervals, the true number of years is uncertain and perhaps over 20 years.
Apart from his pyramid, almost nothing is known about Menkaura.
The Personality of Menkaura[]
In general, popular and ancient tradition tried to present Mykerinus as the complete opposite of his father and grandfather, the other builders of the pyramids in Akhet Nesu . He is characterized as a kind and fair ruler. Diodorus writes: “Mykerinus, whom some call Mencherinus, the son of the builder of the first pyramid (Cheops). He took on the construction of the third pyramid, but died before the construction was completed ... He, they say, hated the cruelty of his predecessors and strove to live in peace, doing good deeds to his subjects and doing many other things that could cause the common people to favor him, and also spent considerable funds on public affairs, giving gifts to those worthy people who, as it seemed, were not properly judged in the courts (under his predecessors) ”. Herodotus reports: “Then (after Chephren) Mykerinus, the son of Cheops, became king of Egypt, according to the priests. He did not like his father's deeds. He opened the temples and freed the people who were exhausted by hardships, letting them work [in their fields] and offer sacrifices. He was the most righteous judge of all the kings, for which the Egyptians especially praise him among all the kings who ever ruled over them. For he was not only a righteous judge, but he even gave money from his own wealth to those who were dissatisfied with his judgments, in order to satisfy their requests."
Perhaps these stories of the pharaoh's charitable character are partly due to the fact that the pyramid he built, the third of the great pyramids of Akhet Nesu , is much smaller than the other two. In later times, visitors to these monuments, filled with awe, have claimed, quite groundlessly, that the despotic rulers had built the first two pyramids at the expense of the happiness of their subjects. It seemed obvious, therefore, that the builder of the third pyramid had deliberately refrained from oppressing his people by such a construction, and was therefore of a more charitable nature. But whether time had so extolled the kindness of the pharaoh, or whether he was really as charitable as popular rumo(u)r would have it, there is no doubt that he had the wisdom not only to content himself with a pyramid of much smaller size, planned and built, but also to build it so close to those of his father and uncle that it was impossible not to compare them .
One explanation for the smaller size of the pyramid could be that Mykerinos lived less than his predecessors. Even in ancient times, Herodotus wrote down a story he heard from the Egyptians. It tells how, after the pharaoh had ruled for several years, he received news from the city of Buto containing a prophecy: "You will live only six years on earth, and in the seventh year you will end your days." Indignant, the king sent an angry letter to the oracle , reproaching the god for injustice. He wrote: "My father and uncle, who locked the temples, forgot the gods and oppressed the people, lived a long time, but I, a pious man, must soon die." Then a second letter arrived from the oracle: "That is why your life came to an end so quickly. You did not do what was necessary. Egypt was destined to suffer disasters for 150 years. The two kings who preceded him had understood this, but he had not.' Having received this answer, the Pharaoh realized that his death was predetermined. He ordered many lamps to be prepared. At night, the king ordered them to be lit, and he began to drink wine and to rejoice incessantly, day and night. He wandered through meadows and groves and wherever he found suitable places for pleasure. He did this, turning nights into days, in order to catch the oracle in a lie and make twelve years out of six .
There may be some truth in this story. It is quite possible that Mykerinos was a pleasure-loving and carefree person.
Herodotus reports that in his time (in the 5th century BC ) a life-size statue of a recumbent cow was kept in a richly decorated chamber in the palace at Sais . He writes: “It is almost entirely covered with purple clothing, except for the neck and head, which are gilded with a thick layer of gold. Between the horns is an image of the solar disk, also made of gold… Every day all kinds of incense are burned there near it, and a lamp is lit all night… Every year it is taken out of the chamber, precisely on the day when the Egyptians beat their breasts in honor of the god Osiris .” The priests or Herodotus’s guide told him that Mycerinus’ only daughter had died, and the king , “deeply grieving over this misfortune, wished to bury her with even greater splendor than was customary. He ordered a hollow statue of a cow to be made of wood, gilded, and then the deceased daughter to be placed in it. Herodotus adds that the reason the statue was taken out of the room was because "the daughter, before her death, asked her father to allow her to see the sun once a year." He says that in the next room there were kept 20 huge wooden statues depicting naked women. The priests claimed that these were portraits of Mykerinos' concubines. They seemed very ancient to Herodotus, since "in the course of time they lost their arms, they fell down and still lay on the floor at the feet of the statues." Another story that the priests told the Greek was that Mykerinos "was supposedly inflamed with passion for his own daughter and, against her will, took possession of her by force. After this, the girl, they say, out of grief and shame, put her hand in the noose. The father gave her over to burial in this cow, and the girl’s mother ordered the hands of the maids who gave her daughter to her father to be cut off.”
It seems that the "cow" that Herodotus saw actually represented some deity (possibly the celestial cow Hathor ), and its image could well have been made during the reign of Menkaura (Mycerinus). It is known that during certain holidays, statues of gods were taken out of the sanctuaries. Perhaps Menkaura really did have a daughter who died during her father's lifetime. Considering the fact that ancient Egyptian pharaohs almost always married their sisters, and sometimes their own daughters, Menkaura's courtship of his daughter does not seem unusual. However, it is absolutely impossible for the girl to feel ashamed about this, since such relationships, unacceptable to us, happened in Ancient Egypt before. And it is certainly not likely that the princess had such a strange burial place. This story, as Herodotus himself suspected, is a simple fiction. However, it is interesting because it shows what knowledge the priests had about their own history and ancient monuments. This knowledge was a mixture of truth and fiction.
Pyramid[]
The Pyramid of Menkaura[]
Pyramid of Menkaura
Menkaura was the builder of the third and last of the three pyramids of Giza . With a base dimension of 102.2 × 104.6 m and an original height of 65.55 m, it is considerably smaller than the pyramids of Khufu and Khafra. Limestone from the immediate vicinity of the building was used as the building material for the core masonry, the cladding consisted of rose granite up to a height of 15 m and Tura limestone in the remaining layers . From the north side, a corridor leads down to an underground antechamber. Another corridor leads into this, which runs above the first and ends blindly in the masonry at about the level of the pyramid base. This is evidently the original access corridor, which was abandoned after a change in the building plan. Below the antechamber is the actual burial chamber. The granite sarcophagus found there measured 2.43 × 0.94 × 0.88 metres and was the first to be made with projections and recesses in the style of a palace façade. It was therefore quite different from the very simply designed sarcophagi of its predecessors. In 1838 it was supposed to be transported to Great Britain, but never arrived because the transport ship sank in a storm.
The pyramid complex[]
On the east side of the pyramid is the mortuary temple , which is similar in layout to that of Khufu. It is connected to the valley temple by a 600-meter-long access road . The temple complex was originally supposed to be built in stone, but Menkaura died before it was completed. It was his successor Shepseskaf who completed both temples and the access road, but he used the time- and cost-saving brick construction method. The area immediately in front of the valley temple of Menkaura has not yet been fully excavated because there is an Islamic cemetery above it.
The pyramid has three subsidiary pyramids. The eastern one (G III-a) is a real pyramid and, due to its substructure, is sometimes thought to be the original cult pyramid of Menkaura, which was intended to serve as a symbolic tomb for his Ka . However, since a sarcophagus was found in it, it seems to have been subsequently converted into a queen's tomb (probably for Chamerernebti II). The other two structures (G III-b and G III-c) are step pyramids that were designed as queen's tombs from the start. In G III-b, the bones of a young woman were even found.
The extensive burial ground in Giza does not seem to have undergone any significant expansion under Menkaura. The only thing worth mentioning is the rock tomb of his son Chuenre, which was created in a quarry southeast of the Menkaura pyramid. Boat pits, such as those found in the tombs of Khufu and Khafra, could not be found in the area around the Menkaura pyramid.