Khui

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Khui was an ancient Egyptian kinglet during the early First Intermediate Period. Khui may have belonged to the Eighth Dynasty of Egypt, as Jürgen von Beckerath has proposed,[2] or he may instead have been a provincial nomarch who proclaimed himself king.

Attestation[edit]

Khui is not known from historical sources and the only certain attestation of his existence is a fragmentary relief on a stone block showing his cartouche which was published in 1912 by the Egyptologist Ahmed Bey Kamal and later republished by Raymond Weill. The block was excavated from a mastaba tomb of the necropolis of Dara near Manfalut.[1] This necropolis is dominated by a massive funerary structure which was hastily attributed to this obscure king (the so-called Pyramid of Khui), assuming that the block came from its almost disappeared mortuary temple.[3][4]

Pharaoh or nomarch[edit]

Based on the cartouche surrounding Khui's name on the relief from Dara, Egyptologists including Jürgen von Beckerath have proposed that he was a king of the early First Intermediate Period, belonging to the Eighth Dynasty.

On the other hand, Egyptologists Barry Kemp and Toby Wilkinson believe it more likely that Khui was a nomarch, that is a provincial governor, who took advantage of the power vacuum following the collapse of the Old Kingdom and proclaimed himself king, in the same way as the coeval and neighboring Heracleopolite founders of the 9th Dynasty.[5][6]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Kamal, Ahmed Bey (1912). "Fouilles à Dara et à Qoçéîr el-Amarna". Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte. p. 132.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  2. ^ Jürgen von Beckerath, Handbuch der ägyptischen Königsnamen, München-Berlin, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1984, p. 60, ISBN 3422008322.
  3. ^ Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, Thames & Hudson, ISBN 978-0-500-28547-3, p. 164
  4. ^ Egyptian History Dyn. 6-11
  5. ^ Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd ed., New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 338-339.
  6. ^ Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, New York, Random House, 2010, p. 123.

Bibliography[edit]