Nitocris

For other uses, see Nitocris (disambiguation).
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Nitocris[1]
in hieroglyphs

Nitocris (Greek: Νίτωκρις) has been claimed to have been the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt's Sixth Dynasty. Her name is found in Herodotus' Histories and in writings by Manetho, but her historicity is questionable. She might have been an interregnum queen. If she was in fact a historical person, then she may have been the sister of Merenre Nemtyemsaf II and the daughter of Pepi II and Queen Neith.[1]

Ancient records

According to Herodotus (Histories ii-100), she invited the murderers of her brother, the "king of Egypt", to a banquet, then killed them by flooding the sealed room with the Nile.

... [Nitocris] succeeded her brother. He had been the king of Egypt, and he had been put to death by his subjects, who then placed her upon the throne. Determined to avenge his death, she devised a cunning scheme by which she destroyed a vast number of Egyptians. She constructed a spacious underground chamber and, on pretense of inaugurating it, threw a banquet, inviting all those whom she knew to have been responsible for the murder of her brother. Suddenly as they were feasting, she let the river in upon them by means of a large, secret duct. (Herodotus)[1]

Then, to avoid the other conspirators, she committed suicide (possibly by running into a burning room). Manetho claims she built the "third pyramid" at Giza, which is attributed by modern historians and archaeologists to pharaoh Menkaure of the Fourth dynasty. Manetho was most likely confused by the similarity of the names Menkara (the prenomen or "throne name" of Nitocris) and Menkaure. Herodotus also has a Babylonian queen of the same name and talks of her constructions in Babylon, mainly connected with diverting the Euphrates. His story about her tomb and the inscription on it which fooled Darius into opening it, only to have another inscription on the inside that chastised the opener for being so greedy is an early example of a familiar cultural meme.

Nitocris is not mentioned, however, in any native Egyptian inscriptions and "she" probably did not exist. It was long claimed that Nitocris appears on a fragment of the Turin King List, dated to the Nineteenth Dynasty, under the Egyptian name of Nitiqreti (nt-ỉqrtỉ). The fragment where this name appears was thought to belong to the Sixth Dynasty portion of the king list, thus appearing to confirm both Herodotus and Manetho. However, microscopic analysis of the Turin King List suggests the fragment was misplaced in reassembling the fragmentary text, and that the name Nitiqreti is in fact a faulty transcription of the praenomen of a clearly male king Netjerkare Siptah I,[1][2][3] who is named on the Abydos King List as the successor of the Sixth Dynasty king Nemtyemsaf II. On the Abydos King List, Netjerkare Siptah is placed in the equivalent spot that Neitiqreti Siptah holds on the Turin King List.

In fiction

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 J. Tyldesley, Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt, 2006, Thames & Hudson, p. 63
  2. ↑ Ryholt, Kim. "The Late Old Kingdom in the Turin King-list and the Identity of Nitocris", Zeitschrift für ägyptische, 127, 2000. p.91
  3. ↑ Lloyd, Alan B. (2010). A Companion to Ancient Egypt. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4443-2006-0.
  4. ↑ Ellis, Mark. The Green Hornet Chronicles (Moonstone Entertainment, Inc., 2010), p. 151–60.
  5. ↑ Griffith, George (1976). The Mummy and Miss Nitocris. Arno Press. Retrieved 2016-07-23.
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