After Den came Anedjib, according to the list of kings. Manetho maintains that son followed father throughout the First Dynasty but Anedjib seems to be the first king accorded by later authorities with sovereignty over the entire Two Lands, suggesting that up to his reign the Thinite assumption of the kingship was still disputed by some interests. Anedjib, however, is named as the first king of the united Egypt in the Saqqara king list, but he was usurped (or at least his monuments were desecrated) by his successor Semerkhet, which suggests that the dynasty was not wholly secure and that there was some residual resistance to them still abroad.
Anedjib introduces a new style into the titulary of the kingship. He adopted the title ‘The Two Ladies’, thus honouring the goddesses Uadji and Nekhbet, who were the tutelary divinities of the south and north and the particular guardians of the kings. He is thus really the first ‘Dual King’ of Egypt. His acknowledgement of the power of the two goddesses suggests that he was concerned to fuse the interests of the two great rival gods. Anedjib’s reign marks a notable falling off in standards compared with the prosperity of his predecessors, a falling off demonstrated by the relatively modest size of his tomb when compared with those of Den, Djet and certainly of the dog-loving Queen Herneith. However though his Abydos monument is relatively small he could afford to install sixty-four retainers in subsidiary graves around it.
The design of the tomb (S3038) at Saqqara51 attributed to his reign is very remarkable, for within the superstructure of a familiar mastaba format there was found hidden what is in effect a buried, miniature stepped pyramid. This was entirely unexpected when it was discovered though it is known now not to be unique; Queen Herneith’s tomb has the same feature though, in her case, in what is clearly a more primitive form. It has been suggested (not altogether convincingly, though the concept is quite Egyptian) that the combination of the two forms of tomb represents the stepped mound or tumulus of the south contained within the rectangular panelled structure of the north. There is certainly nothing to suggest that the panelled structure is northern; after all it was chosen by a southern line of princes to contain their royal names in the form of the serekh. The Saqqara monument has been attributed to a high official serving the king, Nebetka. A feature new to Egyptian funerary architecture was a bucranium buried in part of the tomb’s superstructure.52
In any event, the stepped structure finally conquered, bursting out of its concealment magnificently in the burial monument of King Netjerykhet, several hundred years later. Then the Step Pyramid swallows the mastaba which was the original form of the tomb conceived by Imhotep, Net-jerykhet’s architect.
World History
