The very term ‘‘dynasty’’ is misleading, since in Ancient Egypt it refers less to blood lines than to power groups. Therefore, the Old Kingdom could already use the definition that will become known later, i. e. that of ‘‘a house’’ (per) sharing a Residence, a tutelary god, and common focus. Ancestry will, therefore, not be a pertinent criterion, unlike our own concept of ‘‘dynasty,’’ where the concept is inseparably linked to lineage; it is closer to the Greek notion of a dynasteia, the word adopted by Manetho in a clever translation of the Egyptian per; for the Greek term designates a power group founded by a dynast, and the Latin translation potestas used by Christian chronographers conveys the same idea.
The lack of congruity between family and dynasty is seen clearly, for example, in the accession to the throne of Netjerikhet Djoser, founder of the Third Dynasty, who is known to have been the son and successor of Khasekhemwy, last king of the previous dynasty - a transition which was apparently carried out without conflict, to judge from the quantity of offerings placed by the new sovereign in the tomb of his father at Abydos, sealed with his own name (Dreyer 1998a; Wilkinson 1999: 95-6). At the end of the Old Kingdom, on the other hand, the successors of Pepi II themselves seem to subscribe to the familial continuity of the 6th Dynasty, the numerous queens of this exceptionally long-lived sovereign (more than 60 years in power) having given him a vast number of descendants. The name Neferkare, which is the coronation name of Pepi II, will often be borne by later sovereigns, whether related to him or not (von Beckerath 1999: 66-9; Ryholt 2000), and one of them had an unusual fate in historiography: the famous ‘‘Pharaoh’’-queen Nitocris who, according to Manetho, ended the Sixth Dynasty, and who may be recognized as the Neithiqerty of a fragment of the Royal Canon of Turin. Put in its correct place, this fragment actually fits into the list of kings of the Eighth Dynasty and yields the name of an enigmatic king Neferkare Saptah Neithiqerty (Ryholt 2000: 92-3).
Although the line of demarcation between dynasties seems to have been permeable as far as blood lines were concerned, nevertheless the breaks between the 4th, 5th and 6th Dynasties could well have been linked to the accession of new families or branches of families to power. The mothers of Snefru, Userkaf, and Teti were in no case actually queens/king’s wives (Roth 2001: 67-9, 90-4, 113-27), although these kings initiated real lineages. The fact that the mother of Snefru, Meresankh I, is mentioned only as ‘‘royal mother’’ (though the sources are limited) would give credence to Manetho’s assertion that the Fourth Dynasty was ‘‘issue of another line’’ (ex alia regia familia in the Latin version). For the Fifth Dynasty, the thesis that Userkaf, its first king, was a descendant of Djedefre, son of Khufu, has no basis: the change of dynasty seems to revolve around a key person, the double royal mother Khentkawes I, who did not bear the title of queen either. The importance of this lady, of unknown descent, can be measured by her tomb at Giza, half pyramid (square base), half mastaba (with a roof in the form of a sarcophagus), and from a retouched iconography in which a beard and a uraeus have been added to a female face (Verner 1995: 166-75; 2002: 89-109; Roth S. 2001: 310-11). It is probably she whom the Westcar Papyrus, from the Seventeenth/early Eighteenth Dynasty, calls Redjedet, presented as the mother of the three first kings of the Fifth Dynasty, born from the activities of Re himself. Finally, for the Sixth Dynasty, the accession of Teti, whose mother Zeshzeshet was certainly not the wife of Unis, his predecessor, would constitute another case of familial discontinuity (Stadelmann 1994). However, it is interesting to note that the first wife of Teti, Iput I, acquired the title ‘‘Daughter of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt’’ when her son Pepi I ascended the throne (a variant of the usual ‘‘God’s Daughter’’), i. e. when she gained the status of royal mother, and her mastaba was converted into a pyramid (Labrousse 1994; Hawass 2000). It is possible that this king had hoped to register, through his mother, a more ancient royal lineage, a phenomenon that theoretically affected every monarch, Pharaonic ideology claiming that he was de facto, as Horus, the son of Osiris, his predecessor and father. This monarchic continuity is, moreover, engraved in the stone of the annals, where the kings, placed one after the other, have their mother mentioned as sole parent, the predecessor being treated, rightly or wrongly, as father of the new sovereign (Stadelmann 1994: 335 and 2000: 531-2; Baud 1999: 360-2).
The importance of parentage in monarchy (and Egyptian society in general), based on the Heliopolitan model of father-son succession, thus appears clearly in the sources, despite the very sparse genealogical data. A number of kings of the Old Kingdom are thus related to their predecessor who is father or brother. For the Fourth Dynasty, Snefru leaves the throne to his son Khufu, then he to his own sons Djedefre and Khafre. Menkaure is the son of the latter, and Shepseskaf the son of Menkaure. In the Fifth Dynasty Userkaf is father of his successor Sahure (Labrousse 1997; el-Awady 2006a; 2006b: 41-2), who was the father, in his turn, of Neferirkare, himself the father of Neferefre and Niuserre, both born to queen Khentkawes II (el-Awady 2006a; Verner 2006: 102-3). She ended by gaining the same exceptional status as ‘‘mother of two kings’’ which her namesake at Giza had already held (Verner 1995, 1999). The parentage of the ephemeral Shepseskare, who is curiously inserted between Neferefre and Niuserre, remains unknown, but he could be an older member of the royal family who filled a power vacuum between the unexpected death of a young king, Neferefre (which an anthropological analysis of his remains proves), and the probable immaturity of his younger brother Niuserre; moreover, the interlude was brief (Verner 2006: 102-3). Whilst parentage is unknown for the remainder of the dynasty (Menkauhor to Unis), filiation remains a permanent feature of the Sixth Dynasty: Teti was the father of Pepi I, who was himself the father of Merenre and Pepi II by two different queens, Ankhnespepi I and II, who were sisters, and Merenre II was a son of Pepi II (Vercoutter 1992: 315-26; Roth S. 2001: 138-69; Dodson & Hilton 2004: 70-8). As in the Fourth Dynasty, a strong principle of endogamy prevailed in the royal family: thus Ankhnespepi II married successively Pepi I and Merenre (Labrousse 2000), and her namesake Ankhnespepi III, daughter of Merenre, married Pepi II.
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