The Sun God and his devotees had been making significant advances of position throughout the Fourth Dynasty. Khufu’s name was compounded with that of Khnum, a ram-headed creator god from the Aswan region; most of his successors took names compounded with that of Re, the sun god, ruling in Heliopolis. The priests were gaining power and asserting themselves at the expense of the king’s divine absolutism.
The last king of the Fourth Dynasty gives some evidence of what might well be interpreted as an attempt to reject the domination of Re and his cult. His name was Shepseskaf; he seems only to have reigned for four years. He rejected, too, the idea of the pyramidal funerary monument and instead reverted to something like the earlier form. He built a great low-lying rectangular structure with a rounded top and sharply angled ends which gave it the shape of a gigantic sarcophagus. This is the Mastabat Faraon which, though it is badly ruined, may still be seen at Saqqara.
It is only a matter of speculation whether Shepseskaf’s reign was curtailed by the intervention of the priests, fearful of the possibility of his limiting their power. There is one rather touching piece of evidence which suggests that his qualities as a man were as notable as his acts as a king, concerned to restore the power of his house. His queen was called Bu-nefer; it was she who conducted the ceremonies at Shepseskaf’s funeral, a responsibility usually carried out by a brother or a son. It must be presumed that she loved him.
Throughout his life the king was surrounded by ritual and richly symbolic ceremony. The degree to which this formality must have dominated the king’s life and the lives of those who were closest to him must have been immense. The ceremony will have had a practical value however. If the king was incompetent or idle the round of ceremonies could be intensified to occupy his time, leaving the running of the state to more able or committed officials. Such is only speculation but it would be wholly within the Egyptian perspective to have invented this device of political management, along with all the others which they clearly did initiate.
What life must have been like in the days of the earlier kings, for example in the time of Netjerykhet or Khufu, can only be imagined. But the loneliness of the king’s office is recalled in the sad advice, given to a later occupant of the throne: ‘fill not thy heart with a brother: know not a friend’.
World History
