Talking Pyramids

A summary of what we know about Sesheshet and her pyramid appeared this morning on the Haaretz website.

From the article:

Dr. Deborah Sweeney, an expert on ancient Egypt from the archaeology department of Tel Aviv University, says researchers assume that Sesheshet belonged to the close circle of the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, Unas. He had no sons to inherit the throne and Teti may have been his grandson. Since it is not known when she died, researchers can only guess that the pharaoh’s mother was alive during almost 20 years of his reign, which extended from 2323 to 2291 B.C.E.

“Queens were identified with the goddesses that accompany the sun god, protect him and give him strength,” Sweeney explains. “The king needed a queen at his side. There were periods when the queens played a political role, but that was an exception. There was a need for that, for example, when a king ascended to the throne as a child. Usually in those cases there was a queen mother, who took charge of governing until her son grew up.”

Dr. Rachel Shlomi-Chen, of Hebrew University’s department of Ancient Near Eastern history, says Manetho, a Greek historian from the 3rd century B.C.E., wrote about a conspiracy in Teti’s court. Furthermore, archaeologists excavating the cemetery near Teti’s pyramid in Saqqara have found evidence that may point to a plot: The inscriptions on the tombs of high-ranking officials in the court were damaged, in what does not seem to be a random way, scholars claim: It may have been deliberately done to the tombs of officials belonging to the conspiracy.

The queen mother may have helped Teti in his struggle against the conspirators, but in any case, according to Manetho, he was murdered by his bodyguards not long after she died. His dynasty, the Sixth, ruled Egypt until 2184 B.C.E., almost 1,000 years before the period of Rameses II, the king during whose reign the Exodus from Egypt took place.

Read the article in full at the Haaretz website.

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Tags: Saqqara, sesheshet, teti