The Secret of the Unfinished Pyramid
Partly submerged in sand and almost coalescing with the surrounding desert terrain is the lowest step of a pyramid core that lies only a few dozen meters southwest of Neferirkare’s pyramid. For a long time it represented what was, for Egyptologists, one of the mysteries of the Abusir cemetery. Some attributed the building to the little-known Fifth Dynasty pharaoh Neferefre, while others considered it the work of the still lesser-known ruler of the period, Shepseskare (see above p. 58). There were also those who hesitated to make any identification of its owner. They all agreed, however, that it was an unfinished pyramid and that, abandoned shortly after work had commenced, it never served the purpose for which it had been planned and that nobody was buried in it. It acquired the name of the Unfinished Pyramid at Abusir and, apart from a few occasional visitors to this forgotten corner of Memphite necropolis, nobody expressed any interest in it.
The Unfinished Pyramid became a priority interest of the Czech Egyptological expedition of Charles University in Prague when in 1974 the Czech team obtained the concession which allowed it to carry out archaeological research in an extensive area south of Neferirkare’s and Niuserre’s pyramid complex. There were several reasons for the interest. Above all it was just at this time that papyri from the archive of Neferirkare’s mortuary temple were published by Paule Posener-Kriéger in the series of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. In one of the small remnants published was a fragmentary allusion to Neferefre’s mortuary temple and to the provision of a contribution to Neferirkare’s mortuary cult. This allusion indirectly confirmed the existence of Neferefre’s tomb and a mortuary temple somewhere near Neferirkare’s pyramid complex and which had, moreover, to be at Abusir. Evidence of another kind, but likewise relating to Neferefre, was a limestone block with the remains of relief decoration discovered not in Neferirkare’s pyramid temple, from where it had originally come, but in Abusir village, where it had been used in the construction of a house. On the block was a partially preserved scene depicting Neferirkare’s family and indicating that the ruler’s eldest son was called Neferre, “Re is beautiful.” It is more than probable that this Neferre and the later pharaoh Neferefre, Neferirkare’s successor, were one and the same person. After ascending the throne, the prince simply slightly altered his name to Neferefre, “Re is his beauty,” which expressed the status of a pharaoh more appropriately.
The head of Neferefre is shielded from the back by the outspread wings of the falcon god Horus, whose earthly incarnation the pharaoh was considered to be. The statue thus very eloquently expresses the pharaoh’s exceptional position and universal power (photo: Kamil Voděra).
Another significant factor was the siting of the Unfinished Pyramid in the cemetery—it was clearly located as the third in a series, after Sahure’s and Neferirkare’s. The pyramids at Abusir, just as at Giza, were not positioned in the cemeteries randomly but in accordance with a particular scheme that is not yet understood in all its aspects. The fundamental axis of the cemetery at Giza was a line linking the southeast corners of the pyramids, while at Abusir it was a line linking the pyramids’ northwest corners. Both lines, the axes of the pyramid cemeteries at Giza and at Abusir, converge towards a point that lies at Matariya, an eastern suburb of modern Cairo. In ancient times this was the site of the temple of Re and the famous center of the sun cult, Iunu, in Greek Heliopolis. It is possible that this was the “fixed point” of the world of the pyramid-builders. The positioning of the Unfinished Pyramid was such that, even before excavation work commenced, it could be anticipated that it belonged to Neferirkare’s direct successor, which in normal circumstances would very probably be his eldest son Neferre, the later Neferefre.
The written evidence for the existence of Neferefre’s mortuary temple—and a mortuary cult presupposed the existence of a tomb—and likewise the well-grounded belief that it was Nefrefre who built the Unfinished Pyramid, led to a single conclusion: despite its appearance and the negative results of the trial digging carried out there by Borchardt at the beginning of the century, the Unfinished Pyramid must once have been a real pharaoh’s tomb. With this working hypothesis, research commenced at the end of the 1970s with the aim of finally revealing the secret of the Unfinished Pyramid.
The first step on the road to understanding the Unfinished Pyramid was geophysical surveying. In view of the particular condition of the terrain and the data required, the method chosen from the varied list of geophysical techniques was that of magnetometry. It was most intensively applied to the extensive sand plain, virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding desert, in front of the eastern wall of the Unfinished Pyramid. The results of this geo-magnetic measuring were rapid, unambiguous, and surprising. It was ascertained that under the sand in the lay a huge, highly articulated building of mud bricks, with a basic outline, seen from above, in the shape of the letter “T”. This shape is characteristic of the basic layout of mortuary temples in the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.
Archaeological excavations, precisely and rapidly targeted on the basis of the results of geophysical measurement, soon definitively confirmed the existence of a mortuary temple. It was demonstrated that the building complex dominated by the Unfinished Pyramid was indeed the tomb of the pharaoh Neferefre. Ludwig Borchardt had, in fact, been within inches of this discovery at the beginning of this century. He did not wish entirely to ignore the Unfinished Pyramid on the western margin of the Abusir cemetery and so he carried out trial digging. As an experienced archaeologist and expert on pyramids he decided to dig a trench in the deep open ditch which ran from the north into the center of the monument and at the bottom of which, in the case of a completed tomb, it would be natural to assume the existence of a passage leading to the sarcophagus chamber. He dug a trench several meters deep in the rubble that filled the ditch right up to its upper edge, but he did not reach the passage or its remains. This negative result confirmed to him the belief that he was dealing with a rough, unfinished building consisting of no more than the lowest step of a pyramid core, and that inside it work had never even started on the construction of the passage giving access from the north, the passage blockade (a stone portcullis), or on what is called the king’s funerary apartment, i.e. the antechamber and the burial or sarcophagus chamber situated under the base-line of the pyramid, approximately in the vertical axis of the monument. The orientation of the passage was closely connected with the idea that after death the pharaoh’s spirit would depart to the northern heaven to become one of the never-setting stars around the Polestar. The contrasting east-west orientation of the burial chamber—the sarcophagus at its western wall was, however, once again aligned northeast and the pharaoh’s mummy laid in it with his head to the north and face turned to the east, to the rising sun—was dictated by the solar religion. This involved the belief that after death the pharaoh would become a member of the entourage of his father Re and together with him would float forever on the heavenly ocean.
View of the Unfinished Pyramid from the summit of Neferirkare’s pyramid, just before excavations were started (photo: Milan Zemina)
Was it by mistake or merely by chance that Borchardt did not continue with his probe for at least another hour? Perhaps one meter lower than the point where he gave up his probe he would have made two archaeological finds under the rubble, and these would certainly have led him to a decision to investigate the Unfinished Pyramid and its surroundings thoroughly. Had he reached the bottom of the ditch, he would have discovered, partly still in situ, the huge blocks of red granite out of which was constructed the portcullis blockade in the passage giving access to the burial chamber. It would immediately have been obvious to an archaeologist as experienced as Borchardt that a substructure had been completed in its entirety, even though the pyramid superstructure above had never been finished. The second discovery was also not one that he could have missed. It was a cursive inscription recorded in black on a block from the core of the Unfinished Pyramid that contains Neferefre’s name in cartouche. The builder and owner of the Unfinished Pyramid would then have been known. Borchardt’s premature negative conclusion had apparently consigned the Unfinished Pyramid to perpetual archaeological oblivion. This has made the possibility of correcting his conclusion after more than 70 years all the more pleasurable for the Czech team.
CAD reconstruction of a vertical section of Neferefre’s burial chamber (by Jaromir Krejči).
The excavations in Neferefre’s pyramid complex proceeded, with intervals between individual archaeological seasons, throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Some unexpected and in many respects unique archaeological discoveries have given us an entirely new view of the pyramid complex, the technical aspects of construction, the status of a royal tomb of that period, the organization of the royal mortuary cult, and so on. This has been made possible by the coincidence of two chance circumstances. On the one hand, an unfinished building offers an opportunity to look, as it were, backstage and throw light on many previously unexplained questions concerning the building of a pyramid. On the other hand, the appearance of this abandoned and sand-buried relic of a pyramid apparently held off whole generations of experienced medieval and modern tomb robbers and stone thieves.
On the site destined for the building of Neferefre’s pyramid, which was already quite some way from the Nile Valley, the ground was leveled and bearings taken for the base of the future pyramid. In the middle of the base a rectangular trench was sunk, east-west in orientation, in which the underground parts of the future royal tomb were to be constructed. Then a deep ditch was dug down into the trench from the north; this was to be the basis of the passage leading down to the underground chambers. It is clear from the unfinished building that work on the underground section of Neferefre’s pyramid was planned to begin a short time after the work on the masonry of the first, lowest step of the core of the section above ground. It was a logical approach, given the mode of construction of the gabled roof of the underground chambers. Originally, it had certainly been planned by the chief architect of Neferefre’s pyramid to build, as in the earlier Abusir pyramids of Sahure and Neferirkare, a gabled roof which would have consisted of three layers, each layer made up of huge limestone blocks. However, the premature death of the king probably forced the architect to reduce the number of layers. Anyway, the procedure of the construction of the roof required the presence of compact masonry on the sides to which the huge blocks could be anchored. The construction of the gabled roof was therefore already to be found at the foundation level of a pyramid.
In several places the mud brick masonry of Neferefre’s mortuary temple has survived to a surprising height (photo: Kamil Voděra).
The remnants of a canopic jar of Egyptian alabaster found in Neferefre’s burial chamber (photo: Milan Zemina).
The untimely death of the young king, even before the construction of the descending corridor and the funerary apartment could be made, led to a drastic change in the original building project of the pyramid. All these underground rooms were hastily built and the large vacant space above the gabled roof of the king’s funerary apartment was filled by lumps of stone and rubble arranged in diagonally running walls crossing over the pyramid’s center. The hurriedly completed first step of the core of the pyramid, which resembled a truncated pyramid, was then faced with blocks of fine white limestone. The outer surface of the building, sloping at an angle of perhaps 78º, was carefully smoothed down. Finally what had been planned as a true pyramid became a truncated pyramid, in fact a sort of a mastaba with an atypical square ground plan. In appearance, the tomb resembled a hill, a stylized tumulus above a burial. This resemblance was not, of course, purely accidental. In one of the papyrus fragments found in Neferefre’s mortuary temple there is evidence that his tomb was known as the “Mound” to those who built it and to those who served here in the pharaoh’s mortuary cult. The upward-facing surface of the Mound was constructed in a very original way: the whole horizontal terraced roof of the mastaba was covered by a layer of clay several centimeters thick, into which was pressed coarse gravel collected from the surface of the surrounding desert. The roof terrace thus visually merged with the desert, and the weather over four and a half millennia left as little trace on it as on its desert surroundings.
Fragment of Neferefre’s left hand (photo: Milan Zemina).
Regardless of the large-scale damage caused to the monument by generations of stone robbers, the excavation of the pyramid’s substructure brought a number of important discoveries. At the foot of the northern face of the monument, in front of the entrance to the descending corridor, the remnants of the so-called Northern Chapel were unearthed. The Chapel, built of mud brick, had originally been a small room with a vaulted roof. Only potsherds and tiny pieces of charcoal testified to the ceremonies once performed in this place following the king’s burial and the sealing of the entrance to his tomb.
Plan of Neferefre’s pyramid complex (by M. Švec and O. Vosika).
Approximately in the middle of the summarily built descending corridor lay the portcullis of red granite blocking the approach to the interior of the tomb. The construction of this portcullis is absolutely unique and has no parallel among the royal tombs of the pyramid age. Usually, the plug blocks would slide vertically—as was common at that time. Instead, for Neferefre, an ingenious system of pairs of stones with lugs and holes was used. This system was probably invented and used because the builders of Neferefre’s tomb were aware of the fact that the monument could have been prone to easy attack by robbers from above.
Reconstruction of Neferefre’s sarcophagus (by Jolana Malátková).
From the king’s funerary apartment only scanty remnants have survived, but these were significant enough to reconstruct the original plan of both rooms, the antechamber, and the burial chamber. Amongst the debris, moreover, some remains of Neferefre’s burial were revealed: fragments of a red granite sarcophagus, fragments of alabaster canopic jars, fragments of offerings and, most importantly, some skeletal fragments of the mummy, including the complete left hand. The subsequent anthropological examination of the remnants of the mummy proved that the king died very young, at the age of about 22 or 23 years.
Fragment of a frit tablet with pictures of deities, found in Neferefre’s mortuary temple. The raised figures of the deities were modeled with paste and then covered by thin gold leaf (photo: Jan Brodský).
A collection of builders’ marks and inscriptions found on the masonry of the monument is also of great historical meaning. For instance, the inscription mentioning “the year of the first cattle count,” which would correspond approximately to the second regnal year of the king, is very significant. It is very probable that in this year, or shortly afterwards, Neferefre died.
The unfinished state of the Pyramid has provided yet further significant archaeological testimony. It was long believed that the way in which pyramids were built was by the arrangement of the stone masonry of the stepped core into a system of slanted layers, inclined at an angle of 75º and leaning on a central stone spindle around the vertical axis of the pyramid. The effect, therefore, was of masonry arranged into a system of inner casings resembling the layers of an onion. The author of this theory was Richard Lepsius. It is interesting that it was on the basis of study of the Abusir pyramids, especially that of Neferirkare, that he developed his theory of the construction of pyramid cores. Ludwig Borchardt, who had investigated the three biggest Abusir pyramids, embraced the theory as well.
The Unfinished Pyramid, and the cleaning of thick layers of debris covering the remnants of the king’s funerary apartment showed, however, a different structure of the pyramid’s core than that was assumed by Borchardt. The outer face of the first step of the pyramid core was formed by a retaining wall made of huge blocks of dark gray limestone up to five meters long and well bound together. Similarly, there was an inner retaining wall built out of smaller blocks, and making up the walls of the rectangular trench destined for the underground chambers of the tomb. However, between the two walls, there were no accretion layers, just pieces of small poor-quality limestone sometimes packed “dry” or stuck together with clay mortar and sand; sometimes little compartments had been built of rough stone lumps and filled with rubble mixed occasionally with fragments of mud bricks and potsherds. As the core of Neferefre’s pyramid, undoubtedly other large Abusir pyramids as well had therefore been constructed in this simple way. It was less demanding in terms of time and material but, at the same time, sloppier and less safe from the point of view of stability. The core was indeed modeled into steps but these were built in horizontal layers as described above. For this reason it is no wonder that today the Abusir pyramids, long ago stripped of their casing of high quality white limestone and with their cores denuded and exposed to further human destruction and natural erosion, are now rather formless heaps of stone.
An inscribed cylinder seal of limestone discovered in Khentkaus II’s mortuary temple (photo: Milan Zemina).
Upon Neferefre’s death his heir was faced with a by no means easy task. It was his duty to complete the tomb and, as the new divine pharaoh, to prepare the burial of his equally divine predecessor. The site of the mortuary cult of a pharaoh was at that time usually a large temple erected in front of the east face of his pyramid, the face looking towards the rising sun. In the short time remaining before Neferefre’s interment, however, it was evidently impossible even to think of building a standard temple consisting of an architecturally articulated complex planned on the basis of defined religious principles. For this reason a temple was hurriedly erected in front of the east face of the Unfinished Pyramid and on its east-west axis. The nucleus of the temple built of limestone blocks stood on the pyramid’s base platform, which had been created by two layers of huge limestone blocks. This was because a five meter strip of free space on the platform remained around the pyramid, the space having been allowed in the original plan for completion of the pyramid’s smooth limestone casing. The other parts of the temple were in mud brick.
In its initial phase the mortuary temple’s design was simple and rectangular, with a north-south orientation. The limestone nucleus of the temple consisted of an open vestibule, where the priests carried out the essential purification rituals that were required on entry to the temple and, three other rooms. Of these the largest and most important was the offering hall. It was originally submerged in darkness and the false door, probably made of red granite, which represented the central place of the cult was embeded in its western. In front of the false door stood an altar on which offerings were placed and of which at least an imprint has remained in the paving of the chamber. It is possible that each of the two narrow rooms at the sides of the offering chamber originally contained what is known as a funerary boat. A small shaft under the temple’s paving yielded the discovery in situ of a so-called foundation deposit consisting of symbolic vessels, a piece of fine dark gray clay used for the sealing, and the heads of a small bull and a bird sacrificed during the ceremonies connected with the foundation of the temple.
CAD reconstruction of Neferefre’s tomb including the earliest stage of the king’s mortuary temple (by Jaromir Krejči).
As yet, we do not know with certainty who began to build the initial small mortuary temple for Neferefre and who, therefore, his direct successor was who ruled for a short time either immediately before or immediately after Neferefre. On two clay sealings, found close to the oldest Neferefre mortuary temple, Sekhemkhau, apears the so-called Horus name of an ill-attested king otherwise known as Shepseskare. Was Shepseskare, then, Neferefre’s successor? We do not know but, if he was, it was only for a very brief period. In any case, when Neferefre’s brother Niuserre, who was to rule for more than thirty years, ascended the throne, he confronted a series of difficult tasks. One of these was to complete, at least provisionally, the half-finished tomb complexes of the closest members of his family—his father Neferirkare, his mother Khentkaus II, and his brother Neferefre. The later phases in which Neferefre’s temple was fundamentally extended and basically modified in design can certainly be ascribed to Niuserre. The building projects show signs of both improvisation and originality. The result was the emergence of a huge and architecturally unique tomb complex which in its design conception has no parallel among pyramid temples. It received the name “Divine are the souls [i.e. divine is the power] of Neferefre.”
Reconstruction of a six-stemmed papyrus column from Niuserre’s mortuary temple (by L. Borchardt).
With the earlier building phase, there emerged a large temple with a rectangular ground-plan which stretched along the whole eastern side of the Unfinished Pyramid. With the exception of a few architectonic elements it was entirely built of mud bricks, a material much less durable than stone but representing a saving of time and money. The main axis of the earlier-stage temple was north-south in orientation; no other pyramid temple is aligned in this way, if we set on one side the older and in many respects dissimilar group of step pyramid complexes of the Third Dynasty and Userkaf’s mortuary temple from the early Fifth Dynasty, which was atypically oriented as a result of particular topographical conditions. This unusual characteristic was undoubtedly a consequence of the fact that the architect was faced with the singular task of building a royal mortuary temple not in front of a pyramid—the standard type of royal tomb of the period—but in front of a mastaba, albeit one of markedly unusual design. The only possibility was to improvise, making a break with all the previous customs and more or less settled norms of royal funerary architecture.
The entrance to the second-stage temple lay in the middle of the eastern facade. It was adorned with two four-stemmed lotus columns made of white limestone; these held up an architrave placed crossways on which rested the wooden boards of a roof terrace. In the central part of the temple, between the columned entrance and the offering hall with the false door installed in the small stone first-phase temple, there was neither an entrance chamber, an open court, nor even a sanctuary with five niches and the pharaoh’s cult statues—all features found in other pyramid temples. Instead the central part contained, besides the access passages, five large magazines in which probably the more valuable temple equipment used for cult ceremonies was originally stored. After damage due to a minor accidental fire in the western part of the temple two wooden cult boats were ritually buried and sprinkled with sand in one of these chambers. They were buried with piety, as is shown by about two thousand cornelian beads, perhaps originally strung on a thread, discovered around the boats. This isolated find has led us to reflect just how little we really know of the everyday religious and cult practices in Egypt at that time.
The northern part of the earlier-phase temple was filled by ten large chambers—storerooms, originally on two stories. They were arranged in five pairs located opposite each other and accessible from a common passage. The number of rooms was not accidental. This is because the mortuary cult in the temple maintained a priesthood divided into five groups or phylai (see below, p. 143). In addition to papyri, somewhat mysterious fragments of frit tablets and faience ornaments have been discovered in these storerooms. The frit tablets with depictions of gods and the pharaoh accompanied by hieroglyphic inscriptions are encrusted with a white paste and covered with thin gold leaf. They perhaps originally adorned some cult objects and wooden boxes holding the precious pieces of temple equipment. In contrast, the faience ornaments probably decorated the large wooden symbolic vessels used during temple ceremonies. The storerooms likewise yielded discoveries of vessels made of diorite, alabaster, gabbro (a kind of volcanic rock), slate, limestone and basalt, practical and cult pottery, flint knives and blades, and other remains. The apparently modest clay sealings bearing the imprints of inscriptions from cylindrical seals have enormous scientific value. They come from the jar stoppers on vessels and fastenings on boxes containing cult objects, and from doors and even papyrus scrolls. The priests serving in Neferefre’s temple, just like Ancient Egyptian officials in general, were obsessed by a bureaucratic longing continually to check and register everything and at every moment to have precise information on what was in the storerooms, who was responsible for it and what had to be obtained or released. Cheap, easily procurable clay, which could be molded without difficulty and stuck on the end of a string wound around a chest or the neck of a vessel and which could be imprinted with the text on the cylindrical seal entrusted to the hand of a responsible official, was the almost perfect means to fulfill this bureaucratic obsession. It is thanks to this mania that today we are able, from the seals bearing the names of kings and officials, gods, temples, palaces, and others, to reconstruct with great chronological precision the organization of the administration, economic relations, the mode of keeping accounts, and many other phenomena of great historical significance. The discoveries from Neferefre’s temple have more than doubled the number of seals dating from Old Kingdom and so far known.
The greatest architectural and archaeological surprise, however, was brought by excavations in the southern part of the temple. Under a layer of sand, rubble, and fragments of mud brick almost four meters thick were buried the remains of a large columned hall—a hypostyle. It was an absolutely unexpected discovery since nothing similar had previously been found in any of the known mortuary temples in the pyramid complexes, or indeed in other monuments of the age of the pyramid-builders. The find was the first known archaeological evidence of a columned hall from Ancient Egypt. The hypostyle hall was rectangular in design and oriented east-west. The space in the hall was divided up by four lines of five columns, aligned in the same east-west direction. Not one of the columns has survived but, from the imprint on one of the limestone bases, we can tell that they were designed to resemble sheaves of six lotus or papyrus buds. They were of wood, covered with a thin layer of stucco and multi-colored, and they supported the flat wooden ceiling of the chamber at a height of perhaps four meters. Nothing has survived of the roof either, although from remains of polychrome stucco discovered on the clay floor of the hall we can be almost sure that it was painted blue and decorated with gilded stars. The hall was undoubtedly originally sunk in shadow, as is suggested, for example, by the ceiling decoration. There can also be no doubt that important rites of the mortuary cult were performed there, as several archaeological finds suggest.
Head of a statue of Neferefre, which was damaged by fire. The pharaoh is wearing the nemes head-cloth and a long ritual beard is attached to his chin. Diorite. The head with the beard is 13.2 centimeters high. The statue is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JE 98180) (photo: Milan Zemina).
Bust of the pharaoh Neferefre, his head adorned by the nemes. The bust is a fragment of a statue that originally represented the ruler sitting on his throne. Basalt. The bust, 23.8 centimeters high, is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JE 98177) (photo: Kamil Voděra).
In the columned hall itself and in its immediate vicinity numerous fragments of statues of Neferefre made of diorite, basalt, limestone, reddish quartzite, and wood were discovered. Among them were six complete portraits of the pharaoh! The smallest and most beautiful of the statues, understandably in fragments and incomplete, was of rose-colored limestone and was originally about 35 centimeters high. It represented the young pharaoh, Neferefre, sitting on a throne and holding to his breast the mace, or hedj, the emblem of kingly power. The ruler’s head, its brow originally adorned with a uraeus, was protected from behind by the outstretched wings of the falcon god Horus. The Egyptian pharaohs considered themselves the earthly incarnations of the highest god of the heavens, Horus, and the statue was therefore expressing, in an original fashion, the linking of earthly and heavenly might in the person of the pharaoh. Previously the famous diorite statue of the enthroned Khafre from his valley temple at Giza, now one of the most celebrated exhibits at the Egyptian museum in Cairo, was considered, together with Pepi I’s statue, the only evidence of this conception in this type of statue. Other statues discovered in Neferefre’s mortuary temple represent the ruler striding with the so-called white Upper Egyptian crown on his head and the sovereign’s mace in his hand, or sitting on the throne and wearing on his head the pleated covering called the nemes
The largest of the stone statues of Neferefre was approximately 80 centimeters in height. All these statues were characterized by perfect craftsmanship in relation to materials, and a masterly artistic shaping of the ruler’s likeness and expression of his celestial kingly power. The largest of all the statues found was originally life-size and made of wood. Unfortunately no more than fragments of it survive: a part of the sole with the base, a ritual beard and a part of the hand with the thumb. It was probably this statue in particular which played an especially important part in the cult ceremonies in the columned hall, as is suggested by several fragments of papyri from the temple archive. The discovery of Neferefre’s statues, which are today on permanent exhibition at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, represents in terms of extent what is so far the third largest find of royal sculpture from the Old Kingdom. This find is all the more valuable because it fills what has up to now been a perceptible gap in the recorded development of royal sculpture in Ancient Egypt in the third millennium BCE.
A striding statue of Neferefre. The ruler wears the crown of Upper Egypt on his head. In his right hand, which is placed on his breast, he holds the ruler’s mace. Basalt. The statue, 80 centimeters high, has a low base Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JE 98181) (photo: Kamil Voděra).
Yet further sculptures, however, were found in the hypostyle in Neferefre’s mortuary temple; these were not of the ruler, but closely associated with him. They were small wooden statuettes of the so-called enemies of Egypt. They represented Asians, Nubians, and Libyans kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. The statuettes may have originally adorned the royal throne or naos in which stood the statue of the pharaoh. The motif of the captured enemies kneeling before the pharaoh is a thoroughly royal motif linked with the Ancient Egyptian conception of the arrangement of the world and the status of the pharaoh within it. This was the reason why the motif of the captive enemies so often adorns objects around the pharaoh. Not only the statuettes of the captive enemies of Egypt but also many other archaeological discoveries—symbolic models of boats, fragments of stone vessels or faience decorations, clay seals and so on—are allowing us gradually to reconstruct the significance and function of the columned hall in Raneferef’s mortuary temple.
The architectonic plan embodied the religious conception and made of the columned hall the place of the other world par excellence Under the heavenly night canopy of the hall sheaves of lotuses (perhaps papyrus), symbol of resurrection, flowered in the form of the columns. The pharaoh, finding his image in a cult statue—and his various sovereign likenesses in his various statues—had made for himself an intimate world of eternal bliss, from which he could continue to govern the destinies of “the people of his time,” exist as a living god on earth, and act as a mediator between the worlds of gods and men. This was the basic conception behind the cult which was practiced in the hall with the precision of a timetable of priestly services. It is also possible that the columned hall resembled the throne hall in a royal palace. To confirm this resemblance it would, of course, be necessary to find and archaeologically investigate at least one royal palace from the age of the pyramid-builders. Unfortunately, such a discovery still remains one of the unfulfilled goals of Egyptian archaeology.
While it is true that archaeological examples of royal palaces from the time of the pyramid-builders have not been found and are known only from contemporary Egyptian written records, Neferefre’s tomb complex has nevertheless yielded remarkable testimony of a different kind. When the excavations in front of the Unfinished Pyramid were shifted further towards the southeast, another large building of mud brick began gradually to emerge from the sand and rubble. Like Neferefre’s mortuary temple, it was built in two phases of construction, was rectangular in plan, and north-south in orientation. Its dimensions, orientation, and rounded outer corners indicate that it was not residential or economic but religious in character. Thorough archaeological research eventually brought its purpose to light: to serve the needs of the cult of Neferefre, a cult slaughterhouse for sacrificial animals had been built in the immediate vicinity of the pharaoh’s mortuary temple! From the written records discovered, for example, the inscriptions on the vessels for fat or fragments of papyri in the temple archive, it was ascertained that this cult abattoir was named “the Sanctuary of the Knife.” While this name had been known from other contemporary written sources, its interpretation had been the subject of dispute because archaeological evidence had been lacking.
Neferefre sitting on the throne. In his right hand, placed on his breast, he holds the ruler’s mace. The pharaoh is dressed in a short skirt. A uraeus, probably made of gold, originally adorned his forehead. The statue, originally approximately 40 centimeters in height, has a low base. Rose limestone. Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JE 98171) (photo: Kamil Voděra).
Neferefre’s “Sanctuary of the Knife” had a single, relatively wide entrance from the north through which the sacrificial animals, mainly cattle but also wild goats, gazelles and others, were led inside. These would then have been ritually slaughtered with the aid of sharp flint knives in the open courtyard in the northwest part of the slaughter-house. In the chambers in the northeastern corner of the slaughter-house the meat would then have been cut up on a wooden chopping board and prepared by heating. The rest of the abattoir—at least two thirds of the building—consisted of storage rooms. A staircase leading to a roof terrace suggests that this space, too, fulfilled a particular function in the context of the slaughterhouse; perhaps the meat would have been dried in the sun here. The great capacity of the storage areas of “the Sanctuary of the Knife” was initially rather puzzling, but only until there had been time for at least a general examination of the newly-discovered papyri of Neferefre’s temple archive. On one of the fragments it was possible to read that on the occasion of the ten-day religious festivals thirteen bulls would be killed daily to supply the needs of Neferefre’s mortuary cult. This means that during individual annual festivals and to meet the requirements of a single royal mortuary cult an unbelievable 130 animals would be killed! This figure testifies not only to the intensity of the cult and the number of people whose economic life would be linked simply with one mortuary temple and who would themselves consume the offerings made to the pharaoh’s spirit after completion of the ceremonies, but also suggests how great the material resources tied up—essentially unproductively—in the building of the huge tomb complexes and their long-term maintenance were. Undoubtedly this was one of the causes of the economic, political, and social decline of the Ancient Egyptian state at the end of the Old Kingdom.
“The Sanctuary of the Knife” served its purpose for a relatively short time. Already, during the reign of the Niuserre, the ruler who built it, Neferefre’s mortuary cult was reorganized, the supplies of meat for the pharaoh’s offering table were secured from elsewhere and “the Sanctuary of the Knife” became a storehouse. This change occurred at the point when the decision was taken to extend Neferefre’s mortuary temple towards the east and alter its design to approximate more to the standard pyramid temple model of the period.
Detail of the upper half of a statuette of a captive Asian chieftain discovered in Neferefre’s mortuary temple. The chieftain is represented kneeling with hands bound behind his back. His shoulder-length hair is tied with a headband and he has a pointed beard. The statuette was originally inserted into a larger object, perhaps a throne or a naos. Wood, 15.5 centimeters high, Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JE 98182) (photo: Jan Brodský).
The last major building phase in the temple’s development principally involved the construction of a new monumental entrance and a large open columned courtyard. The temple acquired the characteristic form of a “T” in its rough ground plan and the once independent “Sanctuary of the Knife” became an integral part of it. The monumental entrance was placed, as in the preceding building phase, on the east-west axis of the tomb complex. Its roof was supported by a pair of six-stemmed columns of fine white limestone in the form of bundles of papyrus stems. Just like the lotus, the papyrus was a plant of great symbolic significance in the religious conceptions of the Ancient Egyptians. In the time of the pyramid-builders dense papyrus undergrowth covered the great flats of the mud banks of the Nile. Papyrus rapidly renewed itself, was always green and fresh and therefore became a symbol of resurrection, eternal life, and permanent prosperity. Religious beliefs also influenced the design of the open courtyard, another place of important ceremonies for the royal mortuary cult. The courtyard was rectangular and oriented east-west in layout. Around its sides 24 columns supporting a flat wooden roof were arranged at regular intervals. Not a single column has survived and they have left only a few limestone bases, on one of which is the characteristic circular imprint of the shaft. The circular imprint suggests that the columns were of wood and fashioned to resemble date-palms—the symbol of fertility, abundance, and peace. This symbolic meaning was one of the reasons why the legendary palm grove in the venerable Lower Egyptian royal seat Buto became the mythical national cemetery of the Ancient Egyptians.
Two Asian captives led on the rope by the god Sopdu, the Lord of Foreign countries. Polychrome low relief in limestone from Sahure’s mortuary temple at Abusir (by L. Borchardt).
No vestige remains of the wall paintings that decorated the walls of the courtyard or of the stone, perhaps alabaster, altar that originally probably stood in the northwest part of the courtyard and on which offerings would be presented. At the latest at the beginning of the Sixth Dynasty, in the reign of Teti, the entrance to “the Sanctuary of the Knife” was walled up and the whole of this part of the temple was permanently taken out of commission. From papyri surviving from Neferefre’s temple archive it can be inferred that even before this point, in the reign of Djedkare, the appearance and function of the columned courtyard had changed fundamentally. Irregular, sporadic, and even bizarre brick constructions of dwellings for the priests who served in the temple appeared in the area between the columns. The settlement of priests immediately inside the temple’s columned courtyard further reduced the temple’s status and accelerated its decay. From archaeological and written evidence it is clear that the cult in the temple died out at the end of the Sixth Dynasty under the long rule of Pepi II. During roughly the following two centuries of the so-called First Intermediate Period, which was characterized by the decay of central state power and by social unrest, Neferefre’s mortuary temple and his tomb itself was robbed for the first time.
After the renewal of strong state power in the country at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom the cults in the Abusir royal mortuary temples, including Neferefre’s, were temporarily resuscitated. It is from this period that there dates a remarkable interment discovered in a wooden sarcophagus of box type, richly decorated inside with religious texts. The burial pit for the sarcophagus was dug in the floor of a chamber in an already long abandoned and ruined “Sanctuary of the knife.” The man buried here was a hunchback, crippled as a result of severe tuberculosis of the bone. He was called Khuiankh and he was very probably one of the last of Neferefre’s mortuary priests. Then once again, and this time for ever, Neferefre’s tomb complex fell into oblivion.
Peseshkef knife in the shape of a swallow-tail, conical limestone bowl, and conical basalt bowl. These were cult objects used in the ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth. The knife, made of gray-black slate, is 16.7 centimeters long, the limestone bowl is four centimeters high, and the basalt bowl is three centimeters high. They were all found in Neferefre’s mortuary temple and are now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (IE 9730) (photo: Jan Brodský).
Flint knife and blades found in Neferefre’s mortuary temple (photo: Jan Brodský).
Under the New Kingdom, the temple’s destruction as a building began. Particularly in the earliest part of the temple thieves began to quarry away limestone blocks for new building works. Simple people from the villages in the nearby Nile Valley started to bury their dead in the temple area in primitive, anthropoid wooden coffins in the belief that the best final resting place was in the shadow of the monuments of the mythical rulers and heroes of long ago. This common people’s cemetery was abandoned as late as the beginning of the Roman era, roughly around the divide between BCE and CE. In the centuries that followed, the ruin of the Unfinished Pyramid, buried under the sand, apparently repelled rather than attracted the attentions of tomb-robbers. It is partly due to this fact that we owe the opportunity today to study one of the best preserved royal mortuary temple complexes of the Old Kingdom, to plunge into the secrets of the papyri of Neferefre’s temple archive, and to admire the pharaoh’s superb statues on exhibition at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
A view of Neferefre’s pyramid complex under excavation (photo: Kamil Voděra).
Flooded palm grove near
the village of Kazrouni
on the way to Abusir
(photo Milan Zemina).
