Intef I

An Egyptian pharaoh bore a series of names, and the Horus name, written in a rectangular frame, was the oldest of them and the one that said most about how he saw his rule. When Intef took the name Sehertawy, he presented himself as the pacifier of the whole land, although he ruled only the Theban country. Historians see this as the moment when the family of Thebes passed from governors to pharaohs. The step was as much a statement of ambition as a statement of fact, for Memphis and Herakleopolis still stood.

No monument of his own time is certainly his. The chief evidence is two blocks from the temple of Montu at Tod, south of Thebes, which were set up under Mentuhotep II and show the names of his ancestors, among them Intef I. A graffito in the desert mentions the "assault troops of the son of Ra, Intef", but it may refer to him or to his brother Intef II. His name is partly kept in the Karnak list of ancestors, and in the Turin Canon, the long list of kings written in the 13th century BCE, the section where he would stand is lost. This means that we know him almost only from the memory of his descendants.

The most likely father of Intef I is Mentuhotep I, the figure of the Karnak list and the Elephantine base, and his mother may have been a woman named Neferu. Both ideas are inferences from the later family tree and cannot be proved from his own time. His brother Intef II followed him on the throne and reigned for decades. The family kept its first name, Intef, in many later pharaohs, and the repeated names are the main reason why modern books number them. The order of the early members is less sure than the order of the later ones, and some scholars place the same pharaohs in a different sequence.

Coptos, a river port near the start of the desert roads to the Red Sea, lay to the north of Thebes and was its natural rival. An inscription in the desert on the road west of Thebes names its governor Tjauti, and it has been read as a record of fighting between Coptos and the Theban Intef. If the reading is right, this war is the earliest event of the rise of Thebes that we can place in a real landscape. The sources do not tell who won at the time. It can only be said that the Thebans later held the Coptite country, which made them the masters of the desert roads and of the gold and stone brought by them.

The Thebans of this age were not buried in pyramids but in a new type of tomb called saff, "row", which has a long courtyard cut in the rock and fronted by rows of pillars, with the burial chamber deep behind. A very large one at El-Tarif, on the west bank opposite Karnak, is usually given to Intef I because the pottery found in it is the oldest of the group. It carries no inscriptions, so the attribution is a guess from style and sequence. The inscribed saff tomb nearby belongs to his brother Intef II. Later the tombs were buried under a village, and they have been only partly studied.

Some modern books say that Intef I defeated Ankhtifi, the lord of Hierakonpolis, or that he reached Abydos. None of this is shown by a source of his own time. His real control beyond the Theban country is not known. What the evidence supports is a smaller claim: a Theban lord who took royal titles, who fought with the neighbouring Coptos and whose brother and descendants would carry the claim much further.

Intef I is a name at the threshold. He is the first of the Theban family to speak as a pharaoh, and with him the Eleventh Dynasty begins in the lists of later ages. The man himself is hardly visible, a few blocks, a graffito and a tomb without a name. What came after him is easier to see. His brother Intef II reigned for nearly fifty years and turned the claim into a southern kingdom.