Intef II

The Turin Canon gives Intef II forty-nine years, and the stela of his treasurer Tjetji credits him with fifty. The two figures are close, so most scholars accept a reign of about half a century, and on the chronology used by this site it fills the years from 2066 to 2017 BCE. A reign of that length matters. It gave the Theban court time to organise officials, build up the army and plan, and it let the royal title become accepted in the south as a fact of life.

Early in his reign the Theban pharaohs took control of the south as far as the First Cataract, probably after the death of Ankhtifi, the lord of Hierakonpolis who had opposed them. The control of Elephantine, at the cataract, gave the Thebans the border with Nubia and the trade routes for ebony, ivory and gold. In the sanctuary of Satet on the island, the pharaoh ordered chapels, and these are the first of a long series of royal buildings in the provincial temples of Upper Egypt. Some historians also believe that a chief of Lower Nubia helped the Thebans with troops, but this rests on slight evidence.

The great fight of his reign was for Abydos and the surrounding country, which the old texts call Thinis. The city was a holy site, where the Egyptians believed Osiris was buried, and it lay on the border between the Theban south and the Herakleopolitan north. Abydos changed hands more than once before the Thebans held it. The officer Djari says on his stela that Intef "fought the house of Khety" north of Thinis. The Teaching for Merikare, written from the other side, admits that the land of Thinis was ravaged. The two texts together show how violent this war was. At the end of the reign, the Theban frontier lay somewhere near Abydos and perhaps not far from Asyut, but its exact line is not known.

The best sources of the reign are the stelae of the pharaoh's men. Tjetji, the chief treasurer and chamberlain, boasts that the pharaoh ruled from Elephantine in the south as far as Abydos in the north. Djari, an army officer, tells of the fighting around Thinis. Hetepi, who governed the three southernmost provinces, mentions a famine in his charge. We must read them with care. An official writing his own funerary stela wanted to praise his master and his own part in the success, so the claims of territory may be larger than the facts. Still, taken together they show a state with a treasury, an army and governors, much as the Old Kingdom state had been.

Under Intef II appears the oldest dated mention of the god Amun at Karnak, then a small shrine in the Theban district and not yet the greatest temple in the land. An octagonal column with the pharaoh's name is the oldest surviving royal piece of building there. Montu, the old war god of the region, was the other great god of the Theban pharaohs. After many centuries Karnak would become the largest religious site in Egypt, and the first stones of it were laid by the family of this pharaoh.

The tomb of Intef II at El-Tarif is a saff tomb, a vast open court of about 250 metres by 70, fronted by rows of pillars and with the chapel at its eastern end. It lies under a village today and has been only partly studied. Among the finds are stelae that mention the pharaoh's hunting dogs by their names. One of them was found near the offering chapel. The detail is rare and humane. After a career of war and politics, the pharaoh chose to be remembered with his animals.

Intef II turned a Theban claim into a southern kingdom. He held the south from Elephantine, fought with Herakleopolis for Abydos, started the great temple of Karnak and left a tomb that still lies under the fields at El-Tarif. His son Intef III inherited the kingdom, the war and the dream of a united Egypt, and the grandson Mentuhotep II would finally achieve it.