Khety I

Herakleopolis Magna, called Nennesut in Egyptian, lay on the Nile in Middle Egypt, at the entrance to the Faiyum, so that it stood between Memphis and the south. Khety began as its nomarch, the hereditary governor of the province. When the pharaohs at Memphis could no longer enforce their will, a man in his position had the soldiers, the grain and the local support to claim the throne himself. That is how the old tradition describes it, and the little that survives agrees. No text of his own time, however, tells how he rose.

Flinders Petrie, Alan Gardiner, William Hayes and Nicolas Grimal all took Meryibre Khety to be the first pharaoh of the Ninth Dynasty. On this view he claimed to be the lawful successor of the Sixth Dynasty and ruled from about 2160 BCE. Jürgen von Beckerath instead put him late in the Tenth Dynasty, shortly before Merikare. The two views differ by about a century. The reason is that the king lists of the period are damaged and incomplete, the names are often copies of one another, and few reigns are dated by anything but their position. Nothing in the evidence settles the question.

Manetho calls the first pharaoh of the Ninth Dynasty Achthoes, and the Egyptians perhaps wrote his name Akhtoy. According to the summaries of Manetho he was more terrible than all who had ruled before him. He did great harm to the people of Egypt, later went mad and was killed by a crocodile. This is a story of the kind told about founders who took power by force, and it is not backed by any text of the time. It matters only because it shows that the Egyptians remembered the change at Herakleopolis as a violent one.

Meryibre Khety is known from only a few objects. They include an ebony wand from Meir in Middle Egypt, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and a fragment of an ivory casket from Lisht, south of Memphis. Together they show that his name was carried by the royal craftsmen over a large part of Middle Egypt. His titulary, the full series of royal names, is the most complete of any pharaoh of the period, which may mean that he or his scribes took care to present him as a pharaoh in the old manner. Nothing is known of buildings or campaigns.

The name Khety was borne by more than one Herakleopolitan pharaoh, and modern books number them differently. Meryibre Khety is the one called Khety I on this site. Nebkaure Khety appears in the literary tale of the Eloquent Peasant, which is set in his reign. Wahkare Khety is named in the Teaching for Merikare as the pharaoh who instructs his son, and some scholars think he and the founder were the same person. The order of the Khetys is not agreed, and the numbers are a convenience for the reader and not an Egyptian custom.

In the text known as the Teaching for Merikare, a pharaoh of this line advises his son on how to hold the north. He speaks of the Asiatics who press on the eastern edge of the Delta and tells his son to guard the frontier. He speaks also of the war with the south, admitting that the region of Thinis was ravaged in his time. It was the beginning of a long struggle with the family that was rising at Thebes. Whether the pharaoh speaking in this text is Meryibre Khety or another Khety is not known.

Khety I is the name that stands at the head of the Herakleopolitan pharaohs, and whether he really was their founder is an open question. What is clear is that a provincial governor of Middle Egypt took the royal title and was accepted as pharaoh in the north, and that the line he started kept the north together for generations. It had to fight a rival in the south, as the pages on Merikare and on the First Intermediate Period tell.