Merenre II

Pepi II ruled for more than sixty years, and his sons were many. Merenre II, then still called Nemtyemsaf, was one of them. A false door from the funerary complex of Queen Neith calls him a pharaoh's son and shows that he already bore this name before he became pharaoh. His mother may have been Neith, who was both a queen of Pepi II and his half-sister, but this is only a possibility. Because the old pharaoh lived so long, the heir was probably no longer young when his turn came. That is an inference and not a fact stated in any source.

The Turin Canon still shows his reign length, one year and one month, although his name has been lost from the line. Manetho, in the version of Africanus, also gives one year to a pharaoh he calls Menthesuphis. These short figures agree with each other, but nothing is known for certain about what Merenre II did in that time. No dated inscription, expedition or building of his has survived. He is a pharaoh whose reign can be described almost only by its length.

Today he is called Merenre II because the Abydos King List, carved under Seti I about 1290 BCE, names him Merenre Nemtyemsaf. No object from his own time gives him the throne name Merenre. It may have been supplied by the scribes of the 19th Dynasty who worked from old and damaged records, and the form of the name in the list suggests a gap in their source. Contemporaries probably knew him as Nemtyemsaf. The number "II" is modern: the same birth name belonged to Merenre I, who was also Nemtyemsaf.

The surest trace of Merenre II comes from the pyramid complex of Queen Neith at South Saqqara. There archaeologists found the damaged false door that names him as a pharaoh's son. In the mortuary temple of the same queen they also found a royal decree protecting the funerary cults of Queen Neith and of Queen Ankhesenpepi I. The decree may have been issued by Merenre II. If so, its Horus name would read S...tawy, with the middle of the name lost. Such decrees were meant to stop the offerings of dead royal women from being diverted to other uses.

A pharaoh of the Old Kingdom was expected to build a pyramid, and Merenre II may have begun one near that of his father at South Saqqara. No pyramid has been identified as his. In one year there was little time to build. The next pyramid we can name at South Saqqara belongs to Qakare Ibi of the Eighth Dynasty, a small pyramid with Pyramid Texts built beside that of Pepi II.

The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE, tells of a pharaoh killed by his subjects. His sister Nitocris succeeded him and took a terrible revenge. Manetho places Nitocris right after Menthesuphis, and for this reason many writers have taken the murdered pharaoh to be Merenre II. No Egyptian text says so, and Herodotus does not name the pharaoh. The story may be an echo of real unrest at the end of the Old Kingdom, or only a legend. It is told in full on the page about Nitocris.

Merenre II is a name, a number and a few small traces. He was a pharaoh's son who reached the throne very late, held it for about a year and left almost no mark. His importance is one of timing. The long era of Pepi II ended with him, and within a few years the state that had built the pyramids was breaking into pieces. The Abydos King List names the pharaohs who followed, and the page on the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties tells what is known about them.