Netjerkare Siptah

The name Netjerkare is his throne name and means "divine is the ka of Ra". Siptah, "son of Ptah", is the name he received at birth. A third form, Neitiqerty, "Neith is excellent", appears in the Turin Canon. It is this form that the Greeks later turned into Nitocris. The birth name Siptah is a masculine name. This is the main reason why Kim Ryholt and others regard him as a man, whatever the Greek tradition says about a queen.

The Abydos King List, carved under Seti I, gives Netjerkare as its 40th name, directly after Merenre Nemtyemsaf. The Turin Canon, a papyrus of the 19th Dynasty, has a fragment with the name Neitiqerty Siptah, but its position had long been unclear. Ryholt studied the fibres of the papyrus and concluded that the fragment belongs at the end of the Sixth Dynasty, right after Merenre II. If he is right, both lists place the same pharaoh in the same spot. Both were written more than eight hundred years after his time.

Apart from the two king lists, only one object carries his name. It is a copper tool kept in the British Museum, and its place of discovery is unknown. It shows that the throne name Netjerkare was really used and not made up by later scribes, but it says nothing about the man himself. No inscription, building or tomb of the reign has been found. At the end of the Old Kingdom the state no longer raised monuments on the earlier scale, and the royal archives that might have recorded such a short reign are lost.

In 1883 the scholar Ludwig Stern suggested that the queen Nitocris of the Greek authors and the pharaoh Netjerkare were the same person. Ryholt supports the idea. In his view the name Nitocris is a conflated and distorted form of Netjerkare, and the story of a queen was added later around it. There is a second argument from position. Manetho puts Nitocris at the end of the Sixth Dynasty after Menthesuphis, which is where the lists put Netjerkare after Merenre II. Not all scholars agree. Some still see Nitocris as a real woman, perhaps a regent, and the question is open.

Where to put him is a matter of definition. If Manetho's Nitocris is the same ruler, he is the last pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty, and some modern lists follow this view. Others make him the first pharaoh of the Seventh or the Eighth Dynasty, because the line of Pepi I and Pepi II probably ended with Merenre II. The difference is mostly one of labels, since in either case he stands at the very edge of the Old Kingdom. This site follows the Abydos King List and places him between Merenre II and the rulers of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties.

The silence around Netjerkare Siptah is itself a piece of evidence. After the very long reign of Pepi II the court at Memphis left very little that scholars can date. The names that follow in the Abydos King List are short, and many of them are built on Neferkare or a similar throne name. They are remembered for little more than that. A pharaoh who ruled only a few years in such conditions could not have left much, and we can say only that the office of pharaoh was still being filled.

Netjerkare Siptah is a pharaoh known from two lists and one tool. Whether he is also the origin of the legend of Nitocris is one of the open questions of the end of the Old Kingdom. What is certain is that his name stands at the point where the long age of the pyramid builders ends and the confused years of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties begin.