Pepi II

Pepi II became pharaoh as a small child after the death of Merenre I. His mother, Queen Ankhesenmeryre II, probably governed for him in the first years, perhaps with the help of her brother, the vizier Djau. An alabaster statuette in the Brooklyn Museum shows the queen seated with the young king on her lap, dressed as a pharaoh but as small as a child. It is one of the very few images of Pepi II and a rare portrait of a royal mother and her son.

In the second year of his reign the boy king received news from Harkhuf, a governor at Aswan, who was returning from the land of Yam in Nubia with a dwarf, perhaps a pygmy, who could perform the dances of the gods. Pepi II answered with an excited letter: Harkhuf must bring the dwarf to the palace alive and well, with trusted men sleeping beside him at night, because the king wanted to see him more than all the gifts of Sinai and Punt. Harkhuf was so proud of the letter that he had it carved on the front of his tomb near Aswan.

Under Pepi II officials from Aswan led caravans and armed expeditions south into Nubia. They brought back incense, ebony, animal skins and ivory, but they also met growing resistance from the Nubian peoples, and some of them lost their lives there. Ships sailed to Byblos on the Lebanese coast for cedar wood, and objects with Pepi's name have been found in the city. Expeditions also worked in the turquoise and copper mines of Sinai and in the alabaster quarries of Hatnub, where an inscription is dated to about his 62nd year.

Pepi II built his pyramid at South Saqqara. With a base of 150 cubits, about 78.5 metres, and a height of about 52.5 metres, it was much smaller than the pyramids of Giza, with a core of rubble and mortar cased in limestone. The walls of its burial chamber are covered with Pyramid Texts, spells that were to help the king rise to the sky and join the gods, and the ceiling is painted with stars. Around it stood the smaller pyramids of his queens Neith, Iput II and Wedjebten, whose chambers also bear Pyramid Texts. The Swiss archaeologist Gustave Jéquier excavated the complex in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the long reign the balance of power changed. The governors of the provinces, the nomarchs, built large tombs in their own regions instead of near the king and passed their offices on to their sons. The king divided the office of vizier between Upper and Lower Egypt and gave land and privileges to temples and officials, so royal income fell while local families grew rich. Some researchers also link the crisis with a series of low Nile floods around 2200 BCE, but how much the climate contributed is still debated.

Pepi II outlived many of his heirs. According to the Turin Canon and Manetho he was followed by Merenre II, who ruled only about a year, and later tradition tells of a queen Nitocris, whose existence is doubtful. Within a few decades royal authority collapsed and the First Intermediate Period began, a time of rival rulers, local wars and, according to later texts, hunger. A much later story about a king Neferkare who secretly visits his general Sasenet at night may refer to Pepi II, but this is disputed.

Pepi II ruled longer than almost any other pharaoh. His reign began with the curiosity of a child king and ended in the slow weakening of the state. The monuments and inscriptions of his time show both the wealth of the late Old Kingdom and the forces that soon tore it apart.