The Fourth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt: The Era of King Sneferu

The end of the Third Dynasty and the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty

The rule of the Third Dynasty in Ancient Egypt was probably a hundred years long, and it began with a prosperous era, the reign of Djoser, but this renaissance soon stopped and did not continue to progress as we expected.

We have seen how Egypt knew how to build the Step Pyramid, but it was decades later that they did not take the next step of knowing how to build a complete pyramid.

Egypt spent about four hundred years building the tombs of its kings in the first and second dynasties in the form of rectangular terraces until a brilliant architect was born, Imhotep, who raised the tomb of the king and made it a step pyramid.

Imhotep's renovation remained a higher example for nearly a century until the days of the Third Dynasty ended and the Fourth Dynasty began in ancient Egypt. We cannot yet know the factors or circumstances that led to the emergence of the Fourth Dynasty, and we also lack the necessary information to determine the relationship of the founder of the Fourth Dynasty to the last king of the Third Dynasty, although we are sure that it was not a hostile relationship, but perhaps a kinship relationship.

First Dynasty of Ancient Egypt: Pharaohs, Timeline, and Legacy

Sneferu: The Brilliant Founder of Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty

Sneferu married Princess Hetepheres I (very likely Huni's daughter), the princess who held the right of succession to the throne, thus legitimizing his position in the country. We know that his mother was called Meresankh I, and that she was buried in Meidum, but we do not know for sure his relationship with Huni, the last king of the Third Dynasty, although some researchers in Egyptian history see them as related.

King Snefru from his funerary temple of Dahshur - Photo by Juan R. Lazaro source

The Military and Architectural Achievements of King Sneferu

From the study of the Palermo Stone we know a lot about the activity of this king and we know the large number of palaces and temples that he built in the country, and we also know that he sent a naval fleet of forty ships to bring blocks of cedar wood from the mountains of Lebanon, many of those woods have remained until now inside the Bent Pyramid in Dahshur, and those woods are still in good condition until now, and they still perform the task for which they were built, such as stabilizing some stones or supporting them in their places although more than four thousand six hundred years have passed.

Sneferu is also famous for the campaign he sent to Nubia in the south to restore security and tranquility to Egypt's southern borders, and his army returned with 7,000 captives and 200,000 head of oxen and sheep, and his men left the memory of those expeditions on the rocks of Wadi Maghareh near the copper and turquoise mines in that area.

He also sent mining expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula, and his men left the memory of those expeditions on the rocks of Wadi Maghareh near the copper and turquoise mines in that region. Although Sneferu was not

the first king to exploit Sinai's mines or send expeditions to discipline the lawless Bedouins, later generations saw him as a protective deity of the region alongside the goddess Hathor.

His policy of expanding trade with the Syrian coast and Nubia, exploiting minerals, and organizing the internal affairs of the country soon yielded the best results, and a general renaissance began in Egypt, the most obvious effect of which was the progress we see in the social life of the people in general and in the arts in particular, including architecture.

The Bent Pyramid: Sneferu’s First Step Toward Perfection

This king built his royal tomb near the capital, and the supervisors wanted to build

that tomb to make it a complete pyramid, later known as the Bent Pyramid, and to be greater than any other monument built in Egypt before his days, whether in the size of the part visible to people or in its internal corridors and lobbies.

They started building the lower part of the pyramid, completed the construction of all its internal corridors, and made an entrance to it in the middle of the northern facade like other listed pyramids that were built, and this entrance leads to a long vestibule that slopes downward and then ends with another vestibule and then a burial chamber before it.

The construction of the pyramid rose at an angle of slightly more than 54 degrees until the height of the building reached 48.07 meters, and then the original design changed, so we see them change the angle of construction to forty-three degrees, and when the construction was completed, its shape became irregular to change the angle as if it was a full pyramid over an incomplete pyramid, its total height is 101.15 meters, while the length of the side of its square base is 188.60 meters.

If we wanted to search for a reasonable practical explanation for changing the angle of construction of this pyramid, we would find only one explanation, which is that the angle of 54 degrees was too large and the architects estimated that the height of the pyramid would be large, and this may have affected the safety of construction, especially since some cracks began to appear.

The Bent Pyramid was the school in which they studied the geometry of building another pyramid, the Red Pyramid, less than two kilometers north of it, and they made its angle of inclination almost the same as the angle of inclination of the upper part of the Bent Pyramid, that is, forty-three degrees. They also made another improvement by limiting the entrance on the north side only, and instead of leading to one chamber, it leads to three chambers, one after the other. The height of the Red Pyramid, the first real pyramid in the history of Egyptian architecture, is 99 meters and the length of each side of its square base is 220 meters.

Pharaoh-Sneferu's-Bent-Pyramid-in-Dahshur-Egypt

Where Was King Sneferu Buried? Mystery of the Twin Pyramids?

Some researchers believe that he was buried in the Red Pyramid, as we see that the workers had completed all the complementary parts of it, so they built on the southern side of it that small pyramid that some archaeologists wanted to call the pyramid of the soul or the pyramid of rituals, but we do not know exactly what its function was and we are not sure of anything related to it except that it was not used for burial but may have been a shrine to perform special rituals related to sacrificial offerings.

They built a large stone wall around the pyramid and built on the eastern side of it a small funerary temple similar to the temple of the Meidum pyramid. They also built a road leading from the northern side of the wall to the valley and deviated to the east, where they built a large temple at a distance of more than seven hundred meters from the pyramid and covered a large part of its walls with inscriptions representing King Sneferu performing some well-known religious rituals.

The most important of them are scenes from the Thirtieth Festival, and scenes representing his visit to the temples in the northern and southern capitals (Buto and Nekhen), and we also see in it scenes representing the regions of Egypt and its most important countries at that time in which Sneferu owned one of his estates, and they symbolized each of them with a lady carrying offerings and wrote in front of it the name of the country or region arranged topographically from south to north, which helped determine their current locations.

In the excavations of this temple between 1951 and 1953, some shattered statues of King Sneferu and a large number of statues of the temple priests in the days of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, as this temple was still standing and was not destroyed until the New Kingdom. To the east of the pyramid were the tombs of Sneferu's family, including some of his sons and daughters, as well as the tombs of many of his priests and employees, both in his day and in later eras. Many of these mastabas and tombs are still unexplored.

In any case, there is an important fact that the ancient texts always mention the two pyramids of Sneferu, and the city that was the center of the administration of the properties of these two pyramids, and we also know that the Egyptians in the Twelfth Dynasty made Sneferu a god, so he became one of the gods, mentioning him and making offerings to him along with other gods such as Osiris, Ra, Sokar, Ptah and others.

The Golden Age of Art in Sneferu’s Reign

It is enough for a person to look at the inscriptions of his temple or the inscriptions of the tombs built in his era, whether in the Dahshur region or in Meidum, to realize the extent to which the art of sculpture has reached, whether in relief inscriptions or in color painting, as the Egyptian artist in the era of Sneferu reached a limit that he could not surpass him in the following eras except in a few cases.

Queen Hetepheres I: Royal Treasures and Tomb Mystery

The relics of Queen Hetepheres I are found in the Egyptian Museum, where the visitor to the Egyptian Museum stands amazed in front of some Meidum relics, but his admiration doubles when he stands in the hall in which the contents of the tomb of Queen Hetepheres I, the wife of Sneferu, are lined up in the Egyptian Museum, and he sees in that hall her jewelry, her gold-plated bed, her large chair, her mobile tent with gold-plated columns, and he sees her mattress, as well as some decorative tools made of gold or copper, and he also sees some of her decorations made of gold or copper.

the contents of the tomb of Queen Hetepheres I

The Hidden Tomb of Queen Hetepheres: A Discovery Without a Mummy

The contents of the tomb of Hetepheres I were found in 1926 when the American Harvard-Boston expedition found the mouth of a well during their excavations east of the Great Pyramid at Giza. This well had no structure built over it, and it was filled with stacked stones.

When the discoverers reached its end, they found the side entrance of the chamber blocked by built-up stones, and behind it, the contents of the tomb were piled on top of each other, and there was an alabaster sarcophagus with its lid placed over its box.

The name of Queen Hetepheres I and the name of her husband Sneferu were written on the furniture, so the discoverers expected her body to be inside the coffin, and when they lifted its lid, they did not find anything inside the chamber indicating that the contents of the tomb were placed in haste and without order, and some things were thrown on top of others, and the coffin without the body, and they did not find the upper tomb structure if this place was prepared as the eternal resting place for Sneferu's wife and Khufu's mother? There is no doubt that an ancient secret hides behind this.

Where Is Queen Hetepheres' Mummy? An Ancient Egyptian Mystery

The head of that expedition offered a plausible explanation: Hetepheres I was buried in Dahshur, close to her husband's pyramid, although she lived until the days of her son Khufu, who chose the Giza area as his royal tomb, as a result, the Dahshur area was no longer maintained or used as it had been.

Shortly after her burial, some thieves gained access to the tomb and took as much jewelry as they could. They carried with them the queen's body with other jewelry, as was customary.

When the guards discovered the truth of what happened, the officials decided not to leave the tomb in its place anymore and moved everything to Giza and cut off the roadside of the funerary temple that they were working on at that time, that deep full moon and piled the rest of the contents of the tomb in it.

The tomb's discoverers believe that the act of placing the lid on the empty coffin was a deliberate attempt by the guards to conceal the fact of the queen's body being stolen, so that King Khufu would not discover the truth. To this day, no tomb or remains of a tomb in Dahshur, Meidum, or Giza can be definitively attributed to Queen Hetepheres, making it impossible to determine with certainty where she was ultimately buried.

Sneferu’s Legacy: A Beloved Builder Turned Deity

Sneferu was not only a great king who loved to build, but he was also a person beloved by those around him, just among his subjects, and we have seen how the Egyptians deified him more than six hundred years after his death, and we also know that some Twelfth Dynasty kings chose the Dahshur region in particular to build their pyramids to be close to him, in honor of the sanctity of the region.

But what is interesting is what the following generations wrote about him, as his name was rarely mentioned in a text without some descriptions that were not used when referring to any other king of the Old Kingdom, such as saying that he was the beloved benevolent king.

We read about him in the Westcar Papyrus, which was written seven hundred years after his death, a story in which the author was keen to show his gentleness, kindness and compassion for those around him, and his use of the kindest words when talking to them.

Sneferu ruled for twenty-four years, and his sons held all the important positions in the country, both in the capital and in the provinces. When the day came when he left the affairs of Egypt to his son Khufu, he left him a stable throne, a wealthy and well-organized country, trained officials, and artists who had completed their experience.

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