Khufu

The Great Pyramid of Giza, counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was raised for Khufu, second king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. He reigned in the 26th century BCE, during the Old Kingdom, but beyond his monument surprisingly little about him is securely known, and much of his later reputation comes from Greek writers who lived some two thousand years after him.

Khufu followed Sneferu, the great pyramid builder of Dahshur, on the throne. Egyptologists usually take Sneferu to be his father, though this rests partly on later assumptions about succession; some now think Sneferu may have been a stepfather who legitimised him through marriage. His mother was probably Queen Hetepheres I, whose rich burial was found near the Great Pyramid in 1925. Khufu's wives included Meritites I and Henutsen, and among his sons were two later kings, Djedefre and Khafre.

His reign is hard to date. Proposed ranges include about 2589 to 2566 BCE, and others place it a decade or several decades later. The Turin king list, compiled in the Nineteenth Dynasty, credits him with 23 years; Herodotus gave 50 and Manetho 63, figures now regarded as exaggerated. Dated graffiti near the pyramid point to a 28th or 29th year, so he probably ruled somewhat longer than the Turin figure.

Khufu moved north from Dahshur to the Giza plateau, choosing high ground where his tomb would be visible from afar. He called it Akhet-Khufu, "horizon of Khufu". Its base measures about 230 metres a side and it once stood about 481 feet tall, before its white limestone casing and capstone were stripped away for building stone. Inside are three chambers: a granite burial chamber, a so-called queen's chamber whose purpose is still debated, and an unfinished room cut into the bedrock. A mortuary temple, a causeway nearly 700 metres long and a valley temple completed the complex, with small pyramids for queens and cemeteries for princes and officials around it. Pits on the south side held dismantled funerary boats of cedar.

Who ordered the nearby Great Sphinx is still disputed; Khufu and his sons Djedefre and Khafre are the leading candidates.

Papyri found in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, a Red Sea harbour, include the logbook of an official named Merer, which records boats carrying limestone from the Tura quarries to the pyramid site. They are the oldest inscribed papyri yet found in Egypt. Inscriptions show expeditions to the Sinai for copper and turquoise, and Khufu probably traded with Byblos for cedar. Strikingly, the only nearly complete statue of him is a small ivory figurine, found at Abydos in 1903; some scholars think even this is a much later copy.

In Egypt, Khufu was honoured for centuries. Dozens of priests served his funerary cult through the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, and Giza became a centre of worship again under the New Kingdom. A Middle Kingdom tale, the Westcar Papyrus, shows him as a curious and ultimately generous king, though one who was ready to have a prisoner beheaded to test a magician.

Greek historians told a darker story. Herodotus reported that Cheops, as the Greeks called him, closed the temples and forced the whole population to labour on his tomb, and he repeated a tale that the king prostituted his own daughter for money. Diodorus claimed the Egyptians hated him. Modern Egyptologists treat these accounts as late, hostile and unreliable, coloured by Greek attitudes to monumental tombs, not as evidence of Khufu's character.

None of our maps falls in his reign: the 2000 BCE map shows the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, and the Early Dynastic Egypt page covers the united kingdom his dynasty inherited. See also the New Kingdom of Egypt, when his cult at Giza revived, and modern Egypt.