When was pharaoh khufu born

The idea that Khufu used slaves to build the pyramid comes from Greek historian Herodotus. He also describes Khufu as a cruel and wicked leader who prostituted his daughter when he ran short of money. But the Westcar Papyrus describes Khufu as a traditional oriental monarch: good-natured, amiable to his inferiors and interested in the nature of human existence and magic.

Despite not being remembered as fondly as his father, the funerary cult of Khufu was still followed in the 26th Dynasty, and he became increasingly popular during the Roman period. Search term:. Read more. He sent several expeditions to Byblos in an attempt to trade copper tools and weapons for precious Lebanese Cedar wood.

This kind of wood was essential for building large and stable funerary boats, and indeed the boats discovered at the Great Pyramid were made of it. Khufu's name was dedicated to the earth deity God Khnum , which might point to an increase of Khnum's popularity and religious importance. In fact, several royal and religious titles introduced at his time may point out that Egyptian pharaohs sought to highlight their divine origin and status by dedicating their official names to certain deities.

Khufu may have viewed himself as a divine creator. The king connected Khnum's name with his own. Khufu's full name Khnum-khufu means "Khnum protect me". Because of his fame, Khufu is the subject of several modern references, similar to kings and queens such as Akhenaten , Nefertiti and Tutankhamen. His historical figure appears in movies , novels and documentaries such as the novel The Mummy!

A Tale of the 22nd Century and Roland Emmerich 's Stargate film, in which an extraterrestrial device is found near the pyramids. Khufu and his pyramid are furthermore the objects of theories which deal with the idea that Khufu's pyramid was built with the help of extraterrestrials and that Khufu simply seized and re-used the monument, this ignores archaeological evidence or even falsifying it.

We do not know many elements of his life, his biography is largely incomplete. The great number of years separating us from the birth of Khufu should make us humble in the face of the accuracy of genealogical information.

However certain facts are established, archaeologically speaking. We know that Khufu was the son of Snefru, the founding pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. When Snefrou I disappeared it was naturally Khufu who took the throne of Egypt.

It was around in to two years, the dates diverge. It should be noted, therefore, that the brother-sister relationship was not a hindrance to the husband-wife relationship. The least that can be said about Khufu is that he built three major architectural elements. The best known is its funeral complex that we know through the famous pyramid of Khufu. The grandeur of this complex, which has no equal in all of ancient Egypt, shows the importance of the king Pharaoh in the Egyptian civilization of the middle of the third millennium.

The amount of workers needed for its construction as well as the tenacity it was necessary to show shows an organization of the Egyptian people without fault. No doubt, then, that this people was organized into an independent, powerful state, equipped with all the trades necessary for public life.

So there is a kind of apogee during the reign of Khufu. The other constructions of Khufu are two temples, one dedicated to Hator It is to Denderah, a city to 65Kms to the North of Luxour and the other is the temple of Bastet that one is to Babastis, an extinct ancient city that was near Zagazig. The reign of Khufu ended at his death, around At two years, the dates are not well enough known. We can only rely on bits of information to know the state of the economy at the time of Egypt in the twenty-first century BC.

What we see is a convergence of facts that tend to prove that it was during the reign of Khufu that the Old Empire reached its peak. For example, we know that Khufu developed copper and turquoise mines Sinai, Nubia and diorite mines Abu Simbel. Adjoining the east face of the pyramid was the Mortuary Temple. Little is known of the events of this King's reign, but some indication of the extent of Egypt's power and influence at this time is afforded by the occurrence of his name on monuments ranging from Nubia to Sinai and even farther afield.

A stele bearing his name was found in the diorite quarries northwest of Toshka in the Nubian Desert, and a relief at Wadi Maghara in Sinai depicts him smiting the local Bedouin. A background work is Sir A.