Four or five thousand years before Christ are the dates assigned to this period. We must grope and work somewhat at random in the reconstruction of our mosaic. Yet does Queen Mertytefs stand out with a certain lifelikeness. Imagination plays around her active figure, and she looks out at us from the shadows, not with languorous, soft glances and gentle movements, but with vivacity and power in her black eyes and an attractive and capable face. None but a woman of power and capacity, we may be sure, could have been “Administrator of the Great Hall.”
CHAPTER FOURTH.
NITOCRIS.
The Sixth Dynasty is illustrated by the name of Queen Nitocris. Famed, and it may be fabled, the obliterating touch of the centuries has yet spared something of her personality. The “most beautiful and spirited woman of her time” is the record that comes down to us from very ancient sources, and “rosy-cheeked” the epithet applied to her. She was the last sovereign of her dynasty, but first we must glance at a few, less noted, that preceded her.
Dynasty after dynasty was named according to the great cities of the provinces, and to the Fifth by some, or by others to the Sixth, was applied the term Elephantines, from the city of Elephantine, in Syene. According to certain authorities, the First, Second and Third Dynasties of Manetho were ruling at This, while his Fourth and Sixth held sway at Memphis, and during a portion of the time his Fifth at Elephantine, Ninth at Heliopolis and Eleventh at Thebes or Diospolis. It is almost impossible to tell which of the families or monarchs were contemporary, or which ruled in succession. To unravel this tangled skein of history is beyond the sphere of the present work.
With Manetho’s Second and Fourth Dynasty we reach the testimony of the monuments, which is perhaps the chief source of information. The Egyptians painted everything but the hardest and most valuable stone, and both brush and chisel have furnished something of our partial and fragmentary story. Our princesses lived in a blaze of color, in radiant sunshine, and amid rainbow tints, sheltered by walls “lined throughout with Oriental alabaster and stained with the orange flush of Egyptian sunsets.”
The winged sun disk, as a symbol, makes its appearance for the first time on monuments of the Fifth Dynasty, a simple disk between two wings inclining downward. Under the Sixth it was more conventionalized, the wings were straightened out and the asp added. At one place Pepi I appears protected on one side by a flying hawk and on the other by a disk, evidently regarded as equivalent. To the Fifth Dynasty also belong the precepts of Patah-hotep, which were found in what is called the “Prisse” papyrus in Paris. “This,” says the script, “is the teaching of the governor Patah-hotep, under his Majesty, King Assa—long may he live.” This monarch appears to have been the first Pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty and the first who had the two names, the throne and the ordinary name. The last, Unas, constructed a great truncated pyramid, now called Mastaba, or “Pharaoh’s seat,” north of the pyramids of Dahshour.
King Shepseskaf, near or at the close of the Fifth Dynasty, who had been adopted by King Mencheres, gave to a highly favored page in his household the hand of his eldest daughter, the Princess Maat-kha. Less frequently than in modern times were foreign alliances sought, and thus the husband often mounted to a higher rung on the social ladder, or even to the throne itself, assisted by the hand of his wife.