... was built of mudbrick, forming a niched facade surmounted by a crown of limestone chips gathered from the surplus stone cut for the pyramid itself.  Contemporary with the pyramid, it is a splendid combination of mudbrick and limestone, the latter used for extensive flooring on its eastern side, which only an ingenious architect could devise.  It is a slight struggle to enter through the narrow gap in the robber’s passage forced into the mastaba’s southern side, but the effort is rewarded by a huge red granite sarcophagus and stone-lined burial crypt exhibiting the rare feature of a curved wall, reminiscent of the structure mentioned in Djoser’s Step Pyramid enclosure.  When this mastaba was explored in modern times a male skeleton lay in the sarcophagus.  Who was he?  King Huni, perhaps, buried here when his pyramid was usurped by his successor?  Or a crown prince of Sneferu who died prematurely before gaining the throne of Egypt?  Meidum, like so many monuments of the pharaohs, refuses to yield up all its secrets at once.

When the archeologist Wainwright broke into the burial chamber of Mastaba 17, he discovered that the occupant’s body had been torn apart by grave robbers.  Among the objects they left behind was a royal scepter, the symbol of kingship.  Although most modern Egyptologists dismiss its significance,  the presence of the scepter would strongly suggest that the occupant of Mastaba 17 was Huni, the last king of Dynasty III and Seneferu’s predecessor.  Seneferu apparently built Mastaba 17 after Huni’s death for his predecessor’s burial, thereby saving Huni’s pyramid at Meidum for his own use, should Seneferu require it later in his newly begun reign.

The profound significance of Mastaba 17, however, is not that it was Huni’s burial place or that Seneferu appropriated Huni’s pyramid for his own use.  Rather, the most important point is that Mastaba 17 failed to provide protection for its occupant’s remains.  Pyramids are vulnerable because a passageway must be built between the outer surface and the burial chamber to allow passage of the king’s body during burial.  Mastaba 17 needed  no such passageway because its occupant already was dead before construction started.  The burial chamber was dug out of the bedrock, the body was placed inside, and then the huge mastaba was built on top of the burial site.  Yet the grave robbers,  as Wainwright noted, knew the exact location of the burial chamber because their tunnel through the mud brick follows the shortest possible route from the outer surface to the burial crypt.  The thieves must have plundered Mastaba 17 within the memory of those who had helped build the tomb and knew exactly where to dig.  Mastaba 17 yielded its treasures during Dynasty IV, probably during Khufu’s reign when distant Meidum was all but forgotten in Khufu’s court.  The robbery clearly demonstrated how vulnerable royal tombs were to plundering within a generation of being built and may have influenced Khufu to make design changes to his own Great Pyramid as it was being built.

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Egyptologists recognize that tomb robbery was a way of life during Dynasty IV.  The royalty had to find a way to preserve their bodies upon death to enjoy the pleasures of the afterlife and the peasantry had to desecrate royal corpses to obtain the sewn-in wealth they needed to enjoy their present lives.  In fact, tomb robbery was so prevalent that one of the most famous tomb robberies uncovered by Twentieth Century archeologists may not have been a tomb robbery, at all.  More specifically, on February 9,1925, the archeological team headed by  Dr. George Reisner was working along the east side of Khufu‘s Great Pyramid.  While Reisner’s staff photographer was attempting to level his tripod, he became distracted by an unusual patch of plaster-like material, which upon removal uncovered a rectangular area packed with limestone blocks, which upon further removal revealed a sloping passage opening into a vertical shaft filled with stone blocks.  The discovery of the tomb of Khufu’s mother,  Hetepheres I, at the bottom of this 100-foot shaft is documented in detail in Volume II of a History of the Giza Necropolis, subtitled The Tomb of Hetep-heres the Mother of Cheops⁴ and compiled and revised after Reisner’s death by his colleague William Stevenson Smith.  Among the more popular accounts of this important discovery is one in The Lost Pharaohs⁵ by Leonard Cottrell, which begins:

The Giza pyramids and their hundreds of attendant mastabas have been known for nearly five thousand years.  Unlike later sepulchers there was no attempt at concealment; the brick and stone superstructure revealed plainly where the burials were.  For the better part of fifty centuries they have been open to the attacks of robbers and it would seem impossible that any tomb, above all a royal tomb, could remain undetected until the twentieth century.  Yet this did happen once, and the story of how the tomb was discovered, excavated, and its splendid furniture reconstructed from a mass of decayed wood and fragmented metal is one of the great romances of Egyptology.

In February 1926, Reisner’s team completed clearing the tomb shaft and began work on the burial chamber that lay at its base.  By April 1926, they had successfully registered, photographed, and cleared objects from the tomb floor and were able to identify the tomb’s occupant.  From rows of gold hieroglyphics fastened to bars of decayed wood from a chair, Reisner was able to read the titles: Mother of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt; Follower of Horus; She who is in charge of the affairs of the (Harem?); She whose every word is done for her; the Daughter of the God of his body, Hetepheres.  Another inscription on one of the beams for a bed canopy apparently given to Hetepheres by her husband Seneferu stated: The Horus Nebmaat, the Great God, endowed with life, endurance, and power; the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the two Crowns, Nebmaat, the Golden Horus Seneferu, Lord of the Hepet (?); the Golden Horus, Foremost of the Places of the God,

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The official seals found on Hetepheres’ funerary equipment items bore Khufu’s name.

In March 1927, Reisner, members of his staff, and a party of high officials assembled in the burial chamber to open the sarcophagus.  The lid was pried loose and swung upward with a sling.  To everyone’s surprise, the sarcophagus was empty.  Reisner, himself, lamented: It had seemed to me inconceivable that Cheops should have ordered the remains of his mother’s burial to be transferred to Giza and hidden under 100 feet of masonry unless the body  . . .  had been brought along with the coffin⁶.  To explain the missing body, Reisner concocted an ingenious story about Hetepheres’ reburial.  As retold, in part, by Cottrell in The Lost Pharaohs⁷:

When Queen Hetepheres died, she was buried near her husband’s pyramid at Dashur.  There is a small pyramid near the Bent pyramid which may have been her tomb.  But at this time her son, Cheops, had begun his Great Pyramid at a new site at Giza twelve miles away, and it is likely that the Dashur Necropolis was not as well guarded as it should have been.

Not long afterward the burial thieves broke into the Dashur tomb, perhaps aided by the Necropolis guards or some of the masons who worked on the tomb.  The tomb robbers had to do the job at night and were desperately short of time.  When they had tunneled through the masonry filling and broken into the burial chamber, they saw the great gold canopy with its curtains covering the sarcophagus.   Probably they tore down the curtains and flung aside the gold furniture, which they had no time to strip or remove.  Even small portable articles like the gold drinking cup were overlooked.  They went straight to the sarcophagus, knowing that the most precious objects would be on the royal body.  With hammers and chisels they forced open the lid, dragged out the body and carried it out of the tomb to a hiding place where their torches would be concealed.  Then they tore the mummy apart, wrenching off gold necklaces and armlets and jeweled rings.  Perhaps the inner coffin itself was of gold.  Hurriedly sharing the loot, they dispersed, leaving what remained to the jackals or perhaps setting fire to the wrappings in the superstitious belief that by so doing they would escape the vengeance of the Queen’s ka.

Soon afterward the robbing was reported to the high official responsible for guarding the Necropolis.  With his staff he visited the tomb and found that the body had disappeared, but that most of the tomb furniture remained.  No doubt he ordered a search to be made but whether he found the robbers will never be known.  However, he is certain, for his own sake, to have made an example of someone.  Next came the delicate matter of informing the King that his mother’s sepulcher had been violated. 

 

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The official probably made light of it as much as possible, minimizing the damage done and not daring to tell Cheops that Queen Hetephras’s body had disappeared.  Enraged, the King ordered that the Queen and all her funerary equipment be brought to Giza and reburied near his own pyramid.  Perhaps he chose the site himself, and to make sure that there should be no second violation he ordered a secret tomb to be made.  Work on the quarry was stopped, and the workmen began to sink their shaft.

As spellbinding and compelling as the story about the plundering of Hetepheres I tomb at Dahshur may seem, it suffers from a major flaw--- it is virtually pure fiction.  Over 70 years have passed since the discovery of Hetepheres’ burial at Giza but no tomb for her ever was found at Dahshur.  The small pyramid near the Bent Pyramid was identified as the satellite pyramid of Seneferu, an integral part of his funerary complex.  Moreover, the vacant space inside it was far too small to accommodate Hetepheres’ funerary furniture.

In 1985, Dr. Mark Lehner authored the intriguing book, The Pyramid Tomb of Hetepheres and the Satellite Pyramid of Khufu⁸, which contested Reisner’s belief that grave robbers had broken into Hetepheres tomb at Dahshur and that the Giza tomb was a re-burial.  Lehner argued that thieves attempting to reach Hetepheres body would have caused much more damage to her sarcophagus lid than the careful chipping that was observed on all four sides.  To Lehner, it appeared that the sarcophagus lid had been removed by administrative officials to retrieve Hetepheres body for reburial.

But, to where?  He speculates that her body was re-buried in pyramid GI-a or GI-b, two of the three small pyramids east of Khufu’s Great Pyramid, but offers no proof.  Even today, Lehner appears uncertain that Hetepheres was re-buried alongside Khufu’s Pyramid. In fact, in his recent book The Complete Pyramids, Lehner simply states⁹:

The first pyramid to the north, GI-a, may have been for Hetepheres, thought to be the mother of Khufu. --- GI-b might belong to a queen Meritetes, who lived through the reigns of Sneferu, Khufu, and Khafre, based on an inscription found in the chapel of the first mastaba to the east, that of Kawab, an “eldest son” of Khufu.  One theory is that the male occupants of mastabas closest to the small pyramids were the sons of respective queens.

The southernmost pyramid, GI-c, could belong to a Queen Henutsen, a name known only from much later, in dynasties 21-26, when the chapel at the centre of the eastern base of this pyramid was converted to a temple of the goddess Isis under the epithet “ Mistress of the Pyramids”.

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Beginning in January 1998, the three queens’ pyramids alongside the Great Pyramid were opened to the public.  Tourists are now being told that one of the three originally was built to hold the remains of Khufu’s mother. As Dr. Zahi Hawass¹⁰, Under Secretary for Giza Monuments, stated:

The three small pyramids to the east of Khufu’s pyramid are generally considered to belong to Khufu’s queens. --- Each originally had a small chapel on its side.  The southmost pyramid is the best preserved, retaining much of its core and some of its casing.  The central pyramid is generally believed to belong to an unknown queen of Libyan origin, as suggested by George Reisner.

The function of the northern pyramid is the least clear.  Because of its proximity to the mastaba of the crown prince Kawab, it is sometimes assigned to his mother, Meritites, who would have been Khufu’s main queen.  However, Mark Lehner proposes that it was originally built for Queen Hetepheres I, Khufu’s mother, but was later reassigned as the king’s ritual pyramid when the architectural plans changed. Lehner suggests that the middle pyramid was then used for Hetepheres I.

In an interview given to The Associated Press¹¹ on January 2, 1998, Dr. Hawass made the remarkable statement that:  One description of Meryetes said she had blonde hair, adding that she may have come from Libya.  But we don’t even know that for sure.  Actually it was Reisner who attributed the Libyan origin to the mother of the blond-haired Hetepheres II, but that mistaken notion was dispelled decades ago by Reisner’s colleague and co-author Stevenson Smith¹², who pointed out:

. . .  The evidence for the Libyan origin of this queen rests only on the red or yellow hair of her supposed daughter, Queen Hetep-heres II, shown in the tomb of Queen Meresankh III.  Caroline Ransom Williams long ago pointed out that the red lines across the yellow surface of her headdress must be interpreted as conventional drawing lines, while I have called attention to a similar headdress worn by Zoser’s queen, the lady of the Bankfield Stela, and the mother of Khufu-khaf.  Since Reisner has identified the lady represented with Khufu-khaf in G 7140 as Henutsen, the owner of the adjoining Pyramid G I-c, it is unlikely that her hair as well as her dress would so much have resembled those of Hetepheres II unless they were the fashion of the period.  Mariette also describes the figure of Merytyetes on her stela as having a pointed shoulder to her dress like that in G7140.  It would seem that we are dealing with a wig somewhat like the king’s head cloth in shape and that it is unsafe to give an ethnic interpretation to the yellow coloring which happens to be preserved only in the case of Hetep-pheres II.

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Like a modern dragoman performing his ages-old calling, Zahi Hawass appears to revel in spinning entertaining tales for those who come to the Giza Plateau to listen.  Unfortunately, such tales as one of Khufu’s queens, Merytyetes,  having blonde hair and a Libyan heritage and one of the three queen’s pyramids belonging to Khufu’s mother lack veracity.  The first is an amplification of Reisner at his worst and the second is a wrong-way revision of one of Reisner’s more solid findings.

But where did Khufu re-bury his mother if Khufu’s three principal wives (his full sister Hetepheres, Merytyetes, and “Henutsen”)  are buried alongside his Pyramid?  Good question.  We’ll arrive at an answer shortly.  But first, What do we know about the burial place of Khufu’s father? Well, we know that Seneferu built both the Red (Northern) and the Bent (Southern) Pyramids at Dahshur.  An analysis of the state of completion of pyramid complexes from Dynasty IV kings and related Dynasty III and V rulers is presented in Table 3.  From this exhibit, it can be seen that Seneferu’s Northern Pyramid complex is surprisingly incomplete.  Certainly, this state of completion is not consistent with: (1) a 50-year reign for Seneferu (See Table 1), or with (2) Seneferu being buried in the Red Pyramid.  Khufu simply had too much to finish with the Red Pyramid complex, including the necessary satellite pyramid, valley temple, and causeway, for it to be a burial site appropriate for his illustrious father.  Nor could Khufu simply ignore the desires of Seneferu’s other sons and leave the pyramid complex  unfinished while burying Seneferu in the Red Pyramid.   Khufu’s  reign had just begun, and he was very fortunate to be wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt rather one of Seneferu’s first-born sons such as Kanofer or Ankh-haf.  It appears that Seneferu was, indeed, buried in the Bent Pyramid at the end of his 24-year reign.

Certainly, the eminent Egyptian archeologist, Dr. Ahmed Fakhry, believed that Seneferu was buried in the Bent Pyramid.  Fakhry, who began his excavation of the Bent Pyramid complex in 1951, noted¹³ that the satellite pyramid of Seneferu,  located about 55 meters south of the center of the Bent Pyramid, was cleared in 1946-47 by Abdel-Salam Hussein.  Its interior was:

:           . . .  found to be empty.  A quarry mark on one of the stones was incorrectly read as part of the name of Queen Hetepheres, Sneferu’s wife, and some attributed this building to her.  But the reading was a mistake, and the chamber inside is so small that it could never have contained a burial, much less the elaborate funerary equipment which was later removed from her original (and still undiscovered) tomb and re-buried near the great pyramid of her son Khufu at Giza.  This small pyramid yielded only fragments of broken pottery, and no trace of a burial of any kind.

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He concludes Chapter 5, The Pyramids of Sneferu at Dahshur, of his book¹⁴ by stating:

. .  The reader is no doubt curious about where Sneferu was buried.  I am convinced that this king was buried in the Bent Pyramid of Dahshur, in the upper burial chamber at the end of the western gallery.  There may exist some of his funeral monuments near the Northern Pyramid, but the principal ones are those discovered near the Bent Pyramid between 1951 and 1955; it is this pyramid that was the eternal house of his body.

Unlike any known pyramids till then, the Bent Pyramid had two burial chambers: the usual one reached from the traditional north face of the pyramid and a separate chamber reached by a passage from the western face of the pyramid.  To plunder the Bent Pyramid from the traditional northern side, one had to know that there were two burial chambers as well as the exact location of each in relation to one other, inside information if ever there was any.  Figure 3 shows the relative position of the two burial chambers in the Bent Pyramid and the passageway connecting them¹⁵.  The lower (northern) burial chamber is 17.3 meters high from its floor to the top of the corbeled ceiling.  At a height of 12.6 meters in the southern wall, there is an opening, which measures .74 by .92 meters and which leads to a winding passage whose length is 18.81 meters and whose exit is 5.47 meters higher than the entrance opening.  The Connecting Passage between the northern and western burial chambers has the following important features:

¨ the route selected is the shortest, safe dig between the two burial chambers; it requires precise knowledge of the best starting location and the required angle of passage ascent (16.2⁰),

¨ stone cutting marks on the walls of the Connecting Passage indicate that it was built entirely in one direction, from north to south,

¨ the total length of the passage was known in advance; although it winds somewhat, its exit is exactly to the south of its entrance and is carefully built¹⁶,

¨ the route selected avoids difficulties posed by the location of the vertical shaft on the southern side of the  lower burial chamber as well as by attempting to break into the stonework of the upper burial chamber, itself,

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¨ the rectangular shape, large area, and the high quality of the connecting passage indicates it was not built by amateur grave robbers intent on plundering; instead, it appears to have been built by expert stone masons with dimensions large enough to allow a sarcophagus to have been removed from the western burial chamber, and

¨ a royal burial apparently did take place in the western burial chamber; the passageway to the western face of the pyramid was sealed in antiquity and remained sealed until April 1951, a portcullis stone was plastered shut on its western side, and Fakhry, himself, notes¹⁷ that at the intersection of the connecting passage and the western corridor we notice that a part of the south wall opposite to it (the connecting passage) was hacked away as if it were done for the purpose of facilitating the transportation of some solid object through the winding passage which was more than two meters in length.

The presence of the western burial chamber has been known since ancient times because of the Connecting Passage.  Some Egyptologists believe that the two burial chambers were linked to allow workmen to seal the western passageway from within after a royal burial and then to exit the pyramid from the western burial chamber via the northern burial chamber to the northern face.  To me, this seems like utter nonsense.  The western burial configuration was a self-contained system that did not require intervention from the northern configuration; indeed, linking the two burial chambers before completing a burial in either one destroys the security of both chambers.  It appears much more likely to me that the Connecting Passage was built from the northern burial chamber to the western chamber within a generation after a royal burial had occurred in the western chamber and while the internal structure of the pyramid still was known to the insiders who built it.

Am I alone in believing so?  Not at all, in fact, Mark Lehner makes a similar statement in his recent book¹⁸.

Some time after both chambers were constructed, a connecting passage was made between them.  It was definitely made later by someone who knew exactly where the two chambers were.

But Lehner stops there¹⁹  and merely muses:  “We can only speculate why Sneferu decided to have this duplicate arrangement in his pyramid”.  Actually, the answer is obvious: having the entrance to the burial chamber on the west side of the pyramid instead of the traditional north side was the trick used by Seneferu to attempt to foil grave robbers.  And it should have worked!  Lehner should have pondered: “We can only speculate why Seneferu decided to have this connecting passage built”.  That

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answer also is obvious: He never did because that would have compromised the secret of the Bent Pyramid (whose western entrance was not opened until 1951  and then from inside out)²⁰.  Building the Connecting Passage was the key to plundering the Bent Pyramid and that construction had to occur within the living memory of those responsible for building the Pyramid.

To me it seems amazing that so many leading Egyptologists/archeologists can miss the significance of the Connecting Passage and the removal of a sarcophagus from the western burial chamber.  In April 1996, for example, Dr. Bob Brier narrated a television special about Seneferu in a four-part series titled the Great Egyptians²¹.  Brier is shown along with his Egyptian guide exploring the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur.  After they enter the high-ceiling chamber depicted in Figure 3, Brier proceeds forward informing his TV audience:

To get to the (western) burial chamber, you have to climb up a swaying rope ladder.
Then, the entrance to Seneferu’s burial chamber is reached through a hole in the top of the wall.
This is the reason for the massive ladder. 

After the rope ladder, this one (wooden scaffolding and ladder) seems very firm.
When you’re high on the ladder, it first hits you.
All four walls are stepped inward to form a corbeled ceiling.
It’s incredible.

Crawling through the narrow tunnel made by ancient tomb robbers, we finally hit the corridor through which Seneferu’s mummy would have passed on the way to the burial chamber.

Amazingly, there’s a strong, constant breeze of fresh air here.
Some investigators believe there are hidden passages yet to be discovered.

As Brier and his Egyptian companion make the 45^o turn out of the Connecting Passage into the corridor leading to the western burial chamber, neither one comments on the very obvious section of the corner of the wall that is missing; which is as plain as day.  Even an amateur observer would be led to conclude that just such a piece would have to be cut out of the wall to allow an object the shape and length of a sarcophagus to make the turn from the western burial chamber into the Connecting

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