Userkaf was a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and the founder of the Fifth Dynasty. He reigned for seven to eight years in the early 25th century BC. His reign heralded the ascendancy of the cult of Ra, who effectively became Egypt’s state god. He built a sun temple, known as the Nekhenre, between Abusir and Abu Gurab.
About Userkaf in brief
Userkaf was a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and the founder of the Fifth Dynasty. He reigned for seven to eight years in the early 25th century BC, during the Old Kingdom period. His reign heralded the ascendancy of the cult of Ra, who effectively became Egypt’s state god. Userkaf may have been a high-priest of Ra before ascending the throne. He built a sun temple, known as the Nekhenre, between Abusir and Abu Gurab. In doing so, he instituted a tradition followed by his successors over a period of 80 years. Little is known of his activities beyond the construction of his pyramid and sun temple. He had at least one daughter and very probably a son, Sahure, with his consort Neferhetepes. This son succeeded him as pharaoh. His identity is uncertain, but he undoubtedly had family connections with the rulers of the preceding Fourth Dynasty. The location of the pyramid attributed to Neferhenes suggests that she may instead have been userkaf’s wife. If so she should be identified with the Neferhettepes who is the mother of UserKaf’s successor and likely son,Sahure. He may also have been the son of Menkaure by one of his secondary queens and possibly a full brother to his predecessor and the last king of the Fourth Dynasty, Shepseskaf. He was the object of a funerary cult after his death like the other Fifth Dynasty kings, but his was relatively unimportant, and was abandoned after the end of the dynasty.
The temple was the subject of four building phases, during which it acquired a large obelisk. He is the earliest attested pharaoh to have built a pyramid in Saqqara close to that of Djoser, a location that forced architects to put the associated mortuary temple in an unusual position. The mortuary complex was lavishly and extensively decorated with fine painted reliefs. A relief from Sahure’s causeway depicts this king and his queen together with the mother, a Neferkenes, which very likely makes her wife a daughter of Djedefre and Hetepheres II. Like Gromír Malek, Mark Lehner, Peter Clayton and Rosalie Selinoff, Mark Khentkaus I, and Anthony Selimoff concur with a hypothesis shared by Ari Kozloff. They propose that UserkAF’s queen may have been Khenthaus I. They note that Neferheepes is not given the title wife of king’s wife in later documents pertaining to her mortuary cult, although they note that this is not the absence of that title. They suggest that this absence is further evidence that this queen was not the wife of the king’s king’s queen. The identity of Neferhereepes’s husband in this hypothesis is unknown, but Grimal conjectures that he may be the \”priest of Ra, lord of Sakhebu\”, mentioned in Westcar papyrus.
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This page is based on the article Userkaf published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
