The list of pharaohs has just gotten a bit longer. The University of Pennsylvania has uncovered the tomb of a pharaoh named Woseribre Senebkay, who apparently ruled as part of a previously unknown dynasty based out of Abydos. This news has made it into the mainstream media, but I highly recommend reading the official Penn Museum announcement. A lot of the mainstream coverage has been sort of silly (such as this gem from the Daily Pennsylvanian: “Most tombs have unadorned walls, stripped of their decorations by ancient plunderers”.[note]Tomb walls were decorated with frescoes and carvings. Not exactly something a tomb robber would make off with![/note]).
As is so often the case, the tomb was plundered in antiquity, so there isn’t a lot of bling left. Poor Senebkay even suffered the indignity of having his mummy torn apart by grave robbers. Judging from the remains of his canopic chest (which had the name of a previous royal owner covered over with gilding!), it seems that his burial may have featured a lot of ‘recycled’ material.
Senebkay reigned c. 1650 BCE during a time scholars call Second Intermediate Period. The SIP was a time of political fragmentation and disorder, and we don’t really have a firm grasp of the chronology. Until now, Senebkay was pretty much unknown to history, though the Turin King List contains two fragmentary references to kings with similar throne names.
Although Senebkay styled himself ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’ in his tomb, he was probably little more than a local potentate whose domain was limited to Abydos and its environs. In his time, the Delta was under the control of foreign kings who belonged to a group called the Hyksos (a word that’s derived from the Egyptian Ḥq3-ḫ3st, or ‘Rulers of Foreign Lands’), while Thebes was ruled by a dynasty that would eventually expel the Hyksos and reunify Egypt. The presence of reused material suggests that he might have been comparatively poor, though it’s also possible that he simply died before he had time to acquire his own funerary equipment.
This discovery just goes to show that, despite all the advances that Egyptology has made over the past 200 years, there are still gaping lacunae in our understanding of Egyptian history.
Codex Lochianus 