Qahedjet

The stela

Description The stela of king Qahedjet is high, wide and thick and made of finely polished limestone. It was bought in 1967 by the Louvre at Paris, where it is now on display. The front shows king Qahedjet embracing an anthropomorphic form of the god Horus. King Qahedjet wears the White crown of Upper Egypt and an artificial king's beard, and looks directly into Horus' eyes, both figures being the same height. His face looks remarkable with his crooked nose, the bulging lips and his square chin. The king wears a kilt with a dagger in a belt. In his left hand, he holds a mace while in his right hand he holds a staff with a wing-like mark at middle height. Horus has laid his right arm around Qahedjet's shoulder and holds Qahedjet's elbow in his left hand. The hieroglyphic inscription describes the king's visit to the northern shrine of the god Ra at Heliopolis.

Authenticity The authenticity of Qahedjet's stela is questioned by Egyptologists such as Jean-Pierre Pätznik and Jacques Vandier. They point to several stylistic contradictions that can be found within the relief motif. Firstly, they stress that the earliest known depiction of an anthropomorphic Horus is found in the pyramid temple of Sahure, second pharaoh of the 5th Dynasty. Secondly, they argue that the motif of a king embracing a god (or a god embracing a king) would be highly unusual for the Old Kingdom, since the king was then seen as the living representation of Horus (and Seth), but not seen on a par with them in this way. Depictions showing a king in an intimate pose with a god would therefore be heretical and provocative at the same time.

Further arguments of Pätznik and Vandier concern the inscriptions right of Qahedjet's serekh. The hieroglyphic signs are unusually shifted to the right and they are not square in arrangement. This contradicts the Egyptian rules of calligraphy on royal monuments. Additionally, the details on the owl-sign (value m) of the stele do not appear before the first half of the 18th Dynasty and the stele would represent the earliest formulation Horus + m + toponym. Finally, serekh names involving a royal crown as a hieroglyphic symbol are otherwise only known from king Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty onwards, and Pätznik and Vandier remark that Qahedjet is known to be a variant of Thutmose III's Horus name, so that the stele, if authentic, could be an archaistic work of the New Kingdom.

Similarly, Jürgen von Beckerath, Rainer Stadelmann and Dietrich Wildung considered Qahedjet to have ruled toward the end of the 3rd Dynasty. Again, their theory is based on the stylistic resemblances between Qahedjet's face and that of king Djoser on reliefs from his pyramid complex.

Peter Kaplony dated the stela to the First Intermediate Period of Egypt. Pierre Tallet argued that Qadedjet is king Snofru.