Nebunebty

Nebunebty
Royal Wife
An impression showing how queen Nebunebty might have been represented in art, based on Old Kingdom iconography
Born	c. 2400 ± 100 BCE
Died	c. 2400 ± 100 BCE
Burial	c. 2400 ± 100 BCE Saqqara
Spouse	Shepseskare (?), Menkauhor (?)
Issue	Nebuibnebty (?)
Egyptian name
Transliteration	nbw nbtj
Dynasty	5th of Egypt
Father	Unidentified noble
Mother	Unidentified pharaoh consort
Religion	Ancient Egyptian

Nebunebty (also Nebunebti) was an ancient Egyptian queen who has been tentatively associated with the 5^th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Her name translates as 'the gold of the Two Ladies', or 'golden are the Two Ladies'.

Life

Nebunebty is poorly attested, and the particulars of her reign are highly uncertain. It has been proposed that she lived during the 5^th or 6^th Dynasty, though French Egyptologist Michel Baud felt that this range might be narrowed down to the first half of the 5^th Dynasty, on account of the datation of other monuments surrounding her burial.

Austrian Egyptologist Wilfried Seipel suggests she may have been a queen to the pharaoh Shepseskare as part of a wider proposition concerning the marriages of royal women of the 5th Dynasty. Baud criticises Seipel's methodology, observing that pharaohs might entertain several wives concurrently. Baud suggests a wider date range that includes the reigns of Neferirkare, Neferefre, Shepseskare and Nyuserre.

Baud's assessment has been countered by Vivienne Gae Callender, who contends that the peculiarities of the titulary recorded in Nebunebty's mastaba likely relate her to women known to have lived during the reign of Djedkare. Callender theorises that Nebunebty may have been a wife of Menkauhor, noting the possibility, were Nebunebty to have survived him, that she could have been interred during the reign of his successor Djedkare.

Callender also draws parallels between the offering formulae detailed on her tomb and those of Habauptah, an official who served multiple pharaohs of the 5^th Dynasty, finding that they are largely identical. Callender therefore assumes Habauptah to have been a contemporary.

Titulary

During the course of her life, Nebunebty was accorded the title of Royal Wife.

The Royal Wife Nebunebty in hieroglyphs
Era: Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BC)

In addition, several epithets are bestowed in the inscriptions found at her burial: she who sees Horus and Set, great one of the Hetes-Sceptre, she who sits in the presence of Horus, companion of Horus, Great of Praise, she who is joined to the beloved of the Two Ladies and the King and honoured by the King, by Osiris, and by the Great God.

The title Royal Wife makes clear that she was married to a pharaoh, and thus of royal stature, but there exists no evidence to suggest that she was a princess prior to her marriage.

Family

Nebunebty's burial offers no surviving mention of her parentage or her issue, and her husband is referenced only by the title of pharaoh.

Regarding the royal women of Nebunebty's probable dynasty, Callender considers the references to gold and to the Two Ladies characteristic of women alive around the time of Nyuserre and thereafter. She postulates that Nebuibnebty, a contemporaneous figure of likely royal stature, could have been a daughter of Nebunebty on account of the similarities between their names. She acknowledges, however, that this is conjectural.

Burial

Nebunebty was buried in mastaba D 18 (no. 64) in Saqqara, lying some way north of Djoser's burial complex. According to Jánosi, Nebunebty's mastaba is one of only a few peculiar cases of a burial in Saqqara having little or no apparent association with its nearby pyramid complex.

The mastaba was unearthed by Austrian Egyptologist Auguste Mariette in the latter half of the 19^th century, whose exploits in Saqqara were published in Les Mastabas de l'Ancien Empire.

Mariette observed at the time of excavation that the mastaba was in a good state of preservation. He assessed it to have consisted of several rooms whose walls were plastered with white stucco. However, other than two short inscriptions bearing record of Nebunebty, her titles and her epithets, there remained nothing else of note. After establishing that the mastaba contained no serdab or stelae, he refocussed his efforts elsewhere, leaving the rest of the mastaba unexcavated.

References

• Baud, Michel (1999). Famille Royale et Pouvoir sous l’Ancien Empire Égyptien, Tome 2 (in French). Le Caire: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.

• Begelsbacher-Fischer, Barbara L. (1981). Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt des Alten Reiches im Spiegel der Privatgräber der IV. und V. Dynastie (in German). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

• Callender, Vivienne Gae (2011). "Curious Names of some Old Kingdom Royal Women". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. Vol. 97. pp. 127–142.

• Dodson, Aidan; Hilton, Dyan (2004). The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.

• Jánosi, Peter (1992). "The Queens of the Old Kingdom and their Tombs". Bulletin of the Australian Centre for Egyptology. Vol. 3. pp. 51–57.

• Jánosi, Peter (1993). "G 4712 - Ein Datierungsproblem". Göttinger Miszellen (in German). Vol. 131. pp. 53–65.

• Mariette, Auguste (1889). Les Mastabas de l'Ancien Empire. Paris: Collège de France.

• Seipel, Wilfried (1980). Untersuchungen zu den ägyptischen Königinnen der Frühzeit und des alten Reiches: Quellen und historische Einordnung (in German). University of Hamburg.

• Troy, Lana (1986). "Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History". Boreas, Uppsala Studies in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Civilizations. Vol. 14. University of Hamburg. pp. xiv 236.