Huni: The Last King of the Third Dynasty and the Threshold of the Old Kingdom
Huni was an ancient Egyptian king, the last pharaoh of the Third Dynasty of Egypt during the Old Kingdom period. Based on the Turin king list, he is commonly credited with a reign of 24 years, ending c. 2613 BC.
The chronological role of Huni as the final king in the third dynasty is quite clear but there is some confusion with respect to the order of succession of rulers who governed the end of the third dynasty. Scholars view Huni as an incomprehensible figure in the history of Egypt, since he was well remembered in Egyptian tradition, yet there were not many documents, objects, or monuments of his reign that survived.
Huni holds a special place in the history of Egypt. He is the last of the Third Dynasty, who reigned over a time when kingship, architecture and administration were in a state of maturity. Huni is not remembered as having built one monument, clearly identifiable, as did some of his predecessors. Rather, his legacy is in change. He reigned at the last stage of transition when the Old Kingdom was getting its most iconic image with the kings of the Fourth Dynasty.
Huni’s reign appears to have been stable, organized, and influential, even if much of its physical evidence has been lost or reassigned to later rulers. He governed a unified state with a functioning bureaucracy, expanding royal control into Egypt’s border regions and laying the groundwork that would soon allow for the construction of the great pyramids. To understand Huni is to understand how Egypt moved from early experimentation to architectural and political confidence.
Huni-StatueHead
Attestations of Huni
He is not a well-attested pharaoh; most of the attestations only point indirectly to him. There are only two contemporary objects with his name.
1- The first one is a conical stele made of red granite, discovered in 1909 on the island of Elephantine by Henri Gauthier. The object is 160 centimetres long, 69 centimetres thick and 50 centimetres broad. Its shape resembles a typical Benben stele, as known from mastaba tombs of the early dynastic kings. At the front, the cone presents a rectangular niche with an encarved inscription inside. The inscription mentions a royal palace named the Palace of the headband of Huni and writes Huni’s name above it inside a royal cartouche. The decorated niche is interpreted by scholars as a so-called “apparition window”.
The lower part of the window frame is flattened and elongated and shows traces of a second inscription, apparently the same as inside the window. It is not fully clarified where exactly the object was once on display. Because it was found very close to a stepped pyramid, Egyptologists such as Rainer Stadelmann propose a position on the very front of the monument, or even visibly embedded in one of the steps. Today Huni’s dedication cone is in the possession of the Cairo Museuem.
3- Huni is also attested in mastaba L6 at Saqqara, attributed to the official Metjen and dating to the end of the third dynasty. There, an inscription was found with the name of a royal domain (“Hut-nisut-hu”) of Huni.
4- Huni is further mentioned on the back of the Palermo stone in the section concerning the reign of the 5th-dynasty king Neferirkare Kakai, who apparently had a mortuary temple built for the cult of Huni. The temple, however, has not yet been located.
Huni in Palermo Stone
5- Finally, Huni is attested in the papyrus Prisse, in the Instructions of Kagemni, probably dating to the 13th dynasty.
Most scholars today think that this extract may strengthen the theory that Huni was the last king of the 3rd dynasty and the immediate predecessor of King Sneferu (the first ruler of the 4th dynasty).
Huni Name
Huni cartouche
Huni’s identity is difficult to establish, since his name is passed down mostly as a cartouche name and in different variations. The earliest mention of his cartouche name may be on the granite cone from Elephantine, which might be contemporary. Otherwise, the earliest appearances of Huni’s cartouche can be found on the Palermo Stone P1, dating to the 5th dynasty, and on the Prisse Papyrus of the 13th dynasty.
Huni’s cartouche can also be found in the Saqqara kinglist and the Turin Canon, both dating back to the 19th dynasty. The Abydos kinglist, which also dates to the 19th dynasty, mysteriously omits Huni’s name and gives instead a Neferkara who is unknown to Egyptologists. One suggestion for this omission is that Neferkara was the nomen for Huni.
The reading and translation of Huni’s cartouche name is also disputed. In general, two basic versions of his name exist: an old version, which is closest to the (lost) original, and a younger version, which seems to be based on Ramesside interpretations and misreadings.
Whilst the stone vessel from Abusir writes Huni’s name without a cartouche, but gives the Niswt-Bity-title, all other Old Kingdom writings place the king’s name inside an oval cartouche.
The Ramesside versions use the hieroglyphic signs candle wick (Gardiner sign V28), beating man (Gardiner sign A25), water line (Gardiner sign N35) and arm with a stick (Gardiner sign D40). The cartouche No. 15 in the Kinglist of Saqqara writes two vertical strokes between the water line and the beating arm. The Prisse Papyrus omits the candle wick and the beating arm. Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt had already proposed by the beginning of the 20th century that the old and Ramesside cartouche versions were referring to the same king.
Huni’s possible Horus name
The Horus name of Huni is unknown. There are several theories to connect the cartouche name “Huni” with contemporary Horus names.
In the late 1960s, the Louvre Museum bought a stele showing a king whose Horus name is Horus-Qahedjet (“the crown of Horus is raised”). For stylistical reasons the stele may be dated to the late Third Dynasty and it seems possible that it refers to Huni, whose Horus-name it provides. However, its dating and authenticity have been put into question several times, and today the stela is believed to be either fake or dedicated to King Thutmose III (18th dynasty) while imitating the artistic style of Dynasty III.
Huni Family
The place of Huni as a member of the lineages of ruling kings, with the disintegration of the 3rd dynasty and the beginning of the 4th one, is very controversial. In many modern and later sources, Huni and his successor Sneferu are always listed together, in a direct line, in one sentence. Therefore, Egyptologists and historians believe that Huni might have even been related to Snefru.
King Sneferu
A key figure in this case is Queen Meresankh I, the royal mother of Snefru. She definitely bore the title of a queen, but no contemporary source connects her name with the title of a daughter or wife of Huni. This circumstance raises doubts in the family relationship between Huni and Sneferu. Today most scholars prefer to believe the historian Manetho, who claims in his Aegyptiacae that with the enthronement of Sneferu a different royal house gained power over Egypt and a new dynasty began.
A possible wife of Huni was instead a queen Djefatnebty, whose name appears in black ink inscriptions on beer vases from Elephantine. Her name is guided by the title Great One of the hetes-sceptre, making her definitely a queen consort. According to an interpretation by Günter Dreyer, Djefatnebty’s death is mentioned alongside several events during the reign of King Huni, although no king is mentioned in the inscription by his name.
Until today, no child or other relative of Huni can be identified and connected to him with certainty. William Stevenson Smith and George Andrew Reisner propose to identify Queen Hetepheres I as the daughter of King Huni. Hetepheres bore the female title Sat-netjer (“daughter of a god”), which led Smith and Reisner to the conclusion that this could be a hint to her family position as the daughter of Huni.
In this case, Hetepheres would have been an heir princess and by marrying Sneferu, she secured the bloodline of the royal dynasty. But other scholars, such as Wolfgang Helck and Wilfried Seipel, raise strong doubts against this theory. They argue that the title of Hetepheres does not explicitly reveal to whom she was married in her lifetime.
Huni Reign
He is given a reign of 24 years by the Turin canon, which is commonly accepted by scholars. Religious or military activities are not known from his reign.
The only contemporary documents, which allow some evaluation of any political and social developments during Huni’s time, are the tomb inscriptions of high officials such as Metjen, Khabausokar, A’a-akhty and Pehernefer. These are dated to the time span from the end of the 3rd dynasty up to the beginning of the 4th dynasty. They show that the reign of Huni must have been the beginning of the heyday of the Old Kingdom.
For the first time inscriptions give explicit insights into the power structure of the state, with nomarchs and viziers exercising important powers. The tomb inscriptions of Metjen also mention, for the first time in Egyptian history, that titles of high-ranked officials and priests were only passed down by inheritance from father to son.
mastaba L6 at Saqqara
It seems though, that Huni undertook some building projects. The Turin Canon, which is rather modest about additional information concerning the listed kings, credits Huni with the erection of a certain building, for which Huni must have been honoured in later times. Unfortunately, the papyrus is damaged at the relevant column and the complete name of the building is lost today.
Another hint of possible building projects and city foundations under Huni might be hidden in the name of the historical city of Ehnas (today better known as Heracleopolis Magna). Wolfgang Helck points out that the Old Kingdom name of this city was Nenj-niswt and that this name was written with the same hieroglyphs as the cartouche name of Huni. Thus, he proposes Huni as the founder of Ehnas. Additionally, the tomb inscription of Metjen mentions a mortuary domain in the nome of Letopolis. This building hasn’t been found by archaeologists yet.
After his death, he seems to have enjoyed a long-lasting mortuary cult. The Palermo stone, which was made over a hundred years after Huni’s death, mentions donations made to a funerary complex temple of Huni. Huni’s name is also mentioned in the Prisse Papyrus, further evidence that he was remembered long after his death since the papyrus was written during the 12th dynasty.
Huni Monuments
1- Meidum pyramid
In the early 20th century, the Meidum pyramid was often credited to Huni. One long-held theory posited that Huni had started a stepped pyramid, similar to that of king Djoser, Sekhemkhet and Khaba, but architecturally more advanced and with more and smaller steps. When King Sneferu ascended the throne, he would have simply covered the pyramid with polished limestone slabs, making it a “true pyramid”.
The odd appearance of the pyramid was explained in early publications by a possible building catastrophe, during which the pyramid’s covering collapsed and many workmen would have been crushed. The theory seemed to be fostered by the unknown duration of Sneferu’s reign. At the time, Egyptologists and historians couldn’t believe Sneferu had ruled long enough to have three pyramids built for him.
The Meidum Pyramid
Closer examinations of the pyramid surroundings however revealed several tomb inscriptions and pilgrim graffiti praising the “beauty of the white pyramid of king Sneferu”. They further call for prayers to Sneferu and “his great wife Meresankh I”. Additionally, the surrounding mastaba tombs date to the reign of King Sneferu. Huni’s name has yet to be found anywhere near the pyramid. These indices led Egyptologists to the conclusion that the pyramid of Meidum was never Huni’s, but rather an achievement of Sneferu, planned and constructed as a cenotaph.
Ramesside graffiti reveals that the white limestone covering still existed during the 19th dynasty and started to collapse slowly after that period. The rest of the limestone covering and the first inner layers were robbed during the New Kingdom period and the Roman period. This practice continued in Christian and Islamic times, in particular during the construction works of the Arabs in the 12th century AD. Arab writers describe the Meidum pyramid as a “mountain with five steps”. Finally, several regional earthquakes damaged the monument.
A third argument against the theory that Sneferu completed Huni’s project is newer evaluations of Sneferu’s time on the throne. According to the Turin Canon, Sneferu ruled for 24 years. However, during the Old Kingdom the years of rule were counted biennially, when cattle counts and tax collections were performed, which would mean that Sneferu may have ruled for 48 years.
The compiler of the Turin Canon may not have been aware of this long-gone circumstance when redacting his document and would consequently have attributed 24 years to Sneferu. Today it is estimated that 48 years of rule would have allowed Sneferu to build three pyramids during his lifetime. Additionally, Egyptologists such as Rainer Stadelmann point out that it was uncommon for rulers during the Old Kingdom to usurp or finish the tomb of a predecessor; all that a succeeding king did was to bury and seal the tomb of his predecessor.
2- Layer Pyramid
As stated earlier, Rainer Stadelmann thinks that there is a possibility that Huni might have constructed the so-called Layer Pyramid at Zawyet el’Aryan. This monument was left unfinished and according to Stadelmann and Jean-Philippe Lauer, it was almost finished. The question of whether the subterranean complex was ever utilised in the burial of the king is unknown. The necropolis of the Layer Pyramid has still not been investigated.
A nearby mastaba (Mastaba Z500), which was integrated into the pyramid complex, contained several stone bowls with the Horus name of king Khaba. Thus, the Layer Pyramid is commonly known as the pyramid of Khaba. Rainer Stadelmann proposes an identification of Khaba with Huni. He argues that the finishing of the pyramid lasted a long period of time and since the Turin Canon credits a 24-year reign to Huni, this time span surely covered the building time needed for the pyramid. Thus, both names (“Huni” and “Khaba”) might point to one and the same ruler.
3- Lepsius pyramid – I
A mysterious mud brick pyramid, originally planned to be the size of that of Khafrâ, was uncovered in Abu Rawash and documented by Karl Richard Lepsius, who listed it in his list of pyramids as Pyramid I. The pyramid was already a heap of rubble at the time of his excavations in the 1840s: only a 17-metre-high (56 ft) stump of brick layers was left. Lepsius nonetheless discovered a narrow corridor leading down to a nearly square chamber. In it, he found a roughly hewn stone sarcophagus. Lepsius dated the pyramid to the late 3rd dynasty and proposed a connection to King Huni.
It was made of small mud bricks, with a quarter of its inner core hewn out of a natural bedrock. The rock core itself contained several rock-cut tombs dating back to the 5th and 6th dynasties. Swelim and other Egyptologists, such as Toby Wilkinson, point out that it would be surprising for a royal pyramid to have been destroyed less than 300 years after its construction, only to be reused for simple rock-cut tombs.
Additionally, he points to the unusual geographic position of the pyramid: Old Kingdom pyramids were commonly built on high grounds, while the pyramid Lepsius I lies on a flat plain. Thus the dating of this monument to the late 3rd dynasty is no longer considered tenable.
4- Cultic step pyramids
Several small step pyramids along the Nile River are also credited to Huni. These small pyramids had a cultic function and marked important royal estates. They contained no internal chambers and were not used for burial purposes. One of them, the Pyramid of Elephantine, is located at the eastern end of Elephantine island and a granite cone with Huni’s name was discovered nearby in 1909.
Elephantine Island by D-Stanley
Therefore, this little pyramid is the only one that may be credited to Huni with some certainty. Some scholars such as Andrzej Cwiek contest this attribution however, pointing out that it might be at least possible that the granite cone of Huni was reused in later times, when Ramesside priests restored cultic places of the Old Kingdom period.
The only cultic step pyramid that can be definitively connected to an Old Kingdom ruler is a small step pyramid known as the Seila Pyramid, located at the Faiyum Oasis. Two large stela with the name of Sneferu were found in front of the pyramid, thus indicating the king responsible for its construction. Since Sneferu was Huni’s likely immediate successor, this might indicate however that cultic pyramids were indeed constructed at the transition between the 3rd and 4th dynasties.
Here are the names of the other cultic step pyramids:
- Pyramid of Naqada
- Pyramid of el-Kula
- Edfu South Pyramid
- Pyramid of Sinki
- Pyramid of Zawyet el-Maiyitin
Conclusion
He was a king of transition, ruling at the threshold between two eras. As the final ruler of the Third Dynasty, he inherited a stable kingdom and passed it on stronger than before.
Through administrative continuity, regional control, and support for architectural development, Huni prepared Egypt for the rise of the Old Kingdom. His reign reminds us that behind every age of greatness lies careful preparation.
Though often overlooked, Huni deserves recognition as one of the architects of Egypt’s enduring success.
