Last night I settled down to watch a two-hour documentary I’d recorded from the History Channel. No, it wasn’t about Richard III, or even the English medieval period, but about the Fourth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. Specifically about the discovery of the long-fabled fourth pyramid, some five miles from Giza: here Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the actual documentary anywhere on line, but no doubt it’s lurking somewhere.
To read more about the pyramid, go to this article.
The documentary was very interesting, but why am I mentioning it here? Because the pharaoh who built it, Djedefre, was the most maligned and ignored of the dynasty. (Sound familiar?)
Born the son of the mighty Khufu, he came to the throne on the death of his brother – a death for which he he was afterward damned as a murderer. (Echoes of boys in the Tower?) Modern(ish) historians leapt to accuse him, and to claim that he was untrue to his father, vicious and hated, and was murdered in turn by his other brother some eight years later. Oh, and there was the incest, of course. He married his dead brother’s queen, who also happened to be their sister. Well, Djedefre didn’t invent that sort of thing, Egyptian pharaohs did it all the time! They thought it kept their bloodline pure. We know that it kept their bloodline all sorts of things, none of them beneficial, but they didn’t have the benefit of our modern knowledge. (Richard III’s so-called intention to commit incest with his niece Elizabeth of York was more storytelling by Henry Tudor’s agents. And as for claims that his marriage to Anne Neville was all manner of vile and illegal things…I wish the culprit historians could be made to eat their own words.)
Oh, those historians have a lot to answer for, because excavations at the site of the fourth pyramid have revealed that Djedefre was a very different man, loyal, dutiful and determined. (Even more familiar?) He was a good ruler for twenty-three years (not eight!) who was greatly mourned after death. And no, the pyramid he built wasn’t pulled down by the people because they loathed him. (That’s the historians’ version!) it was ransacked for stone by the later Roman invaders and has been steadily denuded over the intervening centuries so that today it’s little more than a heap of rubble.
So, now perhaps you see why I’m posting this. Like Richard III, Djedefre has been greatly wronged by biased historians who are eager to paint the blackest picture imaginable. The Tudor spirit lived on in these historians, and with it all the Tudor fabrications.
murreyandblue 