Nehesy Aasehre (Nehesi) was a ruler of Lower Egypt during the fragmented Second Intermediate Period. Most scholars place him into the early 14th Dynasty as either the second or the sixth pharaoh of this Dynasty. As such, he is considered reigned for a short time, c. 1705 BC and would have ruled from Avaris over the eastern Nile Delta. Recent evidence makes it possible that a second person with this name, a son of a Hyksos king, lived slightly later during the late 15th Dynasty, c. 1580 BC. Most of the artefacts attributed to the king Nehesy mentioned in the Turin canon may belong to this Hyksos prince.
Family
In his review of the Second Intermediate Period, egyptologist Kim Ryholt proposed that Nehesy was the son and direct successor of the pharaoh Sheshi with a Nubian Queen named Tati. Egyptologist Darrell Baker also shares this opinion and posits that Tati must have been Nubian or of Nubian descent, hence Nehesy’s name meaning The Nubian. The 14th dynasty being of Canaanite origin, Nehesy is also believed to be of Canaanite descent.
Four scarabs found, including one from Semna in Nubia and three of unknown provenance, point to a temporary coregency with his father. Furthermore, one scarab mentions Nehesy as King’s son and a further 22 as Eldest king’s son. Ryholt and Baker thus hold the view that Nehesy became the heir to the throne after the death of his elder brother, Prince Ipqu.
Manfred Bietak and Jürgen von Beckerath believe that Nehesy was the second ruler of the 14th dynasty. Bietak further posits that his father was an Egyptian military officer or administrator who funded an independent kingdom centred on Avaris. The empire controlled the northeastern Nile Delta at the expense of the concurrent 13th Dynasty.
Attestation
Despite a very short reign of around a year, Nehesy is the best-attested ruler of the 14th Dynasty. According to Ryholt’s latest reading of the Turin canon, Nehesy is attested there on the 1st entry of the 9th column (Gardiner, entry 8.1) and is the first king of the 14th Dynasty whose name is preserved on this king list.
Nehesy is also attested by numerous contemporary artefacts, which are scarab seals. In addition, an incomplete obelisk from the Temple of Seth in Raahu bears his name and the inscription “king’s eldest son”. A seated statue, later usurped by Merneptah, is believed to have originally belonged to Nehesy. It is inscribed with “Seth, Lord of Avaris” and was found in Tell el Muqdam.
Nehesy is also attested by two relief fragments inscribed with the king’s names, which were unearthed in Tell el-Dab’a in the mid-1980s. Finally, two further stelae are known from Tell-Habuwa (ancient Tjaru): one bearing Nehesy’s birth name, the other the throne of the king Aahsere. Thanks to these stelae, it was possible to connect the name Nehesy with the throne name Aahsere ˁ3-sḥ-Rˁ. Before this discovery, Aasehre was regarded as a Hyksos king.
In 2005, another stele of Nehesy was discovered in the fortress city of Tjaru, once the starting point of the Way of Horus, the major road leading out of Egypt into Canaan. The stele shows a king’s son Nehesy offering oil to the god Banebdjedet and bears an inscription mentioning the king’s sister Tany. A woman with this name and title is known from other sources around the time of the Hyksos king Apophis, who ruled at the end of the Second Intermediate Period, c. 1580 BC. Daphna Ben-Tor, who studied the scarabs of Nehesy, concludes that those referring to the king’s son Nehesy are different in style from those referring to Nehesy as a king. She thus wonders whether the king’s son Nehesy might be another person from the better-known king of the same name. In this situation, king Nehesy would still be an early 14th Dynasty ruler, but some of the attestations attributed to him would belong to a Hyksos prince.
Reign
According to the Austrian Egyptologist Manfred Bietak, Nehesy’s 14th Dynasty kingdom started during the late 13th Dynasty, around or just after 1710 BC, due to the slow disintegration of the 13th Dynasty. After this event, “no single ruler was able to control the whole of Egypt” until Ahmose I captured Avaris. Alternatively, Ryholt believes that the 14th Dynasty started a century before Nehesy’s reign, c. 1805 BC, during Sobekneferu’s reign. Since the 13th Dynasty was the direct continuation of the 12th, he proposes that the birth of the 14th is the origin of the distinction between the 12th and the 13th in the Egyptian tradition.
