Nerikare was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 13th Dynasty during the Second Intermediate Period. According to the Egyptologists Kim Ryholt and Darrell Baker, he was the third king of the Dynasty, reigning for a short time in 1796 BC. Alternatively, Jürgen von Beckerath sees Nerikare as the twenty-third king of the 13th Dynasty, reigning after Sehetepkare Intef.
Attestations
Nerikare is known primarily from a single stele dated to year 1 of his reign. The stele was published in 1897 but is now lost.
In addition, the prenomen of a king who could be Nerikare is attested on a Nile record from Semna, near the second cataract of the Nile in Nubia. The record is dated to the first regnal year of this king, whose name was read as “Djefakare” by egyptologists F. Hintze and W. F. Reineke. Kim Ryholt, however, notes that the prenomen was misread by the discoverers of the record with Gardiner’s sign G14 nry, representing a vulture, mistaken for the sign G42 representing a duck and reading ḏf3. Thus, Ryholt and others, such as Darrell Baker, now read the name as “Nerikare”.
Chronological position
Ryholt points out that known Nile records, similar to the one he attributes to Nerikare, all date to the period from the late 12th to early 13th dynasties. He thus concludes that Nerikare too must have been a king of this period, and since “Nerikare” does not appear in the Turin canon, Ryholt proposes that he was mentioned in the wsf lacuna affecting the third king of the Dynasty in the Turin canon (column 7, line 6). A wsf (literally “missing”) lacuna signals a lacuna in the document from which the Turin canon was copied in Ramesside times. This would establish Nerikare as the third king of the Dynasty, although the lacuna might have comprised two kings, and Nerikare could be the fourth ruler, following an unknown king. The duration of Nerikare’s reign is six years in the Turin canon. However, Ryholt has shown that this is true for all kings marked as wsf and that the author of the king list likely inserted this figure to avoid chronological gaps. Instead, Ryholt proposes that Nerikare reigned for only one year. Furthermore, the existence of a Nile record dated to his first regnal year indicates that he accessed the throne at the beginning of a calendar year, before the season of inundation during which such records were inscribed.
Nomen
In his 1997 study of the second intermediate period, Kim Ryholt proposes that Nerikare’s nomen may have been “Sobek”. This nomen appears on three seals, which can be dated to the 13th Dynasty, before Sobekhotep III. Since the nominal of all but two kings of this period is known, he argues that only Nerikare or Sekhemrekhutawy Khabaw might have borne this nomen.
