Sanakht (also read as Hor-Sanakht) is the Horus name of an ancient Egyptian king (pharaoh) of the Third Dynasty during the Old Kingdom. His chronological position is highly uncertain (though he is more likely to have reigned towards the end of the dynasty), and it is also unclear under which Hellenized name the ancient historian Manetho could have listed him. Many Egyptologists connect Sanakht with the Ramesside cartouche name Nebka. However, this remains disputed because no other royal title of that king has ever been found, either in contemporary sources or later ones. Two relief fragments depict Sanakht initially from the Wadi Maghareh on the Sinai Peninsula.
Identity
Sanakht’s identity and position in the Third Dynasty are not entirely clear and remain controversial. While seal fragments attest to Sanakht’s existence from mastaba K2 at Beit Khallaf and a graffito, his position as the founder of the Third Dynasty, as recorded by Manetho and the Turin Canon, has been seriously undermined by recent archaeological discoveries at Abydos. These discoveries establish that it was likely Djoser who helped bury—and thus succeed—Khasekhemwy rather than Sanakht. This is determined from seals bearing Djoser’s name found at the entrance to the latter’s tomb.
Proponents of the theory that Sanakht was nonetheless the founder of the dynasty object that the presence of Djoser’s seals in Khasekhemwy’s tomb only shows that Djoser conducted cultural rituals in honour of this king and did not necessarily imply that Djoser was Khasekhemwy’s immediate successor. Alternatively, some have considered Sanakht to be Djoser’s elder brother. Sanakht could then have married Queen Nimaethap, with Nimaethap being the daughter of Khasekhemwy rather than his wife. Together with Sanakht, they could be the parents of Djoser.
Presently, the dominant theory is that Sanakht’s reign dates to the later Third Dynasty, after Djoser. Egyptologists Toby Wilkinson, Stephan Seidlmayer, Kenneth Kitchen and Rainer Stadelmann equate Sanakht with “Nebka”, a name appearing in Ramesside king lists. In support of this theory is a clay seal fragment on which the lower part of a cartouche appears. In this cartouche, Wilkinson, Seidlmayer and Stadelmann see traces of a Ka-sign, the end of the name “Nebka”. Likewise, Dietrich Wildung favours equating Nebka with Sanakht. However, he questions the validity of the seal as evidence, given that it is too badly damaged to read the inscription within the cartouche as “Nebka” with any certainty.
John D. Degreef, Nabil Swelim and Wolfgang Helck are against equating Nebka with Sanakht. They refer to the fact that the name “Nebka” is not attested on any monument nor in any document dating to before Djoser. Instead, Nabil Swelim identifies Nebka with the Horus name Khaba. He further identifies Sanakht with a king Mesochris mentioned by Manetho, regarding this as a Hellenized form of the throne name of Sanakht. He dated Sanakht’s reign to the seventh and eighth king of the Third Dynasty.
Jürgen von Beckerath, Wolfgang Helck, Dietrich Wildung and Peter Kaplony proposed that Sanakht’s Horus name is that of the shadowy Horus Sa, seeing the name “Sa” as a short form of “Sanakht”. From this, Wolfgang Helck holds that Sanakht’s Nisut-Biti name was Weneg. King Weneg, however, is widely held to have ruled during the Second Dynasty, and Helck’s theory has been greeted with scepticism.
Sanakht’s name was once read “Hen Nekht” by Egyptologists such as Ernest Wallis Budge. Today, this reading is not in use anymore; the up-to-date task is “Sanakht” or (seldom) “Nakht-Sa”.
Reign
The exact duration of Sanakht’s time on the throne is unknown. Unlike Djoser, few relics survive from his reign, which casts serious doubts on the traditional figure of 18 years of rule for this king, as given by both Manetho and the Turin Canon. The Turin Canon, for instance, was transcribed on papyri from the reign of the New Kingdom king, Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1213 BC. It must be stressed that the Turin Canon and Manetho were more than one and two thousand years removed from the time of Egypt’s Third Dynasty and would be expected to contain inaccurate or unreliable data.
Very little is known of Sanakht’s activities during his reign. The presence of reliefs depicting him in the Sinai at Wadi Maghareh, together with those of Djoser and Sekhemkhet, suggest an essential Egyptian presence at the time of the Third Dynasty. Expeditions were launched to that location for the procurement of mineral resources, in particular turquoise.
Tomb
The location of Sanakht’s tomb is not known with certainty. It was long thought that Sanakht’s tomb was the large mastaba K2 at Beit Khallaf, as excavations there yielded relief fragments bearing his name. However, some Egyptologists now regard this mastaba as the burial of a high official, prince or queen rather than that of a pharaoh. In contrast, others continue to support the first hypothesis.
In the mastaba were found the skeletal remains of a man over 1.87 m (6 ft 1+1⁄2 in) tall. According to Charles S. Myers, this stature was considerably more elevated than the 1.67 m (5 ft 6 in) average of prehistoric and later Egyptians. The specimen’s skull was huge and capacious. Although his cranial index was comprehensive and almost brachycephalic, the proportions of his long bones were tropically adapted like most other ancient Egyptians; especially those from the predynastic period. His overall cranial features, however, have been closer to those of dynastic period Egyptian skulls.
Consequently, the mastaba has been associated with an anecdote by Manetho in which he tells of a late Second Dynasty king called Sesochris, who he describes as exceptionally tall. The Egyptologist Wolfgang Helck proposed another hypothesis: that Sanakht’s tomb is an unfinished structure west of the pyramid of Djoser.
While the case of Sanakht has often appeared in the medical literature as a potential case of pituitary disease, no definitive consensus has existed for many years on whether it was acromegaly or gigantism. In 2017 palaeopathologist Francesco M. Galassi and Egyptologist Michael E. Habicht from Zurich University’s Institute of Evolutionary Medicine coordinated an international team of researchers to reassess this case. They concluded that the alleged remains of Sanakht are the oldest known case of gigantism worldwide.
