Nitocris (
Greek Νίτωκρις) has been claimed to have been the last
pharaoh of the
Sixth Dynasty. Her name is found in the
Histories of
Herodotus and writings of
Manetho but her historicity is questionable.
According to Herodotus (
Histories ii), she invited the murderers of her brother, the "king of Egypt", to a banquet, then killed them by flooding the sealed room with the
Nile. Then, to avoid the other conspirators, she committed
suicide (possibly by running into a burning room). Manetho claims she built the "third pyramid" at
Giza, which is attributed by modern historians and archaeologists to
Menkaure. Herodotus also has a
Babylonian queen of the same name and talks of her constructions in
Babylon, mainly connected with diverting the
Euphrates. His story about her tomb and the inscription on it which fooled
Darius into opening it, only to have another inscription on the inside that chastised the opener for being so greedy is an early example of a familiar cultural
meme.
Nitocris is not mentioned, however, in any native
Egyptian inscriptions and "she" probably did not exist. It was long claimed that Nitocris appears on a fragment of the
Turin King List, dated to the
Nineteenth Dynasty, under the Egyptian name of
Nitiqreti (
nt-ỉqrtỉ). The fragment where this name appears was thought to belong to the Sixth Dynasty portion of the king list, thus appearing to confirm both Herodotus and Manetho. However, microscopic analysis of the Turin King List suggests the fragment was misplaced in reassembling the fragmentary text, and that the name
Nitiqreti"is in fact a faulty
transcription of the
praenomen of a clearly male king Netjerkare
Siptah I, who is named on the
Abydos King List as the successor of the Sixth Dynasty king
Nemtyemsaf II. On the Abydos King List, Netjerkare Siptah is placed in the equivalent spot that Neitiqreti Siptah holds on the Turin King List.
