= Paper =
by Thierry STASSER, in Res Antiquae 14, 2017.
While excavating the Royal cemetery around King Pepy II ‘s Pyramid in the 1920’s, Swiss archaeologist Gustave Jequier brought to light the monuments of three wifes of the sovereign. Within the complex of Queen Iput II, he uncovered the funerary equipment of another Queen, named Ankhnespepy. At the end of the XXth Century, the Mission Archéologique Française à Saqqara (MAFS) discovered eight resting places of VIth Dynasty Queens around King Pepy I’s Pyramid, mostly wives of this king. But two complexes at least belong to wives of of Pepy II, one of them bearing the name Ankhnespepy. Do we have only one Queen, or two different women ? Opinions of Egyptologists differ here. The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate that there are two different homonymous ladies, each of them a King’s Mother. The first part will review the evidence, which is scarce. The second part will run through the different hypothesis and to conclude, I try to demonstrate that at least three, maybe four successors of Pepy II weere his sons, by different wives.
Keywords: Pepy II, Ankhnespepy, Royal Mothers, VIth Dynasty
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