Hetepheres I

Hetepheres I was the wife of Sneferu, founder of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, and the mother of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid. Her titles, preserved on the furniture from her tomb, include King's Mother, Mother of the King of the Two Lands, Attendant of Horus, and God's Daughter of His Body. Egyptologists generally read the last as a claim of royal birth and take her to be a daughter of Huni, the last king of the Third Dynasty, so that her marriage carried the blood of the old royal house into the new one. Whether she was Sneferu's principal queen or a lesser wife is not known.

She is remembered chiefly for what was found underground at Giza. In 1925 the Harvard–Boston expedition under George Reisner uncovered an unmarked shaft, later numbered G 7000 X, east of the Great Pyramid. Some eighty-five to ninety feet down it opened into a chamber holding a sealed alabaster sarcophagus, an alabaster canopic chest, and a mass of collapsed furniture: a gilded bed and canopy frame inscribed with Sneferu's name, armchairs, a carrying chair bearing the queen's titles, a curtain box, silver bracelets, pottery, and toilet articles. The canopic chest still held organic remains in natron solution, among the earliest evidence for the separate burial of the organs. When the sarcophagus was opened in 1927 it proved empty.

The empty coffin has never been explained. Reisner argued that the queen had first been buried near her husband at Dahshur, that robbers stole the body, and that officials hid the theft from Khufu by reburying the equipment secretly at Giza. Others propose that G 7000 X was her original tomb and the body was moved to the small pyramid G I-a when it was finished, that the mummy was stolen from the shaft soon after burial, or that she was first laid in G I-a and moved after a robbery.

Her furniture, reconstructed from decayed wood and gold sheathing, is among the finest to survive from the Old Kingdom; the originals are in Cairo, reproductions in Boston. Through her son she was grandmother of the kings Djedefre and Khafre and of Queen Hetepheres II, and her name links the two dynasties that raised the pyramids of Meidum, Dahshur, and Giza.