It was a momentous day when Sneferu, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Great God, died sometime around 2590 b.c., but the date of his death and the details of the funeral of one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs went unrecorded. This seems incredible to us, living in a society that wants every possible detail of Princess Diana’s death and is still debating how JFK died, but things were different in ancient Egypt. Death was a defeat and Egyptian scribes only recorded victories. History was not intended to record objective facts; it was to present the glories of a nation for others to see and wonder at. This leaves Egyptologists with the task of sifting through fragments of information to piece together the details of a pharaoh’s death.
For the reign of Sneferu, one of the most important fragments is the Palermo Stone, a chunk of black diorite in the Regional Museum of Archeology in Sicily. Originally the stone was more than six feet long, and inscribed on its polished surface were the names and reigns of more than 200 kings of Egypt. The fragment in Palermo is only thirteen inches wide and ten inches long, but it lists the earliest pharaohs, including
Sneferu. It recounts the major events during the various kings’ reigns and from it we learn that Sneferu sent a trading expedition to Lebanon to obtain cedar for building boats and the doors of the great temples of Egypt.
It must have been a successful mission; forty ships laden with huge logs returned home to Egypt. Fragments like the Palermo Stone are the bits and pieces from which Egyptologists reconstruct ancient lives, but they don’t give us the exact date of a pharaoh’s death. There are two reasons for this. As we noted before, the Egyptians viewed death as a defeat, but they also had a unique calendar. The Egyptians didn’t number their years consecutively. Our year 2008 will be followed by 2009, but in ancient Egypt when a new king like Sneferu ascended the throne, the calendar began anew with: “Day 1, Year 1 in the reign of Sneferu.” The only reason we know Sneferu died in 2590 b.c. is that a few events such as total solar eclipses mentioned in ancient Egyptian records can be dated accurately in terms of our calendar. Let’s say that an ancient Egyptian papyrus written during the reign of Ramses the Great mentions that a solar eclipse took place. Using our calendar, astronomers calculate exactly when the solar eclipse took place and then Egyptologists count backward to get dates for reigns of the earlier kings. Based on evidence like this, our best bet for Sneferu’s death is 2590 b.c. We can be sure, however, that when Sneferu died, all of Egypt
mourned. Under his rule Egypt became an international power, sending trading expeditions to Lebanon for cedar and to the Sinai for turquoise and copper. Sneferu ushered in the era of the great pyramids, but there
is another reason to believe Egypt mourned his passing. It is recorded on the Westcar Papyrus, located in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Before the Egyptians invented papyrus, writing was done on clay
tablets. After being inscribed, the damp clay tablets were baked in a kiln to be preserved. It was an expensive and tedious process to form a tablet out of clay, inscribe it with a stylus, and then bake it. Sending
letters abroad was not easy; great care had to be taken that the tablets didn’t crumble and break. The Mesopotamians even had special envelopes, also baked, to protect them.
The invention of papyrus (from which we get our word “paper”) created a literary boom. All of a sudden, writing was easy. Sheets of paper made from strips of the papyrus plant were glued together in long rolls that could be written on with a brush. No more baking of tablets, no problem transporting the writings—the publishing industry took off. The Egyptians wrote everything on papyrus, religious texts, battle accounts, magical spells,even fiction. The Westcar Papyrus, named after its owner, contains a series of magical stories told by Sneferu’s grandson, Prince Bauefre, the Stephen King of ancient Egypt .