The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

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Figure 2. The Tomb of Queen Khentkawes in right center foreground of the Pyramids of Khufu (right), Khafre (center), and
Menkaure (left). The Khentkawes Town (KKT) extends east (right) of the queen’s monumental tomb. The modern cemetery fills the
wadi at the southeast end of the quarry incline on which the builders founded the KKT. View to the northwest.
Excavations
The Khentkawes Town (KKT)
All the while we were excavating the Lost City of the
Pyramids south of the Wall of the Crow (which we
refer to in short as HeG, after Heit el-Ghurab, “Wall of the
Crow” in Arabic), we knew of a neighboring community,
roughly contemporary with the final days of the ancient
city, on the other side of the Wall of the Crow and a few
hundred meters west: the town attached to the gigantic
tomb of Khentkawes, an enigmatic queen who ruled at the
end of the 4 th Dynasty (figs. 1, 2). The form of her tomb is
halfway between a mastaba (bench-like superstructure)
and a pyramid, with a bedrock pedestal topped by a stack
of laid blocks. Her titles, etched into the granite doorjambs
of her chapel, only add to her mystery. They can be read
either “Mother of the Two Kings of Upper and Lower
Egypt,” or “Mother of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt
and King of Upper and Lower Egypt.” The latter reading
suggests she ruled in the guise of a male pharaoh, as did
Hatshepsut of the 18 th Dynasty, one thousand years later.
We must assess our settlement south of the Wall of the
Crow in the context of both the large urban agglomeration
of KKT, and just 30 meters to the south of KKT, another
settlement attached to the valley temple of the Pyramid
of Menkaure (GIII.VT).
When Selim Hassan (1943) excavated the KKT in 1932
he found an L-shaped mudbrick settlement with modular
houses strung out 150 m east-west along a causeway leading
to the Khentkawes Monument (fig. 3). The foot of the L
extends 61.5 m southward and contains larger buildings.
The town covers an area 6,059 m square (measurements
from Hassan’s published map and text).
The modern, systemic methods that we use to excavate
and record the HeG settlement did not exist in Selim
Hassan’s day, and so we know little about the KKT beyond
Giza Occasional Papers 4 9