page_title: Nehesy
section_title: Attestation
hierarchical_section_title: Nehesy / Attestation
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of a scarab of pharaoh Nehesy. 14th dynasty, reign of Nehesy, Middle Kingdom/Second Intermediate Period.
context_page_description: Nehesy Aasehre was a ruler of Lower Egypt during the fragmented Second Intermediate Period. He is placed by most scholars into the early 14th Dynasty, as either the second or the sixth pharaoh of this dynasty. As such he is considered to have reigned for a short time c. 1705 BC and would have ruled from Avaris over the eastern Nile Delta. Recent evidence makes it possible that a second person with this name, a son of a Hyksos king, lived at a slightly later time during the late 15th Dynasty c. 1580 BC. It is possible that most of the artefacts attributed to the king Nehesy mentioned in the Turin canon, in fact belong to this Hyksos prince.
context_section_description: In spite of a very short reign of around a year, Nehesy is the best attested ruler of the 14th dynasty.
  According to Ryholt's latest reading of the Turin canon, Nehesy is attested there on the 1st entry of the 9th column (Gardiner, entry 8.1) and is the first king of the 14th dynasty whose name is preserved on this king list.
  Nehesy is also attested by numerous contemporary artefacts, foremost among which are scarab seals. In addition, a fragmentary obelisk from the Temple of Seth in Raahu bears his name together with the inscription "king's eldest son". A seated statue, later usurped by Merneptah, is believed to have originally belonged to Nehesy. It is inscribed with "Seth, Lord of Avaris" and was found in Tell el Muqdam.
  Nehesy is also attested by two relief fragments inscribed with the names of the king, which were unearthed in Tell el-Dab'a in the mid 1980s. Finally, two further stelae are known from Tell-Habuwa (ancient Tjaru): one bearing Nehesy's birth name, the other one the throne of the king Aahsere. Thanks to these stelae it was possible to connect the name Nehesy with the throne name Aahsere ˁ3-sḥ-Rˁ. Before this discovery, Aasehre was regarded as a Hyksos king.
  In 2005, a further stele of Nehesy was discovered in the fortress city of Tjaru, once the starting point of the Way of Horus, the major road leading out of Egypt into Canaan. The stele shows a king's son Nehesy offering oil to the god Banebdjedet and also bears an inscription mentioning the king's sister Tany. A woman with this name and title is known from other sources around the time of the Hyksos king Apophis, who ruled at the end of the Second Intermediate Period c. 1580 BC. Daphna Ben-Tor, who studied the scarabs of Nehesy, concludes that those referring to the king's son Nehesy are different in style from those referring to Nehesy as a king. She thus wonders whether the king's son Nehesy might be a different person from the better known king of the same name. In this situation, king Nehesy would still be an early 14th Dynasty ruler, however some of the attestations attributed to him would in fact belong to a Hyksos prince.
caption: Scarab of Nehesy, now in the Petrie Museum.
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