ABSTRACT
The last king of the Third Dynasty was Huni; it is not clear what, if any, relation to him was the next king, Sneferu, who was acknowledged as the founder of the Fourth Dynasty. His mother seems to have been a minor wife of Huni, but we do not know if Sneferu was his son; presumably the annalists did not think so, for otherwise there would not have been a new dynasty commencing with his name. He did, however, marry the Princess Hetepheres, ‘the Daughter of the God’, who presumably brought him the thrones of Egypt as her marriage portion. He was revered throughout the length of Egyptian history; his reign was always regarded as one of the high points of the Egyptian Golden Age. Virtually uniquely amongst the Kings of Egypt he was remembered by a sobriquet: he was ‘the Beneficent King’ and his cult was sustained down to Ptolemaic times, more than two thousand years after his death.
