Khuit I

Khuit in hieroglyphs
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A King's Wife from the Fifth dynasty of EgyptPossibly a wife of Menkauhor Kaiu Buried in Saqqara

Khuit I was an Egyptian queen who lived in the mid-5th Dynasty of Egypt.

She was buried in mastaba D 14 at Saqqara.The Austrian Egyptologist Wilfried Seipel has suggested that was the queen of pharaoh Menkauhor Kaiu.^[1] Based on the datation of the tombs surrounding Khuit's burial, Seipel argues that she lived during the mid-Fifth Dynasty. Proceeding by elimination, Seipel attributed known queens to each king of the period, which only leaves Menkauhor as a candidate king for her.^[2] These arguments are criticized by the French Egyptologist Michel Baud, who observes that pharaohs could have had more than one queen.^[3]

Another queen by the name of Meresankh IV is more commonly suggested as the wife of Menkauhor Kaiu and thus may have been a contemporary of Khuit.^[4][5]

Khuit held the titles Great one of the hetes-sceptre (wrt-hetes), She who sees Horus and Seth (m33t-hrw-stsh), Great of Praises, King’s Wife, his beloved, Attendant of the Great One, King’s Daughter, and King’s Wife.^[6]

Sources

1. W. Grajetzki, Ancient Egyptian Queens: a hieroglyphic dictionary, 2005
2. Seipel, Wilfried (1980). Untersuchungen zu den ägyptischen Königinnen der Frühzeit und des alten Reiches: Quellen und historische Einordnung (PhD). University of Hamburg. OCLC 256076594. See p. 214
3. Baud, Michel (1999). Famille Royale et pouvoir sous l’Ancien Empire égyptien. Tome 2 (PDF). Bibliothèque d'étude 126/2 (in French). Cairo: Institut français d'archéologie orientale. ISBN 978-2-72-470250-7. See p. 537 & 484
4. Joyce Tyldesley, Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt, Thames and Hudson, 2006
5. Dodson, Hilton, The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, 2004
6. W. Grajetzki, Ancient Egyptian Queens: a hieroglyphic dictionary, 2005