Sewahenre Senebmiu

Sewahenre Senebmiu (also Sonbmiu) is a poorly attested Egyptian pharaoh of the late 13th dynasty during the Second Intermediate Period. According to egyptologist Jürgen von Beckerath, he was the forty-first king of the 13th dynasty.[2][3][4] Alternatively, Darrell Baker proposes that he may have been its fifty-seventh ruler.[5] Kim Ryholt only specifies that Senebmiu's short reign dates to between 1660 BC and 1649 BC.[6]

Sewahenre Senebmiu
Sonbmiu, Sonbmijew, Senebmaui
Drawing by Wallis Budge of a fragment of a limestone stele of Senebmiu, from Gebelein.[1]
Pharaoh
Reign	after 1660 BC, possibly for 1 year (13th Dynasty)
Predecessor	uncertain, Se[...]kare (von Beckerath)[2]
Successor	unknown
Royal titulary

Attestations

Inscription of Senebmiu from Deir el-Barhi.[7]

Senebmiu is a poorly attested pharaoh. Unfortunately, the Turin canon is severely damaged after the record of Sobekhotep VII and the identity and chronological order of the last 19 kings of the 13th dynasty is impossible to ascertain from the document.[6] Senebmiu's prenomen Sewahenre may nonetheless have been partially preserved on column 8, line 16 of the papyrus, which reads Se[...]enre. Darrell Baker and Kim Ryholt note that this attribution is far from certain as it could also correspond to another obscure king of this period with the name Sekhaenre.[5] Otherwise, Senebmiu is attested on entry 49 of the Karnak king list, redacted during the reign of Thutmose III.[5]

Contemporary attestations of Senebmiu are few and all originate from Upper Egypt. Darrell Baker and Daphna Ben Tor suggest that this may signal that the 13th dynasty had lost control of Lower and possibly Middle Egypt at the time.[5][8] A fragment of a limestone stele discovered by G.W. Fraser in 1893 in Gebelein and now in the British Museum (BM EA24895) bears the mention "The son of Ra, of his body, Senebmiu". The stele once depicted the king wearing the double crown and probably making an offering, but most of the relief is lost. Another attestation of Senebmiu was uncovered in the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II at Deir el-Bahri, where the side of a small naos is inscribed with the king's titulary.[5][6][7] Finally, a staff bearing the king's prenomen and inscribed for the "Royal sealer, overseer of marshland dwellers Senebni" was found in a now-lost tomb in Qurna on the west bank of the Nile opposite Karnak.[5]

See also

• List of pharaohs

References

1. Wallis Budge: Hieroglyphic Texts, V (1914) see p. 7 and pl. 18, available copyright-free online.
2. Jürgen von Beckerath: Handbuch der Ägyptischen Königsnamen, MÄS 49, Philip Von Zabern. (1999)
3. Jürgen von Beckerath: Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte der Zweiten Zwischenzeit in Ägypten, Glückstadt, 1964
4. Jürgen von Beckerath: Chronologie des pharaonischen Ägyptens, Münchner Ägyptologische Studien 46. Mainz am Rhein, 1997
5. Darrell D. Baker: The Encyclopedia of the Pharaohs: Volume I – Predynastic to the Twentieth Dynasty 3300–1069 BC, Stacey International, ISBN 978-1-905299-37-9, 2008, p. 381-382
6. K.S.B. Ryholt, The Political Situation in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, c. 1800 – 1550 BC, Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications, vol. 20. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997, excerpts available online here.
7. Édouard Naville: The XIth dynasty temple at Deir el-Bahari, Part II, (1907) available copyright-free online
8. Daphna Ben Tor: Sequences and chronology of Second Intermediate Period royal-name scarabs, based on excavated series from Egypt and the Levant, in: The Second Intermediate Period (Thirteenth-Seventeenth Dynasties), Current Research, Future Prospects edited by Marcel Maree, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 192, 2010, p. 91