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and left it an empty shell. Mummification transformed this emptiness so that it could pass over into the afterlife. Mummification constituted a form of resurrection by reconnecting ka and ba to body and allowing the whole being to cross over.
    Exactly where the realm of the afterlife was thought to exist changed over the course of the Old Kingdom, most notably during the reign of Khufu. Early on, the other world was located in heaven, among the stars. After death and burial, the mummified, resurrected pharaoh made his way to the stars and there joined the ranks of the gods. Later, however, the afterlife came to be literally an underworld. The sun moved from east to west during the day, then at night dropped below the horizon to appear again in the eastern sky at dawn. There, beneath our world, in that unknown place where the sun shone at night, the gods and the resurrected spirits passed their paradisiacal days for all eternity. The afterlife had moved from stars to sun.
    Khufu was never known as a “son of Re,” the sun god worshiped at the Egyptian holy city of Iunu (later known by its Greek name Heliopolis, “city of the sun”). But his Fourth Dynasty successors—Djedefre, Khafre, and Menkaure—bore that title. According to one interpretation, sometime between the death of Khufu and the accession of Djedefre, a major religious change occurred. A minor son of Khufu who came to the throne only after the untimely death of the most likely successor to the throne, Djedefre turned away from his father’s complex at Giza to go his own way. The new pharaoh began a pyramid at Abu Roash (also spelled Abu Rawash), some 5 miles north of Giza and directly opposite the temple of Re at Iunu.
    When Khafre, another minor son of Khufu, took the throne—possibly as a result of Djedefre’s unexpected death, perhaps through a coup d’état—the pyramid of Abu Roash was left unfinished, and images of Djedefre were smashed. Something ferocious was going on in ancient Egypt, even as Khafre refocused the energy of the Fourth Dynasty on Giza and there built the pyramids associated with his reigns. He had come back to Khufu’s ritual center, yet he and his Fourth Dynasty successors carried the title “son of Re,” which the builder of the Great Pyramid had never borne.
    Against this background, one interpretation is to view Khufu as the last defender of the old way, a fact that becomes all the more interesting when we look at the conflicting ancient stories surrounding him. Khufu is variously seen as a sacrilegious tyrant who opposed the religious ways of many of his people, or as a religious scholar who possessed a deep knowledge and yearning for the sacred. These competing interpretations of Khufu might be expected if he was a man of strong religious convictions—but not necessarily convictions shared by all of his people.
    One ancient account of Khufu comes from the classical Greek historian Herodotus, who lived from about 484 B.C. until sometime between 430 and 420 B.C. According to Herodotus, Sneferu created a perfect state of justice—the social version of ma’at —and spread prosperity across Egypt. Khufu, though, “plunged into every kind of wickedness,” 2 shutting down all the temples, forbidding sacrifice, sending his daughter into prostitution when he needed money, and ordering all Egyptians to work for him, first in building a road, then on a burial vault on an island created by a canal from the Nile, and finally on the pyramid that now bears his name. Manetho, an Egyptian priest and writer of the third century B.C., who authored a history of the pharaohs from before the First Dynasty to Alexander’s invasion, described Khufu as a scholar who wrote a holy book. Manetho claimed to have a copy, but unfortunately this work has not survived. Diodorus Siculus (c. 80-20 B.C.), a Graeco-Roman historian from the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus, maintained that neither Khufu nor Khafre was buried in the pyramid each built.