Herakleopolitan kings, e.g. Khety (Akhtoy)

The rise of the nomarchs

With the complete breakdown of the Memphite government, provincial governors (nomarchs) began ruling as independent warlords. Operating from massive estates protected by private armies, these nomarchs completely ignored the capital.

The tyrant of Herakleopolis

In Middle Egypt, near the entrance to the Faiyum, a powerful warlord emerged from the city of Herakleopolis to establish the 9th Dynasty. His name was Meriibre Khety (also known as Akhtoy). He did not claim the throne through noble lineage, but through sheer force and intimidation. The historian Manetho wrote that Khety was more terrible and cruel than any king before him. According to ancient legend, the gods cursed him for his cruelty, driving him mad before he was ultimately eaten by a crocodile.

A fractured kingdom

The 9th Dynasty—and the subsequent 10th Dynasty, which may have just been a rival faction of the same family—never truly controlled all of Egypt. Powerful southern nomarchs, such as Ankhtifi of Hierakonpolis, paid them only lip service while expanding their own territories. Eventually, the Herakleopolitan kings found themselves in a massive civil war against an upstart dynasty of nomarchs rising from the southern city of Thebes.

Ankhtifi's boast at Moalla

One of the richest firsthand sources for this period comes not from a king but from a regional strongman, Ankhtifi, nomarch of Hierakonpolis and Edfu, whose tomb at Moalla preserves a lengthy autobiographical inscription. Ankhtifi boasts of feeding his province through a severe famine while people elsewhere, he claims, were reduced to eating their own children, and describes campaigns to secure grain and extend his influence toward the Herakleopolitan sphere. Historians treat his claims with caution, since such self-praise inscriptions were a conventional genre rather than neutral reporting, but the text remains valuable evidence that famine and open rivalry were real features of the age, not just later literary exaggeration.

The Instruction Addressed to King Merikare

The clearest window into how the Herakleopolitan kings understood their predicament comes from a later literary work, the Instruction Addressed to King Merikare, framed as advice from an unnamed royal father to his son and successor. Though surviving copies date to the Middle Kingdom and may reflect later revision, the text describes a monarchy struggling to hold the country together, warns against needless cruelty toward rebellious nomes, and reflects anxiously on relations with the rising Theban rulers. Whether or not it preserves a historical king's literal words, Egyptologists widely read it as a genuine, if stylized, record of the dynasty's political anxieties.