The Bearded Lady of Giza: Appropriation, Conspiracy, and Veiled Protest in the Pyramid Texts of Unas*

We report here a thus far unrecognized, unusual hieroglyphic icon, ostensibly created by a scribal error on the north wall of the Sarcophagus Chamber inside the pyramid of the late Fifth Dynasty, ancient Egyptian King Unas. We present hieroglyphic, textual evidence that what looks like an accident of hieroglyph carving into the limestone wall instead appears to be an intentional, albeit veiled, reference to the couchant lion goddess Mehit with a bent rod above her back, an iconic symbol of the royal writers’ and archivists’ guild at the dawn of Egyptian civilization. While this combination of lioness and rod appears in sealings and title records from the first four dynasties of ancient Egypt, it disappeared from the known record after Fourth Dynasty King Khafre, more than a century before the time of King Unas. Thus, its reappearance, and ostensibly intentional placement within the earliest known version of the Pyramid Texts in Unas’ pyramid prompted us to search for further evidence why this may have been done. Scanning the Pyramid Texts for other veiled references, we show that invocating what was, by then, the archaic lioness cult of Mehit was part of a wider subtext apparently embedded by the texts’ composer into Unas’ hieroglyphic afterlife utterances using ancient Egyptian phonetic invocations called Heka Magic. We define and apply four criteria to amplify detection of veiled composer intent and reconstruct the theme of this subtext as a lament by the composer at the desecration of a preexisting lioness statue at Giza into the Great Sphinx, the expungement of the cult associated with Mehit, and the side-lining of the older cult of Thoth-Moon, both in favor of a new cult of the Sun dedicated to Re and Atum. We identify what may have been at issue in the mind of the composer, i.e., a fundamental violation of prevailing convention by the royal house during the Fourth Dynasty in re-carving the statue of a female lion goddess into the likeness of a living king wearing the divine beard, as if he was a living god-king. We conclude that by the time of King Unas, there must have been an influential faction at the royal court that opposed the cults of Atum and Re, the Sphinx, and above all, the claim of the royal rulers to divinity while still living. We suggest that this cadre of dissent against the state-ordained cult of the living Sun god kings must have been willing to risk their lives and conspire to sabotage the royal funerary corpus of texts with a veiled record of this opposition and its pretext that we have reconstructed. As evidence, we present