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| Cartouche name of Merbiape |
Anedjib was the fifth king during the first dynasty. He kept Memphis as his capitol city throughout his 14 years of rule. Anedjib's crown carried the symbols of both Upper and Lower Egypt, a representation of the unification of the country associate his power. Historians, however, doubt that Anedjib really controlled the northern, due to the fact that the northern Nomes rebelled against him always throughout his reign. His wife, Queen Betrest, was the mother of
King Semerkhet, who was his successor. The queen provided Anedjib with legitimacy and power since she was a related from the Memphite royal line. Anedjib is a swayer that not so often is known about. He was also called Enezib and Merbiapen and governed from Memphis. According to Manetho (Af.) who called him Miebidos, his reign was 26 years. He may have come to power by marriage to queen Betrest of the Memphite royal family and in that case he was not son of pharaoh Den. A struggle between the Lower Egyptian classes and the south seems to have been temporary solved by Anedjib whose name is the first of all kings in the Sakkara list. Maybe he was the first king not to be directly related to the Thinis line of pharaohs. However the theory that he was an supplanter (or his successor was) and wasn't established by all his generation, has some means, because his memorials were deliberately violated by his immediate follower on the throne. His name in a serek has been deleted and the new king's put there instead in many stone vessels found at
Sakkara.
Likewise there his name has only been found in two other places in Egypt:
Abydos and Helwan, and out its borders possibly at En Besor in southern Palestine. At Sakkara a great mastaba, plausibly for his prime minister, revealed a new architectural building within when it was dug out in the 1950s. In contrast his own tomb in Abydos was a crude small construction and so were the rows of 64 satellite tombs. This high number tells that though is rule seems to have been a step backwards for the country as a whole (internal struggle?) the pharaoh's power over the commoners was unbroken.
King Anendjib's Burial place:
His tomb in abydos (tomb x), very small with burial chamber of wood. 64 alternative burials. Its Walls about 1.3 –1.6 meters. It was take one of the lowest Egyptian royal tombs.
