Ancient EgyptianHistoricalPyramid builder
Meaning: eternal are the souls of Ra.
Menkaure
| Origin | Ancient Egyptian — mn-kꜣw-rꜥ, the third of the Giza pyramid builders |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Eternal are the souls of Ra, from men (enduring, established) + kau (plural of ka, the life-force) + Ra |
| Pronunciation | men-KOW-ray by convention. Egyptian script recorded consonants and left the vowels out, so this respelling is a modern scholarly convention, not a recovered pronunciation. |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; not given to boys in Egypt |
| Variants | Menkaura, Menkaourah; Mycerinus and Mykerinos in Greek |
| Nicknames | None from antiquity; Men and Kau are modern shortcuts |
| Monument | The third and smallest Giza pyramid, about 65 metres, its bottom courses still in undressed granite |
History & meaning
Three words, and the middle one is the interesting part. The ka was a person's life-force, the double that survived death and had to be fed with offerings; kings had several, and the plural kau is what stands in this name. Put beside men, “enduring”, and the sun god, it comes out as “eternal are the souls of Ra” — a statement about the permanence of the divine, with the king attached to it. Say it men-KOW-ray if you like, or men-KAW-ruh, which you will also hear; both are modern reading conventions, because Egyptian script gave the consonants and no vowels, and the actual sound of the name has been gone for millennia.
He was Khufu's grandson and probably Khafre's son, on the throne around 2532 to 2503 BC, and his pyramid is the small one on the Giza skyline: roughly 65 metres against the Great Pyramid's 146, with a quarter of the volume of Khafre's. The lower sixteen courses were being cased in Aswan granite when the work halted, and the blocks are still there half-dressed, bosses left on the stone for the final smoothing that never came. His successor Shepseskaf finished the mortuary temple in mudbrick. The unfinished look is not carelessness; it is a construction site frozen at the moment its patron died. George Reisner's excavation of the valley temple in 1908 turned up the Menkaure triads, greywacke groups showing the king flanked by the goddess Hathor and a personified province, now divided between Cairo and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, along with the paired statue of the king and a queen that appears in every textbook of Egyptian art.
Who is named this now
Nobody, in Egypt or anywhere else in any numbers. The Egyptian names parents actually use are Arabic or Coptic — Ahmed, Youssef, Hossam, Mina, Boutros — and Menkaure is a label on a pyramid rather than a name in a family. Four syllables and an ambiguous stress make it a demanding choice in English as well.
Middle names for Menkaure
Follow the long vowel run with something plain: Menkaure James, Menkaure Paul, Menkaure Blake, Menkaure Reed. The middle names guide explains why a single-syllable middle rescues a long first name.
Famous Menkaures
The pharaoh is the only bearer of note, and the way he was remembered is itself a story. Herodotus reports him as the good king of the Giza three, the one who reopened the temples his father and grandfather had supposedly closed and who was told by an oracle that he had only six years to live. That is a Greek account of an Egyptian legend written two millennia after the fact, and it should be read as folklore, not as biography.
Consider instead
Khufu is the shortest and best known of the Giza names. Khafre sits between the two in both size and syllables. Youssef is a name Egyptian boys are given in large numbers right now.