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One of the most curious of the Greek stories about Egypt is that which ascribed the building of the Third Pyramid of Gîzeh to a woman, according to the usual tale, the famous courtesan Rhodopis. We find this story given in various forms by Herodotus, Diodorus, and Strabo. Herodotus would not credit it (ii. 134), but it was evidently generally accepted among the Greeks in Egypt, so much so that the native historian, Manetho, when called upon by the Greek rulers of Egypt to write the history of his country, himself attributed the building of the pyramid to a woman, an Egyptian queen, Nitokris, the heroine of another Herodotean story (ii. 100). This Nitokris Manetho places at the end of the VIth Dynasty. Thus Nitokris and Rhodopis were connected, and Professor Petrie in his ‘History’ (i.p. 105) considers, that the Herodotean Rhodopis is ‘evidently another version of Nitokris, whom Manetho describes as fair and ruddy.’ In reality however it would seem that Manetho's Nitokris was a version of Rhodopis rather than Rhodopis a version of Nitokris.
1 Correctly interpreted or paraphrased in Eratosthenes as ᾿Αθηνᾶ νικαφόρος
2 Aegypten ii. 236 ff.
3 Ägyptische Geschichte i. 216.
4 Dr. Borchardt is of opinion that the additional work of the Third Pyramid is to be attributed to an ‘Umbau’ of the XXVIth Dynasty, under which special care and attention was given to the work of the Old Kingdom (‘Zur Geschichte der Pyramiden,’ Äg. Zeits. xxx. (1892), p. 98). See Note 11 below.
5 Prof.Lepsius', theory (Chronologie der Ægypter, 307 ff.)Google Scholar was, shortly, as follows: Manetho must have known who the real builder of the pyramid was. Therefore he cannot have written the words ἤ τὴν τρίτην ἤγειρε πυραμίδα. They are the addition of later copyists, who identified ‘Rhodopis’ with Nitokris (and so in all probability also added the words ξανθἠ τὴν χροιἁν certainly added the ‘rubris genis’ of Eusebius),because there lived under the XXVIth Dynasty a King Psametik-Menkarā who married a παλλακὶς Διός named Nitokris, and, since the Third Pyramid had certainly been built by a Menkarā, the ‘leichtsinnige Interpreten zu Säis’ naturally took him to be the XXVIth Dynasty Menkarā and his wife the παλλακὶς Nitokris to be the same as the hetaera Rhodopis of the tale. This was a very ingenious theory, but since it was propounded in 1849 we have learnt that there was no such king as Menkarā in the XXVIth Dynasty—the name is that of a private person of the Roman period who usurped the sarcophagus of Ankhnesneferabrā (Brit. Mus. Egyptian Saloon, No. 32, published by Dr.Wallis, E. A. Budge, The Sarcophagus of Anchnesraneferab, London, 1885)Google Scholar queen of Psametik II., and placed his name next to that king's in the royal cartouche—and that the title tuaneter, borne by the XXVIth Dynasty queen Nitokris in question does not necessarily betoken a παλλακὶς (see note 11 below).
6 Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch. xi. p. 221 f.
7 The Arab historian Abd ul-Latif thus describes the appearance of the face of the Sphinx in his day (transl. de Sacy, p. 179): ‘On voit sur la figure une teinte rougeâtre et un vernis rouge, qui a tout ľéclat de la fraîcheur. Cette figure est très-belle, et sa bouche porte ľempreinte des grâces et de la beauté. On diroit qu'elle sourit gracieusement.’
8 Herodots Zweites Buch, p. 485.
9 We may assume for the nonce the actual existence of an Egyptian historiographer Manetho, the author of the chronology of which fragments have come down to us under his name.
10 Zaphnath-paaneakh is 
Žeṭ-puete(r)-ef-ankh, ‘The God spake and he lives,’ a name of a type which never occurs before 1000 B.C., and was used down to the Ptolemaic period. Potipherah or Potiphar is 
Peṭpra, ‘He whom the Sun has given,’ a typically Saïte and Ptolemaic name.
11 If Dr. Borchard's theory (Note 4 above) of a XXVIth Dynasty rebuilding of the Third Pyramid be accepted (it rests solely on his authority as an architect), the fact of this alteration under the Saïtes may also have influenced Manetho in attributing its building to a queen Nitokris, since this was a Saïte royal name (see above): he may have heard that a Saïte Nitokris had rebuilt it and have thought that this must be a mistake for his Vlth Dynasty Nitokris. But this would be a farfetched theory, and would entail the supposition that there existed in Manetho's day a tradition that the alteration had been carried out by a XXVIth Dynasty queen Nitokris, and of this we have no manner of proof. Lepsius's theory identifying Psammetichus II's queen Nitokris with Rhodopis (Note 5 above) has as we have seen, nothing to back it up now that we know that the name Menkarā in the cartouches of Psammetichus II. on the sarcophagus of Ankhnesneferabrā does not belong to that king.
