He was himself very likely succeeded by his eldest son, born of his queen Khentkaus II, the prince Ranefer B who would take the throne as king Neferefre.

His rule witnessed a growth in the number of administration and priesthood officials, who used their expanded wealth to build architecturally more sophisticated mastabas, where they recorded their biographies for the first time.

In all probability, it was also around this time that the story of the Papyrus Westcar was first written, a tale where Userkaf, Sahure and Neferirkare are said to be brothers, the sons of Ra with a woman Rededjet.

Neferirkare's entry is commonly believed to be in the third column-19th row; unfortunately this line has been lost in a large lacuna affecting the papyrus, and neither his reign length nor his successor can be ascertained from the surviving fragments.

[31] Similarly, the Egyptologist Stephan Seidlmeyer, considers the break in the Turin Canon at the end of the Eighth Dynasty to represent the relocation of the royal residence from Memphis to Herakleopolis.

[32] The Egyptologist John Baines holds views that are closer to Verner's, believing that the canon was divided into dynasties, with totals for the time elapsed given at the end of each, though only a few such divisions have survived.

[34] The Egyptologist Ian Shaw believes that the Turin Canon gives some credibility to Manetho's division of dynasties, but considers the king lists to be a form of ancestor worship and not a historical record.

The Byzantine scholar George Syncellus reports that Africanus relates that the Aegyptiaca mentioned the succession "Sephrês → Nefercherês → Sisirês" for the early Fifth Dynasty.

Some Egyptologists, including Nicolas Grimal, William C. Hayes, Hartwig Altenmüller, Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton, viewed him as a son of Userkaf and Khentkaus I, and a brother to his predecessor Sahure.

In it, a magician prophesizes to Khufu that the future demise of his lineage will be in the form of three brothers – the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty, born of the god Ra and a woman named Rededjet.

[45] Egyptologists such as Verner have sought to discern a historical truth in this account, proposing that Sahure and Neferirkare were siblings born of queen Khentkaus I.

[4][59][60][61] This relationship is confirmed by a relief on a limestone slab discovered in a house in the village near Abusir[62] depicting Neferirkare and his wife Khentkaus with "the king's eldest son Ranefer",[note 3][63] a name identical with some variants of Neferefre's own.

[70][71] Further evidence for the filiation of Nyuserre are the location of his pyramid next to that of Neferirkare, as well as his reuse for his own valley temple of materials from Neferikare's unfinished constructions.

[72] Yet another son of Neferirkare and Khentkhaus has been proposed,[73] probably younger[74] than both Neferefre and Nyuserre: Iryenre, a prince iry-pat[note 4] whose relationship is suggested by the fact that his funerary cult was associated with that of his mother, both having taken place in the temple of Khentkaus II.

[94][95] The annal then records that in his first year as king, Neferirkare granted land to the agricultural estates serving the cults of the Ennead, the Souls of Pe and Nekhen and the gods of Keraha.

[97] Neferirkare also commanded "the fashioning and opening of the mouth of an electrum statue of [the god] Ihy, escorting [it] to the mrt-chapel of Snefru of the nht-shrine of Hathor".

[98][99] Later in his reign, in the year of the fifth cattle count, Neferirkare had a bronze statue of himself erected and set up four barques for Ra and Horus in and around his sun temple, two of which were of copper.

[15] The decree exempts personnel belonging to a temple of Khenti-Amentiu from undertaking compulsory labour in perpetuity, under penalty of forfeiture of all property and freedom and be forced to work the fields or in a stone quarry.

[89] In conjunction with this trend, the mastabas of high officials started to become more elaborate, with, for example, chapels including multiple rooms,[104][105] and from the mid to late Fifth Dynasty, wide entrance porticoes with columns[106] and family tomb complexes.

William C. Hayes proposed that a few fragmentary limestone statues of kneeling and bound prisoners of war discovered in his mortuary temple[111][112] possibly attest to punitive raids in Libya to the west or the Sinai and Canaan to the east during his reign.

[41] The art historian William Stevenson Smith commented that such statues were customary[111] elements of the decoration of royal temples and mastabas, suggesting that they may not be immediately related to actual military campaigns.

[120] Contacts with Byblos on the Levantine coast might also have happened during Neferirkare's rule, as suggested by a single alabaster bowl inscribed with his name unearthed there.

[136] The mortuary temple was far from finished at the death of Neferirkare but it was completed later, by his sons Neferefre and Nyuserre Ini using cheap mudbricks and wood rather than stone.

This meant that Neferefre's and Neferirkare's mortuary complexes became somewhat isolated on the Abusir plateau, their priests therefore had to live next to the temple premises in makeshift dwellings,[143] and they stored the administrative records onsite.

A gravestone made of yellow calcite was discovered by Borchardt bearing an Aramaic inscription reading "Belonging to Nesneu, son of Tapakhnum".

[154] This hypothesis has been dispelled in late 2018 thanks to advanced analyses of the verso of the Palermo stone by the Czech Institute of Archeology, which enabled the reading of inscriptions mentioning precisely the architecture of the temple as well as lists of donations it received.

Due to this, some details of its layout are known: it had a large central obelisk, an altar and store-rooms, a sealed barque room housing two boats[148] and a "hall of the 'Sed festival'".

Secondly, they observe that both the pyramid and sun temple of Neferirkare were unfinished at his death, raising the question as to why the king would have devoted exceptional effort on a monument of Userkaf when his own still required substantial works to be completed.

A pair of statues belonging to a certain Sekhemhotep were uncovered in Giza, one of which is inscribed with the standard Ancient Egyptian offering formula followed by "of the temple of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferirkare, true of voice".

[176] The statues, which date to the early 12th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom period are the only archaeological evidence that Neferirkare's funerary cult still existed or had been revived around Abusir at the time,[177][178] albeit in a very limited form.