His chronological position is highly uncertain (though he is more likely to have reigned towards the end of the dynasty), and it is also unclear under which Hellenized name the ancient historian Manetho could have listed him.

While Sanakht's existence is attested by seal fragments from mastaba K2 at Beit Khallaf and a graffito, his position as the founder of the Third Dynasty, as recorded by Manetho and the Turin Canon, has been seriously undermined by recent archaeological discoveries at Abydos.

Egyptologists Toby Wilkinson, Stephan Seidlmayer, Kenneth Kitchen and Rainer Stadelmann equate Sanakht with "Nebka", a name appearing in Ramesside king lists.

It must be stressed that the Turin Canon and Manetho were more than one and two thousand years removed from the time of Egypt's Third Dynasty, and would be expected to contain some inaccurate or unreliable data.

The Turin Canon, for instance, was transcribed on papyri that dates to the reign of the New Kingdom king, Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1213 BC.

It was long thought that Sanakht's tomb was the large mastaba K2 at Beit Khallaf, as excavations there yielded relief fragments bearing his name.

Although his cranial index was unusually broad and almost brachycephalic, the proportions of his long bones were tropically adapted like those of most other ancient Egyptians; especially those from the predynastic period.

[9] Consequently, the mastaba has been associated with an anecdote related by Manetho in which he tells of a late Second Dynasty king, called Sesochris, whom he describes as being particularly tall.

In 2017 palaeopathologist Francesco M. Galassi and Egyptologist Michael E. Habicht from Zurich University's Institute of Evolutionary Medicine coordinated an international team of researchers to reassess this case.