Nitokris

A deceased Egyptian who gives unnamed feasts beneath the Great Pyramid. Probably the same as Queen Nictokris, from "Imprisoned with the Pharoahs." Lovecraft had initially heard of Queen Nitocris in 1919 at a lecture given by Lord Dunsany at the Copley-Plaza Hotel in Boston. Dunsany mentioned the anecdote from Herodotus which we have quoted below.

From Herodotus, The Persian Wars, Book II, Chapter 100 translated by George Rawlinson, The Modern Libaray, New York, 1942: Next, they read me from a papyrus, the names of 330 monarchs, who (they said) were his succesors upon the throne. In this number of generations there were eighteen Ethiopian kings and one queen who was a native: all the rest were the kings and Egyptians. The queen bore the same name as the Babylonian princess, namely, Nitocris. They said that she succeeded her brother; he had been king of Egypt, and was put to death by his subjects, who then placed her upon the throne. Bent on avenging his death, she devised a cunning scheme by which she destroyed a vast number of Egyptians. She constructed a spacious underground chamber, and, on pretence of inaugurating it, contrived the following: Inviting to a banquet those of the Egyptians whom she knew to have had a chief share in the murder of her brother, she suddenly, as they were feasting, let the river in upon them, by means of a secret duct of large size. This, and only this, did they tell me of her, except that, when she has done as I have said, she threw herself into an apartment full of ashes, that she might escape the vengeance whereto she would otherwise have been exposed. [A footnote reads - Nitocris was an early Egyptian queen if the word Neitakri, occurring in the Turin Papyrus and as the last sovereign of Manetho's 6th dynasty, is feminine in gender.]

("The Outsider")