Egyptian Pharaohs: The God-Kings Who Ruled the Nile

The pharaohs were the kings of ancient Egypt from the unification of the Nile Valley under Narmer (c. 3100 BCE) until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE, a span of more than 3,000 years and roughly 170 rulers arranged into about 30 dynasties. They were not merely kings in the modern sense. They were living gods, the bridge between the people of Egypt and the divine powers of the sun, the river, and the underworld. To understand ancient Egypt is to understand the pharaohs who built it.

If you read only one book on this whole subject, make it Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2011). It is a single-volume history that does not condescend, and I have reread the New Kingdom chapters more times than I care to admit.

What Was a Pharaoh?

The word “pharaoh” comes from the Egyptian per-aa, meaning “great house.” Originally the term referred to the royal palace and the court that surrounded the king; only in the New Kingdom did it begin to be used as a personal title for the king himself.

A pharaoh was more than a political ruler. In Egyptian belief he was the earthly embodiment of the falcon god Horus, and after death he became one with Osiris, lord of the underworld. This dual role made the pharaoh responsible for maintaining ma’at, the cosmic order on which the whole country depended. When the Nile flooded, when the sun rose, when the crops grew, the Egyptians believed it was because the pharaoh was doing his job.

The pharaoh’s duties were wide-ranging:

• High priest of every temple, performing the most sacred rituals on behalf of the people.
• Commander-in-chief of the army, leading campaigns into Nubia, Libya, and the Levant.
• Supreme judge of disputes too important for local officials.
• Chief builder, commissioning the pyramids, temples, and tombs that would secure his place in eternity.
• Living image of the gods, whose person was considered so sacred that even his sandals were holy objects.

For a deeper look at the religious side of kingship, see our guide to the Egyptian gods and goddesses and our guide to Egyptian mythology and beliefs.

The Royal Regalia

To perform these roles, the pharaoh wore and carried a set of symbolic objects that the Egyptians could read at a glance:

• The double crown (pschent), which combined the white crown of Upper Egypt and the red crown of Lower Egypt, symbolized a united country.
• The crook (heka) and flail (nekhakha), the shepherd’s tools that represented the pharaoh’s duty to lead and discipline his people.
• The false beard, a ceremonial attachment worn by the pharaoh, and later also by queens, when performing religious rituals.
• The uraeus, a stylized cobra worn on the brow, was said to spit fire at the king’s enemies.
• Cartouches, oval rings enclosing the pharaoh’s name, were inscribed on every official monument to preserve his identity for eternity.

To see these symbols in context, explore our guide to the Egyptian pyramids, where they appear carved in stone on tomb walls and temple pylons.

The Pharaohs Through History

Egyptian history is traditionally divided into roughly thirty dynasties, beginning with the first pharaohs of the Early Dynastic Period and ending with the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE. The chronology was assembled from the Turin King List, the Abydos King List, and the Manetho tradition, and modernized by scholars including Aidan Dodson (Monarchs of the Nile, 1995). The most important of these dynasties cluster into the three great kingdoms of Egyptian history.

The Old Kingdom and the Pyramid Builders (c. 2686–2181 BCE)

The Old Kingdom was the age of the great pyramid builders. King Djoser of the Third Dynasty built the first Step Pyramid at Saqqara (c. 2670 BCE), and the Fourth Dynasty rulers, Sneferu, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, raised the three great pyramids at Giza. The Great Pyramid alone contains an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks averaging about 2.5 tons each. For more, see our guide to the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Egyptian pyramids.

The Middle Kingdom and the Theban Kings (c. 2055–1650 BCE)

After a century of fragmentation, the Eleventh Dynasty reunited Egypt from Thebes. Its pharaohs, especially Mentuhotep II (c. 2055 BCE), reasserted royal authority and ushered in a new age of literature, art, and pyramid building. The Middle Kingdom ended when the Hyksos invaded the Delta, beginning the Second Intermediate Period.

The New Kingdom: The Warrior Pharaohs (c. 1550–1069 BCE)

The New Kingdom is the most famous era of Egyptian history, and not by accident. Its pharaohs were warriors, builders, and empire-makers, and the surviving monuments of the period are staggering in their ambition. Among the most important were:

• Hatshepsut, one of the most successful pharaohs of all, who ruled as a king despite being a woman (c. 1479-1458 BCE).
• Thutmose III, often called the “Napoleon of ancient Egypt,” who led 17+ military campaigns and expanded the empire to its greatest extent.
• Akhenaten, the heretic king who tried to replace Egypt’s many gods with a single sun disk, the Aten. The conventional reading of Akhenaten as a sincere monotheist is, in my view, more doubtful than the older Egyptology made it sound; Donald Redford’s Akhenaten the Heretic King (1984) is still the starting point, but the recent trend is to see the Aten cult as a more political move than Redford allowed.
• Tutankhamun, the boy king whose nearly intact tomb (KV62) was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 and found to contain 5,398 catalogued objects. Tut’s reign was short, and for decades the orthodox view treated him as a minor king. I am not a believer in that view, and the more I read the late Eighteenth Dynasty material, the more I think the restoration of the old gods under his name was a more substantial political project than the surviving sources admit.
• Ramesses II (“the Great”), who reigned for sixty-six years (c. 1279-1213 BCE), fathered some 96+ sons and 60+ daughters, and built more monuments than almost any other pharaoh.

For deeper coverage, see our guides to Tutankhamun, Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and the New Kingdom of Egypt.

The Late Period and the Ptolemies (664–30 BCE)

After the New Kingdom, Egypt was repeatedly invaded and ruled by foreigners, Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, and Persians. The last great dynasty of Egyptian rulers was the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic Dynasty, founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Its most famous ruler was Cleopatra VII, whose alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony ended in defeat at the Battle of Actium and her own death in 30 BCE. For more, see our guide to Cleopatra VII.

Royal Women and the Queens of Egypt

Although the title “pharaoh” was almost always held by men, royal women played a far more important role in Egyptian history than in most ancient cultures. The “Great Royal Wife” was expected to support her husband politically, and several queens, most famously Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII, ruled Egypt in their own right.

Other famous royal women include Nefertiti, the chief wife of Akhenaten and one of the most iconic faces in Egyptian art; Nefertari, the beloved wife of Ramesses II, whose tomb in the Valley of the Queens is one of the most beautiful in Egypt; and Tiye, the powerful matriarch of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

To learn more about the role of royal women in this period, see our guide to the queens of the New Kingdom.

How We Know About the Pharaohs

Modern knowledge of the pharaohs comes from a remarkable range of sources. Tomb paintings and temple reliefs preserve scenes of royal ceremonies. Royal annals and king lists, most famously the Turin King List and the Abydos King List, record the order of rulers. The Rosetta Stone, which allowed scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs, opened up the entire textual record of ancient Egypt to modern readers.

For more on how the Egyptians wrote, see our guide to Egyptian hieroglyphs and writing. For the political divisions of Egyptian history, see our guide to the ancient Egyptian civilization as a whole.

How a New Pharaoh Took the Throne

In theory, the pharaoh’s eldest son and heir inherited the throne at the moment of his father’s death. In practice, succession was often contested, and the throne passed to the strongest or most cunning claimant. A young or weak king could be displaced by a powerful relative, a successful general, or a high priest. The reign of Ramesses III, for example, ended in a harem conspiracy in which a secondary wife tried to place her son on the throne.

When a new king took the throne, he was immediately identified with Horus, the divine falcon. He took a Horus name and a prenomen (a personal name chosen at his coronation), and he was crowned in a great ceremony at the temple of the principal god of his capital. The coronation was a public event, and it was the moment at which the new king was believed to receive the divine breath of life that would sustain him throughout his reign.

One of the most famous coronation ceremonies in Egyptian history is the coronation of Hatshepsut, who had to be crowned as a male king despite being a woman. Her obelisks at Karnak record that the god Amun himself chose her to be king, and that her coronation was attended by all the gods of Egypt. For more, see our guide to how a woman became pharaoh in ancient Egypt.

The Royal Family and the Royal Household

The pharaoh was the head of a vast royal family and royal household, both of which played important roles in the life of the kingdom. The pharaoh’s principal wife, the hemet nesu weret (Great Royal Wife), was expected to be of royal blood. She was often a half-sister or cousin of the king, and the marriage was as much a political alliance as a personal relationship. The Great Royal Wife was the only woman entitled to be called “king’s wife,” and she was frequently depicted in temple scenes standing behind her husband’s throne.

Below the Great Royal Wife were the secondary wives and concubines. Some of these were foreign princesses, sent to Egypt as part of diplomatic marriages. Others were Egyptian noblewomen who had caught the king’s eye. The sons of secondary wives and concubines could also be designated as heirs if the Great Royal Wife had no sons, and several pharaohs, including Thutmose III and Ramesses II, were born of secondary marriages.

The royal children had their own households, with their own estates, tutors, and servants. The eldest surviving prince was often given responsibility for important tasks, commanding armies, governing provinces, supervising temple building, that would prepare him for kingship. Princes often held the title of Generalissimo or Overseer of the Priests, and they appear in tomb scenes from a very young age.

The royal household also included a large staff of servants, bodyguards, and officials. The Keeper of the Royal Diadem, the Master of the Royal Horses, the Overseer of the Royal Harem, and the Chief of the Royal Kitchen were all important positions. So was the Sandals-bearer of the King, a personal attendant who followed the pharaoh everywhere, including into battle.

The Pharaoh in the Afterlife

The Egyptians believed that the pharaoh did not simply die. He transformed, becoming one with Osiris in the underworld and joining the imperishable stars in the sky. This transformation depended on three things: the proper preservation of the body through mummification, the recitation of the correct spells and rituals, and the proper provision of offerings at the tomb.

The pharaoh’s tomb was therefore designed to be his eternal home. It had to contain everything he would need in the next world: food, drink, weapons, jewelry, tools, and even small models of workers who would labor for him in the afterlife. The walls of the tomb were inscribed with passages from the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, and the Book of the Dead, each of which was thought to give the king new powers in the world to come.

For the Old and Middle Kingdom pharaohs, the tomb was a pyramid, surrounded by a mortuary temple and a complex of smaller tombs for the royal family and officials. For the New Kingdom pharaohs, the tomb was a hidden rock-cut chamber in the Valley of the Kings, with a separate mortuary temple on the edge of the cultivated land. The most famous of these is the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered nearly intact by Howard Carter in 1922.

The Daily Life of a Pharaoh

Although we tend to think of the pharaoh as a remote, almost mythical figure, he was also a working head of state. A pharaoh’s day was structured by religious and administrative duties from sunrise to sunset. The pharaoh woke early, was washed and dressed by servants, and was adorned with the symbols of kingship before being carried in procession to the temple of the principal god of his capital, usually Ra or Amun.

There, the pharaoh performed the central ritual of Egyptian kingship: presenting offerings of bread, beer, oxen, and fowl to the god’s image. Although priests handled the more technical aspects of the ritual, the pharaoh’s presence was essential, his touch, his voice, his breath were considered to be the very means by which the god was fed and the world was sustained.

After the morning rituals, the pharaoh turned to affairs of state. He held audiences with the vizier and senior officials, heard petitions, judged disputes, and reviewed reports from the provinces. He signed decrees, dispatched officials, and received foreign envoys. He inspected the work of the royal workshops and reviewed the produce of the royal estates. Most of these activities took place in the audience chamber of the palace, with the pharaoh enthroned beneath a great golden canopy.

The afternoon was reserved for leisure, although “leisure” for a pharaoh could mean inspecting a building site, hunting in the desert, or visiting the temple workshops. Egyptian kings were enthusiastic hunters; many of them, including Amenhotep III, Thutmose III, and Ramesses II, are shown on temple walls killing lions with bow and arrow.

In the evening, the pharaoh returned to the palace, where he dined with his wife and children, entertained guests, and consulted with advisors. He slept in the inner chambers of the palace, surrounded by the women of the royal household, his principal wife, his secondary wives, his concubines, and his children. To learn more about the role of these royal women, see our guide to the queens of the New Kingdom.

The Pharaoh in Art and Architecture

The pharaoh was the most frequently depicted human figure in Egyptian art. Whether carved in colossal stone, painted on tomb walls, or molded in faience, the image of the pharaoh followed strict conventions designed to convey his divine nature.

The classic pharaonic image shows the king in profile, striding forward with one arm raised to smite an enemy or both hands laid on the symbols of office. He wears the nemes headdress or the blue crown, the false beard, and a short kilt. His body is youthful and idealized, even when the real king was old or sick. This convention, the eternal, divine, vigorous king, was so deeply embedded in Egyptian art that deviations from it stand out. The strange elongated skull, almond eyes, and feminine hips of Akhenaten in his statues and reliefs are a famous exception, and they shocked even the Egyptians.

The pharaoh also left his mark on architecture. Almost every major building project in ancient Egypt, from the pyramids of Giza to the great temples of Karnak and Luxor, was begun, expanded, or decorated by a pharaoh. Each king wanted to outdo his predecessors, and the result was a continuous, sometimes chaotic, layering of structures that is still visible at sites like Karnak today.

How Pharaohs Were Remembered

Because the Egyptians believed the pharaoh’s name and image had to survive for eternity, every king worked hard to keep his memory alive. They built temples, raised obelisks, commissioned statues, and inscribed their names in every corner of the kingdom. They also produced official king lists, like the Abydos King List and the Turin King List, that recorded the names of their predecessors and often deliberately erased the names of rivals.

In some cases, the erasure went further. Hatshepsut, one of the most successful pharaohs of the New Kingdom, was almost completely erased from the official record by her stepson and successor Thutmose III shortly after her death. Her images were hacked from temple walls, her obelisks walled up, and her name left out of the king lists. Only in the 19th century, when archaeologists began to clear the temples of Deir el-Bahari, did the full extent of her achievements become clear.

Yet not all pharaohs are remembered equally. Khufu, who built the greatest of the pyramids, was remembered mainly as a tyrant in later Egyptian literature. Tutankhamun, a relatively minor king in his own time, became the most famous pharaoh of all after the discovery of his nearly intact tomb in 1922. The story of how Howard Carter found his tomb is one of the great adventures of modern archaeology.