The Pharaohs That Matter
- cepmurphywrites
- 15 hours ago
- 10 min read
By Gary Oswald.
So, as I think is probably clear by my contributions to this blog, I find Alternate History interesting. I find the idea of making changes to the past and seeing what results from that exciting and compelling. But I also find the much more obscure parlour game of Alternate Historiography equally interesting. With the latter, you do not change the actual events, instead you change how they are perceived and covered by historians.
The classic take on historiography is “history is written by the winners”. This is simplified and not always true (a lot of the textbooks about the American Civil War were written by the losers) but broadly it is fair to say that how some events are perceived changes by what comes after that. Kristallnacht is perceived as it is because it led to the Shoah whereas other pogroms didn't. I can pretty much instantly tell whether a text about early 20th century Liberia was written before or after Samuel Doe overthrew the True Whig regime and ushered in the Liberian Civil Wars, because, even though the events are the same, an autocratic regime is perceived differently when you know the ultimate outcome is the state institutions they built disintegrating versus when they are still holding it together. If the later True Whig presidents had successfully reformed, the earlier ones would be more kindly looked at, even though they themselves are not changed in any way. And, of course, historiography is also dictated by the morals and ethics of the people perceiving it; one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and so on.
But it's not always that simple. A lot of debates over what happened in history is not agenda driven but source driven. Take, for instance, the Rinderpest Epizooic of 1889 which killed so many cattle in Africa. Frederick Lugard, a British civil servant in Africa, blamed that epizooic, one of the most devastating events in African History, on Indian cattle imported by the Italians for a campaign in Somalia. This line is repeated in pretty much every English Language book on Africa during this time and, as you may have noticed, in about five of my articles on this blog.
Except, as was pointed out to me by a kind reader, Italian sources disagree. Vico Mantegazza talks repeatedly about the importation of cattle for that campaign and the dates he gives for his purchases are after the first case of Rinderpest are reported in other sources. I, and all the actual historians, are probably wrong. Why? Because Lugard wrote in English and Mantegazza wrote in Italian and we don't speak Italian so we didn't find his notes.
This is not due to an agenda, this is due to a coincidence as to which reports are read and by whom. And so much of how history is known comes from which sources survived, which sources were read by which historians, and which theories became popularised. A society identical to ours could have entirely different opinions on a lot of historical events simply because different historians, acting in good faith but with access to different sources, set the agenda.But there is another area of historiography which I think is even more interesting than what we think happened and what the results of that were: which events we talk about the most.
Most countries have had hundreds of rulers and yet normally there's only like three or four that you'd expect most people to know. This depends on the country, of course. In the UK, with South Africa, an African country of relatively limited power, I'd expect everyone to know Nelson Mandela and no-one else. In terms of Russia, a powerful European behemoth, I'd expect Catherine the Great, Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, and Putin. But which leaders make that list is a part of historiography and something that can change hugely based on which areas of history are the focus of both scholarly analysis and pop culture.
Perhaps the most famous example of pop culture propelling a relatively obscure historical figure into fame is Macbeth, King of Scotland from 1040 to 1057 and the main character in one of the most famous pieces of historical fiction of all time, William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth. As a result, a minor king is probably the most well-known ruler of an independent Scotland. Not because of what he did, but because of what happened years after his death when British writers wanted to villainise him to strengthen the claim of the House of Stuart. You change the results of 16th century court politics, and this 11th century King is much more obscure. That's Alternate Historiography.
So let’s try and get some data as to which rulers are famous and which are obscure, in English speaking spaces at least, and how events from after their death can change that. There is an online tool that can provide some crude data here and that is pageviews analysis, which looks at how many people have visited the English Language Wikipedia page of a particular figure over the last ten years.And let’s look at Egyptian Pharaohs.
Egyptology, the study of Ancient Egypt, began in earnest in Europe as a result of the Egyptomania that took off in Europe in the aftermath of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, when the first detailed description of its ancient monuments came back to Europe. This in itself is something that can be altered, Egypt is always going to be prominent but the specific things that made it so compelling to so many historians was all this new information (the translation of hieroglyphs for instance) arriving at a specific time wherein academia was becoming more prominent.
Looking at the numbers from page views analysis, we see that the most viewed Wikipedia page of an Egyptian Pharaoh is Cleopatra with 225 million views over the last ten years, followed by Tutankhamun with 20 million, Rameses II with 11 million, Nefertiti with 8 million, and Akhenaten rounding out the top five with 7 million.
Now the size of that gap is for a specific reason we will get to later but why is Cleopatra at the top? Well, first of all, she was a significant figure; the last independent pharaoh prior to the Roman conquest is always going to be historically important as marking the end of an era. Moreover, she was a woman and so is often mentioned as such in lists of famous women, and she was a woman romantically involved with famous men, which meant she appealed as a figure of drama and tragedy. And as those famous men were members of the Roman Empire, she is involved into a heavily studied bit of European history in a way few Egyptian rulers can be. She was mentioned in around fifty Roman works of history, though often only briefly.
Most significantly she is one of the main figures in the Life of Antonius written by Plutarch and while many of Plutarch’s biographies didn't survive to the modern era, that one did thus giving a source for the drama of her life that became the basis of works of fiction like Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra and the 1963 film Cleopatra among many others. Cleopatra is one of the most written about historical characters of all time but it is easy to imagine a historiography where more of Plutarch's work is lost and so she never takes the same role in pop culture memory.
However, when I said Cleopatra's Wikipedia page has had 225 million views over the last ten years, what I didn't say is only 15 million of those occurred in the first five years. If that rate had kept up Cleopatra would be on 30 million, still top of this list but nowhere near what she actually got. That change because in 2020, when the AI tool Google Assistant was first rolled out, it included ‘go to Cleopatra’s page on Wikipedia’ as an example in the list of things you might want to use it to do, and hundreds of millions of people have done so upon being prompted. This is not random, Cleopatra was picked because she is a well known enough that people know the reference while ancient enough to be seen as classy and educational, but that choice, probably made by a single software designer, has guided much more people to look at that page than otherwise happen and has probably increased the number of people who know anything about Cleopatra. In an alternate historiography that could instead be a page about Hannibal instead and that would have effect how both people are perceived.
This is true even more of the second name on this list, Tutankhamun. He died at eighteen, his significance as a king is limited by his age and short rule, but his royal tomb was the only one to survive in near-intact condition rather than be emptied by grave robbers. As such Tutankahmun has become the most famous of the ancient pharaohs, not because of what he did, but because of decisions made by robbers decades after his death. His mask, tomb mummy, and treasures were, and are, displayed in museums for the world's public to view and so as Jon Manchip White put it, "The pharaoh who in life was one of the least esteemed of Egypt's Pharaohs has become in death the most renowned". And likewise this fame led to fiction writers writing about Tutankahmun, as well as The Mummy series of horror movies inspired by tales of the opening of his tomb by Howard Carter.
The discovery of an untouched pharaoh's tomb will always be big news but the fact it was 1922, in the aftermath of World War I, also probably contributed to the mania about him. It provided welcome relief to get a feel-good story rather than news about the ongoing conflicts in Ireland, Turkey, and Russia. It was also during a time where radio and papers had some of their biggest reach. A different discovery date changes how big the new story could be.
And not just for Tutankahmun, because this is the general pattern of the most esteemed of Egypt's pharaohs: they are there because of the discovery of famous artefacts about them. Rameses II, or Ozymandius, third on this list gained fame due to the arrival of the 'Younger Memnon' statue of him to Europe in 1818, which inspired the famous Shelley poem Ozymandias. Queen Nefertiti who was made famous by the discovery and display of her ancient bust in 1912, though it's still debated as to whether she actually was a ruling pharaoh in her own right.
I say all this not to minimise the importance of these figures, who were all significant rulers, but to point at the importance of which artefacts survived and which didn't in terms of which of many important rulers end up most prominent in the public memory. Narmer, who unified Egypt; Kufu, Khafre and Menkaure, who were buried in the great pyramids; Djoser, who hired Imhotep to build the first pyramid; Ptolemy, the first Greek ruler of Egypt; and many others were also important figures, but they were less lucky with their legacy in terms of artefacts and stories.
But I have left out probably the most famous of all the Egyptian Pharaohs. The pharaoh from the Book of Exodus. The one who enslaved the Jews and so was punished by ten plagues and was drowned by Moses. The one who prior to 1945 was the universally agreed sign of evil. Thomas Paine signalled his disenchantment with the British State during the American Revolution by comparing London to the Pharaoh, and both sides in the American Civil War, called their opponents Pharaohs, to mean tyrants for one side and slave holders for the other. This was the man, who prior to Egyptomania, provided the main European image of Egypt.
But he isn't on the list because he doesn't have a Wikipedia page, because there is no agreed identity as to which Egyptian ruler he was.
Around fifteen possible identities have been proposed, with Rameses II, due to his existing fame, being the one to make it into pop culture and films such as The Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments, though Rameses' rule is significantly later than Exodus is normally thought to have happened. Had an Egyptian artefact directly mentioning the events of Exodus, such as the Moabite Stone in Jordan which talks about a battle from the Book of Kings from the perspective of the Jews' enemy, then whichever pharaoh was in Exodus would probably hold a position in that top five, but it did not. Perhaps had the Ipuwer Papyrus, which is sometimes assumed to be about Exodus, survived intact that would have been different.
In fact of the many pharaohs mentioned in the Bible, only two have been positively identified in a way which is mostly accepted: Taharqa and Necho II. Neither have made a jump into popularity as a result, gaining between 500-600 thousand views on my graph over those ten years.
Taharqa is the more interesting of the two, in my opinion, simply because he was Sudanese in ethnicity rather than Egyptian and as such, given the bitter debates about the race of the ancient Egyptians, one of the few pharaohs we know was black. In an article about the myths surrounding Mansa Musa I once wrote:
“Afrocentrism and the desire to claim notable figures like Cleopatra, who was ethnically Greek, as black Africans is bad history. But it's also a reaction to the fact that Cleopatra has cultural cachet and the Sub Saharan Africans of the same period, such as Queen Amanirenas of Sudan, just don't. Saying Amanirenas was a powerful black woman doesn't mean anything, because nobody knows who she is, but saying Cleopatra, a famous person, was a powerful black woman does. And this is despite the fact Amenirenas successfully maintained her country's independence while Cleopatra killed herself after failing to. Its not that Amenirenas achieved less, it's that Sudan does not matter to Western audiences and Egypt does. Which is why it became so important for the disciples of Chiekh Anta Diop to claim Egypt as their own, because Diop was fighting against an establishment that openly claimed sub-Saharan Africans had achieved nothing.”
Taharqa was an unambiguously black pharaoh but he also wasn't a person that Shakespeare and Shelley were writing about. His appearance in the Bible is as a figure fighting wars that Israel is also involved in, and there is nothing in there as juicy as the story of Exodus or Plutarch's history of Anthony that would inspire great fictional work about him. Which isn't to say that there wasn't elements in his personal life that were that dramatic but those stories, if they existed, were either never written down or never survived.
And as such it is not what happened during his life that has meant that he is an obscurity, whereas Cleopatra is world famous, it is what happened afterwards. You don't need an Alternate History of Ancient Egypt, merely an Alternate Historiography for Google Assistant to ask if you wanted to go to Taharqa's Wikipedia page.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.